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For the past ten years I’ve been trying to convince people that all wheel drives cars and SUVs need winter tires more than two wheel cars (due to the added mass the tires need to bring to a stop, and in the case of SUVs inherently inferior braking and handling and tires with hard rubber designed to take the punishment of off roading).

if a picture is worth a thousand words this video from Automobile is worth many times that.

Sure it’s spring again, but now you’ll be safer come next year…

...was my reaction when I found out Cadillac is doing a BOSE edition of the CTS. I know BOSE is a master of marketing and GM tends to market their cars more than they actually engineer them but come on… I feel dirty even putting the words BOSE edition CTS in my blog.

If you see anyone driving one, be sure to give them a look of disgust.

As automakers continue their quest for more power AND more efficiency AND lower emissions, the gasoline engine and the diesel engine are growing closer, adopting tricks from one another.

One thing the gas engine has cribbed is to spray the fuel directly into the combustion chamber at high pressure rather than introducing it to the intake charge (where some of it coated the backside of the intake valve and evaporated).

BMW once broke down the power increase of each component changed when they moved from the M52TU to M54 engine family in 2001, but no one had released how much power and efficiency D.I. gives in and of itself til now because it was bundle with other changes such as turbocharging or a radically different motor.

Rather than forced induction or hot rodding the motor as is the norm, Cadillac’s next CTS will have an optional engine that simply adds direct injection to the existing 3.6L. The resut is an 15% increase in power, an 8% increase in torque and a 25% decrease in hydrocarbon emissions.

Given that everything coming out of GM these days uses the high feature 3.6, I’d expect that sometime down the road the technology will trickle down through the lineup.

Looks like the loud ticking that you hear at idle is here to stay.

Order the 22-inch tires if you must have the look, but we advise against them. They ride harsher than the less sporty choices, they’re noisy, and their quick-responding nature fights with the steering feel on gusty days, taking you down a ziggy path. – Car and Driver

[Inside the Malibu] Ragged mold partlines are everywhere. Several plastic trim pieces feel as if they were secured by bubblegum and a prayer. There’s this sense that if you turned the car over and shook it vigorously the entire interior might fall out. There are no overhead hand grips for front-seat occupants, and the trim around the skylights appears to have been cut out with dull scissors. If GM didn’t build cars as if it expected to discount them, maybe it wouldn’t have to. source: Car and Driver, February 2006

(The good news is that GM’s aware of the problem and is just now doing something about it; the interiors of the new GM full-size trucks and SUVs are a marvel and those in the Cobalt and Lucerne are well beyond the General’s usual).

Domestic manufacturers have long operated under a different model, placing sticker prices on their cars that are close to foreign competitors but designing the car so its cheaper to produce. This makes dealers happy because the margins are larger and customers happy because they are often offered ‘cash back’ or are able to negotiate thosands off the sticker price.

Anyone in sales can tell you that convincing the customer they ‘got a good deal’ is more important than anything else, so this formula has worked for the company so far despite the fact that it devalues the car from a resale standpoint (the more heavily a car is discounted at the dealership the more it tends to cost an owner over its service life).

Automotive News reports GM is adjusting its pricing to become less reliant on incentives. The Cobalt’s sticker is slashed by $1,500 for example…

As promising as that may sound, the V.P. of North American Vehicle Sales, Service and Marketing was quoted as saying incentives are “...part of what makes this business fun.” He obviously hasn’t had to buy a car and spend time haggling with a salesperson at one of his dealerships in a number of years…

Along with large wheels, front wheel drive, small windows, vague steering, seating placed in crumple zones and unidirectional tires we’ve always hoped the SUV was a trend that would someday go the way of the dodo.

While we don’t agree with their choice of contenders, we think this list of rankings from a recent Motor Trend comparison points to a trend in comparison tests performed over the years between wagons and SUVs: wagons are more pleasurable to drive. That this test ranks a wagon based on the dynamically mediocre Volvo S60 ahead of SUVs based on the nimble and connected Legacy and CTS says a lot, as does the fact that the test didn’t include any of the more trucky body on frame designs that litter our roads.

And until the laws of physics come crashing down or Ferrari or Maclaren make an SUV, we’d bet that will continue to be the case…