carcounsel.com |HID|

Innovative use of aluminum has proven a defining asset for Jaguar, a unifying engineering theme that’s arrived just in time to imbue the marque with renewed credibility and substance. If we are to be honest, Jaguar had been coasting on the technology front for some time… Yet… Jaguar’s ambitious lineup for an all-aluminum fighting force has been scratched. Aluminum-bodied replacements for the X-type and the S-type have been canceled in favor of minor redesigns. – Jamie Kitman, Automobile Magazine

The problem is all those crazy over-powered Germans. Hell, I love the hot CLS, but there’s only so many times you can spin the wheels before you start feeling like a twat. And the way they all ride? That’s not clever. It’s almost as if collectively, Mercedes/Audi/BMW elected to start bunking the tricky classes some years ago and instead applied themselves to picking up gongs on the sports field. Most powerful! Fastest! Quickest! Most gears! Most crap ride! Thrilling, yes, but hardly nourishing. – Top Gear

Not sure how it is where you come from, but here in the St. Louis area loft constructions are going into parts of town that have been essentially deserted for years. One deterrent for people moving back to the downtown area is the fear of being assaulted or having your car broken into (the later being a valid concern in my experience).

CarLoft units conceived by architectural firm Manfred Dick make a lot of sense from the standpoint of the end user but you have to wonder what the cost per unit to the developer is.

I’d pay a premium to have my car as close and secure as it would be in a suburban garage. Would you?

That’s the question we’ve been asking ourselves since the model’s final specs became public.

After viewing this video and reading the following excerpt, you’ll see why…

Most agreed that except in terms of raw power, the Cayman provided the better overall driving experience. Straight-line acceleration is the performance parameter by which Porsche has chosen to separate these siblings, with the Cayman forbidden from outsprinting its big brother. In addition to docking the Cayman 10 percent in the power and torque departments, the transmission was also hobbled with gearing that’s 6 percent taller in first and second gears. The result is a launch to 30 that’s 20 percent slower than the 911’s – a difference even the least astute customers should notice during a dealer demo drive. (That gap closes to seven percent by 60mph and to two percent by the quarter mile). – Motor Trend, 04.06

Relative Strengths: Large bumps smothered well. Grip level in the dry surprisingly high given heavily siped pattern. Those sipes make for a tire that breaks its grip more gently than the Michelin Pilot Exalto 2 or Pilot Sport 2 sampled on other cars (or many of the compromised towards test track performance tires that dominate the market today).

Relative Weaknesses: Some tread rumble at low speeds. Ride is figety as well (the ride may not be an issue on a vehicle with more slack in the suspension than the firmly damped E46 Xi chassis we sampled it on*). The steering isn’t as linear as I’d like, it’s soft on-center than transitions suddenly on either side (something that might be solved with different toe settings but unexpected given the heavily ribbed pattern of this particular unidirectional).

Verdict: Whereas the A/S version of the Pilot Sport is best considered a three season with better wet and low temp ability, it’s good to see Michelin designed the Exalto A/S tire for the way most of us really drive. Hopefully it signals a return to all-season tires that place all weather grip above 3-season grip or high readlife claims.

*other tires sampled on this chassis: Michelin Pilot Sport A/S, Bridgestone RE750, Goodyear RS-A, Continental ContiTouringContact CV95

A Nigerian court has ordered Shell Oil to pay $1.5 billion to the Ijaw tribe, in compensation for pollution on their land. The Ijaw have long contended that runoff from oil drilling has contaminated water supplies in Niger Delta villages and ruined the local fishing industry. The Nigerian Parliament demanded the payment last year, but Shell refused and Ijaw militants launched attacks on Shell facilities and kidnapped Shell workers. The company said it is not responsible for the pollution and has already spent tens of millions on community projects in the region. It plans to appeal the fine. – The Week Magazine

(I get most of my non-automotive news from The Week – have a look…)

The company’s obsessive—and worthwhile—attempts at reducing the weight of wheels, tires and brakes…

The optional ceramic 382 mm front discs are coupled to 8 – piston callipers and in the rear the 362 mm size is retained with 6 piston callipers. The optional industry first carbon fibre wheels save another 3 kg per wheel compared to the already lightweight magnesium wheels that come as standard. The ceramic discs save another 2 kg per wheel, giving the Koenigsegg CCX lower unsprung weight than any other super car. – Koenigsegg Official Website

