Blog Posts by: Rusty Blackwell   G

This morning, Automobile Magazine sat down with Mopar chief Pietro Gorlier in a small cubicle in the middle of the Ram truck stand of the Detroit auto show. Gorlier has been a high-level executive at the Fiat Group since 2003, and the Italian has been president and CEO of Mopar, ...    Read more

Until spending some time behind the wheel of a bus-driving simulator, I’d never rolled a vehicle . Apparently eighteen-ton buses don’t like to take interstate exit ramps at high speeds, even onscreen. The Minnesota Valley Transit Authority’s bus simulator in Burnsville, Minnesota, is used to train bus drivers to operate the ...    Read more

Car enthusiasts and collectors from around the globe have gathered en masse in Monterey, California, for the sixty-first Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance this weekend. One­—or rather, five—of the biggest attractions are the various accompanying auctions that blanket the Monterey Peninsula from today through Sunday, from the likes of Bonhams, Gooding ...    Read more

Thousands of spectators, hundreds of show cars, and dozens of vintage racing cars endured extreme heat and humidity in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, over the weekend during the twenty-ninth annual Pittsburgh Vintage Grand Prix (PVGP), which benefits the Autism Society of Pittsburgh and Allegheny Valley School. I sweated along with everyone ...    Read more

If the prospect of owning this Boss 302 Trans-Am race car and complementary cab-over Ford flatbed doesn’t give you chills, you’re not human, as far as I’m concerned. Bringatrailer.com recently dredged up the matching set, which was carefully built to replicate the car that won the historic 1970 Trans-Am ...    Read more

It’s not very often that a forty-seven-year-old sports car is sold by its original owner, but this 1964 Porsche 356SC coupe is a supercool example of that uncommon occurrence. Like the 1960 Alfa Romeo Giulietta Sprint that was my favorite a couple weeks ago, this Porsche is a ...    Read more

The controversial finish of the 2011 Indianapolis 500 (one month ago today) was nothing compared to the debacle that was the inaugural 500 one-hundred years prior. None of the forty cars that started that race could come close to turning a lap at 100 mph, but keeping track of ...    Read more

A fleet of cool coupes tantalized vintage-car fans recently on Bringatrailer.com, from this rare 1962 Sunbeam Harrington Le Mans to this quirky 1972 Citroën SM to this randy 2002 BMW M coupe. My favorite car this time around, though, has to be ...    Read more

As usual, there were plenty of fabulous old cars for sale on Bringatrailer.com in late May, but this 1966 Chrysler Newport convertible was easily my personal favorite. Mopars were my first automotive love (it’s a small miracle that I selected three Fortnight Favorites before picking my first Mopar), and ...    Read more

Cool vintage Fords seemed to be the theme for Bringatrailer.com over the past couple weeks. My favorite was definitely this 1964 Ford Falcon two-door wagon, a clean time-warp machine from California offered -- and currently still available -- as a BaT Exclusive for $7000. It’s a minimally optioned vehicle ...    Read more

Having kids changes a guy’s life. If you’re a car guy, it likely means that your days of driving a two-seater are more or less behind you -- or at the very least dependent upon whether you can find a babysitter, how often you want to abandon your family in ...    Read more

For the inaugural pick of my favorite Bringatrailer.com vehicle a couple weeks ago, I chose a 1965 Austin Mini Cooper S. This time around it was an even tougher choice, but I’m going with another British car, ...    Read more

For the last few years, Bringatrailer.com (BaT) -- which publishes daily features on a very, very wide range of vintage cars for sale -- has been the only blog that I’ve regularly visited. Sometimes the site inspires me to seek out the next subject for our Collectible Classic section, ...    Read more

The Jeep Grand Cherokee is a fine road-tripping machine. How do I know this? Early Sunday morning, I returned home to the Ann Arbor area after driving through the night all the way from Saint Paul, Minnesota, where I saw the Michigan Wolverines fail to clinch their tenth NCAA men’s ...    Read more

OK, the motorways of northern England and Scotland are mundane compared with Germany’s unrestricted autobahns, so perhaps "the fastest road" is a poor headline. Still, I gladly enjoyed flowing with the fastest-moving traffic I’ve ever personally experienced when I shared the M6 and M74 motorways with numerous drivers who traveled ...    Read more

If Shaquille O’Neal’s sneaker were a car, it’d probably be the diminutive, shoe-looking Tango T600, an 8.5-foot long, 39-inch-wide, $150,000 tandem-two-seater in the basement of the 2010 North American International Auto Show. The electric Tango is one of more than a dozen alternative-fuel vehicles available for media test drives on ...    Read more

Ferraris and Lamborghinis seem common when you consider the 2009 Lotus Exige S 260 Sport, of which only fifty are bound for North America. And since Canada is too-often ignored when it comes to exotic cars for the North American market, I decided to cross the border into Ontario and ...    Read more

The Volkswagen Jetta TDI is currently the least expensive diesel-powered car in the United States. Diesel take rates---according to Dr. Johannes-Joerg Rueger, the senior VP of diesel engineering at Robert Bosch GmbH---are currently racking up at an impressive 30 percent of overall Jetta sales in the U.S. (58,721 units from ...    Read more

In central Italy, modern Mini Coopers are mid-size and pizza is supposed to come with crispy, even slightly charred, crust. It is here that the Bridgestone tire company opened a state-of-the-art, 346-acre proving ground in 2004. The Japanese company claims that it chose this location near Aprilia, south of Rome, ...    Read more

The sad state of the economy has recently caused several manufacturers to cancel some exciting pending models, such as the Pontiac G8 Sport Truck and the Lexus LF-A supercar. But these makers would have even more egg on their faces if they’d canceled these products after the sales promotions really ...    Read more

As if we needed further evidence that Hyundai's new Genesis is taking the market by storm, the vehicle picked up another honor--Car of the Year--yesterday at the thirteenth annual Urban Wheel Awards, held at the Detroit Opera House.The Ford Flex, a 2009 Automobile Magazine All-Star, earned the Urban ...    Read more

Late last summer, on the heels of the formal unveiling of the Chevrolet Volt, Chrysler showed off three electric vehicles developed by its ENVI (short for ENVIronmental) department: a Chrysler Town & Country, a Jeep Wrangler, and a Lotus-based Dodge sports car. In the months since, the company ...    Read more

Even though 2008 was “a pretty good year” for Subaru (it had its highest market share in the U.S. in more than twenty years), the company still managed an underwhelming press conference at the 2009 Detroit show. For most of the day, Subaru’s Legacy concept--the primary focus of its 4:40 ...    Read more

Unlike the smashing Detroit-show debuts that Jeep vehicles have enjoyed in the past, the Jeep Patriot EV was unveiled with the simple pulling away of a sheet. Not very inventive, but Chrysler’s auto-show budget has obviously; been hugely slashed in light of its recent government loans. For example, Chrysler’s ultrasimple 2009 ...    Read more

Ferrari, that hallowed Italian supercar manufacturer, is using a version of Chrysler’s MyGig in its hot new $200,000, 453-hp California hardtop convertible.Don’t believe us? See for yourself. Straight from Sicily and the recent launch of the California, these photos clearly show an Italian-speaking, silver-buttoned MyGig multimedia system, ...    Read more