Pat Oliphant/Universal Press SyndicateSaturday, October 09, 2010
Friday, October 08, 2010
Driving & Rating The 2011 Chevy Impala: How Far Has General Motors Come?
I have been a relentless critic of General Motors over the years and never got off the fence as to whether its decades of inept leadership and beyond mediocre automobiles should be rewarded with a taxpayer-funded bailout.
But when the opportunity arose the other day to rent a 2011 Chevrolet Impala LT, I bit because it would provide an ideal comparison test: A 340-mile round trip from my weekday crib to the mountain retreat and back again over a route that is a combination of flat-out interstate, secondary roads and S-turn-filled mountainous byways.
The bar for the Impala was going to be high because I had made this trip many times in Audi all-wheel drive station wagons and most recently in an all-wheel Lexus RX300, all well made, nicely furnished, superbly handling and hugely grippy vehicles that nothing except deep snow have slowed over the years.
My Enterprise rental was a silver middle-of-the-line, front wheel-drive Impala with a 3.5-liter V6 under the hood and a mere 2,500 miles on the odometer. In fairness, now matter how improved a $26,000 Detroit sedan flagship might be, it would have a tough time stacking up against Audi and Lexus models costing $15,000 more. But then the Lexus is closing in on 300,000 miles and remains imperturbable, the Audis had anywhere from 150,000 to 275,000 miles and were equally unphased by their age, while the Impala is brand, spanking new.
In any event, how did the Impala compare to those German and Japanese imports, as well as the abominable Chevy sedans that I had rented in the early 2000s when GM first began flirting with bankruptcy?
Here's my breakdown:
STYLING: What constitutes an attractive car is in the eye of the beholder. I found the Impala not unattractive and a big improvement over the Angry Kitchen Appliance look, as one former GM executive termed the company's hideous offerings a few years back. The styling was not plain vanilla, but neither was it distinctive.
BUILD QUALITY: A vast improvement from previous GM offerings. The Impala had a good paint job, was well put together and did not have the squeaks and rattles that I had encountered in previous GM rentals. But the doors closed with a clank and not the thud that the Audis and Lexus doors have, and there was an outrageous amount of road noise that was deafening with the driver's side window cracked.
INTERIOR: Comfortable front seats with somewhat narrow wells, decent rear seats and head room, ample storage space and a decent sound system. Dashboard controls were easy to figure out and use, but the cupholders -- yes, those all-important cupholders -- were too far back, requiring a two- or three-step maneuver to extract a cup of takeout coffee. The trunk was so spacious that it practically swallowed up my mountain bike, which I pedaled back from the Enterprise agency after dropping off the car.
ENGINE: Silky smooth shifts with plenty of torque and acceleration and none of the thrashing characteristics of older V6 models. I did not attempt to calculate a 0-to-60 time, but I am sure that it is more than adequate.
FUEL ECONOMY: GM claims that an Impala with a 3.5 liter V6 delivers 29 miles to the gallon in highway driving, to which I say "bullspit." Enterprise handed over the keys to my Impala with the gas gauge on Really Empty. I filled the 17.5 gallon tank with 87 octane Sunoco for a bit more than $40, but had to purchase another $25 worth to make it home. Dropping $65 for Regular gas for a 340-mile trip is less than economical.
HANDLING: This is where the Impala came off the rails, and badly so. It flounced and bounced on straightaways, wallowed on turns, and threatened to over steer on sharp turns. This required that I keep two hands on the wheel when not trying to drink coffee.
My conclusion is that the Impala performed well overall and in most respects was a vast improvement over its counterparts of six, eight and 10 years ago.
GM has indeed come far, but not far enough. It is hard to imagine owners of comparably sized and priced imports such as the Honda Accord, Nissan Altima and Toyota Corolla embracing the Impala, and GM will have to do better still if it hopes to maintain its feeble market share, let alone re-emerge as a leading automaker.
