This week, the LA Times's Dan Neil takes his Pulie and sticks it up the Chevrolet HHR's tailpipe with such figurative vigor, we're tempted to just hit copy-and-paste, shut the lights, and go get sugarplummed on Applebee's margaritas. Instead of wasting the HHR with a single, jungle-clearing BLU-82, labeled "poseur," he addresses the HHR's cultural failings like a lone Delta Force operative.

There is a Detroit-cloistered quality to the HHR, and not simply because it is such a pointed response to a crosstown rival. The HHR wants to capitalize on a sentiment.

Custom-car building and hot rodding are mechanical folk arts. Their very appeal lies in their perversion of the ordinary like a '32 Ford or a '49 Hudson into something extraordinary, something irreverent and ornery. Hot rodding is a kind of insurgency that cannot be commodified.

I'd keep going, but the salt is melting off my glass.

A Lukewarm Hot Rod [The Los Angeles Times]

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