NY Show: Someone Call 911!
New York's auto show brings up the rear, and we're not just talking the saucy way it teases us in cutoff shorts. It's the final biggie of the American auto show season, and as such it often becomes the clearinghouse for all the concepts and production vehicles the automakers couldn't jam into previous shows. This year, that posed more of a problem than usual; so many major new cars and trucks came out, at least one journalist had to be carted away for emergency medical treatment. Luckily his resident voodoo priest was on call.
While the big American companies were on call too with hugely important new vehicles-like the 2005 Grand Cherokee, Caddy STS and Land Rover LR3-the import makes brought some equally impressive iron. Last month we showed you a Lexus IS with V8 power, and in New York, Lexus showed us a new concept that no doubt plays a role in the next IS line. A totally new Acura RL popped up on the radar, and an SE-R version of the Altima broke cover, too, along with a brace of wagons from Korea.So you missed the bagels, the big lights and the hourly injections of Demerol, at least you've got our wrapup of New York's greatest hits right here.
The Ultimate Gaming Vehicle?When you need to take a long road trip-anything from cross-country John Madden slogs to crosstown trips to the bail bondsman-you probably need to be entertained. Otherwise you spend all the time pushing every frickin' button in the back seat like a child. It's like we've been there! But maybe there's a solution for your childlike behavior: games. Between them, Infiniti, EA Sports, CEC and Alpine Electronics have teamed up to create what could be the finest gaming machine capable of highway speeds ever. The Ultimate Gaming Vehicle can not only carouse off-road like a drunken beaver and speed on the tarmac like it's being chased down by the LAPD, it can do so while two guys go head to head on the video console in back.
The whole back seat, in fact, has been turned into one massive gaming room in this one-off concept. Front and center there is a 37-inch flat screen TV that still leaves behind enough room for the vehicle to house a 340-lb NFL player or a 6'10" NBA hoops star, according to the constructors. The rest of the utopian surroundings including an Alpine 1360-watt AM/FM/CD/MP3 tuner with DVD video player, CD changer, and XM Satellite Radio, with the sound pumped out through a 20-speaker 5.1 Dolby Digital/DTS sound system. It's enough to make your heart stop, or at least pound out a few extra beats. As for styling, the Ultimate Gaming vehicle wears 23-inch Antera Type 325 chromed wheels wearing 305/40-series tires, atop eight-piston Bremos. The co-conspirators say they'll foist this ungodly creation on VIPs, sports stars and other notaries so they can arrive at public events in style. We say bring it over to our office; we're tired of playing Donkey Kong in the back seat of our editor's Excel.
In Other Words
-A new study by Ford Motor Company has found that drowsy drivers could contribute to as much as 1.5 percent of all crashes on the nation's roads-or about 100,000 each year. The company, which cites statistics from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), says its findings from a new VIRTTEX driving simulator indicate that the effects of drowsy driving can be markedly different in age groups and genders: young men are the most vulnerable to drowsy-driving accidents, Ford finds, while middle-age women had the fewest episodes of sleeping behind the wheel. Ford is using its data to develop a lane-departure warning system for its vehicles including its Volvo lineup in the coming years; Nissan's Infiniti brand says it will be the first to introduce such a system to U.S.-sold vehicles.