Absolutely. I really don't care that they don't like testing econo-boxes, but for Yates to outwardly flame hybrids/alternative fuel vehicles for kicks in his editorials is a bit much. He also just loves predicting the demise and fad nature of non IC cars. Frankly, I wouldn't want to test my car either, it is a commuter after all, and falls at the bottom of the "fun to drive" list of any vehicle I've ever owned except for maybe that Ford Fiesta. (I don't think I've had the tach up past 4000 rpm in the 19,000 I've owned it)

 

Yates definitely has annoyed me for years, the rest of the writers are actually rational though, so I try not to hold Yates against the magazine.

It does always crack me up when Yates rants on about how the answer to the nations traffic issues are simply more highways.......

 

Brock Yates seems to write about 4 articles. He just writes them a little differently each time so it doesn't seem too obvious to everyone that he hasn't got anything new to say. They seem to be:

1) How Brock Yates will fix the Indy 500 by making IndyCars front engined and with little or no downforce
2) How Brock Yates will fix traffic by raising the highway speed limit to 200mph and making all roads 10 lanes wide
3) How Brock Yates owns such a badass classic racecar, wrote books about Ferrari, loves his truck, or other meaningless stuff about his personal life
4) Why XYZ technology is lame and a fad and should be banished from the industry.

 

The answer to the nation's traffic issue is more highways... about 20 years ago. In Southern California, everything is urban sprawl, good public transportation is effectively impossible. Also, everyone knew twenty years ago that populatio would go up, yet they did nothing to build more highways-- the politicians just raided the gasoline taxes and other funds to use them on general political programs rather than actually building roads. The current highways in the LA area are flooded with people. Had there been about two lanes added to each side of the major LA freeways, millions of peopel would be cruising to work at closer to a steady 60+ mph instead of stop-and-go 20-25mph. The amount of gas, not to mention time, that would be saved by that change would be absolutely staggering.

 

I think they just reflect what's important to consumers. When gas was cheap, performance and luxury were the primary benchmarks. They're carrying this old mindset into a new era, where gas is not cheap and economy/conservation are gaining momentum. I think they are changing - at least they are admitting they drive the wheels off of them and that's why they get bad mileage. For a while (2003) they'd just report bad mileage and blame the car or cook up some wild story about falsified mileage reports.

 

I live in LA and drive one of the major freeways, the 405, to work every day.

Traffic is so bad that for the last 20 years I have gotten up at 4 AM every morning to get to work before the traffic slows down.
I have to get onto the freeway by 5:30.

I get off work at 3:00 PM.
By then traffic has already slowed down considerably.
It is supposed to get worse.

There is no open land left to develop but they are tearing down single houses and putting up condo buildings with several units, with underground parking.
I seriously doubt they will ever improve the freeways here.
Land is just too expensive.

Sorry for the ranting hijack.
I must be crazy to live here.

 

I'm too busy right now to search through their online archives, but Yates' articles typically talk about the "vanishing highways", which is to say the slightly lower number of linear miles of interstate highways in the USA over the last 20 or 30 years. Last time I hit the road, the highways have been just fine. It's the freeways and surface streets that have the most problems.

That doesn't really calculate in to just looking at miles of highway laid out in the great open spaces of the country. As long as there's not a wreck, 4 lane divided highways have always seemed to work pretty well out west. In developed areas, obviously you need higher capacity. Also the last time I read one of his articles on the topic, it was hung up on sheer linear miles of highway, not lane-miles. A lot of the old interstates were only 2-lane roads, whereas now 4 lane divided and even 6 lane in built up areas is far more common. I'd bet we have a lot more lane-miles of highway now than 30 years ago.

 

Or we could have actually controlled the growth with good urban planning...... but that is another discussion for another time.

 

Maybe I'm reading the wrong magazine, but didn't C&D just rate the 06 Honda Civic, car of the year (Jan. 06 Issue)? This included the Si, and Hybrid?

 

Car and Driver doesn't have a car of the year, Motortrend does. Car and Driver has their "10Best" list of the 10 best cars. My issue still hasn't arrived so I can't tell you if the Civic made 10Best or not.