Finally, The Crew At Cars.com Finds A Test They're Qualified To Perform

Those of you who are not stupid well-connected enough to have a bunch of autojournos in your Twitter and Facebook friend lists are missing out on all the, er, coverage coming from the “Midwestern NAMBLA pump n’ dump for morbidly obese auto journalists” track event going on today. Let me give you the precis. It turns out all these cars are ZOMG AEWSUM and track records are falling left and right as America’s finest drivers deliver Vic Elfordian levels of all-weather punishment upon them. No word on whether the Midwestern journo who cracked up a MINI at Autobahn and followed it up by driving off the first corner at MAMA’s event a few years back has caused his usual mayhem.

Expect this event to provide many tales of “pushing it to the limit” in the soul-crushing months to come. In the meantime, however, we’ve found an activity which is well-suited to the banzai buffet beasts out there: manned crash testing.

To their credit, the nice people at Cars.com aren’t trying to hide the fact that they wrecked their Volt. And it is their Volt; the blog has put its money where its mouth is and stumped up its own cash to buy the vehicle instead of asking for a long-term freeloader, I mean, tester.

Still, it would be nice to know how the crash happened. Whenever your humble author blows a motor, crashes on the first lap, puts a rod through the block, or is slapped with a six-thousand-dollar fine for helping another driver catch a ride on the LifeFlight, I try to provide a brief account of the incident, even if said account is self-serving in the vicious extreme. I guess I did forget to mention the time I bought a $15,800 Mugen Grand-Am engine in practice. Have to get around to that some time, if anybody wants to hear about it.

For the record, this relatively minor-looking mishap cost Cars.com over ten grand in damage for the front end, plus repairs to the rear bumper caused by a cop pushing the car off the road. That typically happens on Chicago freeways, leading to speculation that this was a case of the distracted rear-ender. If somebody is willing to tell us, we will tell you. In the meantime, cross your fingers for the hapless journosaurs out on track today. They are literally hours away from free alcohol!