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Greasing the L.A. Auto Show Hype Machine
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5276 Reads
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The Venturi Fetish |
There are two types of car people in Los Angeles:
Those who tolerate their cars, hate driving and loathe the L.A. Auto Show in all its bloated, overhyped, wrap-new-coachwork-on-the- same-old-smoke-belching-crap glory. And those who f*cking live for it.
Park me in the latter camp. I'm a drooling sucker around carbon fiber, turbochargers, fine Corinthian leather, coffee-can exhausts, alloys the size of washing-machine drums and glitz - especially kandy-colored tangerine-flake streamlined glitz on rotating mirrored turntables. With video mirrors. And onboard wetbars. And dash-mounted ethernet ports. I'm a moron around concept cars, all right? I sweat. I stare. I develop adjective diarrhea.
So it's with no small twinge of amusement that I point you to the 12 world debuts due to be uncloaked by automakers next month at the Convention Center:
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- Chevrolet HHR: Not sure why they're bothering to remake the PT Cruiser as a bull-nosed version of the Dodge Durango (down to the bullseye taillights), but there it is. The "Heritage High Roof" reincarnation of the '49 Suburban. Like we need another SUV.
- The Pontiac Torrent, supposedly an antidote for Aztek indigestion. A little SUV, meant to be a RAV4-beater.
- The New Jetta. New inline 2.5-liter five-banger - sweet. Same dull sheet steel as the Saab 9-3. Yawn.
- Mystery Bentley. No pix or links as it's due to be unveiled quite literally on Jan. 5. If it's anything like the ravishing Continental GT then hey, hubba-hubba.
- Three new Audis including the 5-door Audi A3 sport wagon, meant to duke it out with Saab's 9-2X and Volvo's V50 (look for the optional 3.2-liter six in '06)
- The redesigned Porsche Boxster, which steals the 911's nose, with a horsepower bump from 225 to 240 in vanilla, and from 258 to 280 in the phatter Boxster S
- The Venturi Fetish, an electric sports car, only 25 of which will be built in Monaco, of all places, for sale to the stupid-rich at $660,000. But hey, it'll have a 217-mile range, which makes it a wee bit better than the doomed EV-1 (which leased at about 5% of that cost)
Spyker C8 |
- The fiendish-looking twin-turbo Spyker C8 roadster, which apparently has heritage dating to 1903 and versions that already debuted four years ago, so its inclusion on the Auto Show's press release about debuts is something of a mystery
- And top-secret debuts from BMW, Daimler-Chrysler, Ford and Jaguar.
And speaking of Auto Show press releases, at least we can always count on the Auto Show for lame "themes:"The theme for this year's LA Auto Show is Design Los Angeles, which recognizes the global influence of the Los Angeles region as an automotive design center. A fundamental part of the theme is the integration of an automobile designers' conference within the second media day, Jan. 6.
This is the first conference of its kind developed at an auto show that provides designers with meetings, prominent speakers and discussion topics specifically geared toward the automotive design discipline. Some of these sessions will be open to media, providing journalists with access to and interaction with designers. This sounds suspiciously identical to the no-duh theme of last year's show where - for the record, I had a blast.
If you're going in January (7-16), bring your drool bucket. If not, you're probably quite a few IQ points smarter than I am.
But you probably won't be having near as much brainless fun.
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| Posted by: mack_reed on Tuesday, November 30, 2004 - 09:42 PM
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