It's Gettin' Real in the Hyundai Commercial

last month I saw this commercial making the rounds and something about it seemed familiar. Talented people get to do their thing:



If you are like, "Huh?" check out the Whole Foods Parking Lot video This one always creacks me up:

How Smart is This?

This has got to be the smartest commercial I have seen in years. Man I wish I had written this!

The Next Camaro

I may not want to fill the tank, but I sure like the way it looks.

Smart and Safe

I told you before about test-driving the Smart car last year. I said back then that "The Smart Fortwo ... is basically a reinforced crash cage with an engine. I've seen some pretty spectacular crash tests with the Fortwo and it is amazing how little damage gets transferred inside of that cage." Well, that has now been proven as the 2008 Smart fortwo, the smallest car for sale in the U.S. market, has earned top scores in crash tests conducted by the insurance industry.

According to this latest article, "The 8-foot, 8-inch vehicle received the highest rating of good in front-end and side-impact testing by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, helping address some concerns that consumers may be more vulnerable in the tiny two-seater."

I was told that the local Smart dealer is out of cars for the entire year, but you might be able to find one in your area. They are at least worth dropping in for a test drive.

Rumble Seat

I'm going to share a secret joy with you. It's one of the things I do in my private life that provides an abundance of personal pleasure. Now there are a number of activities that might match that description, but here I am referring to reading car reviews. Shocking I know.

I am not a big auto-tech head, I don't subscribe to automobile magazines and, except for a year or so in the early 80s, I never have. I wasn't all that interested in automobile reviews until 2004. That is the year that Dan Neil of the Los Angeles Times won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. His Pulitzer citation read:

For distinguished criticism, Ten thousand dollars ($10,000).

Awarded to Dan Neil of the Los Angeles Times for his one-of-a-kind reviews of automobiles, blending technical expertise with offbeat humor and astute cultural observations.

Technical expertise, offbeat humor and astute cultural observations? This I had to see, or rather read and since I have had a subscription to the Times since, well, forever, checking out Dan Neil proved to be quite an easy task. It also proved to be addicting as Dan is everything the Pulitzer people said he is. I offer as evidence of this a few bon mots from some recent reviews:

Suzuki SX4 Crossover--April 23, 2008

As a company, Suzuki often seems a riddle wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma, stuffed into a slightly shoddy handbag that smells of cheese. On the one hand, you have the motorcycle side of the company, maker of end-times miracles such as the Hayabusa and the GSX-R. These are completely and utterly fantastic bikes, virtually without peer, especially if you like going 300 mph in first gear. The company also makes scooters, ATVs and outboard motors, and I hear they are pretty good too.

On the other hand, you have the automotive side of the business. I wonder if, given the uneven track record of American Suzuki, a busload of auto execs and a busload of Suzuki Method violin teachers somehow got switched, and now eager 5-year-olds are learning how to charge extra for undercoating.

I actually laugh out loud at this stuff.

2009 Acura TSX: bells and whistles, but no charisma--April 30, 2008

If we accept that there is something interesting about every car, then the 2009 Acura TSX tests this proposition to the breaking point. Is it well made? Are Oprah's diamond earrings real? Of course, it's well made. It's a lux'ed-up, Euro-spec Honda Accord, re-badged as an Acura and aimed at America's young and upwardly mobile petit-bourgeoisie, assuming we have any left.

Is it well equipped? Like a Chippendales show. Acura has always employed the irresistible logic of more is better. The TSX (starting at $28,960) comes standard with a big, beautiful navigation system, heated leather seats, a moonroof and plenty of other upmarket swirlies. Acura simply refuses to yield the value equation. If one of its competitors offered a device to allow telepathic communication with small rodents, you can be sure that the TSX would offer Acura's HamsterLink technology, and it would come standard with the nav system.

Is it attractive? I think the word is clinical. Rarely do you see a design that is so obviously driven by the marketers' metaphorical imperatives -- high-tech but not alienating, sleek but safe, and precisely 23.88% richer and more upmarket than the Accord. Thus the curious polished metal orthodontia in the grille. This thing has a front toof like Ollie.

Does it drive well? Absolutely. If you are benchmarking front-wheel-drive, 3,419-pound sedans with 201-hp four-cylinder engines, it drives beautifully. A deep serenity presides over the ride quality, abetted by barbiturate-like quiet and cabin isolation. Push the car a little harder into turns and, yes, you'll wish you had more steering feel -- or some -- and you'll eventually invoke the disapproval of the stability control system. But the TSX has its shoes laced up tight. Lots of traction, plenty of agility and a willingness to do as it's told that borders on slavishness.

