A360P

A360P Update - More miles than money...

Alejandro Escovedo had an album called "More Miles Than Money" that pretty much sums up my feelings right now. I've been putting a lot of miles on the R32 over the past few months and somewhere outside of Paso Robles, I looked down at the odometer at an opportune time and got a photo of it as it hit 111,111 miles.

I do a lot of preventative maintenance, but some stuff just tends to wear out over time. My HPA/SHS coilovers have been really noisy (and not particularly shock-absorbent) for awhile, so when a friend totaled his R32 recently, I took advantage of his loss by buying the Bilstein PSS9s that were removed from his car post mortem (the car's post mortem - my friend is in fine health and cruising in his new Audi A3). The coilover replacement necessitated the installation of rear control arms because the VW's lack of rear alignment capability caused the rear tires gave up the ghost on a recent trip over to Scottsdale. New tires will go on within the next week, and then everything should be running nice and smooth, the way it was intended to. Then I can start worrying about the progress of the Volvo P1800ES rebuild.

2010 Porsche Cayenne Caravan on PCH

The problem with trying to get quick shots (spy pix or otherwise) of fast-moving vehicles is that I'm invariably driving 60mph+ in one direction while they're driving at 60mph+ in the other direction. Factor in the curves and hills of PCH, the 5-7 seconds it takes to awaken the camera (much less find it in the car) and I can't begin to tell you how many cool shots I've missed (the 2010 Aston Martin Rapide spotted in the Palisades last weekend being only the latest).

Case in point, a damn CONVOY of unbadged 2010 Porsche Cayennes were heading up the coast and I came upon them just north of Latigo Canyon road. Seven or eight of them were all lined up, probably for some sort of press drive. Between the time I saw the first one in a distance (a fleet of blacked-out test cars tends to be visible from at least a little distance away), five or six had whizzed past me. I was able to get the camera up in time to let the auto-focus do its thing and get the above photo. I've got no way of knowing where these were the Cayennes with the hybrid engines, or a diesel, V-6, V-8 or even turbo V-10 model, but I like the changes made to the body contours for this year. My fear is that the designers are edging closer to the look of the Infiniti FX nowadays. Not a major problem, but I find that swoopy-lined cars such as the Lexus SC10 and Infiniti FX put me more in the mind of Jessica Rabbit's ride (from Who Framed Roger Rabbit) than say a curvaceous Delahaye, Mercedes 300SL, or BMW Z8.

Mercedes Benz E55S AMG Wagon

Normally, when you visit a winery, you expect to see the requisite pickup trucks, four-wheel drive, all-terrain vehicles any number of other means to get up and down vineyards and through the mud. A recent visit to a friend's winemaking facility yielded quite a nice variation on the theme, his Mercedes Benz E55S AMG station wagon.

"It really gets me back and forth into town pretty quick when I need to take the kids to school or go to the market." says the owner. Well, duh. With its 469hp supercharged V8 engine, it gets him from 0-60 in under 5 seconds. This is certainly enough to get the attention of your average Porsche 911 or Corvette driver, as well it should, with it's MSRP somewhere in the $90K range. My friend didn't pay anywhere near that much - he picked it up on eBay for a song, and he's had a lot of fun with it ever since.

FWIW, he's a little embarassed about the vanity license plate. It came with the car and he figured that it was just as easy to leave it on. Besides, with only a couple of hundred of these cars imported, it'd be tough to find another owner who'd give up the stealthiness of an "unmarked" station wagon.

1969 Camaro SS 350

Spotted this 1969 Camaro SS 350 a week ago - it was driven by a guy who looked pretty era-specific for the car  and who could probably go to Halloween parties as Tom Petty. What I liked about the car was that it looks as if it's driven regularly. Real regularly. It doesn't appear to have undergone a multi-year frame off restoration...it's just a cool classic car to be driving around. I really wanted one of these in high school (hell, who didn't) but had to content myself with driving around a 1967 Chevy Malibu station wagon. Had I known that I'd eventually be living in Malibu, I probably would have kept it, but it was pretty thrashed by the time it was sold. I liked the SS 396 engine it had; my father always preferred to buy up when it came to horsepower. Whenever anyone comments on my driving pace these days, I just inform them that my lead foot was hereditary and that I've got a lot to live up to.

BMW ActiveHybrid 7

Ran across a BMW 7 series hybrid in the parking lot at How's Market recently. It looks just like any other big new BMW, but for the mass of electrical equipment in the passenger compartment and the HYBRIDvehicle stickers on the outside of the car indicating that there's a lithium-ion battery in there to power the electric motor.  

According to Autoblog, the performance figures of the car are impressive; maximum torque hits 516 lb-ft getting this hybrid up to 60 in 4.9 seconds. Add an eight-speed transmission that transmission with Auto Start/Stop, a process that maximizes efficiency by avoiding engine idling when stopped, and you've got the potential to hit 25 mpg. There is certainly enough space inside the car to transport five people comfortably, with the end result being that you wind up with a car that certainly chips away at any issues people may have had with hybrid propulsion systems. Downsides are that I could find no reference to the proposed cost, and the car looks so good that it'd be a shame to put the carpool lane stickers on the backside of this car. I suppose that it's good thing (at least aesthetically) that the state isn't issuing any more of those permits.

An extremely thorough press release concerning the BMW ActiveHybrid 7 can be found at the Autoblog site above or at worldcarfans.com.

Alfa Romeo GTV 2000 (the first car I ever wrecked)

My driving record has been pretty good thus far, given the numbers of miles I drive and the types of roads I'm on. However, it is not without its blemishes, the first (and most memorable) being back in the early 1970s when an Alfa Romeo GTV 2000 became the first car I ever wrecked. And I wasn't even driving the damn thing at the time....

