Being from Silicon Valley, I've grasped the importance of flawless product demonstrations after living through Steve Jobs's numerous product unveilings. You know, make a bunch of tech journalists sit three hours worth of presentations about new developer initiatives, two hours about new Apple software programs, and right when you think it's the end, say "One more thing," and then spend another two hours talking about the new iSomething.
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Sports sedans and wagons are my jam. There's nothing like having a car that can hang with Boxsters on twisting roads (no doubt the drivers were feathering the throttle in fear of an intermediate shaft failure), take my friends grocery shopping (this is what happens when having a car in college, though I never did get girls with it), and transporting the contents of my sister's dorm room (never have I seen so many boxes full of shoes).
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I, like most car enthusiasts, enjoy a good road trip, mainly to get away from ordinary things, such as watching back-to-back episodes of Parks and Recreation on Netflix, playing with Hot Wheels cars, composing a post on why the XC90 V8 is the best Volvo ever made, and most importantly, looking for a job.
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After weeks of spewing reckless non-car-buying advice, like focusing on license plates, a foray into product planning, and listing why driverless cars will be unsuccessful, I've run out of whimsical list ideas. Therefore, I've decided to venture back into actual consumer advice, which most of you will promptly ignore, primarily to watch a video that involves a girl living out her NASCAR fantasies after a bit too much anesthesia.
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Unlike most people on Jalopnik, I like a good automaker special edition. The Frankfurt Motor Show was full of them from the Lamborghini Gallardo LP570-4 Squadra Corse to the Maserati Quattroporte Ermenegildo Zegna Limited Edition to the Bugatti Veyron Grand Sport Vitesse Jean Bugatti Legend Edition, demonstrating that European automakers will lengthen the name of their cars with any chance they get, mainly so owners can say they're better than anyone with a "normal" Veyron or an "ordinary" Quattroporte.
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A vanity license plate. It's like having a Twitter on your car, except you're limited to using 6 to 8 characters, you're stuck with the message for about a year, or have to pay immense fees to change the plate entirely, and you have the privilege of paying an extra $78 a year to retain that status on top of the initial $98 fee for getting the plate.
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If there's one thing four years of watching and analyzing Mad Men has taught me, it's that businesses run on taglines. Without them, people would be questioning why Acura took it upon itself to describe man for a full minute (that MDX ad is horrible), why the Swedes bother to stack cars in their print ads, and why Volkswagen bought a full page ad in the newspaper only to put a small car there.
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To cover my bases, let me state that I am not calling for the death of the manual transmission, even though I also wrote this. There are manual cars on sale I absolutely love, such as the Fiesta ST, 500 Abarth, 135is, and Mustang Boss 302, to name three (out of a relative few). But there are times when presented with a manual option over the automatic, it's probably best not to tick that box.
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Autocross events are among the few low-cost ways of racing. Go to some place with a lot of tarmac early in the morning, sit through a safety talk of some sort, know what work you're assigned to do, and then get 3-4 runs on a course that takes less than a minute to complete. And the best part is any car can take part! But there are some that shouldn't.
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Finding a bad new car that you wouldn't recommend to anyone is a lot more difficult than it used to be. Hyundai and Kia, which just ten years ago made cars we looked down upon, don't even have a product on this list. And yet people still recommend the bad cars such as the Mercedes R-Class (which thank goodness is gone for 2014). While the Koreans have seriously upped their game, some of the most established of car companies sell cars that almost anyone would hate enough to seek retribution on the person who recommended it.
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