regfootball

cmon, the aztek has a 'hofmeister kink' on the rear window! Looks like an X5, too.

there was an accord review i read last week where the writer echoed what i felt about its interior....very cold and cheap and dated feeling. i will say this. its a bit jekyl and hide with the new accord's interior. you gotta get the leather and correct color. there is a big difference as opposed to the dismal cloth and dark. Either way, the design is nothing to excite. Fusion drives well, needs HP and more exciting interior. (yes, ford fans can be unbiased) I wish Chevy had ponied up for better plastic on the inside of the Malibu because the design is nice. I became re-interested in the Passat recently. Originally i was turned off by the new Passat and its expensive v6 config. But I sat in a nice base passat wagon recently that was well amenitied and i much prefer it as a wagon. Available stick as well. The Malibu is still the best looking but there will be so many of them on the road, i think a passat wagon would be the most unique. Oh how I wish the G8 had AWD. it would really be a no brainer for me then.

saturn changed their business model to sell more models, each with less volume. then chevy can sell greater volume. no need to sell 200k ions, let chevy sell the cobalts and let saturn sell the astra at much lower volume.

good review

fly, as an owner, i can say much of what you wrote was true and insightful and a lot of the reason why we got one. There are 2 others i work with who own one. I do also agree with your assertion that it was the original ugly crossover. When it was introduced, people were not tolerant of styling this bad. But since, so many bad crossovers you listed, that it seems to be a little more acceptable now to be ugly. In fact, i am sure lots of folks are expecting crossovers to look ugly now. It doesn't excuse it, but it does show that sometimes people see the virtue first. you might want to send a kudos to the buick rendezvoux. it is also liked by its owners and really truly was popular. hell, ask buickman. thanks for the writeup......although i am sure you still like the murano better....LOL if anything what it showed it was GM really was thinking on the edge of crossovers......they just didn't package it the best from the get go. what they learned from their mistakes here, they applied to the lambdas. i wish they also had a 2 row lambda.

pontiaction. i love it. i think the resale on the aztek will be better once its a few more years older, then it will be a bit cultish. considering how reasonable it was new (26k+ list, 16k new), resale isn't a concern. considering our friends dumped over 32k in their pilot that only has AWD and leather as options i don't have, and they get less function out of it, i'd say they are the ones who will get screwed on retail......even if their tranny doesn't blow. my car payment is less than half theirs.......money i can use for other things that matter. when a coworker last spring car died and they were in the middle of two home transactions, and they needed a car, they seeked out an aztek deliberately to replace their dead eurovan. there are folks that actually seek them out. she now loves the AWD and flexible seating. it might seem odd to a couple of -people- on this board that someone might seek this vehicle out, but then again, there's a lot of lame people out there that don't have the emotional maturity to put aside things like styling mistakes and prioritize things that matter, like ride, comfort, utility, quietness, flexible seating, good gas mileage, cheap insurance, low cost of ownership. Nearly 90k miles in about 3 1/2 year with virtually no defects and nothing to repair. 20+ mpg and carlike handling and will swallow gear in near minivan like fashion. The styling was a mistake, sure. But to those who continually harp on stuff like that and things like the new focus i just would simply say, 'get a life' and grow up. The Edge is probably the next vehicle in the stable. It has the looks but I wish it had the utility of the Aztek. The Flex to me seems like another Aztek in the making and I guess it interests me too, but I don't think the price will be right.

i hope those actors Hillary hired were union scale. i wonder if any of them were in Die Hard........

Yeah, i live in a box, but lately we upgraded cell phones around here. Then, last week i took advantage of an offer to add another one for nothing. Basically its on Sprint and I've got this thing called power vision that allows me to surf, and load up email and maps and all that stuff. I loaded some mp3's on it and am listening to tunes. They are cameras, camcorders, calculators, IM's, wow. I think TV is even possible. And that's not the half of it I am sure. The other day I got lost driving around and the google maps on my phone saved my ass and my lunch hour. Who needs NAV in the car? Now I can check gmail from my phone, anywhere. I can even get limited streaming tunes from Sirius or Rhapsody if i want to pay. i can check scores. weather. movie listings. damn. Now I know like the Iphone can do even more. I've heard on the true smart phones, you can watch your slingboxed cable or satellite on them even. bitchin'. This is cool stuff. Maybe some of you more tech savvy folks can share what is possible and what features you got on your phones.

hey everyone. bite the banana.

nah, i just had some free time and broke out the paint guns...... wife don't know yet, so don't say anything.........