I was in the latter stages of suffering the slings and arrows inherent in being a high school student and had found part time work in a San Luis Obispo, CA hi-fi shop called Stereo West. This was owned by Cliff Branch and Tom Spalding, two guys who were both very much into cars. While my primary job was to dust and vacuum the stereo equipment and keep the shop looking vaguely neat and clean, I also got to wax their cars. Over the couple of years I worked there, I got to work on cars such as a Jaguar XKE, Porsche 911, Fiat 124, De Tomaso Pantera, Maserati Bora, and even the only street legal Porsche Carrera RSR in the country at that time. Thus it was that I was sent over up over Cuesta Grade to Tom's house in Santa Margarita to wash and wax his Alfa in preparation for sale to the manager of the Cigar Factory, a downtown SLO restaurant.

Tom lived in a place known as the Trout Farm, and appropriate name, given the fact that it was a real trout farm. There were concrete fish pools around the property and the whole place was built into a bucolic setting with sloping hills with lots of live oak trees scattered around the property. I began working on the Alfa, when it somehow slipped out of gear and gravity did its thing. The car began rolling and I tried to stop it (or at least slow it down) but to no avail. It gathered momentum and within a few seconds had rolled about 50 feet down the hill and into a steep creekbed where (fortunately) it came to a rest on a large oak tree about halfway down the hill. I recovered my wits enough to run up to the main house where I called Tom to give him the bad news. He was remarkably cool about the situation. He called a tow truck and headed out to see just how bad the damage was. It turned out that it wasn't catastopic, b the car definitely received a good dose of body work, with the result being that it was still sold to the guy who had already planned to purchase it, and I stopped doing house calls for car waxing.

Tom and Cliff wound up doing okay, eventually building Stereo West into a mail order stereo company called Warehouse Sound Company, and that split off into California Cooperage, the company that brought the hot tub experience to most of the USA. It was all sold off to various entities, with Cliff heading off to a career as a real estate mogul and political firebrand, and Tom driving in the Can-Am series for awhile before pursuing entrepreneurial interests in the computer world. 

The Alfa pictured above looks to be a fun car to drive on the weekends. The GTV 2000s (and their predecessors) haven't reached the sort of resale value that would justify a full-on restoration (which is not to say that people don't do it anyway) so from a distance, this car looks pretty sharp. Then again, it oughta, given that it was designed by Giorgetto Giugiaro for Bertone. I really wish that I'd actually had the opportunity to drive one.

1958 356A Porsche Speedster

What better time and place for a Saturday afternoon drive than on PCH through Malibu? This 1958 Porsche 356A Speedster has seen more than a little body modification over the course of its life but looked and sounded great all the way down the coast. The owner certainly seemed to be having a lot of fun with it.

Gullwings Over Frankfurt - Mercedes SLS AMG

Photo: Daniel Roland/Associated Press

I love this photograph of Mercedes Benz chief exec Dieter Zetsche surrounded by hoards of press while sitting in the new Mercedes Benz AMG SLS. The car's design cues are very much a tribute to its 300SL predecessor, although the mechanical, electrical, and basic driving comforts are (as one would expect for $250,000+) much more up to date. Its 6.2 liter V8 will get you from 0-60 mph in under 4 seconds, with a top speed that'll be somewhere in the neighborhood of 197 mph.

IN case you were wondering where in the world Lewis Hamilton was today, here was here, gazing admiringly (if not somewhat ironically) at a flashy red car:

 

Photo downloaded from Jalopnik 

FWIW, my birthday is coming up in the next couple of weeks, so if you were wondering what might be an appropriate gift, you could do worse than to get me an SLS.

BMW E30 M3

I've always been partial to the mid/late 1980s BMW E30 M3. It's not exactly subtle in terms of its styling, but then again, it initially existed only for purposes of homologation so as to make the car eligible for road racing. They were incredibly successful in this regard, the E30 M3 eventually winning more races than any other road car ever, plus the M3 badge remains one of the most prestigious (if not omnipresent) high-performance designations on the road.

This particular car was photographed on PCH by Pepperdine. It was being driven by someone who seemed to be really enjoying the car's capabilities, and I was feeling more than a little envious. Back in 1999 I was preparing to move back to Southern CA from Berkeley and one of my clients was a salesperson at Fantasy Junction in Emeryville. He mentioned that he had a 1988 M3 available and it was almost in my price range. I ventured down there on my day off and got to take it around the block and it was way too much fun. There were subsequently some financing issues (even back then it was difficult getting a loan for a racecar) so I wound up leasing a 1999 VW GTI VR-6. In hindsight I should have gone with the M3, but it's unlikely that I would have gotten the 170,000 miles from it that I wound up wringing out of the VW. I might also have never gotten around to the R32, so it's probably just as well that I didn't get the M3 a decade ago, but it remains a car I'd like to spend some time driving.

Mr. GT-R, Meet Mr. CHP

There's just something about a warm Sunday afternoon in the Malibu Hills that just seems to make people want to open it up and let loose a bit on Kanan-Dume Road. Speaking from personal experience, this is not a good idea. This unfortunate driver of a Nissan GT-R also found out the hard way that the California Highway Patrol seems hell-bent on resolving the state's budget crisis via stepped-up enforcement of the laws. The goal is ostensibly to increase safety on the roads, and in general I agree that this is a good thing, but doling out tickets for 5 mph over the limit is pushing the boundaries of safety believability. When I received mine, the officer sounded almost apologetic (but still wrote me up). I guess it's just part of the cost of doing business, and I should have known better than to even be on the road on the weekend. If nothing else, I should have drafted a faster motorcycle or car (such as the GT-R) and let them get the citation. Lesson learned...