Last winter as a favor to a friend I had the distictive honor of
babysitting her 2002 VW Jetta while she went home to Texas for
Christmas break. Of course, as anyone up here in central New York can
tell you, parking a car in a lot for a month is a great way to watch
your rotors get rusty and your battery die. So as part of my “favor” I
stipulated that I would have to drive the car at least weekly
(Ow, stop twisting my arm). Of course, she agreed, it was only fair.
After all, I was saving her around 250 bucks.

Read more

This German car showdown has been done to death, or has it? What forces Bimmer owners to look down at Merc-lovers? How come I’ve never heard a song sung about BMW cars like there are about Benzes? And to quote Jadakiss: why don’t they make the CL6 with a clutch?

Read more

In August, your favorite TCB editor was a guest at an exclusive Land Rover off-road driving event. It was co-sponsored by the magazine Town & Country, and was headquartered in a mansion about 30 miles west of Washington, D.C. I drove the brand new Range through a forest walkway, sat in and played with the new LR3 (before it was officially launched in the U.S.) and ate posh food that even Martha Stewart would have been proud to serve.

Read more

Automotive designers seem to be looking backward to design the
future, namely, the cab will be moving further and further backwards. Straight through the ’90s, the cab-forward design dominated this
era of the economobile. Front wheel drive, size constraints and small
displacement 4- or 6-cylinder engines pushed the cabin further forward
to squeak some more room into the car. This design even permeated into
the van market, with the notoriously wedge-shaped Chevy Lumina Van
(Pontiac Trans Sport, Oldsmobile Silhouette). However, the V-8 is back
in a big way, and it’s really mixing up automotive design.

Read more

Attention all car companies: your websites suck. I came to this conclusion quickly (and rashly of course), as a user and a designer, when pulling together some of the links for the articles below. I get that most people don’t buy cars on the web. I get that most people don’t care about what a car is really like. I get that no one likes looking at pictures, or video, or well written articles about cars on the web.

Read more

The “Mondial de l’Automobile Paris 2004” [ fr . en (warning: annoying sound effects in both languages) ] kicked off this last Saturday and one the biggest pulls at this years event is the spanking new Ferrari F430 presented for the first time to the public. The F430 will replace the 360 Modena and comes with a 4.3 litre V8. There has been a lot of speculation concerning the name of this new model but Ferrari seems to have settled with F430 and moreover avoided indicating a type, such as Modena, Maranello or Scaglietti.

Read more

I love new technology just as much as the next guy, in fact, I just impulse-purchased a new iPod the other day. I drool over the latest tech offerings, I keep my eyes glued to Slashdot like it’s my job, and the only kind of history that interests me in the least bit is modern computing history. However, when does it become too much? When does technology start destroying the automotive experience instead of helping it?

Read more

We’ve all seen commercials that show a steep craggy mountain; a large
trailer in tow behind a large pickup truck. A man with a deep voice
proclaims that this truck can tow more than its in-class rivals, has
bigger brakes, bigger tires, and a more powerful engine. The
imagery and the narrative converge to make you pick one up on the way back
from your manly construction job tomorrow. But why doesn’t it make me
want to buy one?

Read more