Regular attendees of at least one of the 2011 auto shows might have noticed the arenas and convention halls were a little more packed over previous years. Through the winter months of 2011, the newly energized auto industry revealed a dizzying exhibition of enchanting forms and cutting-edge technology. Regaining the relevancy to a mode of transportation which enthusiasm was tainted by corporate greed and technological neglect, multiple auto shows occurring within the first three months of this new year have become the trendy places to spend a day.

The launch pad to the 2011 automotive exhibitions, the 2011 North American International Auto Show saw auto manufacturers once again projecting an optimistic look at the future of motoring. Innovative, exciting concepts like the Porsche 918 RSR were joined by products such as the Ford Focus Electric, Volkswagen Passat, and the new family of Toyota Prius offering a sensational exhibition of the 21st century inside Detroit’s Cobo Center. As always with the North American International Auto Show, the 9-day public event completed with blistery cold conditions providing a deterrent as well as an enablement to car show attendance. For 2011 Detroit auto show delivered a 3 percent increase totalling to 735,370 paying attendees. This attendance boost is welcoming as the North American International Auto Show was brought to grief of immediate economic effects just two years prior. Since 2009, attendance to the Detroit automotive display has risen by 80,000 spectators.

With a bump up in auto show spectators at Detroit, the momentum continued as the newest vehicles breezed into the Windy City for the 2011 Chicago Auto Show. Powered by a strong headwind of confidence for four-wheeled transportation, the Chicago Auto Show management announced a 10 percent increase over the 2010 show. The exact count for how many people attended the 10 days of the 2011 Chicago Auto Show is not available since the event organizers do not release audience numbers.

The upbeat message of the auto industry was also passed through Canada. Two major city car shows reported some healthy leaps thanks to fairly cooperate weather and a strong presence from all North American manufacturers. In late January, the Montreal Auto Show played host to an addition 10% general attendees. Counting 207,208 French-Canadian spectators, the enthusiasm turned to the 2011 Canadian International Auto Show in Toronto. A very robust presentation of an estimated 1,000 vehicles (I can attest to this fact personally), the show was looking to return to audience above 300,000 people after being hard hit two years prior. Showing a modest increase from 253,384 in 2009 to 258,652 in 2010 would make the 2011 prospect of lofty; this year’s Canadian International Auto Show pulled in 17.4 percent more spectators than 2010 according to publication Canadian Auto Dealer. If accurate, the actual attendance for the 2011 auto show in Toronto would have seen over 303,000 people basking in the warmness of the newest shapes radiating with light.

The rebound in interest for the automobiles is a global phenomenon and there was no better place than Geneva, Switzerland to give backing this declaration. With a tame estimate of 1.5 million North American car fans moving through the gates of the mentioned auto shows, the recently concluded 2011 Geneva Motor Show saw an increase of 6% over the 2010 event. Expecting the presence of 700,000 guests to see vehicles like the Ferrari FF, the Volkswagen Bulli concept and the complete rebirth of Saab, there was in fact over 735,000 arrived for the festivities in the late days of winter.

Many individuals and families partook in the auto show experience through the winter months as attention turns to spring. Spring is the first chance to see some of these previewed machines roaming roadways. Hoping that the auto show crowds will be a barometer for the upcoming activity at dealerships, 2011 has grounds for cautious optimism. While many carmakers are already enjoying strong sales, the audience at these indoor exhibitions could be either a cause or an effect.

Information Source: Canadian Auto Dealer, Canadian International Auto Show, Chicago Auto Show, Geneva Motor Show, Montreal Auto Show, North American International Auto Show

Photo Source: Chris Nagy

Related posts:

1. Journey Inside the 2011 Canadian Auto Show Part 1
2. Journey Inside the 2011 Canadian Auto Show Part 2
3. Los Angeles Vs Detroit: Which US Auto Show Rules?

“You can’t always get what you want.” Those lyrics uttered in a famous Rolling Stones song has captured the reality for many of us in a work-a-day lives. However, it’s hard to dismiss the fact the Rolling Stones enjoy a life where fewer obstacles exist between specific wants. Exotic cars and trucks is one of those desirable status symbols allowing the world to see ourselves at personal bests. While such a vehicle may be out of reach to our daily routine, how about an opportunity for indulge yourself in the lifestyle for a weekend or vacation period? Several major and dedicated rental car companies can provide an exotic vehicle array turning motoring fantasy into a temporary reality.

Offering vehicles well beyond the Chevrolet Malibu or Ford Fusion most rental car customers would satisfied driving as solid transportation, rental agencies operating in tourist cities such as Las Vegas, Miami and Dubai provides a driving experience that’s truly surreal. Imagine piloting a Ferrari 360 Spider up and down the Las Vegas strip or a Maserati Gran Turismo along Ocean Drive. Too quickly, a driver will forget the stunning locale as they are lured by the feel of pulsating of finely-crafted horsepower, the handling translated through the imported steering wheel and a roaring engine sound. There is even a chance a passenger (friend or spouse) will be forgotten through this dream come true moment.

Realizing this dream drive opportunity, the main difference between renting an exotic ride compared to a run-of-the-mill rental car is price. For instance, the before-mentioned Ferrari 360 Spider in Las Vegas is advertised for daily rental at $1,050. If the single-day rental fee is a little too high for the 3.9-second 0 to 60 mile per hour Italian-bred convertible, a 5-hour period with the Ferrari 360 Spider could be bought for $750. If newer vehicles do not full an individual’s automotive fantasy realm, maybe a classic car could be the desired wish fulfillment. For $350, a 225-inch long 1959 Cadillac Eldorado Convertible is a taste of old Vegas during a future visit.

With rental opportunities throughout the world, exotic automobile rental agency Elite Rent A Car France gives an American in Paris to taste the German flavour of Mercedes-Benz. For the equivalent of $1,760 in US money, the chance encounter with a Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG is offered for a single day. A unique way to observe two cultures of exotic car construction and international regions, one could drive a Bentley Continental GTC through Munich, Germany or a Lamborghini into the country-wide outside of London. Perhaps even better is matching the car and country for an enriching lesson on automotive culture.

Giving you a sense of driving passion, its sobering to keep in mind classic and exotic car rentals do feature some generally stricter rules than typical automobile rentals. Vehicles will need to be selected ahead of time by at least 3 days (pending if a car is available). Secondly, drivers under 25 are often restricted from piloting these machines without exceptions. Thirdly, some rental agencies may require a sizable deposit or booking fee which is non-refundable if canceled.

Once ready to start your driving adventure if for a few hours or longer, most rental car agencies will familiarize the first-time driver with a vehicle. Important since you would not want to spend much of your valuable experience clueless to rising a convertible top or how to use the navigational system. Being a situation where a exotic car is entrusted to you, it is highly recommended more than ever that insurance is taken out on the vehicle. The last way an individual would want their vacation to end is to discover the price of a replacement Ferrari side view mirror or the price to rid scratches from a Chevrolet Corvette front bumper.

Whether its a car rental Los Angeles, car rental Miami or even a car rental Dubai, a travel adventure is enhanced with the right set of wheels.

Information Source: Dream Car Rentals, Drivetravel.com
Photo Source: Chris Nagy

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2. Lofty, Leafy Desires
3. About Driving Responsibly

Some days, I don’t know if I adequately express my love for automobiles in every post I authored. I am truly a car fan and it is an auto show that reminds me just how much I cherish that interest in automobiles. Knowing that so many Automoblog.net followers feel the same sense of emotion with a prized auto make or even the vehicle in general, it was a pleasure to attend media day of the 2011 Canadian International Auto Show at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre.

While many vehicles are making Canadian debuts, many of the cast and faces have risen to idolization already across the auto show world. Nonetheless, when you truly set eyes on something so beautiful as a new car design, even the best LCD screen or finest glossy magazine paper does not completely radiate the full meaning of automotive existence. The scene at the 2011 Canadian International Auto Show media day provided the most upbeat messages to the future of the automobile.

Starting with an opening ceremony as well as a press conference with Ford Motor Company, media day of the 2011 Canadian International Auto Show supplied more energy than perhaps the entire 2010 exhibition. Unveiling first the Ford C-Max, a kinetic display at four acrobats brought a spectacle back to auto industry. A bright spot in American motoring, the Ford Motor Company’s engineering pride was more than evident through their use of floor space. Cutaway of a 2011 Ford Explorer, a simulator of Ford’s stability control program, engines and other various car components including their seat belt airbag were featured with as much attention as the whole vehicles.

