Hyperleggera

2008 Saab Turbo X

The Age of the Automobile

Words and pic­tures: Peter Orosz

Now that The New York Times has decided to use 96-point type on its cover yet again, it’s about time to con­sider another event which may not be encap­su­lated in a single head­line but which is of sim­i­lar sig­nif­i­cance. The auto­mo­bile, apart from com­put­ers and air­planes the single most defin­ing machine of our times, is in its great­est moral crisis yet with no obvi­ous way out.

Take the Saab Turbo X. It is a lim­ited edi­tion of two thou­sand copies based on the third gen­er­a­tion 9-3, with a 280-horsepower tur­bocharged V6, a pres­sure gauge rem­i­nis­cent of the one on the 900 Turbo and twin exhaust pipes which emit a merry oil drum of a noise.

It also has body­work which trig­gers a Darth Vader reflex in anyone who’s been exposed to even the most minis­cule bit of West­ern cul­ture over the past 30 years.

Beneath its veneer of cool, it is also highly symp­to­matic of the decline. It is man­u­fac­tured by a com­pany whose orig­i­nal line of busi­ness was air­craft and which has pro­duced a number of remark­able if weird cars in its early decades, sold by a sales force that included Kurt Von­negut. This com­pany is now owned by an Amer­i­can com­pany whose assets are evap­o­rat­ing like ether, whose prod­uct lineup con­sists of one inter­est­ing car and a boat­load of out­dated dreck and whose busi­ness model would be right at home in Soviet Russia. The car itself is based on an Opel Vectra, which is only slightly less boring than a Volk­swa­gen Bora.

A futile amal­gam of the 900 Turbo and a Star Wars DVD set.

If we look past the Turbo X at all the funky dory rides we get these days from car com­pa­nies, we end up with a remark­able list here: they are all forty years old. You have your Mini, your Cinque­cento, your Mus­tang, your Chal­lenger, your Camaro and even Lam­borgh­ini has com­mis­sioned a redone Miura which is an affront to any eye ever exposed to Gandini’s original.

Of course they all look awe­some! They are focus grouped and engi­neered to do just that. It works won­der­fully. When nobody’s look­ing, I look at pic­tures of the Fiat 500 Abarth SS and think of climb­ing aboard in a fitted shirt with cuf­flinks the shape of its lovely, men­ac­ing wheels. And try not to think of what Carlo Abarth would say of a tur­bocharged car sport­ing his last name, a sort of engine right at home in a Fer­rari F40 or a Nissan GT–R but which has no place what­so­ever in an Abarth.

Every single one of these cars lacks the pur­pose which defined the orig­i­nal. The Mini was an exer­cise of sit­ting four people in a box only slightly bigger than the ones used by Kellogg’s to store break­fast cereal. The new one does noth­ing of the sort. It is three times the size and in Cooper S trim will prob­a­bly out-​accelerate a Day­tona, but really, what is the point? What is the point of a Miura with twenty inch wheels?

What is the point of a Ford Mus­tang that still has a live rear axle in the year 2008? The point of a Dodge Chal­lenger that does not devi­ate a mil­lime­ter from the look of the orig­i­nal. Yes, it is awe­some to con­sider owning a Bul­litt Mus­tang after watch­ing Steve McQueen being super cool on screen, but with­out pur­pose, a machine loses its point.

Forty years on, will anyone be inspired by the muck we pro­duce? Or will they just make copies of copies?

The auto­mo­bile reached its cul­tural zenith in the late Fifties and blos­somed into mag­nif­i­cence in the Six­ties. Space rock­ets, microchips and LSD were accom­pa­nied by the Fer­rari 250 GTO, the Mini, the Fiat 500 and the Ford Mus­tang, along with every muscle car that mat­tered. Add the Maserati Ghibli and the Lam­borgh­ini Miura, which was fol­lowed by another sort of LSD on the Countach.

The auto­mo­bile blasted into adult­hood with the power of a thou­sand F-1 rocket engines, it came of age, as a machine sin­gu­larly dif­fer­ent from all the machines which had pre­ceded it. It was no longer a horse­less car­riage, easily derived from ear­lier modes of trans­port: the car had branched off to become a new king­dom on the phy­lo­genic tree of trans­port. A Miura is a dif­fer­ent qual­ity, it stands fully formed, sprung forth like Pallas from the fore­head of Zeus, a mes­sen­ger of an age where things happen fast, and so is the Fiat 500.

