A Confessed Car Snob Sez...
I am annoyed when my speed is presented in microwave-oven numbers.
PATRICK BEDARD
Yeah, I used to be a car snob, but I'm in recovery now, one of those 12-step programs. "Showing signs of partial rehabilitation"—that's what they tell me at the meetings.
Still, that makes me a lot better than all the other car cuckoos at this magazine. I know this first hand, having just returned from that annual frenzy of car snobbism we call 10Best. That's when road-test editor André Idzikowski collects all the nominees—57 new cars for this year's runoff—at a secret location in southeast Michigan. Then for a week we drive the rivets off the seats of our Wranglers and pencil our notebooks full of penetrating insights.
And in the impromptu moments between drives, we talk cars, lauding some and pooh-poohing others, each of us advocating our own positions with the supreme confidence that comes only with an expertise that never has to be certified. Often in error, never in doubt, that's the swagger of we who do the car-snob thing for a living.
Different generations have different values, of course, and the gaps always show in these conversations. Young men like their music loud, their salsa hot, and their cars thrilling. So I expect them to reserve their low whistles for the cars that boogie, the Corvette Z06 and the Chrysler 300 SRT8 and the Boxster S. And they expect me to speak admiringly of the Lexus LS460, which I can do at length.
Along with the car talk come the stirring, the agitating, the goading. Who will take up an extreme position? Art guy Dan Winter plays the pink-cheeked agent provocateur, and I can see the mischief in his face when he asks how I like the Mazdaspeed 3. Ah, yes, he's cuing the geezer to unload on a defenseless little five-door that's been turbo-boosted till its cylinder-head bolts tremble with the strain and its front wheels cringe from the torque. Here we have a perfectly insane motor scooter and proof that there's life in the Ford Motor Company, albeit within the walls of some foreign subsidiary.
How do I like it? I have to roll my eyes and act my age and denounce it as an unserious candidate for a 10Best slot. But wait, the balloting says it's a winner. Oh, well, Antonin Scalia is often on the minority in Supreme Court judgments, too. I'm certain that no thrill seeker will ask for his Mazdaspeed 3 money back.
It's easy to make too much of the age gap. Larry Webster is one of the youthful hotbloods on this staff—and remains so despite two kids. Yet in a quieter moment he mentioned that he was looking forward to a turn in the four-cylinder Accord. "It's my benchmark," he said.
Yep, mine, too. Since the first four-door version came to the U.S. in 1978, this Honda has set the standard for the people's car, deftly balanced between efficient transportation on the one hand and driver reward on the other. Today's Accord is late into its seventh generation, and we've now voted it onto the 10Best list for the 21st time in 25 years.
What's surprising is how constant our values remain even as the staff changes. I went back to that first 10Best issue, January 1983. Csaba Csere, Idzikowski, and I are the only survivors in this annual immersion into what's new. Digital dashes were the rave in those early years. As a car snob, I am annoyed when my speed is presented to me in microwave-oven numbers. And with a few notable exceptions, these primitive seven-segment digits have been downsized now to odometers, HVAC readouts, and radio stations.
Swimming against the current, Honda's radical Civic has a huge digital speedo. Worse yet, it's wretched microwave-oven blue (red in the Si, as shown below). Yet I'm not terribly bothered by it. Why?
At 10Best we chase the details, even when they're tremendous trifles. We know you can form any digit using only seven straight lines and the ability to illuminate any combination of them. Yeah, they're crude, but the simple processors of the K-car era could manage that much. The smooth forms of today's Civic digits are much more complex; they have rounded corners. A 1 is rounded on top, but the same stroke, when used to make a 4, is square. Examining the fleeting shapes as I creep down the lane, I see 16-segment possibilities in each digit. That's a lot of switching just to clean up the look. But two decades of progress in microprocessors make it easy.
Pleasing style, what's it worth? Porsche prices the Cayman's dash-top stopwatch at $920. It's a Breitling-esque masterpiece of trad timepiece design. The fragile red sweep hand moves in hesitation steps, one second each. The minute register is exquisitely etched in lines so fine I must park before attempting to read them. The face includes a digital readout for seconds and hundredths, but no minutes. Only by moving my eyes away from this perfect timer to the all-digital display in the cluster can I actually read hours, minutes, seconds, and hundredths. The dash-top dial is purely eye candy. I feel hoodwinked.
But the car snob in me loves it anyway.