Right after the Ford conference, BMW and MINI were next to highlight their showcases of 2011 so far. Presenting the BMW M6 convertible, the BMW 1M and the MINI Paceman concept, there was also details on the BMW X1. Reported by some publications earlier this year as being delayed until 2012, the compact sport activity vehicle X1 is set for release late this year starting at just under $39,000 Canadian.

Starting with the unveiling of the MINI Paceman, the automotive marketing of presenting beautiful women alongside the glorious new vehicles. Land Rover and Chrysler later in the day would also enlist the assistance of some photogenic females. With absolutely no offense against the women, my attention is only planted on the automobiles. Using star power, Kia Motors called in sports athletes from the professional soccer team Toronto Football Club to show off a special edition Sportage. For all the people able to present the vehicles during the press conferences, I keep in mind the numerous individuals behind the scenes of the auto companies as well as the Canadian International Auto Show.

Through a stop at the Honda exhibit, the 2012 Honda Civic Si coupe concept in between a tuned Honda Insight and Accord decked out in a white/carbon black paint scheme. Seeing the Civic concept up-close, there is no doubt this vehicle is be the dead-ringer for the upcoming production car. The only thing needed for the final 2012 Civic will be an interior.

Not seen at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit, Nissan came to Toronto presenting Canadian debuts of the 2011 Quest minivan and the Infiniti M35h. An enthusiastic Alfonso Albaisa, Vice President of Nissan Design America, eagerly presented the Ellure concept. Viewed as a designing precursor to a future Altima or Maxima, Albaisa brings much of the passionate new styling direction that was exhibited on his other creation, the Nissan Juke. Along with the NV commercial van, the new Nissan GT-R and the Nismo 370Z coupe, another live act stole the press conference. Influenced by a new advertising campaign around the all-electric Nissan Leaf featuring a polar bear, a bear-suited individual quietly wondered out bringing a welcomed comic relief to the morning surrounding the car business.

The second-to-last exhibit of the media day morning was General Motors. President of GM Canada Kevin Williams introduced Canadian press members to the Buick Verano as the company’s new theme was discretely unveiled. The trucks and large sport utility vehicles General Motors once depended upon as profit centers were moved literally pushed to the corner. It’s obvious that bets are being hedged on the new Chevrolet Cruze . At least 9 Chevrolet Cruze sedans of varying colours and configurations were scattered across the expanded GM exhibit (including a highly-modified tuner and a touring car version). The Canadian International Auto Show also saw GM feature the Buick Regal eAssist as well as the ‘not-for-the-United States’ Chevrolet Orlando.

Grant the fact the Chevrolet Camaro and Corvette are strong brand symbols, it is a relief those vehicles were prominent in Toronto. In fact, on special display for 2011 was an separate exhibit called Icons: Camaro and Firebird. Dedicated to an smaller floor of the convention center were special edition, Indianapolis 500 pace cars and vehicles relating to show business highlighting the best of almost 45 years of the General Motors pony car. A Pontiac Firebird paying tribute to the Knight Industries Two Thousand (affectionately known as K.I.T.T.) from the 1980s TV crime-fighting show Knight Rider and both Camaros representing the vehicle modes for the 2007 Transformers movie character Bumblebee are some stars of the special display. A more modern superstar, the 2012 Chevrolet Camaro ZL1 surprised with its appearance within the Icons: Camaro and Firebird section. Less than a week prior to its debut in Chicago by General Motors, a blue coupe version shown is actually linked to aftermarket company SLP.  Only an hour down the road, the Oshawa, Ontario plant will produce the factory version models of the Camaro ZL1 in very limited quantities.

Three and a half hours of press conferences and vehicle unveils concluded with the Kia Motors exhibit. Covering only a small space of the convention center, Kia’s new Optima and Optima Hybrid supplied a big sense of growth for the South Korea-based auto company. Providing a guide to the brand’s styling direction, the concept Kia Ray was included within the showcase.

For part 2 of this journey, I’ll steer you through an afternoon with Canadian premieres or up-close looks at Mercedes-Benz, Audi and the Concorso Exotica.

Photo Source: Chris Nagy

Related posts:

1. Journey Inside the 2011 Canadian Auto Show Part 2
2. Fast Times at 2011 Georgian College Auto Show
3. Successful 2011 Auto Shows Warmed by Winter Crowds

“Sometimes it’s not the destination that matters but the road itself.”

When it comes to driving, it is more often than not the destination that makes the journey worthwhile. However, there are certain roads around the world that make the destination irrelevant as the journey itself is reward enough.

This infographic by moneysupermarket looks at some of the world’s most scenic driving routes, highlighting what makes each road stand out from the crowd.

Click on the image for a full-size version:

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1. Feel the Thrill – 10 Most Dangerous Driving Roads in the World
2. World Class Driving Review – One Day, Five Supercars
3. Next-Gen Ford Focus – We Finally Get What The World Gets

Only one week from now, the doors opens to the much-anticipated Paris Motor Show revealing the next crop of vehicles slated for introduction to various world markets. Roughly 6,000 miles away in a small Canadian city named Barrie, the new generation of automotive sales and marketing personnel is receiving lessons on promoting the latest crop of motoring innovation.

Expected to possess intuition, attentiveness as well as the dedicated knowledge of their chosen brand’s product, Georgian College devoted a large part of their institution schooling students in the automotive business. Adding legitimacy to a profession which has been affiliated with a fair share of unethical characters, students within the Canadian Automotive Institute (CAI) are given the annual Georgian College Auto Show as the showcase of their acquired knowledge from business and marketing programs. Operating as brand representatives for many of the major automotive brands of North America, the duties of the Georgian College CAI students droves deeper into the entire workings of each show meaning they are practically the driving force of this three-day event. Celebrating it’s 25^th anniversary, the 2010 Georgian College Auto Show had these college students in charge of at least 100 brand new vehicles.

As an observer of an auto show with a $7 admission, you’ll enjoy a hassle-free, sales-free environment offering a chance to sample a new car, truck or SUV/crossover without the fear it might end at a office desk looking over a car loan or lease agreement. An admittedly small exhibition, the Georgian College Auto Show does provide a detailed representations of current and future automotive trends. The 2010 edition of the auto show had a collection of new releases to the automotive marketplace including the new Nissan Juke, the 2011 Honda Odyssey, the redesigned BMW 5-Series sedan and the 2011 Chevrolet Cruze.

In a massive Ford display, three Ford Fiestas, several Super Duty pick up, a 2011 Ford Edge, and a 2011 Ford Shelby GT500 offered one of the most exciting interactions of this 2010 show. All vehicles but the Shelby GT500 were open for visitors to sit in and touch throughout the weekend. Providing an interesting cross-section of the buying attitudes of modern motorists, an equal amount of attention by attendees centered on the new Fiestas as well as on the brand new, rethought 2011 Ford Explorer.

Toyota also had a bullish effort at the 2010 Georgian Auto Show showing off their just recently introduced (and most recently profiled on Automoblog.net) 2011 Toyota Highlanders in both gas or hybrid form. Brought to Canada this year, Toyota’s youth-based brand Scion made their first appearance at this auto show. Unveiling their cars to the Barrie area, the cars looked fantastic but the brand representatives of Scion had a less than ideal placement of their vehicles. Raining days prior to the show, campus’ grass field was downright soggy in areas with the Scion tent setup on muddy turf for Friday. As the show must go on, a few of the vehicles were over wooden boards so the brand’s four-car display could make the Georgian College Auto Show debut.

The Georgian College Auto Show has not been shielded from the troubles of the automotive industry. Because of the bankruptcy filing in 2009, Chrysler didn’t even have a display at last year’s show. In past auto shows Chrysler was known for bringing a concept vehicles showing the future the company wanted to once create for itself. Reemerging this year under the partnership with Fiat, the Chrysler Group returned to the 2010 auto show. Back in a big way, crowds loved the Dodge Challenger and the 2011 Jeep Grand Cherokee highlighting the work of Chrysler.

Though some amazing vehicles were present at this year’s Georgian College Auto Show, the vehicle crop is not as incredibly ripe as in previous years. While Ford brought their A-game as did Toyota, BMW and Mercedes-Benz tents were missing representatives of their high-performance tuner divisions. Without an AMG or an M line vehicle, the sensation in the German automaker displays did not radiate the passion of the car makers.

In my first Georgian College Auto Show I attended in 1997, a Toyota Prius when hybrid technology was little more than a pricey gimmick (for some, the attitude towards hybrids have not . In 2008 Kia, who wasn’t even present at this year’s Georgian Auto Show, brought their Soul to the inspection of Canadian buyers ahead of its debut at the Los Angeles Auto Show. Last year, two versions of the Mazda2 appeared before the Japanese auto company gave the greenlight to the vehicle’s sale in North America. As an automotive journalist, I was hoping to see more from the 2010 show products. But as an automotive enthusiast seeking a free-reign experience to sample a wide-selection of vehicle badges, this year’s Georgian College Auto Show was an excellent exploration.

