#Enthusiasm

For the first time since the days of the 912, Porsche will be selling cars with a boxer-four engine. This new engine will power everything from the forthcoming “Baby Boxster” to the next generation of Boxster and Cayman, likely differentiated by different states of turbocharged tune. Here, a mule of the next-gen Cayman (released in Europe next year), which is growing to accommodate the new entry-level model, shows off the sweet sound of its new turbocharged 2.5 liter four-banger, which is rumored to put out 365 HP in “S” trim. And by “sweet sounds” I mean, it sounds a lot nicer than the 2.5 liter boxer in my girlfriend’s Impreza… although some of our more discriminating readers might feel that it’s still not up to Porsche standards. What say you?

Ian Callum, designer of the Aston-Martin DB7 (along with the new Jaguars and numerous other gorgeous things) is a really, genuinely nice guy. But even nice guys have their limits, and having seen his groundbreaking Aston design evolve with the morphological dynamism of a sturgeon over the last 17 years, Callum appears to have reached his. Bloomberg reports:

It’s still that same old basic design,” Ian McCallum, who designed the DB9 and is now design director at Tata Motors Ltd. (TTMT)’s Jaguar Land Rover unit, said in a July 27 interview. “Some will argue that if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. But you do get to a time when you have to move on.”

Sadly, there are a few factual distractions to deal with here before we dig further into Aston’s predicament. First of all, though a Scot, the man’s name is Callum, not McCallum. Also, it’s not clear how much of the DB9 was styled by Callum, and how much was finished by his successor, Heinrik Fisker. Clear? OK, back to Aston…

Autocar reports that the new “Baby Jag” roadster, will hit the European market by late 2012, cost £40,000 (about the same as a Boxster S) and “will blow the rest of the industry away.” According to the British buff book

The styling of the XE, Autocar understands, follows the company’s philosophy of “expressing lightness”. This is a new Jaguar styling principle that should result in the shape of future models “visually reflecting” the fact that they are made entirely of aluminium.

Unfortunately, because it shares its all-alu platform with the next-gen XK, it won’t be quite as light as a Boxster, with production weight estimated at 3,300 lbs. But, because this video only shows the “XE” (the name is still a matter of hot debate inside Jaguar) test mule, the most relevant detail is the drivetrain: a V6 of unrevealed displacement, in naturally-aspirated and supercharged forms, and hitched to an eight-speed automatic. The engine in this test video exhibits a nice, “emotional” raspy edge that is sure to satisfy in top-down driving, but the final clip of the video gives me the slushbox blues. Skip ahead to the 3:50 mark, when the mule accelerates from a stop, and it’s clear that (at least in mule form) this car shifts softly enough to sound almost like a CVT. Let’s hope they were just testing “touring” or “eco” mode or somesuch, because if you aren’t going to offer a manual transmission in a roadster, the slushbox needs to at least be able to bang some hard shifts when necessary.

Fiat’s 500 is a tough vehicle to figure out. On the one hand, it’s got a lot of intangibles going for it: it’s got huge fashion appeal, it gets far better fuel economy than anything in the Chrysler Group’s US stable and it grabs attention like nobody’s business. On the other hand: the sales stink. Chrysler expected to move some 50k Cinquecentos this year, but after three full months of sales (only 500 special editions were sold in March), the 500 had moved fewer than 5,000 units through June (4,944, to be precise). Fiat has admitted that the 500 launch is “ a tiny bit behind schedule,” and the first official ad (which I count as another positive intangible) is only just going live this week. It’s miles better than the glorified tourist bureau video that has since disappeared from Youtube, but can it motivate 45,000 hip young (at heart) things to buy into the next small thing? We’ll certainly be watching July sales with interest. But if Fiat doesn’t get the ball rolling towards New Beetle-style iconic status in the US, the 500 could go the way of the Smart: iconic, but for all the wrong reasons (namely a challenging combination of price and size).

