Grant

Hey Winston Welcome aboard. About time you joined. We need more highly successful young guys like you. I'm always amazed by the number of awesome (and not so awesome) cars you have owned. If I hadn't seen a few of them myself, I'd call bullshit. Anyway, look forward to your input.

On a semi-related note, I found it interesting that one of the news websites here ran an article on what the main high profile candidates in the recent mid-term elections here drove (as their personal cars).Most of them during the campaign effort drove US cars. However, the article also pointed out what these candidates had driven prior to the campaign effort, and many of them had switched to US cars from other, mainly European, brands.

http://www.crookedbrains.net/2008/01/offic...state-cars.html I have no idea how out of date or accurate it is, but it was interesting and along the lines what what I would have suspected. Edit: Found this too http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Official_state_car

That I will offer an opinion on, and that opinion is that I couldn't agree more!

This thread is awesome. Also, I don't feel entitled to have an opinion on this. I didn't bother to vote in the last election (even though I could have from afar).

I'd go a SAAB 93 vert

I agree with this, and like this point of view.

Or is it that Southerners are a little thin skinned, and easily wound up?(by the way, this is a wind up, nothing more)

You can get rather defensive can't you.

I'm keen to hear Winston's thoughts on this.

I just put anything like this down to the fact that Top Gear doesn't let the truth get in the way of good entertainment.

I just finished watching it. It was very amusing!

As I said earlier, www.finalgear.com

Yes, finalgear.com

It's not the BMWs I want to see pics of. I want pics of cars that are a bit rarer here.

Looks great!

How about less banter and more photos for those of us a few 1000 miles away.

Yup, that was doing the rounds here a couple of weeks ago too. It is pretty damned funny.

Agreed!

What did you expect? A Getz is the absolute base model if I am not mistaken. Hardly the model to base an assessment of a whole brand on!

Geely are not available here, and from what I understand they have a way to go to meet the very strict emmissions standards set here. However, cars manufactured by BYD (http://www.byd.com/) will be available here soon. They will most likely slip into the price point/quality level that used to be held by the likes of Kia and Hyundai. Also, for those people who still think that Hyundai and Kia are a couple of rungs lower on the quality scale than Toyota, you are smoking crack. In fact I would even say that the build quality of the higher end Hyundai's match those of the silimar spec "high end" Euro's. I have been in a new Hyundai Genesis Sedan, and it was a very nice car to be in, equal to, if not better than a new 5 series BMW. Not to mention the warranty on a Hyundai is far better.

The VW Passat ad has been thrashed to death over the last week, with the kid that played Darth Vader plastered all over TV for the last few days. This was my favourite ad from the Super Bowl. I'm not a Chrysler fan, have never been to Detroit, or am not a huge Eminem fan (although I do think he is a very very good artist), but I thought that this was as good as commercial making gets. The Super Bowl was commercials were dominated by car manufacturers. The industry has really turned around here, and dealers that were shuttered two years ago, are all reopening, and Ford are operating plants 24 hours a day to keep up with demand.

I think that Honda make some terrific cars, that are both great fun to drive and very performance orientated.Look no further than the two cars that Apex posted, not to mention any proper Type R variant etc.

+1

Okay.. Each to their own opinions I guess. However, I do find it strange that a huge number of people, that I'm sure are also a lot more intelligent than you are backing both PHEV and EV's. Surely they wouldn't waste their money on a gimmick. I also find it strange that most of the large manufacturers are now either selling, or are on the verge of releasing both PHEV and EVs. Surely, they wouldn't want to waste their money on a gimmick. You do also realize that both battery technology and the efficiency of them is improving at an exponential rate don't you? I think that you have the same opinion as those who 100 years ago or so, when sitting behind their horse and cart had when they saw the first car with an internal combustion engine drive past. "Just a gimmick, it will never catch on, the future is a steam powered engine" Also, I'm pretty sure it isn't/wasn't moisture in the headlights. I did spend quite a bit of time looking over the car, as I had not seen one before and was very intrigued. I think I would have noticed moisture in the headlights. If you want to believe that it is based on the evidence of a highly scaled down photo taken with a cellphone camera, then go for your life. As you were.