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Well, that was quick ...

The federal government has decided to get rid of the ecoAUTO rebate program, only a year after it put the scheme in place. Hang on, let me open my wallet a bit wider. It cost money going in, and it'll undoubtedly cost money going out.

I'd like to say it was a good idea in theory, but it never really was. The plan was that the government kicked back rebates, ranging from $1,000 to $2,000, to people who bought brand-new vehicles that met specific fuel economy standards.

There were the usual problems that spring up when ideas are conceived in haste and implemented at leisure. Apparently, it took more than six months from the time the program got underway until the application forms were ready, and even when buyers could finally apply, there were long waits. According to an article by Carol Goar of the Toronto Star, only 30,000 of the 50,000 people who sent in their applications had received their money as of mid-February.

Much of my objection to the program was in the discrepancies. The Dodge Caliber, for example, doesn't meet the fuel economy requirements for passenger cars, and so there's no refund. But the similarly-sized Jeep Compass, which is mechanically identical and gets the same fuel mileage, is classified as an SUV, and so you get $1,000 back.

And there's a rebate for some flexible-fuel vehicles, which can run on E85, a fuel made of 85% grain-based ethanol and 15% petroleum gasoline. Sounds good, except that at last count, two gas stations in Ottawa appear to be the only ones from St. John's to Victoria that sell it. So you get $1,000 back because your vehicle could potentially save the planet, if you could only fill it with the right juice.

In her article, Goar also notes that while the government will no longer be handing you money back for buying a fuel sipper, it will still be collecting the "green levy" on gas guzzlers, which Goar says generates some $110 million per year. Hey, maybe the feds will spend that cash on improved public transit, bicycle lanes, incentives for car companies to build more fuel-efficient vehicles, and better urban planning to eliminate housing developments that make car ownership necessary in the first place. Yes, I think that's exactly what they'll do.

Watt's that?

A homemade Watts link in action, in my husband's under-construction 1957 Cadillac. Them what ain't fans of the genre won't be too interested, but I'm actually very impressed at the work he's doing on it. Just don't tell him that, okay? It'll go to his head.

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My big brother's watching

This is SmartAlert. It's a new system that Ford and Lincoln dealers in the U.S. will be selling to customers, at a cost of about $1,000 plus a monthly subscription fee. Ford calls it an "onboard, intelligent communication service that connects (customers) with their car or truck." I call it the end of the old-fashioned private eye.

SmartAlert knows where the vehicle is. That's no big deal; systems like GM's OnStar have been around for years. What SmartAlert does is tell you what it knows. It'll send email, phone and text messages to warn you if your car's being moved without authorization (a good thing, granted), if someone's driving it faster than a pre-set speed limit (also a good thing), where a thief has taken it (ditto), and a report of exactly where it was, when it was there, and how long it stayed.

That sound you just heard was Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade crying in their beer. Who needs the guy in the fedora slouched in his car, camera at the ready, to catch one's husband meeting up with his mistress?

Frankly, I sometimes wonder at the things people find intrusive. A police camera on a crime-ridden corner that might film a shooting or a drug deal? We can't have that -- it's an invasion of privacy. A red-light camera at the intersection that could photograph dangerous drivers? We can't have that -- you have no right to send a ticket to the car's owner after the fact. An onboard system that'll track your every movement, send email reports, and file a monthly statement telling you exactly where your car was every minute of the day? Hey, that's technology! Here's my thousand bucks -- sign me up!

Thinking outside the box

This is what's turning my crank today. This is Hot Rod Jakob, and it's a Volvo.

Yes, a Volvo.

This amazing machine was created in Sweden by award-winning car builder Leif Tufvesson at his Caresto shop, and after a tour of the Nordic countries, it'll come to SEMA in Las Vegas in November 2008. Tufvesson showed his last two Volvo creations there, as well.

He took his inspiration from the 1927 ÖV4, the first series-production Volvo. This new version faithfully copies its hood curvature, windshield frame, radiator shell and grille, but uses a carbon-fibre chassis, Volvo T5 turbocharged five-cylinder engine, Volvo M90 transmission, and steering wheel and shifter lever from a P1800.