The auto­mo­bile was as nat­ural an expres­sion of the age of tech­nol­ogy as the alba­tross is of the South­ern Ocean.

No longer, and this is not an acci­dent. There was a scarcity to auto­mo­biles back then, ample road space to rev your engine to its limits. As humans migrate into cities and as cars become ever cheaper to man­u­fac­ture, they will con­tin­u­ally edge toward the precipice of point­less­ness. I live in a city of two mil­lion, insignif­i­cant by world stan­dards, and my mobil­ity would not increase by a single notch if I were to buy a car. They just take up too much damn space.

That is, when every­body has got one and they clog the very streets they ride on.

And what exactly is the point of com­mand­ing a ton or two of metal, plas­tics and rubber just to translo­cate my own ass when said translo­ca­tion does not involve cross­ing continents?

When the car is obvi­ously point­less yet is with­out an obvi­ous suc­ces­sor, the way out for an indus­try still employ­ing mil­lions is to cover its eyes and charge full speed ahead. To pro­duce ersatz Six­ties cars for both the masses and the rich, devoid of their orig­i­nal mean­ing. To make seven hun­dred horse­power the new six hun­dred the new five hun­dred and run laps on a cir­cuit whose last rel­e­vant years were in the Six­ties. To pro­duce gim­micky con­cept cars for every fuck­ing auto show, none of which will ever set rubber on public road.

There would be a way to end this in a styl­ish manner. Let Gen­eral Motors intro­duce the 2003 Cadil­lac Six­teen as a pro­duc­tion car at the Waldorf-​Astoria on Jan­u­ary 4^th, 2009, price it into the stratos­phere, then follow it up by a glo­ri­ous Fight Club-​style con­trolled explo­sion of the Renais­sance Center, com­plete with a humongu­ous dick on screen. The alter­na­tive would be to figure out how to let bil­lions of people in high-​density cities move about at speed and in rel­a­tive comfort.

Vespas and scram­jets may not be the answer.

The car indus­try has become a deeply unin­ter­est­ing, morally bank­rupt con­struc­tion which does not stim­u­late and which has detached itself from the phi­los­o­phy of Vor­sprung. We need a leap way bolder than stick­ing laptop bat­ter­ies in Elises. We need the per­sonal mobil­ity equiv­a­lent of the iPhone. You will know it when you see it. You will want to work very hard to be able to own it. And owning it will make you happy.

And you will also want to take it apart to make it go faster.

Spe­cial thanks to Anna for the Saab and Nat for posing as Darth Vader.

Published on Friday, November 14th, 2008 | 6 comments

2007 BMW 335i Coupé

In the Name of Science, Seven Thousand RPM

Words: Peter Orosz | Pic­tures: Gergely “AlieN” Antal

It is when you approach six thou­sand RPM that the quick­sil­ver rasp envelop­ing the tight cabin takes on the urgent menace of some­thing not quite meant for public roads. As the tach shoots for seven thou­sand, your mus­cles tighten for the robo­t­ized upshift, chief amongst them the ten­sors tym­pani in your middle ears.

Their func­tion is to pull on the malleus, the largest of the ossi­cles in the middle ear. The malleus in turn tenses the tym­panic mem­brane, pro­tect­ing the audi­tory system from extreme ampli­tudes of noise. Which is exactly what BMW’s N54 engine pro­duces in copi­ous amounts at high revs.

The exam­ple at hand powers a 335i coupé and we are on a mostly deserted strecth of black­top, making speed runs for science.

Clenched in my white-​gray fin­gers is an iPhone 3G and I am about to have a 180-pound hair­less monkey land on my sternum.

I have never before sat in the 335i, a car con­sid­ered by many to be on par with the E46 M3, which makes the great­est noise this side of Emilia-​Romagna. The per­for­mance fig­ures are within a few per­cent: the M3 has 333 horse­power to propel 3,460 pounds to 60 mph in 5.2 sec­onds, while the 335i needs only 200 mil­lisec­onds less to do the same to its 3,527 pounds with 306 hp from its twin-​turbo six.

Heavy, yes, but this thing will outrun a Lam­borgh­ini Miura.

Of said num­bers, we need the weight. The rest we mea­sure with our road­side dyno outfit, which con­sists of a pair of hands—mine—and a tele­phone. It is an iPhone 3G run­ning Dyno­li­cious, a piece of soft­ware that uses the phone’s accelerom­e­ter to record per­for­mance data. I hold it steady, press reset, then try to hold on as Han­dras, the car’s slightly edgy owner, drops the clutch. Or what­ever passes for a clutch in a modern Bimmer with com­put­ers wedged in between your senses and the mechanicals.

