A few days ago I posted about the "car free" days planned for this summer in Manhattan, where a huge swatch of downtown will be closed to vehicle traffic and reserved instead for annoying folksy activities. It’s not a bad thing if you don’t mind dealing with swarms of wandering pedestrians clotting up the areas where cars should be, but I’d prefer that such activities not take place in my city. Too bad, because Seattle is planning "car free" street closings this summer too, in the interest of "letting people enjoy the streets in new and healthy ways." Just for the record, I live across the street from CarDomain so that I don’t have to use my cars for daily commuting, and I’m 100% in favor of helping the environment—but I believe that pushing already frazzled drivers to their boiling point by diverting them to sit in endless traffic jams so a few goody-two-shoes citizens can feel like they’re being "green" is absolutely NOT the way to do it. It’s annoying enough that there’s already frequent street closings every summer for obnoxious street festivals and questionable construction projects. And there’s no way that, on top of these, you should be reasonlessly forbidden from driving on the roads that your taxes pay for, whether it’s one weekend a month or one day a week—especially when you need to drive on those roads to access your home or operate your business. Between traffic, fuel costs, and other economic and population-related stresses, drivers in urban centers are already pretty jacked—the "car free" disruptions just seem to be a way of kicking them while they’re down, wasting gas, and displacing congestion (and pollution) to other parts of the city.

A key factor is that the "car free" disruptions in many cities are being billed as experimental—it’s only if they get widespread participation that they’ll be implemented permanently. So if you’d like to be able to continue driving your own car on your own roads, the course of action would probably be to boycott these events, and to get in touch with your local representatives to voice your opinion on the matter. How about you? Any "car free" days planned for your area?

Ok, I don’t get crossover vehicles. Why would anyone buy one of these? Are they for people who can’t make up their mind between a station wagon and an SUV? They don’t handle as well as wagons, and they don’t go off-road as well as SUVs. They don’t get as good mileage as wagons and they don’t look as burly as SUVs. The ones I’ve driven just seem like minivans that can’t carry much stuff. Am I being unfair here? What do you think?

A lotta people be having babies. And while I can’t bring myself to take any interest in child-rearing, one thing I’ve definitely noticed about it among my friends and acquaintances is the extent to which it cuts into wrenching time. I used to know a guy back East whose crabby, neurotic wife would start demanding a baby every time the existing one began getting close to school-age—every time, he swore he’d get a vasectomy on the sly, but then every time, he’d succumb to his serial-impregnator destiny and wind up with another kid to deal while his project-car collection got to look more and more like a scrapyard. I mean, it’s hard enough to complete a project as it is—how are you supposed to make time for it when all of your non-working hours are consumed by the demands of a precocious infant, or of the stressed-out spouse who spends more time tending to it than you do? It’s true that kids can be trained to "help out" around the garage, but that’s much, much later—and it tends to work out a lot better as a bonding experience than as true homegrown labor. When you get right down to it, raising kids is an expensive, time-consuming hobby. And for a lot of people who work on cars, one expensive, time-consuming hobby is more than enough—the multitudes of car classifieds and eBay auctions that mention "new baby" as the reason for sale testify to that. So as a gearhead who knows that there’s no shortage of humans being produced, would you choose to have kids at all? And if you’ve already got both children and a car habit, how do you deal?

It’s no big deal that there’s a lot of bad automotive photography out there. So what, you can rebuild an engine blindfolded but you’re not so handy with the digital camera? It doesn’t make you a bad person. But one rule of thumb that seems to me the most straightforward way to avoid ruining a photo of your ride: get the whole car in the shot. I’m no photographic genius myself, but this seems absolutely basic. Yet you’d be surprised how many people out there just don’t grasp this simple principle—even the pro photographers who cover shows for us sometimes have to be reminded that posting a picture of a car with the front clip clipped off, or the wheels missing, is like hanging up a group portrait on your wall that looks like this. It’s one thing if you’re going for something arty, or doing a detail closeup of some interesting feature on the vehicle—sure, those can turn out beautifully. But when it’s clear that you’ve intended to photograph "the car," and it’s just not all there, the result is like fingernails on a blackboard. Read on…

Continue reading "Why Is This So Difficult? Why?" »

Thomas Friedman, a columnist in the New York Times, is delighted by the current high gas prices–so delighted that he is proposing that the US government establish a "price floor" to make sure gas prices stay above $4 per gallon. He also makes some pretty absurd statements about Chrysler’s "Let’s Refuel America" program, which Rich Truesdell skillfully deflates over at Automotive Traveler.