Already mentioning the event as a hassle-free outing, the Georgian College Auto Show is more than just the figurative kicking of tires. Car care clinics, a Kids Zone and the Pfaff Porsche Autocross Track were all set up for a full weekend of automotive-related excitement.

With all the preparation placed into the event, the last ingredient of an outdoor auto show was weather. Occurring on the next week of September, the skilled student volunteers of the 2010 Georgian College Auto Show could not do anything to fight the unsettled weather which involved extreme heat on Friday and windy, cool conditions on the Saturday and Sunday. While the next batch of students will get a helping hand as the show is being moved to June in 2011, the ambassadors for this year’s show and automotive brands assembled a fantastic event to usher in the fall.

Information source: Georgian College

Photo source: Chris Nagy

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1. Fast Times at 2011 Georgian College Auto Show
2. The SEMA Show- The Better Auto Show?
3. Journey Inside the 2011 Canadian Auto Show Part 1

In a quiet Detroit suburb of Ferndale, Michigan, one gathering of historic wheels is assembled on the 21st of August. Called the Woodward Dream Cruise, the event’s surrounding the cruise has drawn 40,000 classic and collectible cars in recent years as well as the support of the so-called Detroit 3 automakers. Though rain fell throughout the 2010 edition of the Woodward Dream Cruise, the shower did nothing to wash away the passion and some automobile-loving attendees. While the actual cruise occurs on the Saturday, the entire weekend is devoted to creating colourful scenery.

Consisting of a 16 mile cruise down Woodward Drive, reflecting back on a day when cars could freely run the streets of America without the hateful sneers of environmentalist or under the government-appointed microscope. Classic, restored and street rods roared down the roadways representing full individuals and car clubs.

Like previous Woodward Dream Cruises, the major automakers set up extensive displays in close proximity to their past creations. With Ford, GM and Chrysler optimistic of a continuing existence in the modern automotive landscape, the 2010 show was perhaps an ideal outdoor event to showcase their refreshed attitude to building cars. Making its first openly public appearance, Ford brought the 2012 Mustang Boss 302 and the Boss 302 Laguna Seca to a special Mustang Alley display on West 9 Mile Road. As part of the Ferndale Classic & Cruis’n Legends Vehicle Show, Ford Motor Company’s addition to the Dream Cruise party included new products like the Raptor SVT, a Ford Shelby GT500 as well as the Ford Fiesta to stand alongside some beloved Fords of yesteryear.

Further North up Woodward Drive, General Motors showed off the Chevrolet Corvette ZR-1, a GM Powertrain Engine display and another public showing of the Chevrolet Volt. Both the GM and Ford supported areas featured classic cars brought by their employees. For the Ford display, that included as many as 10 first generation Boss Mustangs.

Finally there was the Chrysler display featuring a cornucopia of Mopar muscle. Past representatives of Chrysler cars featured a 1970 Plymouth Cuda, a 1968 Dodge Coronet Convertible and a more contemporary Dodge Viper GTS from the 1998 model year. Current offerings such as the 2011 Jeep Grand Cherokee along with 4 different variations of the Dodge Challenger were present including a Dodge Targa Challenger. A longtime supporter of the event, Chrysler’s previous enthusiasm saw the creation of a special edition PT Cruiser called simply the Dream Cruiser. This year’s show had the Fiat 500 join the Chrysler display of cars consisting of a European spec model featured alongside a 1970 Fiat 500 version.

Unlike the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance set on the previous weekend on the other half of the United States, the show is free event to the public as well as to the classic car entrants. Also unlike the Pebble Beach show where the wine and champagne flowed into the glasses of rather adult guests, the Woodward Dream Cruise is a fully-devoted event for families. Besides providing eye candy of stylish sheetmetal, there were plenty of activities to entertain including a photo trailer at the GM display where you could have a picture with a favourite Team Chevy driver thanks to the use of a green screen. Children at heart are also treated to some delights beyond the car show scene. Many part vendors (including factory performance parts from the 3 automakers) and even a car auction area might provide opportunities for those not already involved in the event to be contributors in 2011.

Mother Nature delivered a cruel blow with the 15th year of the Woodward Dream Cruise, a little water was not enough to hold back custom 1930s Fords, a commandingly long Chrysler Imperial, the grouping of Cobra sports cars or an antique fire truck. With at least 30,000 cars involved in this year’s Woodward Dream Cruise, the automotive festivity concluded as another recent tribute to the automobile as past and present form into a rich motoring future.

Information Source: Chrysler, Ford, General Motors and Woodward Dream Cruise inc.

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A quick walk down to Omaha Beach … seemingly, the British love RVs … what the landed gentry drive to the vacation house … “That engine sounds familiar,” I said …

So one morning, out on the Atlantic coast of France, I get up, and there’s Antoine, my host down in the kitchen. He’d been up for a while, reading the paper. He looked at me and asked, “Wanna go for a walk down the beach? There’s some interesting stuff down towards the touristy end.”

Sure, why not. I had never been down that way before, since the town was in the opposite direction.

It turns out that down that way, along the walking path, separated from the bike path, separated from the road, are a bunch of disused German gun emplacements from the Second World War. You come around this point of land, and suddenly the beach is broad and flat and deep. Anyone with any military sense could see that this was a place where you could land so many boats with so many men that you could easily swamp coastal defenses. No wonder the Nazis were nervous.

Perched above the beach, on the “high” ground was a series of 5 or so gun emplacements. They had maybe a 30 foot height advantage, but hey, you go with what you got.

But that was years ago, and time can change a lot of things. Germany and France were part of one, larger super-country which was, judging by exchange rates, was worth 60% more than America on the open market.

Time also changed the coastline. What was once the high ground, perched at the edge of a 30 foot cliff, was now sea-level sand, and two of the German gun emplacements had tumbled down to sit on the beach at cockeyed angles, stripped of their guns, but still whole, sitting like knocked over childrens’ toys on a beige carpet.

“Those are the German gun emplacements,” Antoine stated flatly. “There’s other bunkers and stuff if you know where to look.”

You had to look around the two or three mid-sized hotels and the summer homes of fairly well off British couples. There were already a few of them here; fifty to sixty years old, fat-ish, pale, looking like land developers and car salesmen and pharmaceutical reps from Renton and Evanston and Atlanta, only they were from places like Gilford and Huyton-with-Roby and Hull, and they all seemed to be driving European versions of RVs.

Somehow, for a given group of Brits (and you could tell that they were British, because all of their RVs were right hand drive, and all of them had stickers on the back that said “GB” or were a Union Jack) they had decided that the cool thing to do was by a vacation house on the French coast, and commute there in their small, Euro-sized RVs.

It was sort of like when you go to a retirement community in Arizona or Florida and 9 out of 10 cars are all beige Oldsmobiles.

And these guys driving them, they were always guys, mum was always sitting in the passenger seat (or on occasion what looked like wife #2 or 3, 30 years younger than the semi-retired mid-level manager from Islington, blond, too much jewelry), seemed pleased as punch. Like driving around in an RV was as good as it got, vehicular experience-wise.

So Antoine and I keep walking down the path, talking about the tourist crowd, pointing out the shuttered up nightspots overlooking the beech and the ocean, when I hear a large mechanical whirring, like a gas powered sewing machine.

“That engine sounds familiar,” I said.

And up over a rise comes a Corvair Greenbriar van, white with a green stripe down the side scallops. It’s rough, but it’s all there.

“Oh my god,” I say. Seriously, what are the chances?

Antoine looks at me and asks, “What kind of car is that?”

“It’s a Corvair Greenbriar van. My dad owned one for awhile that he bought from a Baptist church.”

“Corvair? You mean like Ralph Nader? ‘Unsafe at Any Speed’?”

“Yeah, they made a van version,” I answered, all the while marveling at the van disappearing over a crest, heading in towards town, and that a French guy somehow knew both what a Corvair was, and that he’d also known about Ralph Nader’s ‘Unsafe at Any Speed’.

Related posts:

1. What I Did On My Summer Vacation 2008 Part Huit – On The Road to Royan
2. What I Did On My Summer Vacation – 2008
3. What I Did On My Summer Vacation 2008 Part Six

Race tracks should be this smooth – the Ford Fiesta in action – stay out of the left-hand lane, you moron! – “Sweet Jesus, was that a ’56?”

