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Notes, quotes and observations from the show floor
From pastrami and sauerkraut to four cheese pizza and stale peanut M&Ms in the press room, the food at the New York Auto Show is all about empty calories and heartburn – trust me on this. After all, if you’re an automotive journalist you love food almost as much as cars.
It’s much like some of the cars we’ve seen debuted this year. Indeed, this year's show was just like chowing down on a big open face corned beef sandwich at Carnegie's Deli. It's good, for sure -- but you leave feeling slightly nauseous. Sure, vehicles like the Hyundai Genesis Coupe and the Honda Fit added some nutritional value to the proceedings, but others – think the Pontiac G8 Sport Truck – lacked the daily requirement of automotive vitamins and minerals. Consider: Pontiac executives launched their own version of the El Camino without a name. It’s almost as if they tossed up their hands and said, in essence: “Whatever, we give – you think you’re so smart, name the thing yourself!”
We would, we would. Except right now we have a horrid cheese headache from the individual four cheese pizza we ate at lunch, and we need to go look at the Solstice Coupe again. You know – just to see something nice, to get our car levels right.
--Brian Chee
Quietly tucked away in Nissan’s display was a white Cube. The Cube is a Japan-only small car, similar to the original Scion xB, and one that in fact was created to compete directly with the xB’s Japanese cousin, the bB. This particular Cube is electric; plug it in, and in a little while its lithium-ion battery pack is fully charged and ready to scoot you around Tokyo streets in square hipness.
So why was it here? Look for the next generation Cube to be sold on these shores, with a production version debuting this fall at the Los Angeles Auto Show.
That Subaru can build a small car is no big news. We all remember those early 70s and 80s Subies, right? And what about more recently...wait...was it really almost 20 years ago that the Justy graced our shores? Wow.
Anyhow, the R1 is Subaru’s Japan-market kei car, that is, its micromachine city car. You’ll never guess what the “e” stands for on this model. Electricity, you say? Very good, move to the head of the class. The R1e is here for a summertime evaluation by the New York Power Authority. Developed jointly by Subaru and the Tokyo Electric Power Company, The R1e tries to solve a couple of common complaints about electric vehicles.
The first complaint is charge time. Sure electric is great, but who wants to wait for hours to get a charge? The R1e can get an 80 percent charge in as little as 15 minutes, not much longer than a regular gas-station fill up. A full charge still takes all night, but getting most of the way there in such a short time is a big help.
The second issue are the batteries themselves. The R1e uses lithium ion, which are good as far as how much energy they can hold, but bad because of problems like charge memory loss, that is, it doesn’t know how much charge it has (anybody whose laptop has died with 20 percent of their battery life remaining is familiar with this). The other two problems are a decrease in life if partial or rapid charges are used. Obviously these wouldn’t do given the R1e’s mission, and Subaru says the problems have been eliminated in the car’s battery pack. The upshot is that the R1e has enough juice for a 50 mile range and a top speed of 65 mph, not bad for an urban commuter.
Now, before we get too deeply into this, remember that this is the World Car of the Year award. We want to make this clear right up front for one very good reason: Several of the nominees, and all but one of the winning cars, are not available in the U.S.
OK, on to the awards. This is the fourth-annual presentation of this award, an honor bestowed by a group of international automotive journalists. There are actually four awards: The overall winner gets the biggest trophy, and three smaller ones for Green Car, Performance Car and Design. Nominees are selected from whatever’s new in a given year, and available in a wide enough variety of markets, with different criteria for the three lesser trophies.
The “wide variety of markets” part limits any North American-produced vehicles, since so few of them make it outside of the U.S. The Cadillac CTS was nominated, and probably would have made it to the finals if it was more widely available, but alas, it was ultimately excluded. The Chevy Tahoe Hybrid was also nominated, and we wish it could have made it to the finalists list if for no other reason than it’d be funny to see the big honkin’ SUV alongside things like the Smart For Two diesel. Alas, Europeans refuse to think 6,000 pound body-on-frame SUVs are cool enough to drive, hybrid-ized or not.
Ultimately, the finalists broke down like this:
We weren’t terribly surprised when the Audi R8 took home the trophies for performance and design. After all, which one would you pick in those categories? The BMW 118d was not very surprising either, since if you’re going to go green, you may as well do it in a sporty little BMW.
