Blog Posts by: Ezra Dyer  

Pebble Beach weekend is such a glut of extravagance that by the end of the Concours you're ready for an escape. So I decided to head away from Pebble Beach and into Monterey for dinner. To get there from my hotel, I did the unthinkable and called a cab. You ...    Read more

For the past couple years, we’ve been hearing a lot about New General Motors, the company that arose from the ashes of bankruptcy with a slimmed-down lineup, new management, and an ownership stake from Uncle Sam. It’s all New GM this, Chevy Volt that. But what about Old GM? Well, ...    Read more

In our automotive imaginations, we like to pretend that every road winds through a magical traffic-free California canyon where there’s no speed limit and the terms “understeer” and “oversteer” are actually relevant. We cherish high-rpm horsepower and disparage front-wheel drive. We exalt the Lotus Exige as a paragon of virtue ...    Read more

It's been a couple years since NBC's clumsy embrace of Top Gear (making a pilot but nothing more), and in the meantime, the cars-on-TV genre has blossomed-relatively speaking. Automotive programming is still dominated by shows about guys in a garage arguing over which ring-and-pinion to install in a '68 Mustang ...    Read more

Do you like your motors carbureted and your tracks circular? Your jeans cut off and your bologna fried? Your sunglasses wraparound and your national anthem Bret Michaels-ed? Then there’s a little-known spectator sport that I need to tell you about: it’s called NASCAR, and I hear it’s quite popular. You may ...    Read more

I'm the kind of person who’s in perpetual danger of waking up in the morning and suddenly realizing that there’s some expensive thing that I can’t live without. Most of the time, the fever passes without action—honestly, what would I do with a hovercraft?—but sometimes it settles in and demands ...    Read more

If you read enough car magazines, you eventually come to a sentence that says something like, “The pedals on the Daihatsu Feely Man are perfectly placed for heel-and-toeing.” And then, if you’re like me, you continue to read car magazines for many more years, encountering the phrase “heel-and-toe” about 600 ...    Read more

As far as cars go, Formula 1 machines are the pinnacle of everything, the ultimate predators in the race-car jungle. And to ever drive one, you’ve got to be either supertalented or superrich. Well, I’m not rich. As for the talent, I prefer to tell myself that the F1 world simply ...    Read more

A few years back, my sister-in-law had her second kid, and the arrival of baby number two brought a vehicular change as well. Out went the Nissan Pathfinder, in came the Chevrolet Suburban. At the time, I mocked her for SUV overkill. I was one of two kids, and ...    Read more

The Gumpert Apollo is a deeply controversial automobile. Ask random people on the street what they think of the Gumpert Apollo, and you'll get a wide range of answers. One person might say, "What did you call me?" while the next will say, "Oh, I loved him in Rocky III." ...    Read more

Most of the time, you notice car doors for only two reasons: either they're intentionally flamboyant, or they're unintentionally problematic. For instance, the two-door and four-door Volkswagen Golfs have the same wheelbase and overall length. So on the former model, the doors themselves seem to be about 95 percent of ...    Read more

The hybrid age is coming to an end. Or at least, a new beginning. Soon, new hybrids will be plug-in and thus vastly more efficient than our current crop of machinery. And so now is a good time to ask the question: were hybrids an important technological stepping stone, or ...    Read more

On the Juice: Relearning performance lingo for the electric era.;I took two semesters of physics in college. The first concerned the physical world - objects smashing into one another, mass, momentum - concepts that made intuitive sense. I got a B. The second focused on electromagnetic fields, which are invisible ...    Read more

I'm between cars at the moment. More precisely, my wife and I share a car. It's a rugged, race-bred machine borne of the Paris-Dakar rally, with a performance pedigree forged in the crucible of international motorsports competition. If you think that's an excessively hyperbolic way to describe the Mitsubishi Outlander, ...    Read more

What car should you buy? That's a great question.If you're reading this magazine, presumably you're informed on the subject of cars, such that your friends or family might seek you out for advice. (Either that, or you're reading this because you're in a dentist's office and your other option is ...    Read more

Not the Wurst Idea: A modest plan to revive the American car industry.Whether you're talking about inexpensive cars (Volkswagen) or expensive cars (all the rest of them), Germany is the world capital of automotive excellence. Even our favorite cars that aren't German are German. If you love the Lamborghini Gallardo, ...    Read more

The Danger Zone: Even with 600 hp, hitting 200 mph is difficult.What's the fastest you've ever driven? On this subject, there's always a good story involved - some combination of an empty road, a fast car, and possibly nudity and/or police involvement. When one friend of mine pegged his personal ...    Read more

Last month I got a chance to drive a Bentley Continental Supersports at the World Class Driving 200-MPH Club event outside Miami. My dominant memory of the Supersports wasn’t even from behind the wheel, but standing outside waiting for a turn in another car. Off in the distance, I heard ...    Read more

Chill Rides: Some cars quicken your pulse, but others calm your nerves.This magazine was founded on the simple premise, "No boring cars." Indeed, we all like to imagine ourselves as hard-core, take-no-prisoners speed junkies who readily sacrifice comfort in the name of performance. But after recently driving 7000 miles in ...    Read more

Car names are problematic. A name could be silly, thus conferring silliness on its subject (Isuzu VehiCross). It could get you sued (the Chevy Beretta/Beretta guns imbroglio) or mean something snicker-worthy to another culture (the Buick LaCrosse in Quebec). There are a lot of ways you can screw up a ...    Read more

Zero to Hero: Why do certain out-of-fashion cars suddenly get hot?This past August, I vacationed in Nantucket. I highly recommend it if you enjoy feeling extremely poor. Even if you arrive aboard a million-dollar boat, you'll surely dock next to someone with a $10 million yacht, which will be tied ...    Read more

Points of Interest: A brief history of getting lost.In the historic spectrum of people with a great sense of direction, we have Ferdinand Magellan at one end and my parents on the other. For four years, I lived in the same condo in Boston; they live about twenty miles north-in ...    Read more

Tow No! Or;Life's a HitchLike most Americans, I'm convinced that I'm a pretty good driver. I know how to get to the inside lane of a traffic circle and then, when it's time to exit, dodge the stupid people driving around the outside. I always pick the fastest line at ...    Read more

Why does the coolest new car company have to build cop cars?I like to root for the dreamers in the car business, the visionaries who question the status quo and forge ahead with bold ideas, damn the odds of success. History is littered with companies that took chances with crazy ...    Read more

Saab For Sale: Swedish car company, lots of potential, best offer.Here's the deal: I've got to get rid of a project, and the wife says Saab must go. I'm severely bummed about this, but the time has come to turn over this hobby to someone with the time and money ...    Read more