Harley-Davidson has been making obsolete, inefficient and technologically deficient motorcycles since the 60's. Despite an unrelenting onslaught of technically superior Japanese product, the Harley-Davidson brand has stayed true to its roots (however inadvertently). They've never stopped building bikes that maintain the charm and character of old-fashioned American motorcycling. Or, put another way, Harley makes its living convincing otherwise responsible adults to pay premium prices for old technology. This transition– from cutting edge to outdated to nostalgic to a way of life– is a perfect model for the American automobile industry.

It's already happening. Consider America's love of big dumb SUV's, or, better yet, its best-selling vehicle, the F-150. Ford's perennial sales leader is a tried-and-true workhorse built around fundamentally simple (if highly evolved) technology. As personal transportation it's incredibly inefficient. Compared to a Japanese or Korean car, it's laughably basic. And yet the F-150– and American pick-up trucks in general– are thriving. They're style icons that remind drivers of a time when American culture was dominant and cast iron V8's ruled the roads. The modern F-150 is as "authentically American" as any '50's hot rod or '60's muscle car.

Picture the scene. We're sitting at the kitchen table in the PAG household (that's Ford's Premier Auto Group). Disgruntled father Ford, stressed with bill payments, pounds the table with clenched fist, stares young, seditious daughter Jaguar square in the face and demands, "Why can't you be more like your sisters?" He points to her snide, adopted siblings; vixen Aston Martin, rugged Land Rover, and pudgy little sister Volvo, who with a mouthful of meatballs chimes in, "Ja, vhy kan't you? Dumhuvud."

No wonder Jaguar CEO Joe Greenwell is feeling unloved: Volvo and Land Rover are both doing solid business. There's a December waiting list for Aston's V8 Vantage. To avoid articles like this one, Ford doesn't break out profits according to individual brands. But according to British regulatory filings, Jaguar lost $1.1b in '03. The British marque's losses for '04 and '05 easily match– if not exceed– that figure, capping a sixteen-year flow of red ink. Jaguar's highly-touted plans to sell 200k cars a year? Gone. Last year, Jaguar built 120k cars. US dealers were flooded with 21k off-lease cars; these three-year-old Jags retained just 40% of their value.

Badge-engineering. You know the drill: take a run-of-the-mill bog standard plain Jane vanilla sort of car, add some external bits and internal pieces, tweak the ride, slap on a more prestigious badge and jack-up the price. More specifically, the "new" Lincoln Zephyr is a Ford Fusion with a modified grill, wood trim, floatier ride, Lincoln logo and an inflated sticker price. So rather than badge engineer my Ford Fusion review, I'm going to tell you what Ford– sorry, Lincoln, should have done with this car.

The obvious answer is nothing. Lincoln needs a front-wheel-drive mid-size sedan like Hummer needs a camouflage SMART (unless they use it as an H2 escape pod). Even if we ignore Lincoln's illustrious past– first betrayed in 1936 by a funny-looking car called a Zephyr– the brand's recent history sets the standard. Exhibitionist A: the Lincoln Continental Mark IV: a huge, thirsty, poorly-built, foul-handling beast from a time when jeans had bells at the bottom. While the infinitely smaller [modern] Zephyr is so safe and reliable it Hertz and boasts twice as much everything room than the old Mark, Lincoln's '70's luxobarge holstered a 7.5-liter V8 with more swagger than Ludacris at a Kapp Alpha Theta. Now THAT'S what I'm talking about.

As GM fast approaches the day when it surrenders its world's largest automaker title to Toyota, it's important to remember that we're still talking about a corporate colossus. If you include fleet sales, The General makes one in every four vehicles sold in the United States. Obviously, GM's problem isn't volume. It's profitability. GM's US operations are still designed to cater to a third of the US car market. That's Hell of a lot of fat to trim– especially with a union that hears "efficiency" and thinks "downsizing". Meanwhile, The General has an even bigger problem: it doesn't have a heart.

An automotive brand's "heart" is the car that the average customer associates with a given brand. It's the vehicle whose character most clearly personifies the brand's values. Toyota has the Camry. Honda has Accord. Nissan has the Altima. Ford had the Taurus (and demolished it to push the Explorer). GM has nothing. More importantly, Chevy has nothing. Remember "the heartbeat of America"? It's on the crash-cart, waiting for a transplant.

Mercedes-Benz makes a lot of cars for customers with serious aspirations. Just out of college, looking for bit of respect? C-Class. Mid-level manager aspiring to the next rung on the corporate ladder? Take an E. Mr. Got it All looking for a set of wheels for the woman who isn't his wife? CLK cabriolet. And a car for the woman who is? The SL. The clear link in all this is badge snobbery. In fact, if class consciousness has a symbol, it's a three-pointed star. So what's one of the brand's current campaigns for their $96k CL500? "Mercedes-Benz: For Everyone." Right.

