The Greatest Automobile Relocation Possibilities

When Bob Lutz, GM’s chairman of North American Operations, held a "sketch-off" for a Pontiac concept vehicle, he said, "Keep it simple, pure, and beautiful and it will be easy to love." That call went out at the end of September and by mid-October, the Pontiac Solstice roadster was under development. The program—from the first sketch to the drivable vehicle—was executed in just under four months. The rear-wheel-drive roadster is powered by a 2.2-liter DOHC supercharged EcoTec four-cylinder engine generating up to 240 horsepower. The engine is mated to a Borg-Warner six-speed manual transmission, the same one used in the Corvette. The Solstice’s basic structure started life as a derivative of GM’s global small car architecture, with several mods for structure and balance. The rack-and-pinion steering system was derived from the Subaru WRX, while the all-aluminum independent rear suspension was derived from GM’s midsize crossover SUV family. Finished in a rich gunmetal gray, Solstice features 19-inch front and 20-inch rear wheels, a manual fold-down top that stows underneath the speedster-style hard cover, and saddle-brown Fragola leather seating surfaces.

Article source: http://www.caranddriver.com/content/view/full/200246

There’s a large touch-screen computer console in the middle of the Flex’s dash. This will do anything from providing map directions to filing your federal income taxes. Or so we think. Our Flex came with lots of extras but no owner’s manual. It hadn’t been published yet. As a writer, I can understand how it takes time to craft that special style of car-manual prose and then send it to Mumbai and have it translated into Hindi by one class of sixth graders and translated back into English by another. But this meant that the extras on our Flex were mostly extra confusing. Figuring out trip mileage required more time at the computer than an average college freshman puts into her Facebook page during an entire school year.

When you shift into reverse, the computer turns into a TV with a minicam in the tailgate, at the perfect level to play chicken with your spouse’s knees while he’s marshaling the luggage. (Note to wife: Am I overinsured?) The camera is also useful for parallel parking, to the extent that anyone attempts to parallel park things the size of a Flex. I know I can’t do it. I always wind up with the right-rear bumper in a sidewalk caf’s chair and the left-front fender blocking a lane of traffic.

Anyway, a careful driver never backs into what’s behind him. He sideswipes what’s next to him, such as the fire hydrant he forgot about because he was busy carefully backing up.

The Flex will be criticized by Al Gore and that ilk as being too big. But that ilk’s kids are grown and can squeeze into their own weenie hybrids. We have to take our offspring with us, plus, more often than not, our three dogs. In point of fact, the Flex is too small. Thanks to the third-row split, we could fit in a week’s worth of shorts, T-shirts, and flip-flops for five. But it was a game of inches. The nicely wide and unobstructed load floor behind the Flex’s last row of seats needs to be enough deeper to let two average-size roller bags lie down. That way we could have eaten in restaurants other than the kind with signs saying, “No Shirt, No Shoes, No Sweat—Drinks Half-Price for Shirtless Ladies.”

The Flex was handy in traffic, nimble on the highway, and immune to crosswind effects despite having the shape of the box it came in. The braking was adequate for the kind of driving that’s done with your complete chromosomal heritage to civilization in the back. However, the above assessments should be understood as relative. We are a truck/tractor/wheels-with-locking-hubs family, inured to the shortcomings of lumpy machinery. We have not one but two Chevrolet Suburbans (and a close personal relationship with the Saudi royal family). My daily driver is a beat-down 1999 model with an odometer that looks like an Obama online fundraising figure. If I wanted to make any sudden stops in this, I’d have to get a boat anchor, bolt its chain to the frame, and throw the anchor out the window every time I hit the brakes.

Article source: http://www.caranddriver.com/features/08q4/2009_ford_flex_the_o_rourkes_do_utah_s_lower_left-feature/features_and_driving_impressions_page_3