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They say you should never meet your heroes. For the most part that's true, I've never been more disappointed than after my first drive in a DeLorean DMC-12, childhood dreams of time travel completely squashed. When I was eleven I picked out the colors for a friend's dad's new NSX - red with a black top - and even though I've never driven one, it's been on top of my supercar wish list ever since. So when the guys from 0-60 Magazine called and said they wanted to fly me out to Infineon to drive not just any NSX, but the Spoon Honda NSX-R GT, a tuned version of the rarest NSX ever made, I didn't hesitate. More »
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The car industry and the publications that serve it like order. They like to place things into categories and through doing so, exert some illusion of control over the marketplace. The BMW 3-series competes with the Audi A4. The Honda Accord competes with the Toyota Camry. Vehicles are priced to be a few dollars higher or lower than the competition and offer a few percentage points more of some variable or a few less. All this makes for easy Powerpoint presentations, unchallenged marketing departments and easily defined cars; we all know that an Accord is like a Camry, but with a nicer interior and a better driving experience. It's a nice, comfy way to do business. Then a car like the 2009 Volkswagen CC comes along, refuses to play by the rules and screws everything up. How? By offering more than a Mercedes CLS for less than half the price. More »
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Why you should buy the 2009 BMW 135i: More »
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Exterior Design: **** More »
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Perhaps more than any other car in its range, the 2009 BMW 135i carries the weight of customer expectation on its shoulders. Supposedly the antithesis to the soft, the bloated and overcomplicated cars dominating BMW’s range for the majority of this decade, people want the 135i to herald a return to the simple, well-engineered driver’s cars the company became famous for. And with a 300 HP twin-turbo inline-six mounted longitudinally in a small rear wheel drive coupe, on paper at least, it looks like the 135i could be that car. More »
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Why you should buy the 2008 Infiniti G37S: More »
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Exterior Design: **** More »
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There are those who claim to be able to reach across the ethereal plane, into another dimension, and speak with the dead. I will make no such claim. The best I could offer my friend was assistance in tracking down the plots containing his great grandfather and other relatives, buried in an Irish Catholic cemetery north of town. Aiding us in our search was the stately 2008 Infiniti G37S, which felt appropriate for this task — you don't want to visit your ancestors in an Aveo. It would look bad. More »
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The 2009 Corvette ZR1 is the best car ever made. It redefines what performance cars are capable of, not by its numbers (the 0-to-60 in 3.3 seconds and a 205 MPH top speed figures are no longer noteworthy north of $100,000), but by how it makes those numbers so accessible. Simply put, the ZR1's most remarkable achievement is how easy and unintimidating the chassis makes exploiting the car's 638 HP. The only problem is I'm not good enough a driver to fully do so. Halfway through a day's lapping, halfway around the Lutz Ring and full throttle at the top of third gear is bringing me and a red ZR1 into a 180-degree corner way too fast, while the blind crest just before it - taken at maximum power and maximum cornering - has us way off line too. In any other supercar, especially one as hairy as a Viper or as rear-engined as a 911, this would be a serious moment, probably resulting in one of my notorious off-track excursions. But today I can just haul on the brakes all the way through turn-in and up to the apex and then get back on the power - hard. The result: sweaty palms instead of trashed carbon fiber body work. More »
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Last month's review of the 2008 Dodge Challenger SRT8 may have seemed to some a blinding orgy of Detroit love. Having just moved from Detroit to New York City, I was homesick and was seemingly in need of a shot of Motor City muscle. Still, I offer no apology, because despite the rose-colored glasses, I managed to outline the three glaring issues with the low-volume '08 model year Challenger SRT8 — the outdated interior, the weight and most importantly, the automatic transmission. After spending a day this past week driving the new 2009 Dodge Challenger R/T, SRT8 and SE on the roads of New York City and on the Raceway Park track at Englishtown, NJ, Dodge has fixed at least one-third of the Challenger's problems. That's a good thing for Dodge, because I left the rose-colored glasses back in Detroit. More »
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Why you should buy the 2008 Ford Mustang Bullitt: More »
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Exterior Design: ***** More »
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I managed to drive nearly one thousand miles across Texas in a 2008 Ford Mustang Bullitt without running over a cow, getting in a gunfight or playing a single hand of high stakes poker. How? If you've never been, the Texas in your head is a rugged place with sun-drenched highways stretching across a flat endless plain as seen in movies actually shot in Southern California. We've got three of the ten largest cities in the United States. We've got dusty hills and verdant valleys. Modern skyscrapers and sandy beaches. Twists and turns. Tangy BBQ and spicy Pho. For both Texas and the Bullitt, the myth serves a purpose but the reality is that much more magical. More »
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Why you should buy the 2008 Dodge Challenger SRT8: More »
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Exterior Design: ***** More »
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Michigan's M-1 is a state trunk road that starts at downtown Detroit's waterfront drive, Jefferson Avenue, then shoots north in a straight line for 21.4 miles, past some of the poorest and wealthiest neighborhoods of the metro region until it loops back down the other direction in the city of Pontiac. And really, nobody calls it "M-1." Everyone knows it as Woodward Avenue and it's the heart of the Midwestern metropolis dubbed the Motor City. But until this morning, I didn't realize how important this stretch of road was to me. Many of you may not know, but this past month I moved to New York. Until the start of last month, I'd lived my entire life in this corner of Michigan. But this week I'm back in Detroit for one reason, and one reason alone — an entire week of driving the 2008 Dodge Challenger SRT8. It's a car imbued with so much positive energy there's only thing I can think of to do it justice. I plan on running Dodge's muscular old-school revival up and down Woodward Avenue, stoplight-to-stoplight, from downtown Detroit to Pontiac until I pass out from exhaustion or the gas station declines my credit card. More »
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The first time I saw the gullwing doors on a DeLorean DMC-12 open, in Back To The Future, it was abundantly clear something important was happening. Something cool. Then I learned that it had a chassis engineered by Colin Chapman and a body designed by Giorgetto Giugiaro. Then I read about the cocaine and the stunning fall from grace. Then I visited the headquarters of the company dedicated to keeping the brand alive. Then I got to drive one. The story of our pilgrimage to the reborn Mecca of stainless steel '80s sports car dreams below.
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Exterior Design:*** More »
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