CSpec

This is pretty funny. That said, I do hope Nawlins wins and destroys Manning while they're at it.

Hi 68!

First of all, I'm sorry to say I have no pictures. I went with a friend of mine and it was pushing his attention span as it was, and I didn't want to try his patience waiting to get that perfect angle. However, I saw a decent amount of metal so I'll write up my text impressions here: Ford Fiesta: I was never too agog over the Fiesta, but it was nice to see one in person. The sedan was quite ungainly I think; it was definitely not designed with a notchback in mind, much like the Versa. A jellybean with creases. The hatch was also present, in Top Gear mini-mall green, which looked much more cohesive. The interior looked fine, but I'm still not sure why this car generated so much buzz. I think a Yaris looks better to be honest. Ford Focus: It was seriously a joke seeing the new Focus next to the ancient and terrible US-spec model on sale now. Much improved, and the interior looked quite nice. Mazda2: Looked like a warmed over Protege from the 90s. Super bland styling. It was up on a turntable and not a single person looked twice. Lincoln: The exteriors of the new models all look quite nice, but I think the interiors still need work. Honda CR-Z: Interesting styling, but it's a hybrid, so IGNORED. Toyota: Boring boring boring. And all the cars had accelerated into the fire exits. Oh, they had some pimped out Avenza. That was cool. Not. Audi A8: What a disappointment! Looks exactly like an A4 photocopied at 150%. Come on! The new 7-series seriously blows it away in terms of styling. Mercedes E-class: I think the new E is pretty ugly. Hyundai wants their old Sonata taillights back. Speaking of which... Hyundai Sonata: Like most Hyundais, there is a good base but the detailing is overwrought and leaves much to be desired. Too many creases and slashes for my liking. Hyundai Equus: Bling is a good word for this car. Ostentatious and showy in every way, it attracted a very decent crowd. Will it be Hyundai's Phaeton? We'll see. Kia Forte: I actually really like the styling of this car. The interior is bland and old fashioned, but I think overall it's decent. Subaru: This brand was seriously clubbed by the ugly stick. Not a single decent looking model there. A shame, really. A Toyota conspiracy? BMW Z4: Now THIS was a good looking car! If I were to get a convertible, it would be this one. The interior was great too. BMW 7-series: The exterior styling is great, but we'll see how well it ages. BMW's old polarizing designs all aged magnificently I think. The interior was dull. General Motors Aveo Concept: Cool little car. My friend said it looked like the xB, but I thought the styling was very decent for its segment. Of course, we'll see how it looks with normal wheels and headlights. Converj: Very cool styling on this car. My friend said it looked like a Gallardo, and I think he had a point. I hope they make it with a real engine! Volt: Nice to see a Volt in person. I always thought the styling was great, but we'll see how it actually sells. A Volt-lite with a regular engine would be a cool ride. Cruze: Ehhhh, I'm not a huge fan. The front has a swollen lower lip and the whole car looks very Korean. However it should be a quality product. Granite: Cool little car. The front was a bit overdone because of the pedestrian-friendly high hood, but a neat little package overall. Definitely cues from the canceled Subtheta GMC in there. Regal GS: Very good overall. The front is a little let down by the waterfall grill, but the rest of the styling is great. Even my demostic-hatin' friend liked it. I hope they offer a manual in the other trim levels! Please let me know if I forgot anything! The XTS wasn't there unfortunately.

