Car Crazy

Germany is definitely a car culture.  It is one of the few countries in the world where you still bring your car(s) into the shop twice a year to switch from summer to winter tires.  Most all-seasons are good enough for normal driving even in snow.  Here, however, they want to squeeze every last bit of performance from their vehicle, despite the fact that the extra set of tires costs $750 or more, plus $100 in service each time they get them switched.  (Note:  In some places, they have laws that if you get into an accident in winter without winter tires on, you might automatically be at fault!)

But this post is really about my favorite car reviewer, Dan Neil.  He used to write car reviews for the LA Times, but now is with the Wall Street Journal.  He's won a Pulitzer, and it's easy to see why -- he combines humor, social commentary, and actual auto knowledge into reviews that are just plain fun to read.

His all-time funniest review is about the Corvette ZR1 ("Burning the world's oil for a good cause").  Really worth the read.
Don't believe me?  Here are some of my favorite exerpts as a taste of his writing:

Acura RDX:
...I suppose Acura's new crossover SUV could be better. It could, for instance, run on recycled Victoria Secret catalogs or the renderings from Star Jones Reynolds' recent weight-loss program. It could fairly reapportion congressional districts every time you turn the key or make sure Steven Seagal never-never-never makes another blues album... Is it well made? Are Oprah's diamond earrings real?

 

Audi Q5:
The most astonishing thing about my time in the 2009 Audi Q5 was that I actually took it off road, with dirt and everything. Granted, I was in the Brentwood neighborhood of West Los Angeles, where the creeks burble with Bollinger and raccoons wear rhinestone collars. Nonetheless, for most buyers in the compact luxury sport-utility segment, my little excursion on a home construction site might as well have been crossing the Gobi.

 

BMW 135i:
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.

 

Chrylser Town & Country:
...the 2008 Chrysler Town & Country Limited just might be the sexiest vehicle a man could ever drive.  This 2 1/2 -ton pachyderm, with window shades and the Cartoon Network on satellite TV, is sexier than a Ferrari. If [females] are heeding their instincts at all, they are looking for a man with patriarchal bearing... So the next time you have a blind date, roll up in the Town & Country minivan and just listen to the biological bells go off... And, not insignificantly, the thing goes like stink. Our tester had Chrysler's 4.0-liter, 253-hp V6 buttoned to a new six-speed transmission. Hang on to your juice boxes, kids.

 

Mini Cooper JCW:
The BMW-built 2004 Mini Cooper is not a perfect automobile...The back seat is the automotive equivalent of a spider hole in Tikrit. The ride is rough enough to disqualify you from future organ donations... But the Mini turns the most galling stop-and-go errand into an occasion for joyous gear-jamming and games of Diss the SUV...With its turning radius of a mere 34.2 feet, the Mini is brought to you by the letter U, as in U-turn. See a parking place on the other side of the street? You are on it like Snoop on a fatty.

 

Lexus IS-F:
This car started life as a Lexus IS350...then it got rabies...The IS-F is equipped with an EIGHT-speed automatic transmission, in which the gear ratio intervals are very evenly spaced. Eight speeds happen to correlate to eight notes of the diatonic scale -- do, re, mi, etc. If you hold the throttle and speed steady, and you shift up and down with the shifter paddles, you can actually coax simple melodies out of the stacked-pipe quad exhaust, for instance, "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star." And, yes, I get paid for this.

 

Honda Accord:
I was sitting at a red light when they rolled up beside me, the guy riding his Suzuki Do-Me 8000 with his hot female companion on the back, her thongage pouring out of her low-rise jeans. Her skintight ballistic-armor motorcycle jacket was unzipped down to her navel.  As I sat there in the Amana-white 2008 Honda Accord EX-L sedan, she looked over at me. I knew what she was thinking. She wanted me...And why wouldn't she? The Honda Accord ska-reams confirmed heterosexual. This car ought to be issued with a complimentary pair of relaxed-fit dad jeans... To own this car is to be possessed with an inexplicable urge to trim hedges.

 

Mercedes CL63:
Let's assume there's a bright side to the universe, a place where mercy and justice prevail, where the good are rewarded and the bad punished with equal alacrity. On this sunny shore, public school teachers make six figures, all stray kittens find good homes, and yard gnomes never get their little ceramic heads caved in.  Do not look for the Mercedes-Benz CL63 AMG there.  A veritable neutron star of gas-burning evil, [it] has the power to corrupt, oh yeah, absolutely. I honestly believe if you loaned this car to Ralph Nader and Ed Begley Jr. for the weekend, by Sunday night they'd be doing doughnuts in a Ralphs parking lot.

 

Subaru Forrester:
It is in the land of the ice and snow that Subaru has made its name. With the rather embarrassing exception of the Subaru Baja, this is a Snowbelt brand, a brand for literature professors at the University of New Hampshire; for women's studies majors at Cornell, and their girlfriends; for log cabin-dwelling, geothermal-energy start-up entrepreneurs in eastern Oregon who think that plaid Woolrich jackets are evening wear and that Trader Joe's Two-Buck Chuck is grand cru.  Smart people. Interesting people. And Canadians.

 

Porsche GT2:
You may recall from your psychology classes the name Harry Harlow, a controversial researcher known for his wire monkey-surrogate mother experiments. One group of baby rhesus monkeys was taken away from its mothers and given a maternal figure made of terry cloth; another group was given a figure made of just bare wire. These experiments demonstrated the famous Harry-Harlow-was-a-toolbag principle.  In Porsche's laboratory, the new GT2 -- stripped utterly to its essentials -- is the wire monkey. To love the GT2 is to embrace its malign indifference to your well-being... The GT2's lightweighting program concludes with ditching the rear seats, tossing out all the sound-deadening material, stripping some interior panels to bare carbon fiber and supplanting the front seats with leather-lined carbon shells padded with . . . well, nothing. The resulting car is 225 pounds lighter than the 911 turbo and is about as cozy as an MRI machine.  And yet I find it hilarious that Porsche, having thus perverted the car's power-to-weight ratio, chose to retain the two swing-arm cup holders. This begs the question: What the hell is in the cups?