The bulk of the time I spent in France was out on the Atlantic Coast, in a little seaside fishing village/resort town. The next closest big town was named Royan, and seemed to be about the size of Portland Oregon.

To get there, we had to drive with our friends, Jeanne & Antoine, from Paris in a Rental car. Specifically, we were driving a Ford Fiesta. Don’t confuse this with the Fiesta of the late 70s early 80s, this is about the size and shape of Ford’s last version of the Escort here in the U.S..

We pick the thing up from Hertz in downtown Paris … the Hertz place is like rental places everywhere, fairly clean fairly efficient and fairly dehumanizing, like the DMV is it ran properly.

The Fiesta is a small displacement four banger, that easily swallows fur adults and all their luggage, maneuvers through the early morning streets of Paris with ease, Jeanne at the controls, since there was a charge (natch) for each additional driver, and out onto the motorway.

This is what the French call a freeway, and what you and I, the red-blooded, God-fearing American car guy would call a race track.

Seriously.

I don’t know about you, but I spent a lot of time growing up at race tracks, and comparing a race track to an American freeway is like comparing a Marine’s K-Bar to a steak knife, and the same can be said for a French motorway.

Four lanes wide with lane-sized shoulders on each side, the all blacktop motorway is built on a roadbed of poured concrete 12 feet think. It’s as stable as the Pyramid at Giza and smooth as Willie Mosconi’s favorite table.

We pull out onto this thing, the loaded down Fiesta humming along nicely at 120 clicks and WHOOSH, there goes a black Audi A8 at tremendous speed in the left lane, heading towards central France faster than a Cessna. It’s just like a freeway over here, there’s trucks and sedans and hatchbacks, and they’re all getting along amazingly well, and everybody is driving noticeably faster than here.

The Fiesta was faultless the whole way there. The heating and AC worked, it got great mileage, we were comfortable. Sure, it was boring in comparison to something like that A8, but it worked.

Of course the French have a much more well defined sense of lane discipline than we do. You do NOT camp in the left hand lane. If you are in the left hand lane and someone pulls up on your ass, you move over NOW, and you especially do it when they flash their lights … oh yeah, and by they way, flashing your lights is NOT aggressive driving, setting your fat ass in the left lane and chugging along at 140, THAT’S aggressive – aggressively stupid, so MOVE OVER MORON!!

Everything Flows, everybody moves along quite nicely because they are paying attention and driving their cars. They’re (by and large) not talking on their cell phones and they are most definitely not yelling at the kids, while eating, and trying to put another DVD in the player, while discussing home finances with their spouse.

When they’re on the road, they’re driving. It works better that way.

So that’s the way the drive went all the way out to Royan, a nice little French city in the middle of the Atlantic coast.

It’s about the size of Portland, and all of the architecture is notably new, and of the slab concrete/Le Courbusie/Brutale school.

“Interesting Architecture,” I say to Antoine, our host who had partially grown up north of Royan.

“Oh yeah. That’s cause they had to completely rebuild the town after the war. You’ll see. The beach it really broad and flat, so the Germans though that when the allies would invade, they might do it here. So to keep the Germans thinking that, the British bombed the town to the ground. The RAF tried to make a memorial here for all the pilots that were killed, and the town would let them. They’re not big fans of the British here, since they reduced the town rubble.”

I can understand that.

So we’re driving through Royan and … huh! That sounds familiar. It sort of sounds like a big block V8. And then around a corner comes a sage green 1967 Mustang fastback! What the hell! In France! And just when I’m getting my mind wrapped around that, 100 yards later comes a pristine 1956 Chevy Bel Aire. A four door, not the coupe, sadly, two-tone white & red.

Both of them had French license plates.

It was completely unbelievable.

But there it was.

67 Mustang Fastback for sale

Related posts:

1. What I Did On My Summer Vacation 2008 Part Neuf – The Day I Saw A Corvair Greenbriar Van In Royan, By The Beach With The German Gun Emplacements
2. What I Did On My Summer Vacation 2008 – Part Deux
3. What I Did On My Summer Vacation 2008 – Part Cinq

What I Did On My Summer Vacation 2008 Part Sept – Minivans of France

No, really, minivans … that size thing again … Don’t the French have large families? … sure seem cleaner than ours …

In many ways, minivans are the quintessential American vehicle, and, if you and I were being forthright and practical about our vehicle needs, we’d be driving minivans. Maximum space on the inside, minimum footprint on the outside, room for people, room for things, room for people and things, and reasonably efficient.

But, they lack any sort of fun in the driving department, so most car guys look at them as a necessary evil, like drip pans.

You’d be surprised to see a minivan outside of the US, and boy, I sure was when I saw my first minivan in Paris during this trip … then I saw another one, then another, and another … and then I realized that about one out of ten cars on the road in Paris and elsewhere was a minivan.

At first it was kind of disturbing, but then I realized that this is the same country that considers Jerry Lewis a comic genius and Mickey Rourke an underappreciated actor of lasting importance.

So yeah, they have minivans in France, and if you start to watch how they’re used and who uses them, they make sense even in a French setting.

First off, there’s that size thing. France it really densely packed in. Paris proper is roughly the size of San Francisco (7 by 7 miles) but it has a population of four million (yet somehow it seems like there’s more room for you on the streets and sidewalks than say New York City or Boston or, well, I was going to say Tokyo, but that would be cheating). So if you’re put in the position of needing to transport around more than 3 or 4 people, a minivan is going to fit that bill. Also, since a lot of the roads are terrible narrow, a smaller vehicle is much more workable than, say, an Envoy.

There’s also the family aspect to consider.

The French are, nominally, really Catholic. Per capita, I think they are only second to Italy in Europe, and they come in third or fourth worldwide (I think it goes Italy (where literally over 99% of the population says they’re Catholic) Mexico, Brazil and then France). And like Italy, they say they’re Catholic, but they don’t act vary Catholic (nice girls don’t dress they way 75% of French women dress, which is another reason why I like France). Sure, sure, lots of churches, and you see lots of priests and nuns running around, but the French are not the most penitent and modest bunch.

They do have a tendency to have large families, even in this day and age, so if you’re a husband and wife with four kids … the answer is minivan.

What really jumped out at me about French minivans versus American minivans was just how clean the French versions were, and actually, that holds true for all French cars. Very few people living in Paris proper have garages, so cars are parked on the street, on in alleys or crammed into every available space for the night, yet all the cars are really, really clean. You rarely see cars with dents in the bodywork, and since most of the cars are dark colors, you’d notice the dirt, but they are, for the most part, cleaner then American cars.

That goes for minivans too, which is pretty shocking … because the last time I was in a typical American minivan being used by a family of 6, it look like a McDonalds that had been hit by a tornado. How the French are able to keep theirs clean is a mystery.

Now, you’d probably surmise that a lot of minivans are going to be Renaults and Citroens, but that’s actually not the case.

Citroen does make something that’s minivan-like. I didn’t get the name, but it looks like a minivan crossed with a toaster crossed with a drain pipe that Toulouse-Lautrec would draw after one too many hits of mescaline.

Renault makes this thing called the Espace that looks like a great family-oriented vehicle. About the size of a Chrysler minivan, you’d be hard pressed to tell it was French. They’d probably sell them like crazy if they were to import them into America (assuming they could make them run in a reliable fashion).

But the majority of minivans you see are not of French origin.

First off, you see a fair amount of Chrysler minivans. At first it’s surprising, but then I remembered that Chrysler has this long standing relationship with Talbot, and has been importing their American cars to France for some time (from what I recall, the French just loved the Viper, which is kind of funny). So you see Caravans here and there; slightly bulbous and fat, but they get the job done.

What you do see a lot of, in the minivan department, is VW products. Makes sense, since they’re a European product and they did, after all, invent the minivan.

There are three VW vans that you see all over the place. One, the Transporter, we have here in the US badged as the Eurovan. On the streets of Paris it seems huge, like a delivery truck (which they are used for in their non-civilian role), but there are two other, European only vans that are really quite nice.

These would be the Sharan and Touran. VW of America keep talking about wanting to make a minivan for the US market that’s more in line with Honda’s and Chrysler’s products, but they hem and haw around, futz with this concept and that, but never seem to get off the dime. I found this to be really at odds with what I saw in France, because if they were to bring either the Sharan or Touran over here, I’d bet they couldn’t keep them in stock. Both of them seat 7, although the last two seats in the smaller Sharan are more of the jump seat variety. The larger Touran is about the size of a Caravan, and about as logical and well laid out as you’d expect a German product to be. I saw an advertisement for a Touran, and they are going for the equivalent of 29 thousand dollars, which is about what minivans cost over here. They’ve got airbags and door beams and all that, so I don’t know what VW’s problem is, but they must have some reason for not wanting the extra income.

