Posts filed under ‘Miscellaneous’
Announcing the grand opening of the brand-new Spannerhead Store! I’ve only made a handful of products so far, but look for more as I create more designs. Pick up a stylish t-shirt or bumper sticker and help spread the word!
Not everyone should drop their top, and this adage applies equally well to cars. After a full weekend of continuing to prep my garage for the forthcoming Z restoration project, and extending the sort-of Z theme from the previous post, let’s kick this off with an entry from the Z world:
Nissan 350Z. Shown at top. For a car with proportion “issues,” probably the worst thing Nissan could have done would have been to remove the only element giving it even a hint of interest in profile—the roof—and make it a ragtop. Sadly, they did. The transformation dramatically multiplied the number of “bad angles” possessed by the car. The 350Z’s side view morphed from a quasi-pyramid-like center-cab shape to an amorphous soap bar. And no convertible truly looks good with the top up; but the 350Z deserves special mention for its awfulness, looking for all the world like a symmetrical lozenge with a speed bump amidships. Truly terrible.
Chrysler PT Cruiser. Where do I start? The picnic-basket-like “roll bar?” The bathtub-ish styling? The fact that the once kind-of-plucky retro shape had jumped the shark, past its prime, exhausted its 15 minutes of fame and finally become a complete cartoon with the ragtop iteration? Male, female, young, old, car buff or not; I don’t care what your party affiliation is, driving one of these is a utter affront to human dignity. They should have offered them from the dealer with brown paper bags for the new owners to wear over their heads.
Mitsubishi 3000GT. Take one overwrought, overweight, over-complex Japanese sports coupe. Add a dose of fading public interest. Throw in a poorly-executed, trunk-killing folding hardtop. And garnish with a dash of nearly double the car’s price. Recipe for success? I think not. Over the 3000GT Spyder’s 2-year (’95-’96) model run, its automaker sold a whopping 1618 here in the States. Granted, the folding hardtop was a good idea (the Mercedes SLK would later execute it correctly, sparking an industry trend); Mitsubishi just couldn’t pull it off, and overall it did more harm than good to the car’s reputation.
Let’s get a few disclaimers out of the way:
That said, in no particular order, here are a few procedural steps and goals I bear in mind when wielding my DSLR:
I know that more than anything else, Motor Trend‘s post is kind of an end-of-year throwaway stat compilation. And the editorial staff certainly has enough sense to grasp that qualifying a car’s handling is more than about just the raw numbers. Still, the contrast in criteria between MT‘s “10 Best Handling Cars of 2011” and Car and Driver‘s recent duo of “Best Handling Car in America for Less than $100K” and then “…Less than $40K” is instructive.
In generating their respective assessments, MT relied solely on raw skidpad and track numbers, while C&D, although they used track time as a “tool” in their comparo, treated the numbers as a smaller part of a bigger picture, with additional metrics like steering response, body control and chassis composure factored into their evaluation. In contrast to MT‘s quick-and-dirty establishment of a benchmark for internet racers to bicker over, C&D set themselves the more ambitious goal of trying to qualify the un-quantifiable, of trying to methodically communicate something that’s primarily sensed by the driver, and oftentimes can have far more of an impact on how a car handles than raw capability. Case in point: Anyone who’s ever attended a track day or HPDE will tell you stories of many cars that were slower on paper actually driven faster around the track than more high-caliber racers, simply because the slower cars were more communicative and benign in their subjective feedback to the driver.
The finishing positions of the Corvette Z06 in both the MT and C&D articles provide an extreme example of the exclusivity of objective and subjective handling. According to the numbers, the car is supremely capable, ranking first in MT‘s assessment, but in terms of driver feedback and response, it leaves a lot to be desired, and it comes in sixth out of seventh in the C&D article.
The takeaway from all this is something forum junkies and car buffs in general need to bear in mind when flaunting track times, 1/4 mile trap speeds and braking numbers in online discussions: Your automotive hero may be the performance be-all end-all under the right circumstances, but figures alone don’t seal the deal. No one can prove one car is better than another by simply matching up the data—it’s how a car feels, how it responds, if it makes you smile and feel confident behind the wheel whether it has 90 or 573 hp. As far as I’m concerned, it’s the ability of the car to connect with its driver that separates the truly great from the pretenders, and ensures those that excel in that capacity a loyal following.
Since most automotive journalists are likely hunkered down in their beds, visions of F10 BMW M5s and 2013 GT500s dancing in their heads, it’s been an exceptionally slow news day. What better time, then, to pen a little self-serving look back at the six months I’ve been blogging?
It’s been an adjustment, to say the least. Depending on a number of factors—how excited I am about a particular subject, how familiar I am with said subject, how much time I spend conjuring a topic, how quickly I’m able to find and format images, etc—writing a post can take anywhere from 30 minutes to a couple of hours, and shoehorning that time into often-hectic family life can be difficult. Fortunately, I’ve been able to generate a steady stream of content beyond the initial pent-up backlog of automotive opinions built up over the years prior to the blog. The various series I’ve started help, as does the odd good news day here and there. It may be 10:30 in the evening, and I may have had no clue what to write about up until then, but somehow, inspiration comes, even if I just phone it in for that day (and you all have been privy to many of those posts).