I found it interesting that Friedman mentions how he recently went to his local Toyota dealer in tony Bethesda, Maryland "to trade in one hybrid car for another." I guess he would never consider actually maintaining a vehicle and/or driving something that isn’t brand new. And since he carefully avoids mentioning the Prius when discussing his trade, I’m gonna guess he’s talking about Camry hybrid (33mpg city/34mpg highway) or the Highlander hybrid (27mpg city/25mpg highway). Neither of these vehicles do as well as a plain jane Civic, for example. Or an old Geo Metro. But that isn’t the point, is it? The nice thing about driving a hybrid is that you get to keep your giant house and huge heating bill. You can fly all over the globe on business trips and exotic vacations. You can buy and eat as much crap as you want. In other words, you can have a massive carbon footprint but still communicate to the world that you "care" about environment. And when gas prices go up and put the squeeze on people with less money and less efficient vehicles, you can feel smug as hell.

Edit–the mention of Bethesda, Maryland set off some alarm bells for me, but it’s worse than I thought–I just found this on Wikipedia: "Ann and Thomas Friedman live in Bethesda, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C. The July 2006 issue of Washingtonian reported that they own "a palatial 11,400-square-foot house, currently valued at $9.3 million, on a 7 ½-acre parcel just blocks from I-495 and Bethesda Country Club." Oh, and wifey’s $4.1 billion family fortune comes from developing shopping centers. Think of all the wetlands they paved over. 

Clearly, bureaucrats in Europe hate cars more than life itself, but this seems like a stretch even for them: the European Commission is now attacking the noise made by vehicle tires. But what noise are they talking about? That soothing slushhhh of traffic going by on a rainy street? That burly wah-wah-wah-wah-wah-wah that comes from a Jeep rolling down the highway on mudders? And if a car actually makes a lot of wheel noise going over a road, doesn’t that generally just mean that the road needs to be paved better? Frankly, I can’t imagine what this legislation can possibly be targeting, since I don’t believe there’s an excess of Europeans doing noisy burnouts—they mostly drive underpowered commuter microbots over there, don’t they? The only possible conclusion anyone could reach is that, since modern cars have gotten so quiet that you can’t even tell if they’re running anymore, some busybodies have decided they’re "bothered" by the sounds that tires make—the only part of a car that makes any sound at all anymore. Anyway, the first I’d heard of this bizarre movement to silence European rollomundos was this NYT item explaining that SUV’s might be exempt from it. Some people are pretty upset about this, linking tire noise to stress-related illnesses. Are they serious? I can’t believe what some folks choose to spend their time on—or that anyone even has enough time on their hands to bother getting worked up about tire noise at all. Can you?

As someone who loves Lambos, I have to admit I’m kind of disgusted by this new LP-560/4 spot. When it’s not busy being way too stylized, it’s making stupid statements about the Italian stallion’s ability to collect phone numbers from chics, and guarantee entry into lame clubs you’d probably never want to go to anyway. What were the people who came up with this drivel trying to do, perpetuate the belief that Lambo owners are dorks who need to buy something to make them cool? Because—and I’m not trying to get all After School Special here—there’s nothing you can buy, legal or otherwise, that can make you cool. The geniuses that came up with this crap should stick to shooting dog food commercials, or whatever it was they were doing before they decided to defile Lamborghini. The Ferrari folks must be laughing their asses off—because this is their idea of a good commercial.

Hey, check out this nifty little statistic from MSN: 68 percent of teens killed in car crashes at night were unbuckled. Does this mean that more teenagers buckle up during the day? I don’t know. Probably. But the point is, wear your goddamn seat belt. Chicks dig it, and it could prevent you from being killed or permanently disfigured. And if you kids don’t start buckling up more often, some lawmaker is gonna bring back automatic seat belts, and no one wants that.

Continue reading "Hey Teens, Wear Your Goddamn Seatbelt!" »

Probably, it did. Too much CGI, too much stupid green-screen acting, too much crap dialog. I haven’ t watched it, but regardless of how terrible the reviews are, I will. So I want to know: Is it waste of time or not? Best critique gets a t-shirt.

With Speed Racer set to hit screens Friday, MSN Movies decided to come out with a Top 10 list of the "Best Vehicular Flicks," and it seems way off. Just take a look for yourself. Doesn’t it appear that some deserving movies—Ronin, Gone in 60 Seconds, the Fast and the Furious—are conspicuously absent? And even with the prominent GTO placement, does xXx really belong here? Sure, the goat is a cool ride, but I don’t think that makes the movie Top 10 worthy. Am I completely wrong here? Or should sites like this stick to reviewing films?