The Garage: Your daily dose of automotive news, reviews and motorsports coverage
I just got back from a vary quick blast in a 2008 Subaru WRX STi! On cold, salty roads it’s hard to get too much of a feel of a car. Suffice it to say that the thing is very fast. Autocrossers will like the super short first gear, followed by a slightly longer second. The shift throws are one of the shortest I’ve seen in a production car.
Unfortunately, I don’t have my camera with me today.
No resale value I suspect.
With all the talk about the concepts we saw in Detroit this past week, let’s travel back in time to the 2006 North American International Automotive Show and head towards the Aston Martin stand and the Rapide concept.
Ford’s then Aston Martin division showed a four door sedan essentially a DB9 coupe that has been stretched by 11.8 inches, built off the same aluminum VH architecture as both the DB9 and the two-seater V8 Vantage. It used a 480-hp; 5.9-liter V-12 engine mated to a ZF manu-matic transmission and weighed just 309 pounds more than the two-plus-two-seater DB9 coupe.
When Ford decided to skip out on Aston Martin the Rapide concept was 86’d. When the David Richards era started at Aston Martin one of the first orders of business was to resurrect the Rapide.
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Some racers never seem to slow down especially when their still young. California’s Best Racing team member, Will Faules is one of them. Click here to follow along as we keep up to date with Team No Hot Wire as they head out to enjoy the KONI Challenge FRESH FROM FLORIDA 200 and then Will will be crewing for THE RACERS GROUP Porsches for the 2008 24 Hours of Daytona. Do these damn kids ever stay at home?
The KISS principle. Keep It Simple Stupid.
Having been a car guy and a car industry guy for so many years, I have spent time in new and different vehicles more than the average Joe. Now that I write about cars, I spend even more time in cars from all different manufacturers. As a result, I’m usually pretty adept at finding my way around a vehicle and rarely need an owner’s manual to figure out the basic controls of a car.
When I started road testing cars & trucks for The Garage, I actually thought it was pretty funny the first time I had to reach for the book to figure out how to turn on something basic like cruise control. More often recently, I’m finding myself stymied when trying to find controls without using The Book.
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One of the guys I work with is looking for an older VW of some sort. I think it’s a supercharged Passat or something, I wasn’t really listening, but what he wants is very specific. It must have a sunroof, 5 speed, leather and cannot be red. Apparently there were only a couple of hundred sold here in Canada. He’s not likely to find one.
It used to be that people looking for a used car would just find the car they were looking for and then live with whatever options came with it. Now, we have some really great used car search sites like Carmax. The folks at Carmax have released the Top Ten options searches that have been performed on their site during the first month of their new enhanced vehicle search feature.
Top Ten after the break
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I can remember years ago of auto buyers who insisted they not buy a vehicle that was built on a Monday or a Friday because it may not have had the attention to detail that it should have. Have you ever heard of cars that may have had a bad day on the assembly line or that may have been built when workers knew of an impending lay-off in the days to come?
Click here to read about one such vehicle that I worked on years ago that suffered all of the above.
Global Electric Motorcars, a Chrysler company, that manufacturers NEV’s, or Neighborhood Electric Vehicles, might just have a hot property on their hands.
A GEM Electric Vehicle burnt to the ground yesterday on the University of California Riverside campus. UCR media relations were unaware of the fire and the campus Police Department said it could have been a test burn. Test burn?
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Speaking to reporters in advance of his keynote speech to the Consumer Electronics Show a few weeks back, GM’s CEO Rick Wagoner denied that there have been glitches in the Volt development program. He said he believes that the company will deliver the plug-in electric vehicle to the market by its target date of 2010 but that there is “plenty of work to do.” The battery system seems to present the biggest challenge for the project.
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If you own a 2007 Ford Crown Victoria you now own a little piece of history.
Ford confirmed that the 2008 Crown Vic, first manufacture red in the mid 50’s, will be sold only through its fleet network, mostly to taxi companies and government agencies.