Tufvesson is no stranger to the North American hot-rod scene, but he grew up working on Volvos and for a while built concept cars for the company, so "instead of obtaining inspiration from an old Ford, as is usually the case in hot rod circles, I wanted to build something that meant more to me personally."

Inspiring it is, and my hope is that enthusiasts on this side of the water will look past their long-held traditions that a hot rod must be a North American vehicle, and appreciate this phenomenal piece of work for what it is. I can hardly wait until November and a chance to see it in person.

A grain of salt

One of my all-time favourite movies is The Blues Brothers. I've probably seen it twenty times and could watch it twenty more, and yet, when it came out, most of the critics savaged it. It was the wrong film for them, but it was the right film for me.

The moral of the story? Be critical when you read criticism.

I make most of my living reviewing cars, but I'll be the first to tell you that my reviews, and the reviews of all my colleagues, are only guidelines. A smart buyer uses them to help make a buying decision, but never depends on them.

For the most part, here's how car reviewing works. Each manufacturer puts specific vehicles into its "press fleet". They're usually introductory models, which is why you don't see up-to-date reviews of cars that have been around and unchanged for several years. The option packages vary with each company, but I'm more likely to get a moderate- to fully-loaded vehicle than I am a base model, especially with trucks and SUVs. These come to me from the automaker -- I don't go to a dealer and get a car out of their stock -- and I drive them for a week. They're not specially-prepped for the journalists, as some people suspect; it's not unheard-of for me to pick up a car that's dirty or out of gas, or with obvious problems.

I like to look for things that most people don't find on a test-drive and might later become an issue. When you see these things mentioned in a review, you need to decide if you can live with them. If you never drink coffee in your car, for example, a poorly-placed cupholder isn't an issue. I also like to look at how a car will be used. It's my pet theory that a lot of inexpensive cars get a bad rap from journalists who just got out of sportscars, and who forget that there's a huge market for people who don't need road feel and brilliant acceleration -- or a big price tag -- to get to the office and the grocery store.

Keep in mind, too, that most of us get low-mileage cars and drive them for seven days. We seldom know what a new model's long-term reliability will be.

All of those are reasons why reviews can be an important buying tool, but they shouldn't be your only one. Use them to make a list of the cars you want to try -- and then put your butt in the seat and drive them all for yourself.

It's alive ... in my garage

My husband's been turning his 1957 Cadillac into a custom lowrider, and last night, for the first time, he hooked up the hydraulic system and checked to see if it worked. I don't know what your spouse does for fun, but here's how mine keeps busy.

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It's easy looking green

The writer's strike is over, the Oscars will go on, and of course the celebrities need wheels to get them to the red carpet. General Motors is obliging with a fleet of "fuel-friendly" vehicles, including gasoline-electric hybrids, fuel cell vehicles and those that can run on ethanol, when it can be found.

Celebrities love hybrids as much as they love winning Oscars. They arrive at events in Priuses, they pay cubic dollars for electric sportscars, and a few of them are even driving BMW Hydrogen 7 cars around California. They're greener than Kermit, and admittedly, a celebrity in a Prius is probably chewing up fewer resources overall than a celebrity in a Hummer H2.

But have you seen their houses?

Have a look sometime, when Vanity Fair or Entertainment Tonight gets a camera inside the gates. The average big-name movie star drives that Prius home to a 10,000-square-foot climate-controlled house, with a pool, and with acres of irrigated grass and gardens, many of them in the desert.

I drive a full-size, eight-cylinder truck. But my house is about 900 square feet. I have no air conditioning, I don't water my lawn, I don't use pesticides, I compost every scrap of even faintly organic material right in my back yard, I get my water out of a well and I don't have a pool.

No, I don't own a hybrid.

But I think that in the grand scheme of things, we're just about even.

Sometimes it's the little things

When you walk around a new-car show, it's the big stuff that draws your attention: flashy paint, big wheels, all-new models.

But sometimes, the tiniest thing there could be the next wave of the future.