So who took the trophy for World Car of the Year? The Mazda2 of all things. Quite a change from last year, when the Lexus LS 460 took home the big trophy. Now, before you say “so what” and scroll to the next post, keep in mind that we’ll see the Mazda2 as the Ford Fiesta sometime soon. This bodes well for the small Ford, and the company could certainly use a successful small car to supplement its lineup. Mazda itself is unsure whether it will bring the 2 to our shores, but now that it’s won the World Car of the Year trophy, all bets are off.
One final note to manufacturers: If you win the trophy, hold on tight. If it falls to the floor, the gracefully suspended planet at the top of the award will break off embarrassingly. How do we know this? After the ceremony, a loud “thunk” came from the stage, then a chorus of “oohs,” and finally a couple of chuckles as organizers vainly tried to put Humpty Trophy back together again. Don’t worry, guys, a little JB Weld will fix it right up.
--Keith Buglewicz
Schedule trip to Bondurant Racing School.
Also, figure out excuse for subsequently huge expense report.
--Keith Buglewicz
There’s a method to the typical auto show debut, one that includes a good deal of hoopla before the unveiling of a car, a brief speech by a company talking head detailing all of vehicle X’s virtues, and then finishes with a throng of reporters and photographers angling for pictures and sound bites.
Tradition took the afternoon off as day one of the 2008 New York Auto Show came to its conclusion. A team of engineers and executives gathered in front of the Chevy Volt concept to answer what sounded like unfiltered questions from electric-car enthusiasts and alternative-fuel fans in general. The Q and A session was lead by the founder of gmvolt.com, a site dedicated to GM’s most significant response to calls for decreased fossil-fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions.
A few interesting bits of information trickled out of the discussion:
-- Thom Blackett
Or…it's amazing what 35 mpg CAFE will do to your priorities. Take Bentley: long used to dealing with a class of customer that cared little about the amount of emissions a car was spewing, they now have found themselves in the center of the global anxiety attack over fuel prices.
Really. If you're shopping Bentley, well, you can probably pay someone to worry about the environment, never mind the price of fuel at the pump. Still, though, Bentley executives are worried (about CAFE, perhaps?), and have unveiled a plan of action to lower emissions and increase fuel economy. It starts with improved transmissions, lower curb weight, more efficient engines, and, most importantly, the conversion to E85 compatibility.
It all happens by 2012 and starts next year, so if you're in the market for a Brooklands - well, you'd probably be better off buying a dozen or so Prius Hybrids instead. Rich people caring about blue skies and oil. Why, it makes me all warm inside.
-- Brian Chee
Before the first press conference – which was at 9:40 this morning – I took a little stroll around the convention center. Auto shows are put on by a multitude, you don’t see most of the people, so forthwith, here is their moment in the sun.
This poor woman. Javits Center has more than 675,000 square feet, and she has one little piddling vacuum cleaner. It’s not even self-powered. There’s going to be hell to pay when the Teamsters find out about this one.
It’s not often you meet an ancient Greek god, but here he is, Sisyphus himself. You remember him...he used to push a rock up a hill, only to have it roll back down before it reached the top. Now he’s damned to keeping black show cars polished and shiny, only to have a multitude come and get fingerprints all over it again. We’d rather have the rock.
Before the conferences begin, the workers, their jobs complete, crawl back into their holes in the floor, only to come out again after the last journalist has departed. What happens then stays inside Javits.
--Keith Buglewicz
Tornadoes over Dallas? Bah. That's nothing compared to the joy that waits for me at home. The long hours, bad food (coming soon) weird press conferences and twisted reality that is the show circuit is tough, sure, but I want to appreciate my little bundle of joy even more than I already do, and you know what they say about absence. So - I travel to the shows.
As a side benefit, I actually get a decent night's sleep. Even, as a matter of fact, if it's on a plane. Or in a dumpster. From my perspective (see above), that's fine by me, just as long as there's sleep involved. Apparently the myride.com video crew does not agree, and feel that they have suffered greatly in traveling to this year's New York Auto Show.
Hmmm.
These video guys, they're a soft lot with weak constitutions, to be sure. They've simply failed to consider the benefits of being stuck in El Paso:
1. Go to the airport made famous by No Country for Old Men
2. Get a signed cattle gun by Anton Chigurh
3. Sleep in a chair for eight whole hours! (see above)
Later, on the way to Phoenix, they got free drinks and still more opportunity to sleep, a benefit they again received on their red-eye flight to New York. Sure seems to me that the visual arts side of the show owes Myride.com a little overtime, eh? As for me, I had to suffer through a long and cramped cab ride to the Los Angeles International Airport, wait around, bored, for two hours, then fly direct to the Big Apple. Just because they upgraded me to Business Class due to my inconvenience, well, that's not my fault, is it?
