Now waiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit a minute! Didn’t I just review a grey Nissan Sentra on these very (electronic) pages? Yes, I did, but it was the 2013 Sentra that I took on a long, dreary trip to Minnesota. I found it to be pretty decent but not quite ready to do battle with the class leaders. Imagine [...]

How much car can you get in this country for sixteen thousand bucks? Well, you could try a base-model Elantra, or with a bit of sharp dealing you might come up with a Sentra. TrueCar thinks you might be able to sneak into a Cruze LS. Certainly you could get a Ford Focus, which might [...]

Everybody’s talking about abuse of police power nowadays, but what are you doing about it?

If the answer is not “crush eight cop cars with your tractor then drive away”, you’re not doing as much as Roger Pion.

Edited to congratulate the B&B and to add information

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Meet Brad, Sheena, and Nacho! They are in “the midst of a life-defining campaign to travel around the world”. But they’re afraid to enter Pakistan. Apparently they thought they could travel around the world without visiting any scary places, presumably because their parents didn’t buy them any Jules Verne books. They’d rather drive through China and maybe hang with our Editor-in-chief a little bit, who knows. The cost for that little unplanned detour is nearly twenty thousand dollars. That’s where you come in — helping them make their life-defining campaign as safe and easy as possible.

What? You’re not eager to do this?

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Last week, Matt Hardigree suggested that new-car intenders consider the 320i ZSP + ZMT, which offers a staggering 180 horsepower and a stick shift for a middling $35,000 or thereabouts. I’m personally very excited by this because I learned how to drive in a BMW with about the same weight, power, and sticker price. On the other hand, it’s a considerable step backwards from the 330i Sport I had from 2001 to 2004, so maybe not.

Since we’re big Jalopnik fans here at TTAC, we’re going to put our money where their mouth is. Plus a little.

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What have you been doing the past three years? I’m guessing the answer isn’t “build a 1967 Camaro Z/28 clone from more or less scratch for SCCA ProSolo.”

Unless you’re Jason Rhoades.

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I sing the coupe eccentric;
The doors of those I love engirth me, and I endure them;
They will not let me park till I deal with them, wrestle with them;
And do not ding them, and close them with solid sound unknown by Kia Soul.

It wasn’t that long ago that I recorded my generally favorable opinion of the outgoing Nissan Altima during an impromptu trip to Nashville and parts south. That car was obsolete even as I was reviewing it, supplanted by a zoomy and flame-surfacey new sedan. As of yet, however, the corresponding new Altima coupe has only appeared in renderings and rumors. Therefore Nissan has returned the old two-door for a very limited 2013-model-year engagement. It’s available in one trim level (S), with one drivetrain (2.5 four-cylinder/CVT) and at a relatively steep price ($25,230).

As a child of the Seventies, I have a not inconsiderable attachment to the idee fixe of the mid-sized coupe. The Altima Coupe is the natural successor to the Cutlass Supremes and Monte Carlos that prowled the neighborhoods of my youth. For some time I’ve been trying, unsuccessfully, to rent a new one; that quest came to a successful conclusion when I stepped off the plane in Houston Friday night and found a 2013 Altima Coupe with just 1,400 miles in my assigned stall.

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My rant about colorless F1 drivers of the 21st century may have been honored more in the breach than the observance this past weekend; while Lewis Hamilton was doing the interview with David Coulthard at the end of the race, champagne drinker Raikkonen was having a convo with race winner Alonso. When Coulthard asked the two men to share their conversation with the crowd, both of them declined, Kimi snarking a bit a bout “tires”, but the local camera director for the race coverage made sure you could see that Alonso’s stunning girlfriend had a friend with her. Or a sister. Or who the hell knows.

Anybody who watched it happen and still thinks the winner of China had a lot of extra room in his king-size bed last night is being willfully naive. To the winners go the spoils, and our trio of podium finishers each demonstrated why their teammates weren’t standing next to them when it was time to hand out the trophies.

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In the weeks to come, you will be treated to a set of racing tales to make the most ardent consumer of Schadenfreude blush. (Read More…)

So-called “range anxiety” is the biggest — perhaps the only — issue being discussed in the electric-vehicle debate nowadays. Whether it’s a Leaf crapping out at the sixty-mile mark or a Tesla Model S driving in circles around a parking lot to drain the battery for theatrical purposes, electric cars and range potential are linked in the minds of most potential buyers by a true Gordian knot.

If the people at Phinergy are correct, that knot can be sliced by a sword constructed from charged aluminum plates — and the resulting rewards would be spectacular, to say the least.

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When Alex Dykes checked out a pre-production Sentra in Napa, he was favorably impressed. When I was given a Sentra SV with just 812 miles on it at the rental counter this past Friday, I was unfavorably depressed; I had to cover 1,380 miles round-trip from Columbus, Ohio to Winona, MN in just 40 hours [...]

The autoblogosphere is abuzz this morning with comments regarding the plain-and-obvious awesomeness of this movie trailer, and rightfully so. What I wonder is this: will the message behind the film be the easy one, or the correct one?

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In a move that will undoubtedly create a flood of profitable tickets save uncounted lives, Virginia has made “distracted driving” a primary offense and raised the fines to the proverbial ceiling.

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In November 2010, the officer was tailing a truck around midnight. He ran a registration check on the vehicle, which listed the truck as red. But this truck was blue… The officer then realized his mistake, but continued with the stop to provide an explanation. He noticed an odor of alcohol, conducted a field sobriety test, and arrested the driver.

In the state of Wisconsin, that’s now good enough.

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Your humble author’s affection for the Pentastar-powered Chrysler minivans is relatively well-known within these electronic pages. In the interest of examining the so-called “alternatives”, however, I’ve been attempting to rent non-Chrysler minivans during my travels. A 36-hour unscheduled trip to San Francisco gave me a chance to do just that, deliberately walking past the six [...]