“Ask Amy” advice columnist and self-help memoir author Amy Dickinson has the late Ann Landers’ old slot on the Chicago Tribune. She also has a 1967 Morris Minor. She fell in love with the car the first time she saw one, soon after she moved to London with her then-husband, in 1986. “They are so cute, they look like ice cream cones,” she says. She loves the clatter of its engine, and the way people smile when she drives by, and she says it is her favorite material object in the world.

So after her husband embarked on an open-endedly extended business trip, in 1988, Dickinson, then a housewife, took her five week old baby, Emily, in a taxi to a dealer who restored Morrises, and made her purchase, for 1,500 pounds (roughly $5,000 in current dollars). “One advantage of driving a beautiful, quirky vintage car is that it really helped me meet people,” she says. “So many men said to me, ‘I had one of these,’ and ‘my dad had one of these,’ not to mention ‘getting rid of my Morris Minor was my biggest mistake.’”

Mazda lost $327m in the second quarter, falling below analyst expectations as tsunami-related supply interruptions and currency woes battered the company’s bottom line. According to the Detroit News, this was Mazda’s third straight quarter of losses and the firm has lost money during its last three fiscal years. But, as this video (which, as far as I know has not yet been shown in the US) argues, the “Hiroshima spirit” which allowed locals to rebuild after the devastation of the nuclear attack in 1945, flows through Mazda. The company has a bold new design direction, an “enthusiast howl” of an ad campaign, and it says it will return to profitability when its fiscal year ends in March. But its projected profit for the full year is only $12.8m, which means Mazda is cutting it real close… and as the last quarter proved, projections can always be missed. Here’s hoping the last independent, mass-market, enthusiast-oriented automaker is able to turn things around this year and keep fighting the good fight.

Platform shared with the Evo + three rows of seating = the ideal vehicle for an enthusiast with kids? This formula encapsulates the promise of the second-generation Mitsubishi Outlander. But back when it was introduced, for the 2007 model year, the reality fell short, with too many rough edges in both the chassis and the interior. Last year the Outlander was freshened with a more Evo-like nose, an upgraded interior, and a new GT trim that added an active front differential. More than ever Mitsubishi was pitching the Outlander as the family hauler for enthusiasts. But do the tweaks go deep enough?

Between Nissan’s Leaf racer and a new EV-only racing cup, electric auto racing has been coming along in recent months, although significant challenges remain. For one thing, batteries are still extremely heavy, and for another, they take a long time to recharge. Finally, thermal management issues conspire with both of these battery challenges to force EV races to be quite short. And in search of a solution, one team that’s entered into the EV Cup is looking to the original EV racers for inspiration: slot cars. Rather than getting hot and heavy with big batteries, figures Drayson Racing Technologies, why not charge the car as it’s racing at speeds upwards of 200 MPH? Luckily HaloIPT has come aboard the project, bringing its eponymous wireless Inductive Power Transfer technology to bear in order to create life-sized, wireless, slot-free slot cars.

With only a tiny bit of front-end camouflage left, the new Porsche 991 has been almost completely revealed… can you tell? One thing is for certain, Porsche’s not about to lose its reputation for evolutionary styling anytime soon.

Every automaker is in this business to make money… there’s nothing surprising about that. But some are a little more focused on profits than others, and it should be equally unsurprising that Porsche is one of them. In an extensive interview with Automotive News Europe [sub], Porsche CEO Matthias Mueller gives a strong impression of how Porsche sees itself over the course of the first two questions:

What is your vision for Porsche in 2018?

Porsche is synonymous with sports cars – yesterday, today and doubtless tomorrow as well. In addition, in every other segment where we operate, such as with the Cayenne or Panamera, we always offer the sportiest vehicle. At the moment we are hard at work on our future strategy. And I promise you, it will contain a few exciting surprises.

What are your most important objectives?

We want to remain the world’s most profitable car manufacturer – and build on this position.