But is the TSX interesting, compelling or unforgettable in some emotional way? Will it wake you out of a dead sleep with asphalt-gnawing desire? Will you lie and embezzle or pimp out your dog to get one? Probably not.

It's an excellent car and well worth the money. But when it comes to charisma, compared to the likes of the Mercedes-Benz C300, the Audi A4, the BMW 328i, the Acura surrenders like Lee at Appomattox.

And finally:

A BMW only a mama could love--March 19, 2008

Let's begin with a verity, an undeniable truth that is evident from 3 feet away or from the cold distance of outer space: The new 1-series BMW is ugly. Seriously ugly. Ugly with X-wings locked in attack formation. Spare me your E.H. Gombrich or Helen Gardner. I know an ugly car when one blows past me at 100 mph.

Ugly cars are unusual, for very good reasons. Auto companies are vast organizations, with billions of dollars invested, and tens of thousands of employees, some of whom can actually see to pick out their own ties. Also, in an age of computer-aided design, virtual modeling and rapid prototyping, ugly can usually be rooted out and burned at the stake before the first tooling is purchased. Usually.

My point in sharing this with you is not to piss you off because you don't have an LA Times subscription, that would be just plain mean. No, rather it is to share with you the joy of Dan Neil's writing and to let you know that you can read it on-line at this address. New reviews arrive every Wednesday,

A year ago I could not share this with you though I wanted to. The reason was the horrid state of the Los Angeles Times website. It was clunky, confusing and butt-ugly. However, with the new owners has come a new commitment to the Internet and the Times website is now a sleek and sassy joy to peruse. Check it out and you may be surprised. OK, they need to put their comics on-line, but other than that, the site is pretty damn good.

Not A Happy Camper

A week ago I took my car into the Mercedes dealer; I had a brake light on and the transmission was beginning to "clunk" into gear from time to time and being that I was starting a new job the next week I wanted everything fixed before I did. Well, they replaced the front brake pads and ran some tests on the transmission and said they did note the problem, but that they had fixed it. They charged me for the brakes and $120 for the "minor" transmission work and sent me on my way.

On Thursday I lost my transmission during rush hour on what is known as "The Orange Crush," one of the most over-crowded sections of freeway in California. Amazingly enough I was not hit by anyone, though I had to sit in my car in the number three lane for ten minutes or so with my foot on the brake to keep from rolling back into other cars. An emergency tow-truck came and pulled me off the freeway and I called Triple-A and they came and towed me back to the dealer.

On Friday they called to say I needed a new transmission and it would be $8,977. I just about shit myself. They obviously did not correct the problem when I brought it in to them and told them there were issues with the tranny and now that they let it completely fall apart they want me to fork over nine grand? I called their customer complaint line and we started talking.

On Saturday they called to say that they were going to actually open the transmission up to see what was wrong with it, that they might be able to repair it. I asked if maybe they should have done that before telling me I needed a new transmission, but they ignored my question.

More on this as it progresses.

The Tortoise

Remember the tale of the hare and the tortoise? The hare was a confident bragger, but ended up losing the big race to the tortoise, who was slow but smart? Well, in the realm of automobiles, I have found the tortoise, who in this case is Smart, but slow.

I went last week and test drove the Smart Fortwo, so named because it is definitely a car for only two people. I found a car that lived up to both its name and its brand, but unfortunately, also lived up to the properties of that famous tortoise.

People lined up for an opportunity to try out this diminutive Mercedes, which will not be on sale in the United States till early next year. I guess we all wanted to know what can you buy for $12,000. OK, no one is actually going to get one for that little, you will want all the extras and some of the more expensive ($14,000-17,000) models offer some pretty cool features that many will find attractive.

The Smart Fortwo reminded me of the Sprite. When I was a kid I built and flew model rockets. The race to the moon was in full swing and model rockets were really popular. The first model that almost everyone built was called the Sprite. The Sprite was the smallest rocket you could build; basically an engine with fins and a nosecone.

The Smart Fortwo is like that. It is basically a reinforced crash cage with an engine. I've seen some pretty spectacular crash tests with the Fortwo and it is amazing how little damage gets transferred inside of that cage.

One of the interesting concepts in this car is that only a small amount of the cage frame (in either black or gray) is visible as part of the exterior of the car. The rest of the car is clad in a soft, dent-resistant plastic (like Saturns used to be) of one color or another. The plastic panels are all removable and an extra set can be purchased for around $850, but the extra set can be of a different color, so you can for example, take your yellow car and turn it into a blue car when the mood suits you.

