#Housekeeping

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.

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.