Finally, we come to the weirdest of minivans that I saw, the Mercedes minivan. Yes, I couldn’t believe it either, but Mercedes, vaunted benchmark of all carmakers, does indeed make a lowly minivan. (See, I think that in America, Mercedes has this rep of being a real top-shelf, high end car maker, but what they really are is a European version of GM, manufacturing everything from SLRs to delivery trucks, it’s just that all we ever see is the high-end stuff.) The Mercedes minivan is smaller than a Caravan, roughly doorstop shaped and sort of looks like a stretch limo version of the Mercedes A-Class subcompact. I only saw about 4 or 5 total, since they are, after all, Mercedes, and probably pretty damn expensive.

Again, Mercedes is another company, like VW, that talks about making a minivan for the North American market, yet they already have one in use and on the roads in Europe that would make sense here in the US.

It seems that, even in the minivan world, America could be a lot more interesting place if we only had access to what Europeans get to drive.

Related posts:

1. What I Did On My Summer Vacation 2008 – Part Cinq
2. What I Did On My Summer Vacation 2008 – Part Deux
3. What I Did On My Summer Vacation 2008 Part Six

What I Did On My Summer Vacation 2008 Part Six – The Smart Car In The Wild

The perfect car for the modern urban driving environment … that counts as the trunk, huh? … This still counts as a Mercedes? … Two Smarts in one space … any color you want, as long as it’s black … get a free car (some restrictions apply) …

As you would expect, Smart Cars are all over the place in France, mainly in cities. For the modern, urban driving environment, they’re just about perfect. They’re small, maneuverable, quick enough, and just big enough for 90% of the tasks that an individual driver has. Think of them as a four-wheeled motorcycle with a roof, rather than a small car, and you get a better idea of the mindset.

In a crowded, city driving environment, they’re the right tool for a lot of the jobs you face. Most of the time, cars are about personal mobility. Most of the time, it’s just you, driving in the car, going to your own personal destination. So for a lot of people, a lot of the time, you don’t need things like back seats, cavernous cargo areas and so on.

Being so small, you can maneuver in and out of traffic with ease in a Smart, you can park it in spots a lot of cars would even think of trying, and the MPG is bound to be quite high.

Until you actually see one of these things on the street, near other cars, you just don’t realize how small they are. I was able to do an informal measurement with one parked at the curb, and it seemed that with my right hand on the front bumper, the rear bumper was only 10 inches away from my left hand. I know they must be longer, but they seem to be about the size of a kitchen stove.

Of course, what comes in handy for things like zipping around double parked delivery trucks and tucking into bath mat sized parking spots doesn’t come in so handy when you need to move more than you, a friend and a couple of briefcases. I was checking a Smart out on the street, marveling at how they were able to squeeze all that stuff into the passenger compartment, when my wife remarked, “that counts as the trunk, huh?”

She wasn’t kidding. What passes for the trunk, a miniaturized version of the rear hatch area in a VW Golf, seems to be about two feet by three feet by one foot; you could maybe fit three paper grocery sacks back there. No trips to Ikea for this ride. Picking up some fencing down at the lumber yard is out of the question. I guess what you save in purchase price and fuel costs in going to be partially offset by delivery charges for everything else you buy in your life.

Even though Smarts are tiny, they are, after all, made by Mercedes. Which means they weigh more than you’d first think, are built more robustly than a bank vault, and have top notch fit and finish for something that costs about what the down payment for a Hummer would be. This still counts as a Mercedes? You bet. Everything makes sense. There’s no little quirks in switch placement or door handle oddness you see in smaller French cars (OK, French cars of any size). Apart from the diminutive size, there’s nothing about the car that would be off-putting to your average American driver.

As you would expect, parking the things at a curb is a snap. Normal sized parking spaces seem like runways to these things, and it wasn’t uncommon to see two Smarts parked within the length of one parking space. It almost seemed like they’re doing it to flaunt they’re practicality.

In a very un-Mercedes like move, Smarts seem to be available in a rainbow of fanciful colors. You see them in robin’s egg blue and bright pink and punk rocker’s hair magenta. Or to be more accurate, you see about half of them in various bright shades. The other half are always gloss black. It seem like Smart owners are divided into two groups: those that have said, ‘it’s cheap, why not have some fun with it?’ and those that say, ‘it’s just basic, simple transportation, I’ll take black.’

Of course, if you’re really really thrifty, there are other options for the aspiring French Smart driver. I didn’t get the details, but supposedly there are fleets of Smarts owned by ad agencies in Paris. You can, if you aren’t very picky about things like color and graphics, get a Smart for FREE if you live in Paris – but as the man said some restrictions apply.

In this case, you get a Smart that is covered in some sort of loud graphics or advertising package. There seems to be no one product they’re pushing. I saw Smarts advertising headache pills and paint stores and video games … it all seemed to be random.

From what I heard, the prospective owner looking for a free Smart has no choice in the matter, and the graphics you get splattered all over your car is completely random. Relatives of the friends we were staying with France went to check the deal out for their son (the son having a new driver’s license burning in his hip pocket). Supposedly, they guy at the ad agency/Smart dealership said, ‘Yeah. The next one up for grabs is that one right over there.’

They turned and looked and saw a bright pink Smart car emblazoned with the logos of Frances best selling tampon.

The kid, although folded in half with desire for teen mobility, had his limits and nixed the deal.

Related posts:

1. What I Did On My Summer Vacation – 2008 Part Quatre
2. What I Did On My Summer Vacation 2008 – Part Deux
3. What I Did On My Summer Vacation 2008 – Part Trois

Your Average French Car …. Comparing the size of your car to everyday objects … special editions – Picasso and xBox? … that design makes sense from the inside … half as thin as Mercedes sheet metal …

Your average French car is, as you would expect, small, weird, ostensibly underpowered, demonstrably over-designed , space efficient, even more fuel efficient, and work far, far better then your average American would think of at first glance.

The first thing I noticed was how much smaller cars were in France. A two door VW Golf was clearly a mid-sized car in comparison to what else was on the road. You saw a ton of two and four door hatchbacks on the road. As a matter of fact, of the privately owned cars on the street, I would say the biggest majority would be hatchbacks.

Most of them were VW Polos, Honda Fits, and seemingly countless Citroen, Peugeot and Renault city cars. There were so many French cars, that keeping the individual model names or designations straight in my head was next to impossible.

The hatchbacks were, essentially, the bottom end of the food chain, and this brings up the first really odd thing I noticed: There are no small sedans in France.

You know how over here, there are things like Honda Civic sedans, and other cars about that size? Well there aren’t any in France. It starts out with small city cars & hatchbacks, then there’s a gap, and then you start seeing things about the size of Audi A6s, VW Passats, and Citroen, Peugeot and Renault “mid-sized” sedans.

Right about at this size of vehicle, there are a surprising number and type of minivans running around the streets of France. So surprising in fact, that I’ll deal with them in and of themselves in a separate article.

Full size cars, things like Mercedes S-Class, big Audis, and the like are rarely seen, maybe about 5% of the car population. And most of these seem to be attached to impressive stone buildings, with drivers waiting at the ready … so all I could think was that they were provided by work or the counselor’s office for diplomatic needs.

Large sports cars are almost never seen, and if you are trying to make a statement along the lines of “I’m rich and powerful, pay attention to me”, you generally drive some sort of mid to large coupe. Citroen made a very stunning coupe about the size of an A6, but I never saw any badging, so I’m unsure of the model.

But big coupes are rarities, and most of the cars you’ll notice are small hatchbacks. One of the more popular, seemingly entry level cars is the Renault TwinGo. Low and squat, they seem to be the minimal answer to a question no one in their right mind would ask. Sure, they get you from point A to B, and they seem to have all the modern conveniences (like airbags), but they’re tiny and tinny. When I was down south in Frejus I happened on one of the things, parked, on our way back from buying bread for the day (no really). I was carrying the baguettes so it was easy for me to see that the TwinGo was as wide as two baguettes. That’s about the size of a coffee table.

It’s not like the French are into practicality overall (if that were the case, they’d be Germans) , and like many other countries, they have their own versions of “special edition” cars.

For example, Citroen has a Minivan-like thing called the Xsara, some of which had “Picasso” labeling on the flanks, or maybe that is the name for all of them, it was hard to tell. Also, given that Paloma has been hocking the family name out for quite some time to anyone with enough cash, I wouldn’t put it past her to sell it to Citroen as a complete model name (she needs to read up on what happened to Halston).