Case in point: this is the Hummer HX concept, which I saw at the Detroit Auto Show in January. It's a throwback to the Volkswagen Thing, with removable doors, roof and fender flares, and it's the work of three designers young enough to get carded when they go for a beer.

It might be the basis of an open-air, entry-level model to compete with the Jeep Wrangler, but that won't be its legacy. Instead, these designers might have changed the whole way we look at car stereos. In short, the HX doesn't have one.

It's got a full speaker system, though, and a jack to accept your iPod or other music player, and it's absolutely bloody brilliant. The CD player is going the way of the eight-track; who wants to carry a stack of slippery jewel cases when you can tote thousands of songs on something the size of a pack of gum? A great many people, me included, use the stereo as little more than a means to connect a digital player to the speakers.

Looking into my crystal ball, I see a world where this configuration will be the default, and a stereo -- with AM, FM, satellite, CD or whatever -- is an add-on option. Out of everything unveiled at Detroit in 2008, I'm betting that this is the one that counts.

Car of the Year: Does it matter?

The Automobile Journalists Association of Canada (AJAC), of which I am a member, is in a bit of an uproar over the story behind this photo. That's the Audi R8, a car that costs $139,000 and will sell about 100 copies in Canada. The award that Audi president Diego Ramos is holding is AJAC's 2008 Canadian Car of the Year.

The flap is that a car so exclusive should not be Car of the Year. It should go to something that the average person might have a chance of owning. Ithought it should have come down to a run between the Chevrolet Malibu, Honda Accord and Kia Rondo, but that's not how a democracy works. (And I will also add that, due to a scheduling conflict, I wasn't at the three-day back-to-back testing where the winners are chosen; I guess if you don't vote, you can't really complain.)

But all of that aside, it brings me to another question: are Car of the Year awards now so common that they really don't mean much anyway?

Car of the Year awards effectively began in 1949, when Motor Trend magazine gave its inaugural one to Cadillac in recognition of its new high-compression, overhead-valve V8 engine. During the early years, it went to a manufacturer, not a car, and for three years it wasn't awarded at all.

Now, every publication and every association names its annual winners. Car and Driver, Green Car Journal, Road & Track, Top Gear, What Car, MSN, and even Mother Proof name theirs, and there are many more. There's a North American Car of the Year, a European Car of the Year, a World Car of the Year, an International Car of the Year, Japan Car of the Year, and even a Lithuanian Car of the Year. 

AJAC says that surveys indicate more than half of new-car buyers are influenced by its award. Perhaps in Canada that's very true, since we have fewer "best of the best" handouts across the country, and the AJAC award is the biggest. Even so, when thousands of pieces of hardware get handed out each year, it does tend to water it down.

The smartest buyers will look at awards specific to their needs. You want the best van to haul your children, you go to Mother Proof, because they aren't wowed by 420 horses. Their testers look at stuff that matters to buyers with $25,000 to spend. Or buyers should look past AJAC's single Car of the Year, and look at each of the category winners. Someone with $139,000 and a hankering for an R8 doesn't care if it took Car of the Year or it ended up at the bottom of the pile. It's the folks who work hard for their money and can't afford to spend a lot of it who should be the focus of Car of the Year awards. Look at the cars, but look at the audience, too. Maybe then these awards will be relevant again.

Presenting the ChryWagen

This is a Routan.

Now, you probably haven't heard of it before, although you're thinking it looks familiar. It's from Volkswagen, sort of, and it's pronounced ROO-tan. Yes, the same folks who gave us Tiguan and Touareg, and could use some new staff in the naming department. Routan -- now available without a prescription! But I digress ...

Anyway, I just got back from the Toronto Auto Show press preview, where VW took the wraps off the stunning Passat CC (think Mercedes-Benz CL-Class, but hopefully with a lower price tag) and the Routan. If that one looks familiar, that's because Chrysler builds it alongside the Dodge Caravan and Chrysler Town & Country on behalf of VW. (Instead of Routan, maybe they could have called it a Vodge. Or a ChryWagen.)

