From our family to yours, TTAC wishes all its readers the best of holiday wishes. We’ll be enjoying the company of our loved ones for the next few chilly winter nights, but we’ll return to regular service on Tuesday. And who knows, maybe Santa will leave something for your reading enjoyment over the weekend…

This time tomorrow I will be on an airplane, and for the first time in quite a while I will not be on my to some auto-related destination on behalf of TTAC. That’s right, I’m actually taking a vacation, which I will spend introducing my lovely life partner to the European continent and visiting family in my ancestral homeland of Austria. Of course, TTAC has become such a big part of my life that even my vacation will have a work-related angle: I’ll be spending each week with a different not-available-in-America car that I think should be of some considerable interest to you, our readers. But this is also just the first of two breaks that I’ll be taking from TTAC: in January, I’ll be stepping down as TTAC’s Editor-in-Chief for the calendar year 2012, to pursue a one-year opportunity outside of the field of automotive journalism. Even as I write those words, I can scarcely believe them… I’ve lived and breathed TTAC for so long now, it’s almost impossible to imagine life without it. But do not fear: not only do I leave TTAC in incredibly capable hands, I’m also not gone for good. You won’t be rid of me that easily.

Having read most of the latest raft of auto industry books, with titles like “Car Crash,” “Overhaul,” and “Sixty To Zero,” I have to say, Bill Vlasic’s “Once Upon A Car” is my favorite of the bunch. Not only does it lack the parochial form and voice that define too many of theses tomes, it populates its narrative with rich dialogue and intriguing character studies. In short, it’s got all of the lessons about industry, culture, and competition that you’d expect from a modern study of the auto industry, but it presents them in such a way that they never feel like a lecture or a business school study. Instead you get a well-spun yarn, still-newsworthy anecdotes and an unvarnished look at industry dynamics on their highest level. If ever there were to be a modern movie based on the auto industry, Vlasic’s book should be its basis. Read my full review over at The Wall Street Journal.

We’ve got a lot to be thankful for here at TTAC. We’ve been having a great 2011, growing our traffic, earning awards and hosting some of the best conversations about cars to be found on the web. I am personally extremely grateful for our fantastic staff, who continue to surprise and delight with their sharp insights, brilliant writing, and tireless dedication. I’m also quite thankful for our owners at VerticalScope this Thanksgiving, for their unwavering commitment to TTAC’s independence and excellence. But most deserving of our thanks and recognition today are you, our readers. Not only do your visits and occasional ad-clicks pay the bills around here, but your comments and contributions are an irreplaceable element of TTAC’s special recipe. When I surf elsewhere, I’m continually reminded of how low discourse can fall on these tubes we call the internet, and it never ceases to fill my heart with appreciation for the (mostly) reasoned, civil, constructive conversations we’re able to have here. Communities are a fragile thing in this age of fragmenting societies, and words can not express how grateful I am that this community is as strong, vibrant, diverse, challenging, informative and resilient as it is. So, to everyone who helps make TTAC what it is, my humble, heartfelt thanks.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Caught!

TTAC Commentator Diewaldo writes:

Hello Sajeev,

I didn’t know how to contact you otherwise, but I found your Sierra in Nürburg. It seems to be still in good shape. I have uploaded a photo, here is the link.

Greetings from the Eifel,

Diewaldo

The staging area of the TTAC Goes South tour is picturesque Kenneshaw, GA. For whatever reason, the city sports one of the highest densities of low-priced motels. My Wifi scanner gives me a choice of 9 channels, all belonging to the giants of the roadside hospitality business. Those who arrived from far-away places like Portland (Ed) and Beijing (BS) are already here, waiting for Steve Lang to close his last buy here, pay here of the day.

There are people who wish that TTAC would just go away. This coming week, their dearest wishes will be fulfilled. My special friend in Moscow won’t have to send hate mail anymore: TTAC is finally going South.

I’m not generally much for anniversaries. Heck, after more than six years together, my steady sweetie and I can’t remember our actual anniversary, so we had to make one up… and we (both) still forget it most years. But here on the internet, there’s a record of everything. And looking back, it seems that it was exactly two years ago today that Robert Farago called me to say that The Truth About Cars was going to be my problem from now on.

Please excuse the self-congratulation, but little breakthroughs like this are a big deal for a site like TTAC. The American Journalism Review has a fantastic piece by Frank Greve on the murky and corrupted world of professional car reviewing, which is well encapsulated in the piece’s subtitle

The world of car reviewing is replete with expensive perks and fantasy vehicles. Consumer advocates need not apply.

And after running through the litany of corruptions endemic in the system, Greve concludes:

Web sites like Jalopnik and The Truth About Cars deliver more independent, aggressive and timely coverage for car enthusiasts than traditional car magazines like Motor Trend.

