The $527 a month my neighbor pays for his 2010 Audi S4's insurance makes a little sense now.

Looks like a Pinto with fender flares. I live a few miles from Mexico and air cooled Beetles are still a practically-daily sight here. That looks NOTHING like an old Beetle.

An inconvenient truth: Environmentalists hate people.

The wires chafing, shorting and burning are Quality British Wires.

It is bowed like a banana from the side. Crack Pipe.

@Nighthawkwill7: Sounds painful.

"Then there's our collected mechanical prowess, which would make the average house wife look like Smokey Yunick."

We could save the cars we want to drive, and our standard of living, if we just get rid of the aspiring totalitarians in DC. There is more known oil now than at any previous time.

I'd jump off a plane if the inflight movie was about Senna, but I'd love to see the interview he did with Jackie Stewart.

@MushyHeirloom: Just enough room is a complaint? I don't know where you've been, but the Camry is knocking on full size interior volume and the Accord is already there. The Avalon is bigger than the Camry, so 'just enough room' is a valid criticism sort of like saying the engine is too quiet at idle. Oops. You already…

@Keo: Maybe firing them would lead to better conduct by other government officials. Maybe.

@MushyHeirloom: I haven't driven a new Avalon, but I have driven a 2011 Camry rental car. It impressed me more than any VW ever has, Audis included. It really wasn't any more lacking in road feel than recent Audis or GTIs either.

It looks like a Toyota Avalon, but I doubt it works as well as one. I'm pretty sure the people who buy Avalons do so because they're such competent cars, not because of the styling. Whatever is going through the heads of VW buyers, I doubt they're getting VWs because of the quality of the engineering. So what we have…

@Ash78, ennui pioneer: There is a Hyundai Elantra Touring that is comparable. Hyundai slashed the price $1800 for 2010 after they sat on lots in 2009. I don't think Ford is worrying about chasing a piece of an 18,000 unit market where margins are in the teens of dollars.

@Ash78, ennui pioneer: How do you know the market is ripe? What wagons sell in real numbers? Even Volvo is getting indifferent about wagons that don't have crossover aspirations. I'm not saying that I'd buy anything Ford is selling, but I suspect they make their product decisions based on more than reading this blog.

@Ash78, ennui pioneer: How did the first generation wagons sell? Looking at Wikipedia, Ford killed them a year before the other MKI NA Focuses.

The GT-R is one of those cars like the Porsche Panamera and the BMW 550i GT: the only possible way to make them uglier would be to make them bigger.

@rb1971 - E39M5 + E9 CSi: Thank you! That is the exact twin of the car my buddy and I drove from NYC to Virginia Beach for my first autocross in 1993. He set the FTOD for a car on street tires with me in the passenger seat too. The only cars to go faster were a C3 Corvette with sidepipes and monster slicks and a Miata…

@sdvictor: I'm sorry being redneck trash is such a burden for you. I live accross the street from a Mexican village that rents what should be a single family home. They're drunks, vandals, domestically violent, and generally a loud thorn in the side of the neighborhood. They have yard sales so frequently that one must…

@pres: I had no idea. The first dozen new Camaros I saw were airport rental lot fodder here. I can't imagine a worse car to rent while traveling than one with a trunk opening smaller than Al Gore's mouth.