La Dolce Veloce

The latest car color numbers are in, courtesy of J.D. Power and Associates. No big surprise, silver is the most popular color for new cars at 24.1%. I’m guilty of supporting that trend, as we own two silver cars ourselves (well, maybe they’d be considered gray). Black came in at #2, followed by blue, white, gray, red, green, beige (yuck!), gold (eww), and brown (they still paint cars that color?). Read more about it here.

Details of Porsche’s upcoming Cayman sports car (coupe version of the Boxster) can be found over at AutoWeek. The car promises performance equal to or greater than its more expensive 911 Carrera sibling.

I remember trying to climb low, snow covered hills in a front wheel drive car before. It can be tough, keeping your momentum up and wondering if you’d make it. And that’s on a hill that a toddler could run up without tiring. Well, to show off their all wheel drive system, Audi filmed a commercial showing the ultimate hill climb – up a 37.5 degree ski jump (that’s an eighty percent grade)! The car was helped by some spiked tires (quarter inch spikes), but was otherwise stock.

The GPS7100-B looks pretty interesting. You get your basic GPS tracking (location, speed, etc), configurable reporting (time, alarm, or only on request), and the neat thing is, you don’t pay a monthly fee for the info. Billing is based on the amount you actually use the service. If you just want to ping the location of your car once and a while, it’s $.25 each time. Pretty fair!

It’s stories like this that make people so eager to sue anyone for any reason. Remember the McDonald’s coffee lawsuit? Same thing. What’s they usually don’t hear is how these verdicts are typically thrown out in appeals. In this particular case, two young women died when they were ejected from a 2000 Ford Explored when it rolled. Tragic, certainly. However, they were not wearing their seat belts, so come on, what do you expect? Ford lost this case on the argument that they could have spent a little more money on the side windows to make them safer and less likely to be broken (hence those girls may not have been ejected). The thing is, the Explorer met all Federal safety standards already. Just because you CAN make a safer car, doesn’t mean you’re legally required to do so. If you were, there’d be no more high clearance SUVs on the road, just station wagons less likely to roll over. You can read the full article here.

The Koenigsegg CCR broke the production road car speed record, setting a top speed of 242mph at the Nardo test track in Italy. The previous record was held by the stunning McLaren F1. This small Swedish car company has done a fantastic job of refining their car’s design to get to this point. More pictures can be found here. Read the rest of this post for the official press release.
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The introduction of the Cayenne made me lose all hope for Porsche. If these rumors of a four door Porsche sedan prove true, perhaps, just perhaps, I’ll come to forgive them for that SUV monstrosity. The sedan, possibly to be named “Panamera”, will be powered by either a 340hp V8 or 600hp V10 with either rear or all wheel drive. Prices will not be cheap, around $130-200k. Production is to start in 2009. (source)