I also saw a Renault (I believe it was a TwinGo) that was labeled as an xBox edition. This one was black (they might come in other colors), but had that xBox green as pinstripes on the body, piping on the seats and used as a highlight color on the dash. Each seat had an xBox logo embossed near the headrests.

This co-branding thing was something I had never seen used on cars in America before (apart from that Levi Gremlin that AMC made), but it wouldn’t surprise me to see it sometime in the near future.

Somewhat surprisingly, there are SUVs in France – maybe about one in ten cars is an SUV. Almost all of them where VW Touaregs or Porsche Cayennes, and just like in America, they all seemed to be driven by moms with kids.

One time, my wife and I were walking up the Boulevard du Montparnasse
and what should come driving by but a Hummer H2. I mentioned this to our friend Antoine, who immediately replied, “Was a guy with long black hair and a big nose driving? Was it a big gray Hummer?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“Oh, that was Pierre Accomplissez-Secousse. He’s a television star. Everybody thinks he’s a complete jerk.”

There’s more than one Hummer in Paris, sadly, but everyone knows this guy, it would seem.

How would you like that to be you? A city of 4 million people the size of Chicago and you have one of the few Hummers in town and everybody thinks you’re a jerk

Overall, the design of French cars is puzzling and disorienting to most Americans. When viewed form the curb, the majority of cars seem oddly proportioned, and the details seems haphazard at best. It’s only when you sit in a French car that they begin to make sense; all those windows that seem strangely placed and shaped turn out to be in just the right spot to do-away with this blind spot or that. A lot of French cars are (seemingly) designed from the inside out. You’re sitting in one of the things, a great view of the road, ample vision through a tracery of windows, knobs and switches and whatnot right where they should be, and plenty of headroom, shoulder room, a long reach over to the passenger door … and then you get out, and the car seems to be about the size of a refrigerator, and looks like 7 fishbowls stacked on a lumber cart.

“How can that work?” you mutter to yourself.

The only real fact I can take away is that Hollywood directors should have all their alien spaceships designed by French car companies.

And it gets even more confusing when you start looking at their cars from an engineering perspective. They’re still frightfully light and spindly and made out of sheet metal no thicker than a soup can … yet French drivers pound the crap out of them, driving them at fairly high speeds over curbs and the like, and occasionally getting into accidents, and they hold up surprisingly well, crash-wise, for something made out of steel that’s half as thin as Mercedes sheet metal .

Related posts:

1. What I Did On My Summer Vacation 2008 Part Six
2. What I Did On My Summer Vacation 2008 Part Sept – Minivans of France
3. What I Did On My Summer Vacation 2008 – Part Deux

Scooters In Paris … Vespas are a rare site … Maxis. high speed, high HP … that sounds like more than a 250cc … Apart from bad weather and the whole crush-space thing, they make a whole lot of sense …

As you would imagine, scooters are a widely used for of transportation in France. You see them in the countryside, and in small towns and around colleges, but where they are most plentiful is in larger, urban areas. As just a rough guess, I would say that about 10 to 15 percent of the vehicles on the roads of Paris are scooters of one sort or another.

Being small and maneuverable, they work well in the city’s heavy traffic and hard-to-find parking spots, and since gas is the equivalent of $9.80 a gallon, using something that gets 70 miles per gallon seems like a smart move.

The first thing that I noticed on the scooter front as the lack of Vespa. The brand that pretty much defined what a scooter was is noticeably absent from the streets of Paris. In the whole time I was there, I saw only two Vespas. One seemed to be new-ish and fairly well maintained, and the other looked to be from the 60s and about ready to burst into flames, just sitting silently at the curb.

Although Parisians are nightmarishly fashion conscious, they’re not that over the top. A new Vespa, here in the states, goes for around seven thousand dollars, God knows what it goes for in Europe. That’s a lot of bread to be dropping on a scooter (Hell, for that price I bet you could find two 1st-gen Miatas in decent shape).

For considerably less than that, you can get a more modern scoot of the Japanese variety. Has all the benefits of a Vespa (minus the style) for probably 1200 Euros or some such. These make up the bulk of the scooter population, but coming in close second is what is referred to as a Maxi scooter.

Maxi scooters were first designed by Honda, with its ground breaking Helix model. It had a bunch of novel features (a wheelbase longer than a Harley’s offering a smooth ride, a trunk, etc.) but its two most notable ones were size and power. Dwarfing the available scooters of the day, Honda’s Helix was about the size and weight of a small motorcycle, and it featured a Huge (for a scooter) 250cc engine.

Since then, the Helix has been used as a jumping off point for making even bigger maxi scooters. You see the current Honda maxis all over Paris, but you also see maxis from other companies as well, such as Yamaha and Piagio and Peugeot. Yes, that would be the same Peugeot that makes cars.

All maxis seem to have the same distinguishing characteristics: Big, plastic, high tech dashes, seating for two (but only rarely used that way), quieter than you’d expect, and also, much faster than you’d expect.

I’m not sure what the biggest ones are using for mills, but they sure as Hell sound a lot bigger than the 250cc’s that Maxis have around here. Perhaps things are different in Europe, perhaps Honda and Yamaha and Peugeot are putting in 300s and 350s, because the big ones sound like it, and they certainly are accelerating like they have at least motorcycle levels of grunt. Curiously though, I never saw anything but two full sized motorcycles on the French version of freeways, so I can only assume they are used in town or on the back roads.

So I could see how using a big scooter cold be a reasonable answer. They’re cheaper then the auto equivalent in every way – cost of entry, maintenance, running costs, etc. – so why, if you had budget and space limitations, would you not think about running one of these?

I mean, apart from bad weather and the whole crush-space thing, they make a whole lot of sense …

Related posts:

1. What I Did On My Summer Vacation 2008 – Part Deux
2. What I Did On My Summer Vacation 2008 Part Six
3. What I Did On My Summer Vacation 2008 – Part Trois

The power and the glory that is the TGV … especially when it utterly fails.
Chicago to NYC in 6 hours For $125 … Choke the Mister … Even at this speed, Avignon still give me the willies … “They don’t know what the problem is” …

France has a train system that is truly impressive.

In addition to the local trains that run on roadbeds hundreds of years old, there is the power & the glory of the TGV. TGV stands for Train à Grande Vitesse, which translates as “high-speed train”. What it is, in point of fact, is a totally workable, cheap and efficient means to get from one end of the country to another.

The TGV is electric powered, and, given that France gets 99.8% of electric power from nuclear plants, you can see how this a very advantageous system; contained emissions & pollution, no dependency on foreign oil supplies, noticeably cleaner train stations, etc..

They were also real clever with the track layout. When you talk about making a system like this in America, one of the first negatives that pops up is the supposed need to lay all new track and make new stations etc.. The TGV gets around this by using existing tracks at most destination points, which allows the use of preexisting rail stations, and it then diverts onto its own, newer, limited access lines when they really stand on the gas. And there’s no rail crossing on these lines either; they’re overpass/underpass things for dealing with other tracks and auto routes.

They can get these things cranking along at 320 clicks an hour, as fast as a Ferrari 360 Modena.

What can I say, it’s fun. You’re out in the middle of the French country side, sitting in a cabin closer to a airliner than train, and you are flat out booking for hours at a stretch.

Getting on the train?

That’s fairly easy … unless you’re complete louts like we were. See, we screwed up massively getting on the TGV in Charles de Gaulle airport (and how much of a no-brainer is having a train station at the airport?) which had a comic/tragic knock-on effect, but I’ll get to that later. Anyway, here’s how the ticketing and boarding procedure works:

You go and buy a ticket from a nice lady at a counter. She’s usually well dressed, smells nice, and distracting attractive (usually). You can get the ticket days in advance, or within minutes of the train pulling into the station. You walk about 100 yards to the platform where your specific train will pull up. You get in your assigned car. That’s it.

No metal detectors, no security theater, no bans on liquids or any of that other BS that helps nothing but makes flying more and more of a complete pain in the ass.

If the TGV was up and running in America, you could get from Chicago to New York City in around 6 hours for a cost of $125.

Think about that for a while … and the next time you run into a politician, ask them “Hey, why don’t we have a train system that’s as good as the French have?”

Like all other trains, there’s a bar car, but since this is food in France, there’s none of this 13 day old tuna salad sandwich in a triangular plastic box for $16.38, oh no. Wine, bread, cheese all that sort of thing. My wife turned me on to this kind of open-faced sandwich deal. Since I don’t speak French, I can’t accurately recall, let alone spell what its name is, but it literally translates as “Choke The Mister”* and they aren’t kidding. It’s two pieces of bread layered with cheese and ham and takes up the area of a half a laptop computer. It comes on a plate, and you have to eat it with a knife and fork, since there’s cheese and ham all over the place.