One g of decel­er­a­tion sounds barely more than bounc­ing up against a wall, espe­cially when com­pared to the g-load of For­mula One dri­vers and fighter pilots, yet the human body is quite unable to treat it a normal. The inner ear has evolved to treat one g coming from the direc­tion of your feet as dandy. When said accel­er­a­tion comes not at your soles but at your clav­i­cles, your vestibu­lar organ is vis­i­bly distressed.

A cush­ion of elec­tronic music keeps us giddy in the cool August night as we clam­ber out of the car to look at the results. When you con­sider that the mea­sure­ments were taken with a tele­phone instead of spe­cial­ized equip­ment, the results are all the more remark­able. Both accel­er­a­tion and decel­er­a­tion fig­ures are spot on with their offi­cial counterparts:

Those who have driven it say the N54 feels nat­u­rally aspi­rated. This is due to the fact that it uses two small turbos with the pres­sure dialed all the way down to 5.8 psi. This does get rid of the turbo lag but does not get rid of a BMW straight six’s unique sell­ing propo­si­tion: that noise.

That noise between six and seven thou­sand rpm.

Ama­teur sci­ence has never been such fun.

Published on Tuesday, August 12th, 2008 | 8 comments

Everything You Need to Know

About the Lexus LS600hL

Video: Peter Orosz

Published on Sunday, August 10th, 2008 | 4 comments

Sneak Preview

Sunflowers

Words: Peter Orosz | Pic­tures: Gergely Der­var­ics

Before we con­tinue with our reg­u­lar pro­gram­ming of auto­mo­tive deca­dence, let me intro­duce Nat Polgar, Hyperleggera’s recently appointed exec­u­tive pro­ducer. Here she is, hack­ing sun­flow­ers with a kitchen knife and a roll of elec­tri­cal tape:

If you con­sider the joint appear­ance of sun­flow­ers and sharp-​edged kitchen uten­sils from a his­tor­i­cal per­spec­tive, you may come to the con­clu­sion that great art is about to happen. You may also think that some people have spent way too much time in the hot sun—perhaps in a sun­flower field at the height of summer.

And you may very well be right in both cases.

Published on Wednesday, July 30th, 2008 | 6 comments

London Calling

Lamborghini Countach

Words: Peter Orosz | Pic­ture: Máté Petrány

This, dear reader, is ground zero. But cer­tainly not of cars.

You may wonder why. This is, after all—

—an Ital­ian super­car named after a wolf whistle.

But then con­sider that the auto­mo­bile as a form of progress reached its zenith in 1965. This was the year when a band of twen­tysome­thing tin­ker­ers demoed a piece of tubing with an engine in Geneva, which another twen­tysome­thing later turned into the Lam­borgh­ini Miura.

The Day­tona may have been the better car and the Ghibli may have been more aris­to­cratic. How­ever, it was the Miura which prompted L. J. K. Setright to coin the word super­car.

Touché!

Casual obser­va­tion may clas­sify the Coun­tach as merely the next out­ra­geous act of Fer­ruc­cio Lamborghini’s team of punks, the yin to the Miura’s yang, a study in straight lines instead of curves. This, how­ever, is not the case.

Take in the whole and you will see that the Lam­borgh­ini Coun­tach was clearly meant for deep­space travel.

It may have been pow­ered by a twelve-​cylinder engine and it may have required leaded petrol for oper­a­tion, but that was all smoke and mir­rors. A Coun­tach can only stretch its legs in the outer reaches of the atmos­phere and it does not feel quite all right until you pass the rings of Saturn.

A Coun­tach on asphalt is an alba­tross about the motorist’s neck. Mocked for its clum­si­ness, its clutch that requires a Schwarzeneg­ger­ian quadri­ceps, its lack of rear view.

Men have wit­nessed alba­trosses take off from Ker­gue­len Island and cruise the South­ern Ocean for weeks but has no one in thirty-​seven years both­ered to reach into the driver’s footwell and press the button marked spazio?

Maybe the Ital­ian space indus­try is simply too secretive.

After all, have you ever seen a Coun­tach with its rocket engines exposed?

London Call­ing is a series about super­cars sighted in the UK cap­i­tal.

Published on Wednesday, July 16th, 2008 | 4 comments

1997 Opel Corsa Van

Cruising Again

Video: Peter Orosz

Published on Friday, July 11th, 2008 | 7 comments