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Detroit, 10:07 AM
Wed Dec 2
30 posts in the last 24 hours
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12/01/09
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12/01/09
08:49 AM
BTW, prices on these suckers have fallen to about $8K. I'll be buying one soon.
12/01/09
That being said, the eco pedal is shiite. At this point I await the first drive.
12/01/09
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12/01/09
Two words: Condo & Crane.
The outdoor unit must have weighed about 250lbs, but because of OSHA, they had to rent a crane.
12/01/09
12/01/09
08/20/09
08/20/09
As for the car itself, it's an improvement over current Infiniti's but it's basically a rebadged Maxima.
08/20/09
08/20/09
08/20/09
[karakullake.blogspot.com]
08/20/09
As a kid, I could walk up to the concept car and touch it. I remember the crunch rustle of my Tuffskins jeans and faint squeak of my Keds sneakers on a glistening convention room floor. It might just be a plaster mockup, but even just as a plaster mockup, it was a real object whose textures and colors existed were right there to see, and was it ever a thing to see. Engineers had sweated the numbers and designers had sweated ink to make it a car worth building, and then artisans had shed actual blood building the concept, the prototype, the first few examples off the line. Something large, heavy and expensive had been loaded onto a truck and brought to me so I could see it, walk around it, and hear what a hopeful man had to say about it. He was there to pitch it to me, to make me want it. But we were a frugal nation, a country populated by single incomes, little leagues and family campout vacations because that was cheaper. Good enough was good enough, because good enough was paid for. A man had to really work up the crowd's enthusiasm and when the cloth dropped and the busty smiling models stepped out of the way, the crowd of onlookers oohed and
08/20/09
...aahed as if they had been shown something truly remarkable. And maybe they had.
But now a presenter offers an abstract brushstroke on a screen, which morphs into a stylized car silhouette, which is transformed into a virtual car projected onto a neutral blank. There is thin, brief applause.
And I am not there. I see the reveal via a Youtube video that loads in fits and starts, and plays in fits and starts. And all this is brought to me via Jalopnik. My removal from the experience may exceed my separation from Kevin Bacon. Just as newer and newer cars seem to need people less and less, built by robots, navigated by satellites and correcting their own wheelspin, I am less and less engaged by automakers and their products.
I look back on Tuffskins and showroom models so new you can still smell the paint curing, and know those days can never come again. And that's a shame. Will my kids, once grown, look back on an experience like this, where a company and its workers laid their hearts on the line and built something for them to touch? Will they have been engaged on a level as earthy as putting an actual example directly in front of them, to be lauded or denied in the first person by the potential customer?
Somehow I doubt it.
08/20/09
08/20/09