-- Brian Chee
No one in their right mind would accuse Bob Lutz of being a man who minces his words. After a few tunes from the Young Lords to warm up the crowd, Maximum Bob took to the stage, taking a few stabs at Pontiac’s lame attempt at performance in recent years before quickly shifting the spotlight onto three new rides from the brand – the 2009 Solstice Coupe, the 2009 G8 GXP, and the 2010 G8 Sport Truck. With a wide range of available engines and optional hardware under the skin, Bob expects this new trio to bolster Pontiac’s performance image.
There’s just one problem – executives apparently haven’t warmed to the G8 Sport Truck name, so they brought out 50 Cent to offer his thoughts about the new rides and some possible names for the El Camino of Pontiacs. The trend-setting rap mogul decided that his real name, Curtis, would be appropriate. If you can come up with something better (how hard could that be?), let the world know at Pontiac.com. Word is a 2010 G8 [truck yet to be named] will be awarded to one lucky winner.
-- Thom Blackett
Though Eliot Spitzer and his well-paid escort soaked up most of New York’s political news lately, Mercedes-Benz attempted to muscle itself into the limelight by debuting the redesigned 2009 ML-Class. The brand’s most popular SUV is treated to several updates, but as buttons, placards, red white and blue balloons, and patriotic background music suggested, the real news was the ML320 BlueTEC diesel model. Along with new BlueTEC versions of the GL-Class and R-Class, these high-mpg people movers will be available in all 50 states this fall.
-- Thom Blackett
Why does Kevin, a member of the MyRide video team look like he just spent a night sleeping in a dumpster? Because Kevin and the rest of our video and photo team spent the last 24+ hours getting a royal beat-down by a jerk named "traveling in the United States by plane". Here is a graphic I just made for the appendix in my upcoming book "Auto Shows: The Most Fun You Can Have Legally This Side of the US Border with Mexico" detailing their trip in to this week's 2008 New York Auto Show.
Exhibit 4.2, Why Kevin Looks Like He Slept in a Dumpster
All that said, the videos and photos from the show will probably be better than ever, because MyRide's guys are like the Green Berets of the auto show circuit (they can handle just about anything and keep on rolling like no one's business).
--Elliot Darvick
MyRide is representin’ at the New York Auto Show, albeit in limited numbers for the time being. After encountering some travel woes from hell, the scribes have arrived but Mother Nature’s trickery landed our crew of photographers and videographers on a last-minute red-eye. They’re likely getting a nice post-flight adrenalin rush right now thanks to a psychotic NYC taxi driver. At least they’ll be alert when they hit the show floor.
Some of us have been a bit more fortunate. After spending a few days in Maine over the weekend, I borrowed an Edge from Ford and made the trip to NYC. Sure, it took several hours and one stop at a remarkably clean Shell station, but at least I didn’t have to shave in an airport.
Starting at the family homestead, I loaded up the Edge with a trusty radar detector, set the radio to my favorite Sirius station, clicked on the heated seats (we’re talking Maine in March), and headed south.
Within no time, I was in Taxachusetts where even the grandmothers drive with a chip on their shoulders. Made it through without the privilege of discussing speed limits with the state’s finest.
Continuing on down I95, I was soon crossing into Rhode Island, the so-called Ocean State. On Tuesday, it was the cold and gray state.
Passing through Rhode Island must’ve taken at least 20 whole minutes, after which the only border between me and New York belonged to Connecticut, better known as the Martha Stewart State. With about $40 of Shell petrol poured into the Edge’s tank and a stop off at an oh-so-hospitable Visitor’s Center (if you stop in, the Connecticut Farm Map is a must for any bovine fan), I entered my hotel’s address into the touch-screen navigation system and prepared to swim with the sharks, or put another way, to drive in New York City.
After traveling a couple hundred miles over the course of about five hours, the $36,000 2008 Ford Edge Limited AWD and I hit snarled traffic and crept to our final destination – mine was a small room at the Sheraton, whereas the Edge was left to hang out with its motorized brethren in the hotel’s garage. Glancing at the gauges before handing off the keys, I was disappointed to see only 19.6 mpg after a lengthy highway run, but the comfortable ride and accurate touch-screen navigation system helped offset any complaints. Plus, travel in the Edge helped ensure a good night’s rest, which, unfortunately, is more than my jetlagged colleagues could enjoy.
And now, on with the show.
--Thom Blackett
See more, read more, watch more...MyRide covers the New York Auto Show
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