I’m incredibly grateful for my readership, as limited as it is. I have to admit the bulk of the site’s hits come from search engine results, and so much hit-and-run browsing makes me thankful for the returning visits the site records. Suffice it to say that so far, you’re, um, an exclusive club. I’ve been toying with the idea of starting a forum, but without a compelling “angle” that would differentiate it from the hordes of automotive forums out there, I don’t want to put in the time to set that up, as much traffic as that would have the potential to generate.
Preemptively, and because I would like to focus on automotive topics through the next holiday, I do have a few goals for Spannerhead for the new year:
That should keep me busy for quite a while. Again, thanks to all my faithful readers, and a very merry Christmas to all. May your daily commutes be safe, your heel-and-toe downshifts seamless, and the bases of each of your trees festooned with wonderful car-related gifts.
Riffing on the classic Conan sketch, here’s an example of a train wreck caused by the collision of MMORPG geekery and car enthusiast posturing:
Apparently you can make enough money selling WoWBots to buy a tuned, carbon-fiber-laden Nissan GT-R for $150,000. That’s what one 18-year-old Zilvia.net forum denizen says he did, and now he’s selling the car on the board. Naturally, everyone else thinks he’s trolling.
As the husband of an avid World of Warcraft player (and the owner of a level 85 Draenei mage, no less), the Jalopnik post held particular relevance for me. Needless to say, I immediately sent the link to my wife and asked her if there was any possible way for her to get into this apparently lucrative “WoWBots” programming scene and earn me enough money to score a GT-R as well. Still waiting for a response on that one, but it may be just as well—the thread in question apparently descended into the usual claims, lies and YouTube “proof” which the alleged owner of the GT-R later admitted was all a scam. Yet another “get car quick” scheme goes up in smoke. Oh well.
Matt Hardigree at Jalopnik writes an excellent article drawing parallels between the technologically-dependent pilot mindset that doomed Air France Flight 447, and the potential for a variation of the same mindset to compromise car drivers’ ability to respond in an emergency situation on the road. The money quote:
I’m not anti-technology. I think technology can enhance and improve safety. Driverless cars and similar tech is designed primarily as safety equipment. Great. But instead of worrying if we’ve designed an autonomous system smart enough to drive without crashing when engaged, we need to worry about whether we’ve designed autonomous systems that are smart enough to not make us dumb when they disengage.
As far as technology’s potential to create the kind of dependency that could allow a driver’s emergency instincts to atrophy, or fail to develop in the first place, adaptive cruise control is Hardigree’s Exhibit A. Auto-drive technology, still immature at present and requiring a degree of road-based infrastructure that won’t be in place for quite some time, is the closest point of comparison to the context that doomed Flight 447, but the essence of the article holds true, even for less-than-fully-automated vehicle control environments. The more control a particular driving convenience assumes on our behalf, the more diligent we as drivers must be to maintain a connection to our cars’ actual dynamics, in the event, however rare, that the system fails and we’re compelled to reassert control.
In fact, I’d go further than that and maintain it’s not only the technology that takes control away from the driver that makes a car potentially less safe; it can also be the gadgets and doodads—some the driver himself brings into the car—that allow him to be distracted more easily from his primary task: Driving. It’s a variation on a very relevant theme as the virtual world envelops us more and more—We must be aware not only of what technology does for us, but also what it does to us. The more we become desensitized to the latter, the more we lose touch with our essential humanity, whatever your worldview. And that we do at our peril, whether in a fiery cataclysm like the one that overtook Flight 447, or in the slow withering of the faculties which connect our real bodies and minds to the real world.
Coincidence or not, the release of the Eagle Speedster in the year of the 50th anniversary of the legendary Jaguar E-Type’s debut is entirely appropriate. A car buff’s fantasy of an E-Type with modern running gear, the Speedster takes the classic shape unaltered, tidies up the details of the styling, adds modern power and suspension and prices it into the stratosphere, in the process creating nearly the sensation in the automotive world the original did.
Offered at an eye-watering $780,000 apiece, each Speedster is handbuilt and utterly flawless, qualities which at least partially justify the price. Performance is on par with modern sports cars as well, thanks to the car’s light 2,200 lb weight and torquey, 4.7l, 330 hp straight six. The claimed 0-60 time is around 5 seconds, but then, driving the Speedster isn’t really about raw numbers; it’s about the experience. It’s a delicate balancing act—How to keep enough of the classic car without making it feel old and fragile, and introduce enough modernity without completely bulldozing the classic patina that gives the car its character? If Jeremy Clarkson, in the review after the jump, is to be taken at his word (and there’s no reason not to), it would appear Eagle has pulled it off in spades:
Inspired by the recent reveal of the SSC Tuatara‘s wacky/awesome (take your pick) interior, and the car’s stated intent to reclaim for SSC the title of “World’s Fastest Street-Legal Production Car” from the Bugatti Veyron Super Sport, I decided to revisit the evolution of that title over the past 60 years or so.
Here’s the progression since 1949:
And here are some observations about the list:
