Recapping the best (and worst) of 2015
The Miata and Titan XD fall in the first category
Bi l l Murray once described Christmas as the one time of the year when we all act a little nicer, smile a little easier and cheer a little more. “For a few hours,” said the great sage ( and, for my money, this is still the best description of Christmas spirit of all time), “we are the people we always hoped we would be.”
For a paid cynic, though, this yuletide bonhomie can be a little hard to take, what with all those trespasses forgiven threatening one’s natural sense of dread and the certainty of a doomed future. And what good is a worldweary sense of foreboding in the face of Murray’s “miracle of giving?”
Thank the Lord, then, that the automotive industry always manages to provide the fodder a professional pes-
simist needs to play Scrooge. So with scalpel in hand and prophecies of doom, er, yearend awards to be handed out, here is my take on the good, the bad and the oh-so-corrupt of 2015. The Christie Brinkley “Yes, I am 61 years old” Award for Long-Term Sex Appeal goes to Mazda’s evergreen MX- 5 Miata. Understand that the MX- 5 Miata has sold more than a million copies since 1989, ubiquity usually doing to automotive sexiness what age wreaks on the human form. Yet despite the prospect that we’ll see the little runabout at every street corner, we can’t help but whistle every time we see one.
The back looks a little BMW Z3- ish, the side like a baby Chevy Corvette and its front haunches would do a resurrected Ferrari Dino proud. Indeed, the highest compliment I can pay Mazda’s design team is that the MX- 5 looks more “Italian” — that’s the stereotype for stylish — than the Fiat 124 Spider that is its mechanical clone. The Adele Award for ( Semi) Unlikely Comebacks goes to the Nissan Titan XD. Now that Adele’s 25 is shattering records, it’s easy to be an I-told-you-so forever fan. The truth is, the music industry is a graveyard littered with once- exalted artists who faded, never recovering from a “temporary” creative drought. Likewise, t he automotive industry is similarly replete with the carcasses of Japanese pickups promising to break the Big Three’s stranglehold on the hugely profitable lightpickup segment.
The Titan XD may just succeed. Rather than stick to the traditional segments favoured by the Chevrolet Silverado, GMC Sierra, Ford F-150 and the Ram 1500, Nissan is positioning the XD between the 1500 and 2500 designations, offering almost all of the easy use of the former with most of the workhorse abilities of the latter. The crowning touch is the honking Cummins 5.0-litre turbodiesel V8 jammed under the hood. Equal parts torquey performance — 555 poundfeet at 1,600 rpm — and trucker machismo, the big oil burner marks the first time Japan has a no- excuses truck. Look for the Titan XD to be the 2016 North American Truck of the Year. The Donald Trump Award for Inexplicable Trends goes to Uber. I don’t think I need to explain the Donald Trump part of this award, but Uber? The tech story of the year? What possibly needs explaining about a taxi service that is convenient, inexpensive( except when prices are “surging”) and democratic ( though some would label its lack of driver vetting anarchic)?
All well and truly laudable, but the part I am failing to grasp has nothing to do with its service and everything to do with its drivers who, if Uber’s chief executive, Travis Kalanick, is to be believed, will soon be extinct. Indeed, Uber has made no bones that it wants to eliminate the hu-
man element — that would be the drivers — to further boost the bottom line.
To that end, Uber has raided Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Engineering Center of most of its engineers and software developers in its headlong rush to driverless taxis. Still, the faithful sign up and we wonder why lemmings jump off cliffs. The Richard M. Nixon Award for Corruption to the Core must goto Volkswagen and i ts partner in crime, the European Commission. Indeed, there’s so much malfeasance and obstruction to be had in Dieselgate that it’s hard to know whom to condemn. We all know by now that Volkswagen cheated on its diesel emissions strategy, but did you know the plan was hatched as far back as 2005? Or that the European Commission’s test procedures legalize outright cheating by testing cars on downhill tracks or prying apart brake pads to reduce friction, to name a few measures? And how about this: the fix for all those NOx-spewing Golfs and Jettas — at least in Europe — is a software rejig and a cheap piece of plastic that looks like a cheese grater.
Seriously, Volkswagen. You’ve filthied our atmosphere for the past seven years, destroyed the reputation of diesels for evermore and scuttled your brand on a sandbar of hubris and greed. And all this time, the solution was a plastic thingamabob that looks like it cost about a buck to manufacture? Like Tricky Dick, I don’t know whether to castigate you for corruption or slam you for stupidity. The Caitlyn J enner Award for Graceful Transformation goes to Jaguar. I never had much use for Bruce Jenner and his blithely naked avarice, long ago tarnishing Olympic triumph. But what dignity he lacked as a man, Caitlyn has seemingly regained as woman.
In a similarly startling transition, until 18 months ago, Jaguar was the lost old man of the luxury set, soldiering on with the lovely but creaky XK as an aging hipster, a flawed and pre- AWD XJ and the slightly moribund XF. The first sign of life was the addition of “intelligent” AWD to the XJ and its subsequent inclusion on Jag’s other models, while the F-Type has been a phenomenal success and the XE is looking like the company’s first bona- fide BMW 3 Series rival.
Not only that, Jaguar has just announced its own range of Ingenium diesel motors, but most importantly, the FPace — the SUV the pundits predicted Jaguar would never make because of concern about cannibalizing Land Rover sales — will soon boost sales even more. It’s a stunner and I predict sales records. Jaguar’s future has never looked brighter.