What I found really surprising about the Fortwo was the amount of room inside for the two occupants. I watched two guys, one six-five and the other six-three get in one and sit, what they called, comfortably. Plenty of leg-room, just enough head-room and enough distance between the two bucket seats that they did not bump arms. There was enough room behind the liftback to put some golf clubs or a few bags of groceries, but I wouldn't want to go camping in this thing. The dashboard controls are plain and simple, nothing fancy, just utilitarian. You can get upgraded sound, though I found nothing wrong with the sound in the model I drove.

The real problem with the car is the tortoise aspect. It seemed very slow. Now this might have been because they packed us in pretty close during the test drive. I never got much space between me and the guy in front of me, nor could I hang back much because of the guy behind me. But when I tried to jump on the accelerator, the car balked and sputtered a bit and then started to take off. It might have had decent acceleration after that, but I kept closing on the guy in front of me who refused to put his foot down. They say it will top out at 90MPH. It only has a 70HP motor, but the car only weighs 1,600 lbs, so it doesn't need that much power to get it moving. Still, the jerky acceleration I experienced was enough to worry me.

On the plus side, the car is cute as hell, particularly the $14,000 Fourtwo Passion, with it's full length and width transparent roof made out of the same stuff they make jet fighter canopies out of, and the $17,000 Fortwo Passion Cabrio. I could see using a Fortwo to tool around town in, but I would not be much help if a friend needed to move.

The Day the Turbines Died

Does anyone really know what STP is or does?

I know as a kid I didn't, but I sure knew about STP. Under Andy Granatelli STP became the king of the free product. Normally it was just a big honkin' sticker that said STP in white letters on a bright red background. Not only did I know about STP, it might have been the only company at the time whose president I knew by name and by face. Andy Granatelli not only marketed STP, he marketed Andy Granatelli and Andy and STP promoted heavily at races.

Granatelli stuck STP stickers on every flat surface he could find. A lot of those flat surfaces were the bodies of race cars. Granatelli wasn't satisfied to just sponsor cars though, he was a revolutionary kind of guy and he wanted to change the face of racing, so he had his own cars built. Never a man to do anything half-ass, Granatelli had Indy cars built, Indy cars with turbine jet engines.

In 1967 one of Granatelli's turbines came within eight miles of victory in the Indianapolis 500 when a six dollar ball bearing failed. The engines were said by some to generate 700 horsepower and were damn near unstoppable. The turbines were so much faster than any of the other cars at Indy that the U.S. Auto Club set new limits on the power of turbine engines — thereby banning the STP cars from Indy.

I got my only look at a Granatelli turbine on the final race of the 1968 season and the final race for the STP Turbines, in the Rex Mays 300 at the long departed, but much loved, Riverside International Raceway in Riverside California. The track was about twenty miles from my home in San Bernardino and my father used to take the whole family to the races in those days.

We loved Riverside, a track gouged out of the hard California desert. The track had everything: a series of fast esses that reeked havoc on those foolish enough or desperate enough to try passing on them, a number of tight hairpins, medium and long straightaways and a massive banked 180 degree final turn, Turn 9, that was a fan's delight for high-speed action passes. Somehow my Dad always got great tickets for Riverside, across from the pits that offered an unobstructed view of Turn 9, the pits and the series of ess turns. Never were these seats so wonderfully placed than for the action on December 1, 1968, the day the turbines died.

The two STP turbines were driven that day by Art Pollard and Joe Leonard and though they were a big part of the race's attraction, there were other forces in motion that day that would make it one for the record books. It was the final race of the season and Mario Andretti was locked in a very close battle for the Championship Title with Bobby Unser. With a 308 point lead, Andretti needed only to finish fifth or better to clinch the title and was running second when his Brawner Hawk-Ford's engine blew after 59 laps, setting off a crazy series of car hopping moves.

On lap 27 Andretti's back up "insurance" car driven by Jerry Titus rolled into the pits with a broken rear suspension. When Andretti coasted into the pits with a dead engine on lap 59 he dejectedly walked away from his back up car and headed over to the Granatelli pit. There was a heated discussion between the short Andretti and the bulky Granatelli, which ended with Joe Leonard being told to pit and get out of his car. Andretti hopped into the turbine. Pulling out of the pits just in front of Art Pollard's similar Lotus-turbine, which had also pitted, Andretti let Pollard pass and pulled in behind to learn his way around the unconventional car, which he had only once before sat in, during a tire test at Indianapolis.

After a single lap, Andretti apparently felt comfortable enough in the turbine to attempt a pass on Pollard entering Turn 9 on lap 63. But Andretti misjudged the pass or the speed or the handling, and the two cars collided with one another in a spectacular accident along the wall of the Turn 9 bank!

The era of the STP turbine had ended in a pile of smoking, mangled metal; black tire marks on the high bank wall their only gravestone.