With all due respect to MT (which is but one of many), that sounds like the truth to me. As does Greve’s description of how press cars are allotted (by the likelihood of a positive review). And for one of his examples of the system at its worst, Greve describe an incident involving TTAC’s own Jack Baruth and the aftermath of his no-holds-barred review of the Porsche Panamera.

Matt Farah may be the bigshot star of Speed’s The Car Show, but he got his start on the web, running a little site called The Smoking Tire. And since he’s clawed his way up from the internet’s hurly-burly, he knows how web promotion works: you check out my stuff, I’ll check out yours. As a longtime TTAC reader, he’s asking us personally to check out his new show, which airs each Wednesday at 10 pm on Speed. Don’t have cable? Check out The Car Show on Hulu.

If things seem a little slow around here today, it’s because I’m in the Detroit area, away from the productive calm of my office sanctuary. I’m in town for quite an exciting event: tomorrow, I’ll be conducting an extended interview with the industry’s most infamous executive, “Maximum” Bob Lutz. And though I can’t extend an invite to Lutz Farm to TTAC’s Best & Brightest, I can offer the next-best thing: an exclusive post-interview debrief. If you’re going to be in the Detroit area tomorrow, hit the jump for more details. If you can’t make it to Motown, but you have a burning question for Mr Lutz that didn’t make it into the relevant thread, go ahead and leave it in the comments here.

As promised yesterday, my review of Michael Dunne’s American Wheels Chinese Roads: The Story of General Motors in China is now live at the Wall Street Journal website [sub] as well as today’s print edition. Be sure to pick up a copy and stay tuned for TTAC’s own review of this important book, by our man in China, Bertel Schmitt.

Believe it or not, dear readers, but every once in a while I’m able to take a break from my grueling routine here at TTAC and contribute to another publication. Not often, mind you, as I’ve written an average of four stories per day seven days per week in the three and a half years I’ve been writing for TTAC, but every now and then. Anyway, tomorrow is just such a time, as my review of American Wheels, Chinese Roads: The Story of General Motors in China will be featured in tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal.

Yesterday, someone received the Yellow Card for what looked like a threat of violence. Here is the recommended code of conduct when a yellow card is issued: Take a deep breath. Take a walk. Maybe, take a few days away from TTAC. But for heaven’s sake, don’t talk back. And don’t continue the argument that got you the yellow card. You know the color of the next card.

Americans are often quick to celebrate our unique car culture, the whole-hearted embrace of private mobility that seems to embody our independent character. But if you’ve lost your car, or were never able to afford one, you probably don’t spend much time dwelling on the feel-good benefits of our national romance with the automobile. Instead you probably tend to focus on the downsides: sprawling development and inadequate public transportation. As it turns out though, there’s a typically American response to the problem of carlessness: a non-profit founded by two former auto salesmen, which “helps consumers get the best deal on a reliable, fuel-efficient car.” But don’t call it a charity…

Did you notice? TTAC loads much faster. Most likely , you did not notice. An old axiom in the nerd industry is that performance gains mostly go unnoticed. Slowdowns on the other hand drive people nuts. Our gee-whiz kids in Toronto moved TTAC to something called “Cloudflare,” which really speeds up load times. The trouble is: Once in a while, the Cloudflare suffers burnout and TTAC becomes inaccessible.

Today was such a day.

Possibly Ed’s rant against overusage of “bias” has escaped the attention of some commenters. “Bias” is no longer a welcome word on TTAC. Usage can result in permanent banning. I am inclined to put the word “bias” on our bad word list. The only thing that keeps me from doing so is the fact that the banning robot is stupid and will also kill comments that contain, “bias-ply tires”, sundry “phobias”, “suburbias” etc. Don’t make me wipe out whole suburbias.

While on the topic of banning:

With every holiday, I marvel at the passage of time, and at the twists and turns my path has taken here at TTAC. In reflecting on the recent past, I can’t help but feel an immense gratitude to the inscrutable workings of fate which have conspired to keep me eagerly engaged in this site’s unending quest for automotive truth. And on this, the holiday of American independence, gratitude seems to me a highly appropriate theme. One of the deeply-removed gears of destiny that has created the opportunity that is TTAC is surely this nation’s fundamental belief in public discourse and a free press, the constitutionally and culturally enshrined belief that the open exchange of ideas can make life, and its most necessary evil, government, at least a little bit better. Even those who disagree on a fundamental level with the opinions that TTAC espouses must concede not only that we have the right to our opinions, but also that our criticisms ultimately give strength to their objects. Our founding fathers did not protect speech out of mere principle, but because they knew that free discussion is the dialectic of progress. Through what they saw as the divine power of reason, we could form more complete ideas about the world and be better equipped to take on the challenges of liberty, self-government and the free market.