I wish VW all the luck in the world with it, but really, what were they thinking? The traditional minivan market used to be a license to print money, but that's all changed. You want to do well in this shrinking segment, you make something really inexpensive, like a base Caravan, or a Hyundai Entourage, or a Kia Sedona, because people know it's just going to end up covered in kidspit and dog hair. Sure, the pricier Honda Odyssey and Toyota Sienna are great pieces of engineering, but those two combined sold just under 22,000 copies last year in Canada, compared to 56,572 Dodge and Chrysler vans.

VW should have learned a lesson with the Phaeton, which they wouldn't have been able to keep in stock if they'd released it as an Audi: it's damn tough to sell a $100,000 car that has the same badge as a $16,000 Golf. While pricing hasn't been released, I'm betting the bank that this minivan is going to have a higher sticker than its Caravan twin. Sure, it'll have a nicer interior and "sport-tuned suspension" (be careful you don't tip the groceries when carving corners), but it's a Dodge with a VW badge. Call me crazy, but I think buyers just might figure that out.

Don't start something with me

Here's how you start my 1947 Cadillac: You insert the key into the ignition switch on the dash, and then you press a starter button.

Here's how you start a 2008 BMW 5 Series: You insert the key into the ignition switch on the dash, and then you press a starter button.

You'd think we would have come further than that in 61 years.

Thus begins my rant for the day: why do so many automakers feel a need to answer questions that no one asked? Did BMW have customers calling and sending emails, complaining that it was too much trouble to turn a key and would you please add a starter button?

Sure, proximity keys are cool, in a power-trip kinda way. You walk up to your car, and it recognizes you from several steps away and obediently pops its locks (and if it's expensive enough, it can also move the seat and set the stereo to your preference). From there, since the automaker figures it's too much work for you to then pull the key out of your pocket, you simply press a button, the engine springs to life, and away you go.

The fact is, I like putting the key in the ignition. For one thing, I know exactly where it is. It's not digging into my leg through the pocket of my jeans, or thrown in the cupholder where I'm likely to forget it, or in this coat pocket, or ... maybe this coat pocket? For another, I'm not likely to start the car, remember something I should have grabbed in the house, go back in, come back out, and drive off with the key on the back steps. Don't laugh; people do it more frequently than you think, and once you turn the car off at your destination, it won't start again.

I'll also be more likely to remember to actually shut the car off. I still remember the night I came home with a Nissan Altima Hybrid, which uses a button to start and stop the engine. The problem is that, because it's a hybrid, the engine shuts off when you drive slowly into the driveway. So I think I can be forgiven because I forgot to turn off an engine that wasn't running anyway. Just before I went to bed I looked outside and noticed headlights, and went out to find the engine running. Night had fallen, the automatic headlights came on (because the car wasn't shut off), the battery ran down, and the gasoline engine came on to charge it. There's a drawback to having a car smarter than you are.

Back in 1949, Chrysler came out with an all-in-one key system that eliminated the starter button. It was hailed as a revolutionary breakthrough, and became almost universally adopted within a few years. No one wanted to be stuck pushing an old-fashioned button. I wonder what those drivers would think of us today.

In the beginning ...

So does the world really need another writer who's going to wax poetic on automobiles? Of course not, but that won't stop me from doing so anyway.

I've been scribbling about cars for some twenty years now, and reviewing new vehicles for the last five years. There are a few things that I've learned in that time: that for most people, a car is nothing more than a way to get from A to B; that for some people, it's the reason they breathe; and that the people in Group A will never understand the folks in Group B, and vice versa.

Most of my published writing is for the Group A people. I try to review vehicles that are down-to-earth, and when I do, I try to explain the things they should know to help them make an informed decision. Cars are everywhere, and we're all supposed to know about them -- or so we think. I don't believe that. So I don't just tell my readers that a car has torque steer or turbo lag -- I tell them what that is, because I never assume that they "should know".

But I'm also a member of Group B. I love fast cars, I love hot rods, I love automotive history. I love everything about cars except motorsports. I'm fascinated by automotive technology, and I get up each day to read the news and see what the automakers are bringing out next.

So this blog, these meanderings, are a chance for me to bring these two sides together. I'm here to have some fun and maybe, along the way, my readers will have a good time too.