An Idea Whose Time Has Come
The DF&C uses our everyday car, and because she works out of the mountain retreat many miles from my weekday abode, I usually have had to go grocery shopping and run errands on my mountain bike or prevail on friends for a lift.
Until now.
The university with which I am affiliated recently added Zipcar to its employee perks. Zipcar is a for-profit, membership-based car sharing company (the largest in the world, in fact) that enables me to use one of their hybrid-powered rides by the hour ($8) or the day ($66).
Zipcars are in parking lots throughout our sprawling campus and all it takes to access one is to make an easy online reservation.
Beautiful Photograph du Jour
In conjunction with an A&E biopic on Enzo Ferrari, CNBC and Ferrari historian Marcel Massini compiled a list of the 15 most beautiful Ferraris of all time.
They chose a 375 Mille Miglia Spider (1953) as the most beautiful while I opt for a 250 GT Lusso Berlinetta (1963) for entirely sentimental reasons: On my first visit to Rome, the owner of the hotel where I stayed drove a gun metal gray edition. I can still hear the exhaust note.
Thursday, October 07, 2010
Legal Lollapaloza: Health Insurance, Medical Marijuana & The High Court
I apologize in advance if this post makes your head explode. It nearly did mine, but I was determined to try to make sense of Republican efforts to castrate the individual mandate provision that is at the heart of the health-care reform law.
The individual mandate, for those of you who have spent the past year in a cave or a coma, is a requirement that allindividuals who can afford health-care insurance purchase at least a minimally comprehensive policy. If individuals aren't insured, they must purchase insurance or pay a small fine beginning in 2016, although there is widespread agreement that the fine will be unenforceable.
The reason for the mandate is simple: It brings healthy people into the insurance pool, which in theory keeps costs down and ensures that people don't game a system that forbids insurers from discriminating against people with pre-existing conditions by waiting until they get sick to get insurance.
The . . . uh, weapon of choice for manyRepublicans opposed to health-care form in general and the individual mandate in particular is the Commerce Clause, a constitutional provision giving Congress the right to regulate commerce among the states. But where opponents are trying to get traction is, of all things, is the 2005 Supreme Court decision outlawing the sale of medical marijuana in California. That, in fact, is at the heart of a court challenge to the mandate in Virginia.
But the decision -- Gonzalez v. Raich -- is a curiosity, albeit just one of many foisted on the republic by a high court that has tacked hard to the right through bizarro constitutional interpretations, in this case of the Commerce Clause.
The Chief Justice Roberts-led majority declared that Congress' power to regulate interstate commerce gives it the power to ban possession of medical marijuana that never crossed state lines, and health-care reform opponents argue that by that token the courts and Congress have the right to outlaw the individual mandate.
In an earlier era, efforts to use the Commerce Clause, let alone a ruling like Raich, to go after health-care reform probably would have been laughed out of court. But we live in a time when the high court and Congress are slavishly beholden to the interests of Big Business, which makes the passage of Obamacare, even in it is considerably watered-down form, something of a miracle.
As well as leaves it vulnerable to the very special interests and their legal and legislative handmaidens who oppose it.
Color Hispanic Voters Way Turned Off
Democratic strategists are high-fiving over a new poll showing that Latino support of the Republican Party has tanked because of theGOP's virulently anti immigrant stands, but the fact of the matter is support for Democrats is tepid because the party hasn't given an armadillo's ass about immigration reform over the last couple of years.
That seems to be okay with some cynics, who argue that the Dems simply couldn't afford to court the fastest growing voting bloc because they have a one-election attention span. Or something.
Wednesday, October 06, 2010
Tuesday, October 05, 2010
Of Course I'm Rooting For My Phillies . . .
CHARLIE MANUEL. . . but four straight years of post-season play for the losing-est team in Major League Baseball history is evoking a different kind of feeling among their fans this October.
