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winners:
Quotes from people who didn’t necessarily want to be quoted this year include:
“The loony right has its jaws sunk into the Volt with all the stupid determination of a terrier who has locked his teeth into the mailman’s butt. And with the same result: painful, but without any useful purpose.” So sputtered former GM vice chairman Bob Lutz, who makes our list of quotable quotes for something like the 23rd year running.
“For a long time we all believed that the world was flat because it’s counterintuitive to think that it’s round. Or spheroid. Or whatever.” That was Ben Bowlby, designer of the DeltaWing, the revolutionary Le Mans race car noted for being triangular, or balalaika-shaped, or whatever.
“We’ve officially become a society for which Glee now offers the best chance of keeping us from endangering ourselves and others simply because we can’t wait five minutes to tell people we’re five minutes away.” So ranted on (for about five minutes) the trade mag Automotive News, whose editors clearly don’t go booyah over Journey covers, about a series of anti-texting ads created by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) featuring scenes from Glee.
“It is ubiquitous, like a Town Car in Manhattan or a chauffeured limousine in L.A. The assumption is that someone important is in one,” said automotive analyst Rebecca Lindland of IHS, talking not about the newest plutocratic barge out of Germany, but a minivan. Specifically, the Buick GL8 (we’re not sure if it’s “G-L-8” or “glate”) sold to Chinese plutocrats.
Speaking of less-than-glate, er, great car names, Kia’s forthcoming luxury car, known as the K9 in its home market, will be called the Quoris everywhere else. The made-up word conveys “solidity, luxury, and high technology, all resonating together as a chorus,” according to Kia Motors’ justifiably defensive COO, Thomas Oh, who definitely likes Glee.
“So, Fusion, I like you. I think you are awesome. I don’t know if we will ever date, but I think I could set you up with friends.” Thus blew the journalistic zephyr of truth from kittenagogo.com, one of 150 mommy bloggers and internet “influencers” invited by Ford, at company expense, to the Detroit auto show.
“How about a jet-pack flying-squirrel suit? New York to L.A.: 20 minutes!” That was comedian Jay Leno in an ad for the then-years-away Acura NSX, which battled hard for the title of Super Bowl’s Silliest Car Commercial.
Saturday Night Live’s Bill Hader, mocking Clint Eastwood’s “Halftime in America” spot for Chrysler, which took the Super Bowl’s Most Politically Non-Political Ad award, commanded viewers to “ ‘Get a Chrysler’ and get off my damn lawn!”
loser
Presidential contenders scratched and clawed their way up the greasy pole of politics in 2012, bludgeoning each other with, as candidate Mitt Romney fumed, “all these studies.” One study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association and not cited by either candidate, for perhaps obvious reasons, concluded that the auto-accident death toll spikes by 6 percent on April 15, or tax day, likely due to driver distraction caused by stress. Another study not mentioned on the stump indicated that women are more likely than men to mistake the gas pedal for the brake. The NHTSA finding showed that of 15 crashes per month attributed to pedal misapplication, two-thirds were by women. Even so, men account for 57 percent of all crashes, NHTSA says, and members of the mostly non-Glee-watching gender are three times as likely to die in a wreck, no doubt while firmly stepping on the right pedal for all the wrong reasons.
winner
Be that as it may, it went reported in 2012 that the previous year’s traffic fatalities dropped to a record low, declining 3.3 percent to 32,310, or 1.09 fatalities for every 100 million vehicle miles driven. There has never been a total that low since record keeping began in 1949, when far fewer drivers (in far better-looking cars) produced a death rate of 7.13 fatalities per 100 million vehicle miles. Since then, cars have been fitted with a veritable quoris of life-saving technology, including seatbelts, radial tires, airbags, and dashboards made out of something other than pressed steel studded with harpoon tips. The record worst year of 54,589 deaths was 1972, coincidentally just a few months before Motorola engineers made the first handheld mobile telephone call.
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