God forbid we promote the notion of buying goods from one of our own companies. But we haven't legislated that.

yeah, but letting government be overly active it usually results in a major f-up i.e wait till they f- up 'universal health care' usually what happens is those that think they know better find ways to infiltrate government and policy making to steer the agenda to match their idealism. the rest of the general populace that prefers something else is generally too busy with their producing type jobs to divert what free time they have into countering the folks that steer the agenda. things like supposedly SF banning plastic bags in grocery stores........ those of us who either recycle our bags or use them for trash so we don't have to buy more bags (i.e. they won't have to use more plastic to make more) nope, gotta ban the bags. POLICY! AGENDA! now i guess we'll just use even more paper. and buy more plastic bags for trash instead of using the ones we have already or recycling them

3 words that = socialist driven agenda. who decides? some want to solve the problem without restricting freedoms. some want to legislate and force changes to people's freedoms and think they've solved the problem. we could probably reduce our pollution by 1/3 simply by banning cars in california, where sprawl was invented. hey, let's start there!

what i have encountered is the first thing that gets brought up by the global warming bunch is cars are the enemy, and quicky morphs into a 'we need to get rid of all cars, live like sardines in urban centers, all use mass transit'. Somehow we go from global warming to outright statements telling people how we should live. So, many of these huggers want you all to ride the bus, and want your freedom of movement restricted. Not only that, they want your lifestyle restricted and your space restricted. Those types of positions are not only restricting your freedom, they also lack common sense, and in the extreme version of utopia they create, would also never happen socially. their first assumption is that we can all coexist as sardines living in multistory boxes in urban settings, sharing property and amenities. then they assume all our transport by walking and things like rail and buses and trains will be adequate to support our fast paced and geogrpahically expansive lifestyle. they think we will be adquately served buying all our food and sheets of plywood from little organic farmer's markets and that there should be no need for plywood to begin with. they think you can get your kid or family of 5 to the emergency room and pharmacy at 3 AM by walking in 10 below weather. then they mistakenly assume that all income classes will gladly sign up to buy property in mixed income communal settings. Yeah, like anyone is going to invest big bucks buying a piece of property that lacksthe spoils, and is in proximity to anyone who is not of their ilk. Love the idealism, but you'd be pressed to find many examples where that sort of engineered social agenda has panned out. Face it people, and i'll use tame terminolgy here, 'the man' wants his secluded house in a gated neighborhood with lots of room and exclusivity. It's no statement on what's right or wrong. It's just simply how the system works. No one would invest money into property if those safeguards were not in place to protect their investments. NIMBY's...ever heard of that? A lof of the hard core envinrmental urbanist types are those that would not mind that sort of 'refined tribal' type living environment....i.e. little apartments and condos and shared amenities, that seldom see long term maintenance or care or pride of ownership and responsibility. they want the tight little urban settings where everyone is out and about and not much green space, just lots of lack of privacy and lots of hustle and bustle. little art galleries, coffee shops, etc. and not every body gets into that sort of lifestyle. The folks that hunt, farm, ride snowmobiles and ATV's, HAVE CARS, have livestock and or horses, etc. just don't care for that.

mak- does your car return the favor?

typhoon.... why not just G8 utility? and, they really ought to offer this with a v6. it'll be interesting to see what volume of these they bring over. my guess is only about 5,000 but in and of itself that should create lots of publicity. that, and its a unique offering for GM in the market.

i sent mustangs article to a fellow arhcitect coworker today (tree hugger) and she didn't speak to me for the rest of the day. no comments to reading the article of anything. usually i can get a pleasant debate out of her on something environment related. the political influence is so strong now towards this topic that if you disagree with it or present some counterpoints to it the huggers get all in a huff. yet, most of these folks can never cite the definitive scientific research on the spot to support their fervor. this is why the politicizing of it is so successful. tell a bunch of folks looking for a cause to align themselves with something that sounds dire and fightable and you get lots of bandwagoners.

keep buying those toyotas. send all your money over there and let those guys know you approve of stuff like this.

the real tragedy is the FJ cruiser.

it is. the element's interior is less endearing than a plastic storage container.

some of the admins / power posters over there definitely love to go off on lengthy one sided writeups about this and that and the thing is, i rarely see what they yack about coming true over time. i could type all night about the funny crap i've read over there. i do like how they get stories posted quickly, but then the threads soon go off on directions and die.

please, no reason to invite harry maxx, please.....

funny, i rode in a coworkers element yesterday. yucky mess of cheap plastic and overall very unpleasant. lacks room, warmth. just cheap cheap cheap. my aztek is so much better than that element.

the g8 v8 will start at 30k. so i do not see the camaro exceeding that price with v8 guts. sure, an srt will pack more punch, but i think they are testing the limits of what someone will pay for a muscle car.