Post-modern irony aside, it's true. Mercedes-Benz wants to sell a car in every automotive niche. (Not to mention the ones they invent.) Mercedes can get away with it too. If Mercedes produced the equivalent of Europe's proletarian Ford Ka and slapped a MB badge on it, the automotive press would slam it and tens of thousands star struck buyers would go straight out and buy one. Oh wait, they did. Mercifully, US buyers were spared the rolling atrocity known as the A-Class. That said, it may be only a matter of time before the entirely inappropriate B-Class finds its way into trendy loft livers' assigned parking spaces. Badge snobbery über alles.

I get kinda touchy when people start kicking the boots into Saab, especially when they're basing their opinion on mistaken information. As Saab is a GM brand, and Mr. Farago is the author of an ongoing series called "GM Death Watch", it's understandable that the author was black about the brand's future.  But the "seasoning" enhancing his main points is pure theatre and his conclusions overly pessimistic. Let's examine his argument point by point:

'Saab's Aero-X, a Corvette-based concept car…'

It's official: bankruptcy is good for GM. In their recent ass-covering exercise for the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), The Ford Motor Company listed 'adverse effects from the bankruptcy or insolvency of a major competitor' as a significant risk to its financial future. Translation: if GM goes bankrupt, The General will slough off its excessive labor costs and become… wait for it… competitive. So competitive, in fact, that Ford reckons GM's products would gain an important price advantage. Well how about that?

Obviously, there's more to it than that. Ford's SEC filing also alerts investors that GM's Chapter 11 could destroy The Blue Oval's supply chain. Both automakers share a large number of mission critical parts suppliers; if GM's submersion sucks vital parts makers into bankruptcy– which it most assuredly would– Ford will lose access to the bits and pieces it needs to build Fords. In fact, it's hard to see how Ford could survive a GM bankruptcy. Or why it would want to. The automotive community is slowly (and quietly) beginning to conclude that bankruptcy is both the only thing and the BEST thing that can happen to GM, and, by extension, Ford.

The Range Rover Sport arrived just as Britain's Parliament banned fox hunting. Call it fortuitous happenstance. At the precise moment Britain's shotgun-wielding aristocrats lost their main motivation for chasing each other over hill and dale, the Ford subsidiary came plying more on-road aggression. If these frustrated followers of British blood sports looked upon the new Landie Sport as an opportunity to blow off a little steam in less mucky surrounds, it's a goal they share with America's wealthier PTA MILFs. So, does the Sport have what it takes to get the blood pumping for aristocrats on both sides of the Pond?

The Land Rover Sport HSE looks like a top-shelf Range Rover with its hair slicked back. The Sport shares the exact same two-box profile with its big brother– complete with Rover's trademark 'floating' cantilevered roof. The more rakish Sport's canted greenhouse (both fore and aft) is the model's main distinguishing feature, and its only real attempt at a skosh of street cred. In the name of differentiation, Gaydon's designers replaced the Rangie's classy aluminum front-fender vent slat with a more traditional aperture, and substituted some overly ornate taillights in place of the bigger Rover's refined rounds. Details aside, the Sport remains the very picture of 21st-century shooting brakedom, albeit one rockin' a set of air suspenders.

Automotive pundits in these parts have lauded the new Audi DSG (Direct Shift Gearbox) as if it was the Second Coming of Dr. Ferry Porsche himself. In reality, the "dual clutch" design has long been discredited amongst most modern automobile engineers. Don't get me wrong. BorgWarner and The Volkswagen Group have created a truly impressive version of a 50-year-old concept. But the dual clutch transmission is still nothing more than a wonderful toy, a mechanically elaborate dead end.

The power of love is a curious thing. It makes one brand weep, another brand sing. Change a bug into a little white Dub. More than a feeling; that's the power of love. Yes, I know it's old News, but Volkswagen's Beetle still gets a lot of love. You would've thought a retro reissue of Hitler's people's car would've fallen down the same rat hole that swallowed-up the mustachioed Plymouth Prowler, Chevrolet's WTF SSR and Ford's turkey T-bird. But no. Eight years after its re-introduction into the US market, VW's self-titled "New Beetle" is still here, people still adore it, and I still don't get it.

Admittedly, I'm not gay. While I do enjoy a well-formed six-pack, and consider myself a far better interior decorator than that stuck-up Connecticut con artist, I can't understand how anyone could find VeeDub's Bauhaus Bug "cute." I reckon J Mays drew the St. Louis arch over a Kohler bathtub and called it good. All the superb detailing that gave the 60's version its cutesy-tootsie cartoon character has been replaced with generic post-modern jewelery. To my eyes, the slab-sided minimalist Beetle is about as emotionally engaging as a Braun razor. The '06 facelift offers rounder headlights, more tapered wrap-around air dams and flat-edged wheel arches. It looks like… a slightly newer Braun razor.