These are actually two separate goals altogether, and not two which necessarily go hand-in-hand. But if anyone can pull off the mix between performance and profit, it’s Porsche… and to understand how this strategy will play out in the near future, let’s take a look at Mueller’s product plans.

I was just a pre-licensed car nut when the July 1994 issue of Car and Driver passed along the news of Ayrton Senna’s death. Brock Yates’ column in that issue said, “In a sad way, Ayrton Senna’s death dignifies motor racing…He did not die in vain, but rather he made the ultimate sacrifice in seeking his own personally mandated pinnacle of achievement. Tragically, ironically, he may serve his chosen profession more in death than life.” This meant nothing to me at the time. But it means something now.

Government officials like Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood spend much of their time justifying their positions by tilting at national windmills like the “epidemic” of distracted driving, generally with relatively modest results. And yet, despite the massive increase in mobile device use over the last decades or so, on-road deaths per vehicle mile traveled are at an all-time low. So here’s a new “epidemic” for Secretary LaHood: lane discipline. Every time I take to the freeway, I’m absolutely shocked by the number of people driving at or below the speed limit in the left lane, and the number of people who stay in the fastlane even when there’s nobody to pass. And I don’t have to rely on anecdotal evidence to know lane discipline is a problem in America (or, at least in the Pacific Northwest). According to the PEMCO Insurance Northwest Poll,

43 percent of Washington drivers don’t know that impeding the flow of traffic in the left lane is against the law.

To which I say “bullshit.” Not only is it illegal to impede left lane traffic in Washington (and Oregon, where I live), but the freeways in both states have regular “keep right except to pass” signs, so the ignorance defense doesn’t really apply. People simply don’t care about maintaining lane discipline, and ignore any sign that urges them to do so. Clearly signage and the National Motorist’s Association’s Lane Courtesy Awareness Month aren’t doing the trick… and neither does giving the finger.

What do we mean when we talk about assemblies of steel, carbon and plastic in terms of “emotion”? Every craft has a very narrow dividing line between mere technical proficiency and creating something that’s greater than the sum of its parts, but few crafts enjoy a cadre of critics that are as obsessed with constantly defining this line as auto journalists. I suppose that after spending enough time driving and trying to evaluate cost-no-object luxury items the line may become more obvious, as skills are sharpened and observational powers are honed. But more than increasing the ability to define the line between mere “excellence” and “greatness” or “proficiency” and “emotion,” a career of supercar driving largely seems to reinforce the importance of simply having that line. After all, what’s more important to the reviewer of supercars: preventing some poor soul from squandering a quarter of a million dollars on the wrong supercar, or establishing their own exquisite taste? Here’s a hint: only one of these things keeps the gravy train rolling. So when you’ve got two similarly-performing supercars competing directly for the attentions of the well-heeled, few will actually care which laps what the fastest… and when the going gets tough, the tough get wobbling.

This is all well and good… after all, everyone wants to drive a Ferrari 458 and a McLaren MP4-12c, but nobody wants to go through the motions of justifying why you think one is fundamentally better or worse than the other. Besides, consumers are free to understand that one man’s “lack of emotion” is another man’s everyday usability… or “waste” their money on the car the journalist says he prefers. But when McLaren comes out and gives the latest mid-engined Ferrari a run for its money with its first roadvcar in over a decade only to be met with accusations of a “lack of emotion,” there’s no way a self-respecting sportscar firm would make a change to their baby. But that’s exactly what’s happening…

Despite signs that the horsepower wars are over (or have at least been refined), nobody would argue that the American market lacks for high-powered offerings. Except, apparently, Dodge and its crack ad team at Wieden + Kennedy who have based the latest Durango ad around the idea that performance is dead in America. This canard is so preposterously misguided and thoroughly misinformed that I can’t even bring myself to lay out the all-to-obvious critique piece-by-piece. Instead, let’s turn to the legendary auto ad-blaster, the Autoextremist himself to point out why this may well be one of the most stupid car ads in a long time.