Today I am not just grateful that our founding fathers created a culture which allows me to live in the world of ideas, and in pursuit of truth. I am not just grateful for legal protections of my free speech. I am not just grateful that I can serve consumers and industry alike by shining the light of discourse on the dark places of poor logic, market malfunction, and willful ignorance. Today I am most grateful that my fellow Americans continue to value their free speech enough to patronize sites like TTAC, where they may find ideas and opinions that challenge their view of the world, where these ideas are more important than advertising revenue, and where perspectives from around our shrinking globe can be compared and contrasted in an atmosphere of respect and rigor. In an era when the value of ideas and discourse seems to be losing ground to slickly-packaged distraction and ideological rigidity, it gives me faith that so many still crave the thrilling uncertainty of a tough debate, and a deep-seeded hunger for a better understanding of the world (if “only” the world of cars).

As we celebrate American independence today, I am grateful not only for this nation’s providential founding on the enduring principles of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness (which I would define as being generally synonymous with the Pursuit of Understanding), but the fact that those values have endured in you, our ever-demanding, every hungry-for-knowledge readers. Let us endeavor, together, to live up to the lofty ideals the American spirit as we unflinchingly pursue the truth about cars.

Thanks in part to the help of people from TTAC, TrueDelta received a record number of responses to April’s Car Reliability Survey—over 22,000. Updated car reliability stats have been posted to the site for 559 cars, up from 534 three month ago. There are partial results for another 418. These stats include car owner experiences through the end of March 2011, making them at least eleven months ahead of other sources.

The auto media has been receiving its advance copies of Bob Lutz’s forthcoming book “Car Guys versus Bean Counters” over the last few weeks, and have been leaking some of the more provocative statements and conclusions from it. I too requested a book and tore through it over the past week, enjoying Lutz’s direct voice and keen insights into his time at General Motors… as well as the attention-grabbing, politically-charged statements that the rest of the media seems so fixated upon. The bad news is that I won’t be able to write a full review until we get closer to its mid-June launch date, but the good news is that our forbearance has been rewarded: despite sideswiping yours truly in one passage, a brief but rewarding email conversation has generated more mutual respect, and Mr Lutz has agreed (in principle) to a TTAC interview to accompany our review at the time of the book’s release. Sometimes observing an embargo is worth it.

But fear not: just because the promise of an interview with one of the most influential figures in the industry has us delaying our review for another month or so, we’ve got more Lutz-related material with which to build up to what I expect to be a watershed interview for TTAC. Next week I’ll be publishing a review of Mr Maximum’s previous book “Guts,” and to kick of the coming months of Lutzmania, we’ve got a very special contest that is sure to stump even TTAC’s most well-versed Best and Brightest.

Ed and Bertel are spending this coming week in Detroit to talk to auto manufacturers.

First impression: I could get a nice fixer-upper in an up and coming neighborhood for a little more than the price of my ticket from Beijing to Detroit. Compared to Beijing prices, this is a steal.

Plenty of things have happened since I began writing for The Truth About Cars that I would never have been able to predict, but perhaps one of the happiest surprises came when Timothy Ogden contacted me for an interview that would go into a book on Toyota’s recent recall scandal. That book, Toyota Under Fire, is now complete, and it references work published here at TTAC as well as interviews with myself and Bertel Schmitt. Not only does the book admirably document the media-fueled scandal, but it also contains profound insights into Toyota’s response to the recall challenge as well as Toyota’s efforts to respond to the economic downturn of 2008-2009. A review will be posted first thing tomorrow, and at 1 PM Eastern Mr Ogden and his co-author Professor Jeffery Liker (author of The Toyota Way) will join us in one of our popular author livechats, in which he will answer your questions about Toyota, its recent challenges, and the culture that helped propel it through its darkest hours. Mark your calendars or, if you can’t make it to the livechat, just leave your questions for Mr Ogden and Professor Liker in the comments section below.

Here’s some food for thought: if you “liked” TTAC on Facebook, your mind would already be blown by this magical tale of Panther Love. Seriously, if I didn’t “like” TTAC myself, I might never have seen it [A tip of the hat to Sajeev and Alex Nunez]. So watch the whole thing, savor the chill that will run up your spine, and then go “like” TTAC on Facebook for a steady drip of more awesomely entertaining detritus from TTAC’s internet adventures.

My friend Goto, a former Japanese judo national champion who somehow got caught up in the Summer of Love as an exchange student in Berkeley, and who never looked or went back, once told me: “My father say, some people have death wish, and you have to glant it to them.“

There are some people who are just dying to lose posting privileges on TTAC. It’s fast and easy. Simply do what some commenters did.