Running out of juice From Economist.com IN THE ten years since hybrid electric vehicles first hit the highways and byways of America, they have come to represent 2.5% of new car sales. Yet, in places like Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area and Washington, DC, every other car seems to be a Toyota Prius. That is because hybrids like the Prius have sold overwhelmingly where well-heeled early adopters reside. Expect the new generation of “Post-Prius” electrics—plug-in hybrids like the Chevrolet Volt from General Motors and those relying only on a battery such as the Nissan Leaf—to end up nosing around the same upscale neighbourhoods. With more than a dozen plug-in and pure-electric models arriving in showrooms over the next year or so, sales are expected to outstrip even those enjoyed by the Prius and other hybrids in their early days. A couple of million of the new electric vehicles could be bought by early adopters during the first few years. That would be a problem. Unlike the Prius and its ilk—which use their petrol engines, along with energy recovered from braking, to recharge their batteries while motoring—plug-in hybrids and pure electrics have to be recharged direct from the grid. The popular assumption is that they will be plugged into a wall socket in the garage late at night, taking advantage of cheap off-peak power. Unfortunately, things are not that simple. For a start, the new generation of electric vehicles are not glorified golf-carts, but cleaner and more frugal alternatives to today’s petrol-powered family cars. When fully charged, the Volt (to be called the Ampera in Europe) can travel 40 miles (64km) on electric power, enough for three out of four commuters in America to get to work and back without needing to burn a single drop of fuel. Beyond that range, a 1.4-litre engine kicks in to generate electricity and simultaneously propel the car and recharge its batteries. The medium-sized hatchback Leaf can carry five adults 100 miles on a single charge. To go farther, Nissan has put its faith in a network of rapid-charging stations it is developing with partners. The Leaf is expected to cost $25,000-30,000, about the same as a comparable diesel-powered car. But the battery pack will have to be leased separately (for around $150 a month). One thing the new plug-ins and pure electrics have in common is a beefy lithium-ion battery pack that needs a lot of heavy charging. At the very least, that involves installing 220-volt wiring in the home. Trying to recharge a modern electric car with a standard American 110-volt supply takes too long to be practical (up to 18 hours in the case of the Leaf). Of course, if not fully charged at night it may have to be recharged during the day—when electricity rates can be up to five times more expensive. Average peak rates in America are 33 cents a kilowatt-hour compared with seven cents off-peak. Charging at the peak rate is equivalent to buying petrol at $3.03 a gallon (80 cents a litre), instead of 64 cents a gallon off-peak, reckons Southern California Edison, a utility based in the Los Angeles area. In America, peak-rate charging totally destroys any economic advantage an electric car may have. At least the electricity companies ought to be pleased at the prospect of selling more power, day or night. In theory, recharging electric vehicles during off-peak hours should help utilities “fill the valley”—the trough in electricity demand between midnight and six in the morning, and thereby get better utilisation from their coal- or gas-fired generating stations. But, again, things are not quite as they seem. No utility wants to run its network flat out. Scheduling maintenance becomes difficult, which can lead to more frequent failures. The net result is that additional capacity has to be installed at a cost that would not otherwise be justified. A study done a few years ago by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington, suggested there was enough idle generating capacity in America to recharge three quarters of the country’s 230m cars if they were plug-ins of one sort of another—provided they only connected to the grid during off-peak hours, and preferably in the coal-rich midwest. But the vast majority of new plug-ins will be located in a handful of urban centres on the east and west coasts, which, unlike the midwest, do not have huge reserves of cheap, coal-fired generating capacity. Nor can they import it easily from the middle of the country, given the fragile nature of the grid. Southern California Edison has been operating a fleet of 300 electric vehicles to find out how customers will use and recharge them. Above all, it wants to make sure that a conversion to electric motoring goes smoothly, unlike a previous attempt in the mid-1990s. Back then, California thought electric cars like the Honda EV+ and the General Motors EV1 were the wave of the future, and thousands of public charging points were hurriedly installed in shopping centres, libraries and airports. But the enthusiasm collapsed when the motor industry successfully lobbied the California Air Resources Board in 2001 to get it to relax a mandate requiring 10% of new cars sold in the state to be emission-free by 2003. With no need to worry about zero-emission vehicles any more, GM and Honda promptly called in all their leased electric cars and crushed them. This time the Californian utilities are being more circumspect. They are concerned about highly concentrated pockets of ownership and the effects of everyone deciding to recharge their electric vehicles at once—as they inevitably will do when they return home from work. The local electricity system could be easily overwhelmed, and wider swathes of the grid brought to its knees in the process. Preparing for this means beefing up local transformers as well as installing heavy-duty wiring and smart meters in homes to provide early warning of network troubles ahead. Sooner or later, those additional costs will have to be passed on to customers. Much, of course, will depend on how quickly the new plug-ins and pure electrics become part of mainstream motoring. Generally speaking, it takes 15-20 years for a new technology to capture 10% of an established market, and a further 10-15 years for it to own 90%. That was the case when steam ships replaced clippers in the mid-19th century, and when petrol-engined taxis took over from horse-drawn cabs in the early 20th century. The same sort of lag occurred with the introduction in the 1970s of emission controls on cars. It takes years for the benefits of volume production to work their way through to the market, and for the supply chain to catch up. If plug-in electrics follow a similar demand curve to other disruptive technologies, there could be 25m of them humming quietly around by 2025, and ten times that number by 2040. Hopefully, by then, the utilities will have learned to cope with recharging them.

