While You Were Sleeping: July 14, 2014

A hardcore car disappears, a softcore one is on the way, the bus goes upscale, Red Ink Rick has a fan!

I Was Really Hoping They’d Say “The Arrival Of This Nondescript Sedan Will Be, At Best, A Disaster”: Speaking to Automotive News, Honda senior VP Mike Accavitti drew a deep breath and gamely expressed optimism concerning the arrival of the $30,995 TLX sedan. “By pricing the four-cylinder version of what is essentially an Accord heads-up with the six-cylinder Accord, we’re expecting showroom traffic to come exclusively from people who are turning around in our lot to get to the Wendy’s across the street,” Accavitti most definitely did not say. “Furthermore, by shit-canning the one model that had any respect in the enthusiast community, the six-speed Type-S, we’ve done an outstanding job of ensuring that the fanatical young customer base we accidentally built among used-Civic buyers in the Nineties has absolutely nowhere to go, now that they have jobs and stuff,” he failed to add, certainly not following up with “If you’re on the run from the law and want to make sure that absolutely nobody sees you, the driver’s seat of whatever TLX we anchor in the showroom would be the best possible place.”

The Other Sixty-Eight Percent Are Homeless People Who Smell Like Grease Traps: Greyhound buses have an image problem. Surprise! Not to worry: like everything from PBR (the beer) to PBR (the bull riding), the Southwest Airlines Of The Ground is going upscale. USA TODAY gushes that “Almost 32% of Greyhound passengers earn more than $35,000 annually.” Another staggering figure: 15% of riders are traveling on business, presumably the most dismal business imaginable, with the other 85% presumably traveling to evade child-support obligations. Still, think of what it might have been! If you took a bus to Chinatown! I’d be standing on Canal! And Bowery! And she’d be standing next to me! Ho! Hey!

Nobody Tell Her It’s Not A Real Story: “I always felt sorry for Sisyphus, and Wagoner, for that matter.” So says superstar auto reporter Jamie LaReau in a surprisingly sympathetic tribute to Rick Wagoner. Why bring up something Miss LaReau wrote months ago? Well, as a form of apology. After I made her the target of some extremely mild satire a few years ago, Miss LaReau Facebook-friended your humble author. It would appear that she didn’t catch the aforementioned mild satire. For a few days, it appeared as though I might be able to add the lady in question to my list of intimate acquaintances among the distaff side of the autojourno biz. Unfortunately, somebody clued her in right as I was FB-messaging her some poetry I’d written about her legs, and she blocked me. Then the Buick Encore went on to be quite a success, showing that she knows the business better than I do. Keeps me humble, it does.