Cost? $5.

This is what the French regard as the sort of food you eat when you have to, just to get by, because there’s nothing proper to eat.

No water though, unless it’s bottled. The French still haven’t figured that whole tap water thing out.

So, there you sit, ensconced in a comfortable seat, trying to finish the last of your “Choke The Mister”, blasting through the countryside at 180+, and, more or less, just taking in the view.

The French countryside looks likes something from a world War I movie set. 90% farmers’ fields about an acre in area, boarded by hedgerows or low rock walls, Every so often there’s a little village made up of two and three story buildings made of stone. It looks like the sort of place where you could hastily land the Neuport after that Hun got off a luck shot from his tri-plane and holed your crank case.

Every so often you’ll go through a bigger town or city.

On our way south we passed through Avignon. It sits astride a river, thoroughly modern and up to date in the downtown area, but up on the hill there’s a castle and a cathedral and all that. When I saw the cathedral is gave me the chills. For a while, there were two Popes, and one of them was based out of that building. He came up with all sorts of nifty ideas on how to make the world a better place (once he wrested control from the other Pope). Ideas like The Inquisition. You had best be towing the party line if you were hanging around Avingon a thousand years ago, or you would have come to a very sticky end.

So, we were somewhere beyond Avignon, just outside of Marseille completing the first part of our journey, when all this wonderful, high speed technology of the TGV goes CLANK!!!

We weren’t going all that fast, but the long and the short of it was that the train slowed to a stop.

We sit there, silently for a few minutes. Everyone is doing what they would have been doing had the TGV been in motion, no one seems all that upset.

Then there is a distant, far off banging and clanking and clattering and hammering.

The PA crackles to life, and a voice says, “nous sommes désolés qu’il semble y a un défaut de fonctionnement avec le système d’entraînement si vous nous donnez un certain temps pour le fixer que nous sommes sûrs que les choses seront meilleures ont en attendant encore plus de vin et le fromage tout est normal tout est bon ne laissent nous seul aucun vraiment filon-couche de chose soit bon il est probablement quelque chose avec les enroulements d’entraînement des roues et ces rats arrières au dépôt de réparation dans le shold de Paris ont pris à soin de ceci, garçon, nous les fixera sure.”

The guy sitting across from us, that looks like either a Proust scholar or a shoe repairman, translates, without the slightest inflection or emotion “They don’t know what the problem is.”

So we sit there for another five minutes or so, and in the far background there’s this banging and clanking and clattering and hammering.

Then the PA comes on again, and this French voice says, “Désolé, mais lui semble comme là pourrait être quelque chose vers le haut avec du fromage distribuent sur la pièce avant de la voiture du numéro deux et elle effectue défavorablement le rendement du panneau de commande électrique qui vraiment devrait avoir été fixé par ces singes en arrière à Paris, mais du moins dit au sujet de ces types le meilleur. Quoi qu’il en soit, nous espérons avoir tout mis dans son endroit légitime, et, Dieu voulant, nous serons sur notre chemin dès que sera humainement possible. Ainsi nous vous remercions de votre patience.”

And the guy across from us translates, without the slightest inflection or emotion “They don’t know what the problem is.”

More bangingthumpinghosingpoundingclanking, and then a really frustrated voice gets on the PA and says, “C’est tout le défaut de ces imbeciles arrières au dépôt à Paris. S’il y avait n’importe quelle justice dans notre république, ils pendraient tout des arbres à ce moment même. Pourquoi nous même devons accepter ceci pendant que les professionnels de chemin de fer est au delà de moi, mais là de vous ayez-le. Ainsi nous presserons “MARCHE” et nous obtiendrons le problème résolu dans aucun ordre court, puisque nous l’avons maintenant tracé vers le bas à un défaut dans la transmission magnétique pour rouler le numéro soixante-douze ou au fait que le singe de conducteur auxiliaire est devenu lâche et a arraché les boulons retenants avec ses mains nues.”

And the guy across from us translates, without the slightest inflection or emotion “They don’t know what the pro-“clang-THUMP!!!

And the TGV starts to move, slowly, ever so slowly, down the track on the way to Marseille. We get up to a speed of what seems like maybe 30 MPH, and hold that speed for about 10 minutes until we coast into the Gare de Marseille (that would be the Marseille train station).

By now though, we are horribly late to catch our connecting train on to our final destination.

We pull into the station just in the nick of time. Uniformed TGV personal stand on the platform yelling “Go-go-go!!” urging us forward so the train can leave, and we all, en masse, run out and into the parking lot.

My wife and I realize this is not where the connecting train to Frejus will be boarding, hang a quick 180, book back into the Gare, run the in opposite direction from where uniformed TGV personal are still standing on the platform yelling “Go-go-go!!” urging people forward, just in time to see our connecting TGV silently, powerfully, pulling away from the station without us on board.

By now we had been on the road for 36 straight, sleepless hours (two plane flights and one, almost complete TGV run) and were facing the possibility of having to spend the night in Marseille (look up the history of crime in Marseille, and you’ll see why this was not the best of possibilities).

I don’t speak French, but my wife does, and she did, in great quantity, to the uniformed TGV personal still standing happily on the platform, thinking they had done a great job.

A few phone calls and an hour-long wait in the parking lot (I won’t go into the rats that were eyeing me and my luggage like I was dinner) resulted in Peter, my father-in-law, showing up to drive us the last bit of our journey.

So OK, they kind of screwed up there at the end … but other than that it was a great way to travel. And the two other times we used the TGV, a non-stop blast back to Paris, and a run from Bordeax back to Paris as well, it was as flawless as could be; wine, Choke The Misters, met an actor, saw some great scenery, all that kind of stuff.

Like I said, the next time you run into a politician, ask them “Hey, why don’t we have a train system that’s as good as the French have?”

Maybe sometime this country will get its act together …

*
Note: As it turns out, the name of the sandwich does not translate as Choke The Mister, it actually means Crispy Mister (which is even funnier). My wife, who speaks French, got it wrong while we were on the train, and only realized it when she was looking up the recipe on Wikipedia. So, indeed, it is Crispy Mister.

Related posts:

1. What I Did On My Summer Vacation 2008 Part Six
2. What I Did On My Summer Vacation 2008 – Part Deux
3. What I Did On My Summer Vacation – 2008 Part Quatre

A town with 50,000 people, two traffic lights and seemingly 45 roundabouts
Getting from here to there on Roman roads … tailgating as a foreign concept … The yield sign, properly used … bad karma with a scooter …

The first part of the trip was actually spent in the south of France, in this little town called Frejus (which is a French interpretation of the town’s original Roman name, Forum Julii, go figure).

It was a nice little resort-like town that was located between more famous places like Nice & Cannes. A thousand years ago, it had everything a Roman could want: an aqueduct for water, a coliseum for entertainment and a forum, for business.

Now, a thousand years later, there’s a French town imprinted on the top of all this, and streets that were designed and built to handle oxcarts and horses now have to handle modern cars and trucks and buses driven by Frenchmen and tourists.

One of the ways they handle this was particularly impressive: there were only two traffic lights.

Think about that for a bit. A town of 50,000 people, and not without considerable traffic at times, and they don’t have more than two traffic lights.

The answer? Roundabouts.

I’ve always enjoyed roundabouts, since they’re sort of like public skidpads, but a lot of Americans look at them with a certain amount of fear. There’s something about being “stuck” in the inner lane forever that freaks some people out … I’ve also noticed these are the same people that have trouble with yield signs and merging onto freeways.

Anyway, that’s Frejus’ answer to traffic: Roundabouts.

They’re all over the place. Small, single lane ones about the size of a normal intersection up to big, boulevard-accommodating designs that are 3 or 4 lanes wide.

So getting from one part of town to another is really a pretty quick deal, since traffic is always flowing. You might have to slow down and yield to get onto a roundabout (they have the right-of-way, you do not), but you rarely have to come to a complete stop.

Another thing that I noticed in their driving behavior: tailgating is an alien concept.

Regardless of speed, it seems like it’s an unwritten requirement that you set 18 inches off of the bumper of the car in front of you. So, you see packs of Renaults and Peugeots and Fiats easing up to rotaries at 30 MPH, blending in, then each of them peeling off to go on their own way. Sometimes you’ll see the same pack of 4 or 5 or 6 cars merge onto a freeway, and stay bunched up as they drive off into the distance.

I have no idea what drives this behavior, but it’s fairly obvious that each driver is paying attention, and they’re not doing this out of absentmindedness.