Both drivers quickly got out of the wreckage and waited for the field to pass by before crossing to the infield. As soon as the accident happened, Parnelli Jones ran for a motorcycle and hurried off to the Turn 9 infield. A few moments later, the motorcycle screamed into the pits with Andretti on the back. After a seven lap consultation, Lloyd Ruby's Gene White owned Laycock-Ford was called in to the pits and Andretti took over his third car of the day on lap 70 and went on to finish the race in third place by using all three cars.

For all his efforts though, Andretti lost the USAC National driving championship by a mere 11 points to Bobby Unser. Had Mario hopped directly into Ruby's car, and by-passed the turbine, he may have won the USAC Championship. Mario later said he could not pass up the opportunity to race one of the STP Lotus Turbines. The USAC shortly ruled that drivers would not be allowed to change cars during a race, most likely as a direct result of Mario's antics on the day the turbines died.

A Smart Call?

I received an email today from the dealer I purchased my Mercedes from a half dozen years ago. They are opening a SMART dealership and the email was an invitation to go down to a special event to preview the cars. I signed up for it just to get a closer look at these half Swatch, half Mercedes mini-mini cars. I saw one driving down the 210 freeway not three weeks ago and have to admit to being slightly intrigued by the car. Not that I'm going to by one, but it might be kinda cool to test drive one, just to see how it feels to be in that small a vehicle.

"You Made Not So Great A Deal"

Anyone who has watched Deal or No Deal on NBC knows what those words mean; you sold your briefcase for an amount of cash that looked good, but was no where near the amount in your briefcase. My brother Jack knows what those words mean too. No, he has never appeared on Deal or No Deal, but he did make one very bad deal once upon a time, long ago.

Jack was a Captain in the Army during the Viet Nam War. When his time of service was up, he renewed and was paid a large bonus for doing so. A few months later the Army let him go anyway as they had too many officers and they again paid him a large fee, this time as severance. Bottom line is he left the Army with a lot of money, for late 1960s early 1970s anyway.

He used his money to invest in real estate in which he did poorly and in exotic automobiles, in which he did even worse. Jack first bought a Maserati and spent months looking for someone to insure it. Back in those days automobile insurance was not mandatory like it is today. He finally found a company that would insure exotics and sent them his first payment. A day or so later he crushed the car, slamming it between a number of boulders outside of Colorado Springs, Colorado when, blinded by sunlight, he inadvertently drove the car though a "T" in the road.

When Jack got out of the hospital, his new insurance company paid off and he leaped into action and bought a Ferrari. To be precise he bought a 1961 Ferrari 250 GT SWB Scagglietti Berlinetta; a race car. In 1961 the car cost $42,000, but Jack only paid $4,400 for it in 1971. It cost him $1,100 to make the car "street legal."

Jack's car was one of five built for the 1961 24 Hours of Le Mans race, though his car did not finish the race. I once had a boss who was a Ferrari nut and I asked Jack for the particulars on his car, so I could pass them along. He wrote:

The car sported a blueprinted 220 bhp (at 8,000 rpms) V-12 with three 4-barrel Weber 38 DCN carburetors and a 9.2:1 compression ratio. It had 4 forward gears with a reverse. The actual maximum speeds (at 8,000 rpms) the car reached in 1973 (I drove and Keith [our brother] watched the tachometer and speedometer) were 61 mph (first gear), 118 mph (second gear), 159 mph (third gear) and 193 mph (fourth gear). It was a hell of a blast to drive.

Jack had bad luck with this car. His first problem was that the windshield was so pitted that it was hard to see out of and over time it just got worse. Eventually he could not see out of the front of the car and called his insurance company and they told him to get it fixed.

Well, if Ferrari only made five cars, how many windshields do you think they made? The answer was, "not enough" because there were none to be found. Finally Jack found a company in Canada that would make him a windshield for $4,000. His insurance company said they would pay for it, but they would also cancel his insurance and he would never get any other as they would have to declare that he totaled two exotic sports cars in a three-year period.

He said "OK" and as they removed his windshield (to make a mold for the new one) it shattered. The car was now undrivable and a new windshield could no longer be manufactured. But Jack caught a break when Ferrari found a windshield in a warehouse in Italy. They shipped it to Colorado and Jack was able to get the car fixed and retain his insurance.

This was about the only break he caught. The engine in the car was not original and had problems. Eventually the engine blew when our brother Keith was driving the car. Jack found a rebuilt engine for the car, but by this time he was out of extra money. If I remember correctly, the engine was somewhere between $3,000 and $4,000 and Jack did not have the cash.

He sold the car in 1975 for $5,500 and that owner bought the rebuilt engine which it ended up, was the car's original engine (the serial numbers were the same). That owner turned around and sold the car for $10,800 the same year.

In 1985 the car was sold at auction for $272,000.