[Shotimes] Re: New Ford shooting brake with SHO intake?

[Hartberger, Jason M. AT2 (AW)]

Pretty much the only car C&D has anything nice to say about is the new
Pontiac Solstice, and I agree with them. I think that with that
exception, most cars coming out of Detroit today are uninspiring pieces
of crap. They're cheaply designed, even more cheaply manufactured, and
they just don't look like anybody really cared about them. They don't
show any passion. The V8 Impala was an interesting idea but as usual
it's apparent that building it cheaply was far more important than
building it well.

Now, I'm not saying Asian cars are orders of magnitude better or
anything as a whole, but have you driven a Honda (or even *gasp* a
Hyundai) lately? The panels all fit well, there are no creaks and groans
and rattles, everything feels solid (not cheap) and it's obvious that
quality actually mattered to their builders. I love my SHO to death but
that doesn't make it not cheaply manufactured. I replaced my front door
speakers the other day to discover that the factory never bothered
installing two of the four screws into my passenger speaker bracket! The
paint lay undisturbed in the screw holes. Now that's just cheap! Or
careless. Either way, it's not good.

Nissan only has two brands, Nissan and Infiniti. The two badges (AFAIK)
don't share any cars. Same with Toyota and Lexus (and even scion). Now
OTOH, you have Ford, Lincoln, and Mercury (and that's just the core
three for ford) sharing all sorts of platforms. I think that's a load of
BS personally, and it should be illegal. Two brands selling the same
product is ridiculous. It's like Microsoft getting rid of XP pro,
creating another company called Macrohard and having them sell XP pro
only calling it GlassPane 2004. Hey, guess what! It's still the same
thing! If you call a sheep's tail a leg, how many legs does it have?
Four! You can call its tail whatever you want but IT'S STILL A TAIL! I
don't even like Saturn using the solstice and calling it its own car. A
load of crap. It's a slightly different solstice. They shouldn't pawn it
off to a different name, they should just make a slightly different
solstice and *gasp* make it an option!

Us Americans need to stick to what we do best, whine and bitch about how
drilling for oil in Alaska will kill caribou and then in the same breath
whine and bitch just as hard about how much gas costs and dammit, we
need to do something about it right now!

Jason
Somewhere out in the Atlantic.



-----Original Message-----
From: Donald Mallinson [mailto:dmall@mwonline.net] 
Sent: Monday, April 24, 2006 3:24 PM
To: TechSHO@topica.com
Cc: 'SHOtimes'; 'v8sho'
Subject: Re: [Shotimes] Re: New Ford shooting brake with SHO intake?


Ron,

I don't mind if they get more "edgy"  But if it is just for fun, they 
should really label it that way.  This reads like it is a real car, and 
like about anything American reviewed in C&D, they hate it.  At least 
any bread and butter type car.  Check out the review of the V8 Impala in

the same issue.  Can't say enough bad about it can they? (snip)