Culture|Garage

The new STI. The Volvo C30. The Audi A3. The Mazda Speed 3, hell, even the Ford Verve concept. And now the 9-x concept.

It’s such an absolute love/hate split. I love them for their functionality. And quite honestly, driving a hatch makes me feel all Euro. I feel smarter than the masses. I get performance and functionality. And not another appliance or point to point shuttle.

More rambling… and do hatches do it for you? Read the rest of this entry »

ShareThis

Lutz gave a pretty open an honest status of Pontiac during the unveiling of the Solstice Coupe, the G8 ‘ute (wtf?) and the G8 GXP (400hp and six speed).

He told us how they tried to claim “driving excitement,” but what that meant is we got a four cylinder Grand Am and enough body cladding to fill an Aztec (yes, he really said that). And that now their goal was to actually deliver some excitement to the brand.

And by bringing RWD and true performance models to the brand they were going to be able to ignite this passion and excitement.

Read my thoughts and reviews Read the rest of this entry »

ShareThis

Ok, we have all seen the Sync commercials. We all understand the basic premise. But how many of you have actually used speech technology and voice recognition devices? We have all tried it at one time or another using our shitty Motorola or had to deal with the computer chick on Comcast’s 800 number. And you know what, it has all sucked.

Ford’s biggest dilemma is going to be convincing people that the Sync doesn’t suck. One of the friendly Ford booth gals asked me if I was familiar with the Sync and if I wanted to try it out.

I told her I had an iPhone so I doubted it would work with the Microsoft interface. Wrong. So I hop in the Focus with her, we set my iPhone to discoverable, and then entered the PIN number that the car provided.

Full write up Read the rest of this entry »

ShareThis

Everyone loves lists. And we aim to please. Yesterday we picked up european car’s top 10 sleepers, which had us thinking about a list of American cars. Only thing is, none of us really follow American cars, well, besides Jim… but you probably already figured that out.

Is our list the be all end all? Yes. You will never find a more complete list, we diligently covered all of the bases and discussed this via like two emails. Plenty of time and thought was put into this list. So I am highly confident that we didn’t miss a single sleeper. In case the Internetz confuses you, I was being highly sarcastic.

The full list follows the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

ShareThis