Almost exactly three years and one week ago, my dad, Paul Niedermeyer called me up and told me there was an opening for a freelancer at TTAC’s then-new news blog. Little did I know at the time that just a few years later, so much would have changed. In fact, if someone had told me at the time that in three years I would be editing TTAC and that my dad would have moved onto his own site, I might not have taken the job. After all, if it weren’t for him I might not even be interested in cars, and I certainly wouldn’t be writing about them professionally.

Needless to say, there have been some twists and turns along the way… but sharing a profession with your dad is too deeply rewarding a privilege to simply come easily. His decision to leave TTAC was a tough for me to accept at first, until I realized that TTAC’s loss was the internet’s gain. We may have lost a valued contributor, but the autoblogosphere gained a new destination: curbsideclassic.com.

For legal reasons, you can still find an archive of Paul’s TTAC-era Curbside Classics here, but be sure to surf over to his new site for his latest additions to a body of work that is, without a doubt, one of the best sources of automotive history and nostalgia on the web.

The Truth About Cars is excited to announce that in our relentless drive towards globalization, TTAC has now added a Polish edition.

I regret to announce that JimC is no longer with us. He has been banned for calling Ray LaHood an “idiot.” Mr. Stones also will no longer comment here. He has been banned for telling JimC: “STFU … You’re the idiot. Probably a jap too.”

PBS Newshour looked at GM’s future, focusing on the Chevy Volt. TTAC editor Ed Niedermeyer was a featured guest. If you want to skip to Ed’s appearances, they’re at 4:19, 5:43, and 9:08 (Or, in the clip embedded above). Transcript below the jump.

I wonder if I’m the only person that found this ironic. Actually, I wonder if anyone at PBS Newshour even knows who Alfred P. Sloan was.

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation provided funding for this project

I know, I know; it’s not the first time I’ve left TTAC, but this time is different. The odor of smoldering bridges in the air has a distinct whiff of finality to it. What happened? The picture above says it all well enough. I just can’t seem to fit in. And it’s time to stop hammering.

I didn’t plan on attending the North American International Auto Show this year… I really didn’t. TTAC generally avoids the expense and hoopla of the major auto shows, focused as we are on analysis more than “check out this new hotness” reportage. But this year things are a little different. After my third New York Times op-eds in the last year or so, I’ve been asked by the PBS NewsHour to appear in their piece on the recovery (or, as we like to say here at TTAC, not) of the American auto industry… so in a few hours I will be hopping a plane to Motown for my first-ever NAIAS. While we’re in Motown (and that’s not the editorial “we”… my beautiful and long-suffering life partner has taken the time off work to come support me and take in the sights of Detroit in January) we’ll be stopping in at the UAW protest, reporting on the new launches and reveals, and rubbing elbows with industry reps as well as meeting with TTAC’s staff and our owners from VerticalScope. But there’s another reason we’re headed to Detroit: it’s time to do a little PR work of our own.

Dave Garrad personifies the word “hoon”. When I first met him in the smoke and beer filled haze of the Gemutliche Ecke (Translation: Comfy Corner) in Adenau, Germany, he was attempting a maneuver called The Lunge. There’s never a dull moment around Dave. Naturally, I immediately considered him for the last English caretaker of TTAC’s Ford Sierra project, before its journey to Germany and (ultimately) Houston. Upon our (Panther-lovin’) man Dereck’s delivery of the Sierra to his abode northeast of London, Dave remarked at how glorious the brown upon brown scheme truly was. His wife Helen refuses to ride in the chocolate-toned thing, lest her unborn baby develop unnatural tendencies.

Allow me to be the first (unless someone in Australia beats me to it) to wish any and all a happy and prosperous 2011. May all your whishes (except the devious ones) come true.

I’m not supposed to let you in on our inner workings, but here is something I wanted to share with you for quite a while: There is a huge grassroots movement that wants the HUMMER back. How do we know this?

Well, we are keeping tabs on you, dear reader.

Ed Niedermeyer is too humble to say it, so it’s left to me: Ed just had his second third op-ed piece in the New York Times. Required reading. Two core sentences:

It may not be ready to take on the old Honda tagline, but our 1983 Ford Sierra Ghia is strengthening our ties with our car nutty friends from across the pond. While Capt. Mike’s UK connections are stronger, here’s the story of how our Sierra made it from the seller’s house to one of the Captain’s friend’s homes: a strong group of Nürburgring-fiends who claimed our lovable Air Force Yank as one of their own. But that’s for the next installment in this series because, as the Panther-intensive pictures show, I’m telling this portion of the story.

Tomorrow your humble Editor boards a plane for Michigan, en route to a date with the Chevrolet Volt. TTAC has followed the Volt’s bumpy road to production-readiness since Bob Lutz decided that the Prius had to be “leapfrogged,” and we’ve tracked every change to the Volt’s mission, message and mechanical blueprint along the way. And though cars don’t exist in a vacuum, giving the Volt a fair review will require us to leave a lot of this contextual baggage at the door.