It’s also pretty damn clear that they’re paying attention to not just what the road signs say, but how the roads are best used (a novel and alien concept for Americans).

Take that whole roundabout deal I mentioned before. Say you’re approaching a two-lane roundabout with both lanes occupied, and you’re facing a yield sign, what do you do?

If you’re a doofus, you stop and wait for a gap … if you’re an average French driver, you do just what the sign says, you slow down and then you blend into the flow of traffic. That way the people on the roundabout can get on with their business, and you don’t bunch up people behind you (which is a bad mistake, and they’ll let you know it), and everyone gets down the road quickly and efficiently.

That yield sign business also works at normal intersections … and also at crosswalks. They always, always, yield to pedestrians. And crosswalks are not right at the corners in intersections, but set about one car-length back; so when you are driving, and you go through an intersection, you have got to pay attention until you are way clear.

It is, however, not a perfect system, since imperfect people have to use it.

One time we were going form here to there, and we come up to this roundabout. As we approach, there are two French kids on a scooter already on the roundabout (about 40% of the vehicles are scooters). They are in the inside of the two lanes. We pull up to the yield sign and start to merge in, just as the scooter pulls from the inside lane to the outside lane, without signaling.

This is a huge mistake on their part, even though they do have the right of way, and Renee (who was driving, and should have noticed) continues on into the roundabout. Now there’s a scooter a foot from the right front corner. The rider guns the engine (as much as you can with one of those things) and now he hits his turn signal. The passenger on the back starts gesticulating with one free hand and kicking at our car with his right foot, talking loudly in French. 35 feet after we entered there is another road, which the scooter, with gesticulating passenger still on the back, takes, and they ride off into the sunset, a tragedy narrowly averted (although Renee seems blissfully unaware of the whole proceedings).

It’s tempting to want to apply this idea of less lights/more roundabouts to America, but I fear it would never work – or at least not initially. Maybe in 10 or 20 years, after numerous accidents, acrimony and bad car karma it would finally sink in and our traffic would flow better, but that 10 or 20 years would be terrible and we’d probably never make it past that.

Worth thinking about though…

Related posts:

1. What I Did On My Summer Vacation – 2008 Part Quatre
2. What I Did On My Summer Vacation 2008 Part Six
3. What I Did On My Summer Vacation 2008 – Part Trois

As potentially some of you might have noticed, I dropped off the scene and was replaced by a robot … had to get away, had a summer vacation to go on.

Where?

France … yeah, I know, odd choice, but there were a bunch of conspiring factors.

Why write about it here?

Filler … besides, there’s freaky car-related shit that happens in France.

Have you ever looked at the suspension of a Citroen DS?

Seriously, have you?

Anyway, I decided to write, as an adjunct, what I saw from a car guy’s perspective over there.

Come with me this way, to a land where most NASCAR fans would fear to tread: France.

There’s this rep that France has, or actually has had, for about the last 60 years, and some of it is true.

The girls are cute, the women are gorgeous and the men look like they’re a nanosecond away from either laughing or taking a knife to you or both.

It’s a society that seemingly exists on bread, cheese, ham, cologne ads, cigarettes, newspapers, and indignation delivered by “trucks” that look like something from Theodor Geisel’s last hit of blotter.

Paris is a city more than a thousand years old and is seven stories high.

It’s webbed with a network of “roads” that would make a German traffic safety engineer faint dead away and a London cabby ask for a map.

The roads come in two kinds:

Broad boulevards (in the strictest and most accurate meaning of that term) where you could fit 4 cars side-by-side in each direction, bordered by trees that have been there since they were used to hang some of the nobility in 1438; smooth, lined with raised cobblestone, a good sportscar could blast down these at incredible speeds … and they would, oh they surely would, because the French are stone speed freaks … but for the fact that for every long, broad, tree- and pretty girl-lined boulevard, there comes the second type of Parisian road.

This is a thing that is little wider than an alleyway, called something like the Rue de la Tombeau, and there are eleven Frenchmen hell-bent on getting there first, and you’ve got to go from something like flat out to on the brakes, and keep in mind that not all of the people vying for that piece of tarmac are in “cars”, oh no, it’s you versus (on average) two guys on BICYCLES, five guys on scooters (and these aren’t all little Vespas either), a BMW motorbike, at least three guys in hatchbacks, and a delivery truck loaded with either:
1. rocks,
2. sand,
3. bread,
4. Eau de Sauvage cologne posters or
5. gendarmerie riot cops.

Guess which one usually wins?

That’s right, velocity & tonnage.

Or one of the cyclists …

The things I saw people pull on the streets of Paris would give Nader an infarction.

There are all the things any “normal” American driver would expect to see on the road in their home town. There’re stripes and lanes and lights and crosswalks and OHMYGODLOOKOUTFORTHATDELIVERYGUY!!!

Your average American put down in this situation would crash within a block and a half.

Don’t talk on your cell phone.

Don’t argue with the kids in the back seat.

You better drive … you better pay Attention … if you don’t pay Attention, there will be Hell to pay.

ScreamingYellingHonkingGesticulatingHonkingWaving

Stuff that would get you thrown into an “anger management program” in the States is not only commonplace behavior (when things go wrong in traffic), it’s just the First Stage of what happens when things go wrong in traffic.

If you don’t heed the warnings of your fellow street users, (and remember, this includes everyone on the street at any one given time, not just cars, but people like little old ladies and even worse, tourists) their dire predictions will be followed by The Thump of you hitting something big and solid.

And it gets even worse.

You would tie up traffic.

And woe be unto you for doing something like that.

You know the first 25 minutes of Saving Private Ryan?

It’s like that, only with amazingly cheap and delicious breakfasts.

I once read of Phil Hill (America’s 1st World Driving Champion and multiple Le Mans 24 hour winner) using the term, back in 1964, of “worthless little French heap”.

I knew just what he meant then, and I knew just what he meant when I was standing on a street corner in Paris about 4 days ago.

The French made frighteningly tiny little cars that look like they were made from downspouts and rain gutters back in 1964, and two out of three of their cars still look like they do today.

At first glance, they look like death traps, little better than what Louis Blériot would fly around in. On second glance, you nod to yourself and say, “Jesus! These things are little better than what Louis Blériot would fly around in!”

Then you notice the neat use of crush space and the little signs on the dash and the seats and the A-pillar and the headliner saying AIRBAG.

It (the Bacchanalian use of airbags) must be the only thing that keeps these people from dying like the populace of, well, Paris during the plague years.

I’ve seen less risk-taking at the local go-kart track.

I’ve seen sturdier engineering in a kids’ couch-fort.

Yet these fools fly into alleyway-sized streets like Sebastian Loeb flying into a tunnel on The Col de Turini … hey, wait a minute … kind of explains Loeb, doesn’t it?

Anyway … yet these fools fly into alleyway-sized streets like Sebastian Loeb flying into a tunnel on The Col de Turini, seemingly blind to what’s on the wrong side of that “you’ve got a 99% chance of … “ statement that would be running through my head, and come out the other side unscathed and unruffled.

Slam on the brakes.

Squeeze it into a parking space the size of a shopping cart.

Get out.

“Bonjour!” to their girlfriend/boyfriend/co-worker/friend who is an artist/writer/painter/philosopher and always impeccably dressed.

Walk over to where they are sitting at the outdoor café waiting for them.

Get a café (did you know they have Starbucks in Paris? What the Hell’s the point of that?) from the amazingly efficient yet infuriating waiter and sit down and talk about what ever it was that was so damn important that they had to drive like a certifiable maniac, struggling to “beat” two guys on BICYCLES, five guys on scooters, a BMW motorbike, at least three guys in hatchbacks, and a delivery truck loaded with either:
1. rocks,
2. sand,
3. bread,
4. Eau de Sauvage cologne posters or
5. gendarmerie riot cops.

into a corner.

You’d think this would be it, the whole nut so to speak, but this is just what occurred to me on the 5 kilometer taxi ride from the TGV station to the hotel.

So I got a lot more to say.

You just wait until I get into things like: A town with 50,000 people, two traffic lights and seemingly 45 roundabouts, The power and the glory that is the TGV … especially when it utterly fails, Scooters In Paris, Your Average French Car, The Smart Car In The Wild, MiniVans of France, On The Road to Royan, and The day I saw a Corvair Greenbriar van in Royan, by the beach with the German gun emplacements.

Related posts:

1. What I Did On My Summer Vacation 2008 Part Six
2. What I Did On My Summer Vacation 2008 – Part Deux
3. What I Did On My Summer Vacation 2008 – Part Trois