<object width="560" height="340"><param name="movie" value=" name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src=" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="560" height="340"></embed></object><b></b> From George Mason economist Russ Roberts.

He looks kinda like Dubya in that picture.

Read the majority opinion in my edited post above.

This case is just about free speech, and four of SCOTUS justices apparently have rescinded their support of that annoying little part of the Constituition. Perhaps we should take a closer look into why this suit was brought to begin with; as always, The Economist presents a more level-headed analysis. Here are some highlights: The rules are so confusing that even experts struggle to follow them. Senator John McCain, who co-wrote the bill, was accused of a serious violation of it during his presidential campaign in 2008. Big firms with expensive lawyers can usually navigate the system, but small players flounder. In the states, campaign-finance laws have been used to stifle debate. Prosecutors in Washington state claimed that favourable radio coverage of an anti-tax campaign was a “donation” that the campaigners should have disclosed. In Colorado, a group of homeowners protesting against plans to incorporate their neighbourhood into a nearby town were sued for not registering as a PAC. Both groups won, but they needed lawyers. The effect of the law, said Justice Kennedy, is that “a speaker who wants to avoid threats of criminal liability…must ask a governmental agency for prior permission to speak.” That, he said, was “analogous to licensing laws implemented in 16th- and 17th-century England” which is precisely the sort of thing that “the First Amendment was drawn to prohibit”. McCain-Feingold has failed utterly to keep money out of politics. The last presidential election was the most expensive ever.

http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2010/01/15/dont-give-money-to-haiti/

My employer is also donating $100k. To this I say: http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2010/01/15/dont-give-money-to-haiti/

I get that if the Sebring was the only car on earth, it wouldn't be too bad. But why would you buy one at the same price as most of its competitors?

I don't know, the exterior looks oddly chunky, almost like they tried every trick in the book to make it look more svelte than it actually is. I agree with Walt about an eerie Mercury Sable resemblance. The interior does look quite nice, but I just don't see this cutting it against the new 7-series, and there's a brand new A8 coming this year too.

Welcome back, man.

A warm welcome. There sure have been some great upgrades to the site recently.

Always a treat, bobo.

Not so sure about that seat fabric design either.

I'd also like to see how usable the trunk is. Cargo volume is one thing, but the Lacrosse looks to have a very small opening with a high lift-over height.

I don't think those are very satisfying answers. You are perfectly free to buy the warranty if you would like; if your guys' theory were correct, the 3-year warranties at Best Buy would also be standard. It's odd that they don't let consumers pick their level of warranty coverage with cars like they do in every other industry I can think of. Chevy uses the 5-year warranty as a selling point for example, but you can always buy an extended warranty from a make with lesser coverage if you want. I'm just surprised that buyers, especially poor buyers, haven't demanded the warranty to be optional.

I've been thinking about this question for a little bit, and I haven't come to an obvious answer. The question is this: Why are warranties not an optional extra? Especially on cheap cars. I don't actually know how much a warranty costs, but it must be at least a few hundred dollars on today's reliable autos. A warranty is surely a much higher percentage of the cost of an economy car than a luxo barge, so why is it that very price-conscious consumers have not demanded this? And why have no bargain brands offered it? A warranty is merely an insurance policy on breakdowns; you can always buy one that goes beyond the one provided by the manufacturer. The only possible conclusions I've come up with that all manufacturers feel that consumers are just stupid (unlikely) or there is some sort of regulatory issue and government impediment to "protect" consumers (more likely). Do any of you have any other theories, or an actual answer?

I posted this in the politics board. There's a chance this will work, but there is obviously a much bigger chance it will fail miserably or other companies would have done it already.

That hearse looks awesome. I'd buy one.

Congrats on getting broadband. Your life will seriously change.

Blah. The saga continues. I would like it for this offer to actually work, but I don't have very high hopes.

What? Have you not read any of the press excoriating Bernanke for being obsessed with the current low inflation rate, rather than accepting higher inflation for lower unemployment?