Some of my earliest childhood memories are of sitting at the kitchen table with my mother and grandmother listening to the Phillies on the radio. And more often than not, listening to the Phillies lose. My love of baseball was nurtured on those spring and summer evenings while my father was on shift work, and I had learned the finer points of the game -- from the suicide squeeze play to the art of bunting to when to intentionally walk a batter -- before I could read and write. I also learned that baseball "is only a game," as my mother would say with varying degrees of conviction, which was a damned good thing because the Phillies lost a lot, most famously in 1964 when they led the National League by six and a half games with 12 to play but managed to blow it.
In fact, the franchise made such a habit out of losing that it notched an American professional sports record 10,000 losses in 2007, which makes it all the more fitting that a year later the Phillies won the World Series for only the third time in their 125-year history and for the first time since 1993.
By the time the 2009 season rolled around, long-suffering Phillies fans expected the franchise to be in World Series again, but when they fell to the Yankees in six games the disappointment was dismissed by the once rudest fans in baseball with high praise and an "there's always next season" shrug.
Indeed, the Phillies were expected to again go to the post season from the outset of the 2010 season, but a funny thing happened on the way to October -- injuries to seven of their eight position-player starters at one time or another, a season-ending injury to one starting pitcher, and some truly ugly losing streaks. But the Phillies rallied in September with the best record in baseball as their three pitching aces went undefeated and bench players continued to fill the big shoes of injured starters as they had all season. Oh, and every home game this season has been a sellout.
But beyond the stellar pitching and playing and a come-from-behind fortitude, the biggest keys to the Phillies' success are Charlie Manuel, who is hands down the best coach in baseball, and Ruben Amaro, who is hands down the best general manager.
When the Phillies open the National League Championship Series in Philadelphia tomorrow evening against the Cincinnati Reds, their fans will assume that a third straight World Series is in the cards. But if they don't come home with yet another championship, it'll be no big deal.
After all, it's only a game.
Delaware Is No. 1 With An Asterisk
My University of Delaware Fightin' Blue Hens are No. 1 in two of the three national FCS polls this week.Photo by William Bretzger/Wilmington News Journal
Monday, October 04, 2010
How About This For A Big Surprise: The War In Afghanistan Is Falling Apart
September was a helluva month for the war in Afghanistan.
The Taliban, more powerful than at any time since the U.S.-led post-9/11 invasion, continued to make headway as a major offensive stalled. Afghan President Karzai finally made good on a promise to open formal contacts with the Taliban, but the panel he named to expedite that is dominated by foes of the Taliban. It was revealed that soldiers in a U.S. platoon killed Afghan civilians for sport. And in the coup d'grace to a month from hell, Pakistan closed the most important border crossing for trucks supplying NATO-led coalition troops in Afghanistan in retaliation for an attack by coalition helicopters on a Pakistani security post.
As has been evident for some time, the heart of the problem is that no one knows whether the strategy delineated by President Obama in the spring will work, while there is no Plan B in the likelihood that Plan A -- more troops, smarter counterinsurgency efforts and more national building -- fails to turn a tide running against stabilizing a vast country.
Thinking outside the box is the flavor of the moment for some war analysts, but bringing in people with an intimate knowledge of Afghanistan to suggest alternatives to the struggling strategy that General David Petraeus has been charged with executing will not change the reality that Afghanistan, besides being really big, is ungovernable and deeply corrupt.
And partitioning the country, an idea that was in vogue in Iraq as the civil war there raged on and has now taken hold among some Afghanistan analysts, would be nothing more than window dressing.
In any event, a war that George Bush botched by shifting the focus to Iraq, is now inextricably Obama's, and with every passing day it become more obvious that he should have scaled back U.S. involvement. Or cut and run.
Bittersweet Photograph du Jour
Private First Class Troy Duprey of White River Junction, Vermont hugs fiancee Tiffany Knapp as his mother, Gloria, hugs his brother, Josh, as his unit deploys to Afghanistan.
Photograph by Gloria Duprey
Saturday, October 02, 2010
Friday, October 01, 2010
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