It’s the perfect day and the perfect road for a brisk mountain drive in the siena red Z3. For the last time this year it’s easily warm enough to put the top down—in a little over a week the remnants of Hurricane Sandy will bury the area in snow. WV15 winds tightly along a mountain ridge, flanked on each side by peaking fall foliage. Valleys far below on each side, you’re on top of the world. There’s only one problem with this soul stirring picture: my father started the day closer to Cass, and the BMW is holding me up. With the next brief straight I snick the firm, short-throw shifter into third, spur the boxer well over 4,000 rpm, and roar past him. WV15 is an even better road for a Scion FR-S en route to meet up with a pair of Mazda RX-8s for our Third Annual Appalachian Road Trip.

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One of the cars the organizers of the 24 Hours of LeMons have always wanted to see careening around a road course is a proper General Motors donk. Until today, only the crypto-donked Big Ghetto Skank Tank came close. Now Unununium Medal winner Speedycop has raised the bar again, with this 1979 Pontiac Bonneville coupe rollin’ on 22s. Oh yeah, and 99 other cars showed up to the race at Summit Point Raceway in West Virginia. (Read More…)

First, they sold the most amount of cars in the world, then, they started cost cutting and now, Toyota are taking another big step towards becoming GM. The Charleston Daily Mail reports that the managers of Toyota’s manufacturing plant in Buffalo, West Virginia have allowed workers to distribute union literature during breaks at the plant. There’d been grumblings about unionisation for some time. Last month, some Toyota employees, (with the backing of the UAW, naturally), filed a grievance with the National Labour Relations Board’s regional office in Cincinnati. They wanted to distribute union material but were stopped by Toyota managers. Jeff Moore, a Toyota vice president at the West Virginia plant, reversed that policy.
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