Letter From The Editor: Teutonic Order
February 1, 2007
To you die-hard enthusiasts who
have not yet had your fill of fine automobiles within the 2007 Car of the Year
issue of Robb Report, we hereby salute you with the automotive performance issue
of The Robb Report
Collection.
Attentive readers may have noticed that of the 13 qualifiers in
this year’s Car of the Year contest, vehicles with European origins placed in
the top seven positions. Bentley, this year’s winner, may sound like a British
marque, but the company is in fact a wholly owned subsidiary of the Volkswagen
Group. A Mercedes-Benz sedan from Stuttgart came in second. Third place went to
an entry from a Stuttgart suburb: the Porsche 911 Turbo. In fourth place was the
Bugatti Veyron, VW chairman Ferdinand Piëch’s pet project, and, once again, a
company owned and operated by Volkswagen. Maybach, the überbespoke
arm of Mercedes-Benz, was fifth. Sixth place went to Ingolstadt’s flagship,
the Audi S8, followed by the BMW M6, which technically fell into a tie with
Jaguar, a brand that could have been described as British were it not owned by
Ford.
In fact, of all the cars that made up this year’s competition,
only four were not of German origin. As Arte Johnson from Laugh-In would
say, that is "verrry interesssting." Such a geographic anomaly begs closer
examination.
Herein, we have scoured the globe (or at least every metric
mile of autobahn from Bavaria to the Swabian Alps) to find the best of all the
rest: from the latest in German-engineered, Italian-bodied cars (see the Fisker
Tramonto; the Lamborghini Murciélago LP640; or the Ruf RK
Coupé) to a German-engineered, American-built SUV (see BMW X5 4.8i) to an American-designed, German-owned muscle car (see Dodge Challenger
concept). For the sake of variety, we even cover a couple of
German-engineered vehicles that are actually assembled in Germany: the Mercedes-Benz R63 AMG, the fastest production minivan on the planet;
and the Brabus K8, which represents the best from the aftermarket in
Bottrop, Germany.
Finally, just for fun, we attended a BMW performance driving
school in California, which makes one wonder if American car companies
offer similar experiences in Germany, or if the high-performance highway only
flows in one direction. We used to build great cars, and still do, on occasion.
For evidence of that, take a look at the 1965 Ford Shelby GT350 or the
’32 Ford hot rod. Somewhere, however, we seem to have lost our
collective will.
Most likely, the root of the matter is car culture. In Germany,
the Nürburgring racetrack is open to anyone with enough spare euros to pay the
toll. Germans also live in a country without speed limits. To compete on a
global scale with the best automobile manufacturers in the world, America needs
an entirely new ethos. We need an infrastructure of highways 10 feet thick, and
we need to remove arbitrary speed limits so that we may test the true
performance boundaries of our cars. We need a population that is willing to stay
in the right-hand lane, and to pass only on the left. To become more Germanic,
American car companies need to spend less time developing cup holders, and more
time on chassis dynamics, engine improvements, and interior ergonomics.
Or perhaps we should stick to designing innovative cup holders
and leave the great cars to the experts.
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