I can’t see ever being able to afford such a car (or even wanting to) but the sooner wheels, tires and brakes stop getting heavier the better…

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Leave circuit rather disappointed with ZO6. It’s fast but feels edgy on the limit and uncommunicative too. A Porsche 911 Carrera S is slower and less powerful but I know which one I’d rather drive… ZO6 even worse on the road. If ever you needed proof that there’s more to making a fast car than making it go fast, the Z06 is it. Drove a standard, 400bhp Corvette to the airport. Preferred it. – 4Car’s Andrew Frankel

UPDATE:

In the Z06, despite the manifest improvements over the C6, there’s an underlying aloofness that ensures you never feel inclined to feel for its limits. And while it has the grunt, grip and stopping power to keep pace, or even set the pace, without needing to dig that deep, it’s this lack of ultimate tactility, its inability to fully engage you, that means it never truly delivers those genuine moments of inspiration that define the others. – evo

The Commander is partly an attempt to revive the look of the original, much-liked, much smaller Cherokee – spot the trapezoidal wheelarches and seven-bar grille – but the proportioning has lost much in the inflation. And the obsession with Allen bolts (they appear on the dash, the arches and even in the headlights) seems crass. The point of this rebodied Grand Cherokee? Apart from ruggedness, it’s a seven-seater. The rear pair, which fold to form a flat but high-decked load bay, would be comfortable were the floor not so high that your knees achieve the same altitude as your nipples. That rules it out for most grown-ups. The raised seating of the second row is much better, but thigh support is short. The Grand Cherokee’s offset pedals reappear and the interior, a weird mix of faux military and World of Leather luxury, falls well short. Rearwards visibility is poor, the mirrors rustle at speed, agitating roads agitate the ride and … – Autocar

Every time we hear someone complain that their car understeers, we think to ourselves “they’re probably not driving it the way it was designed to be driven.”

As we said before in this piece, while some cars like a tidy, textbook technique, those with trick differentials only come alive when tossed into a corner and slid most of the way back out.

It’s a bit of a trend that’s sweeping the industry because it makes for great magazine cover shots but I question if it makes the car less enjoyable 99.9% of the time, for 99.9% of owners who don’t know as much as carcounsel |HID| readers.

Autocar’s Andrew Frankel agrees:

Try as I might, I just couldn’t get into the groove with it. I tried guiding it across the Spanish landscape as I would a Boxster S, but found myself missing apexes, turning in to corners too late, constantly having to correct my position on the road. Had a handy racetrack not presented itself, I might still believe the fault lay with the car rather than me. But on the circuit I discovered that trying to flow with the car and steering it smoothly was about as pointless as wearing sunglasses in bed. It would simply magnify all the problems found on the road, understeering stubbornly and leaving you wondering where on earth BMW went wrong. In fact, all it really needed was a different approach: a brutal approach. Instead of throttling back to stop the nose peeling away from a corner, you do the reverse and use judicious amounts of throttle to drive through the understeer, kicking the tail wide and into one of those drifting powerslides that look several times more heroic than they actually are. Treated like this, and once I’d convinced myself that the differential would allow insane slip angles without actually letting the car spin, it drove in much the same way you feel that TVRs should but all too rarely do. Informed and enthused by my discovery, I removed the Z4M from the track and applied what I had learned in diluted form to the medium of the public road. And do you know what? The Z4M transformed in my head from a borderline disaster to what it always promised to be:a seriously good-fun roadster. Even though it and the Boxster S take diametrically opposed routes to the provision of driving pleasure, this does not mean one is necessarily right and the other inevitably wrong. Indeed, if you get your thrills from the delight of feeling the back of the car move and your reassurance from the knowledge that the car has enough basic agility and suspension sophistication to allow you to round it up with ease, then the Z4M driven with the right measure of controlled savagery provides a kind of pleasure the Boxster S driver will never know. But I might get weary of its relentless animalistic nature. Fun though the Z4M can be on the right road or track, this is no substitute for the sensitivity, precision and feel imparted so freely by the Boxster S. However and wherever you drive it, you will never be as at one with the Z4M as you will in a Boxster S.

(Click here) for a previous post on the Z4 M).