Jim Kenzie's The Driver's Seat

It's not easy being green - if you're a racer.

I gotta admit, the environmental optics for car racing aren’t great. Burning all that fossil fuel, just to go round and round?

But how much fuel is burned flying the National Hockey League across the continent?

The fact is, entertainment - and recreation - costs.

And how many NHL teams fly in Diesel airplanes?

Because this weekend, I’m going to run a Diesel race car at Mosport.

No, not the multi-Le Mans-winning Audi (they have my number - make me an offer).

But a Volkswagen Jetta TDI, as part of a race series run by the Sports Car Clubs of America.

(I run a TDI Wagon as my normal car - think that will help?)

The race (Sunday morning at 8:30 a.m.) is a supporting race for the Grand Prix of Mosport weekend, which features the American Le Mans series.

For more info, try: www.mosport.com/alms09.htm.

It’s the second year of the so-called Jetta TDI Cup series - www.volkswagenjettacup.com

Ten races on some of the great road racing tracks of North America (Mosport is the only Canadian stop) pit 25 young drivers against each other in identical, nearly-stock Jetta sedans, equipped with a 2.0 litre turbo-Diesel engine running on SynDiesel B5 biodiesel fuel, and six-speed Dual-Shift gearbox.

The cars have racing suspension, brakes from an Audi R8, Pirelli slick tires, roll cage, and a fire extinguisher system.

To keep it real, drivers may show up at the track and find their car has been swapped out for another, this to prevent anyone from gaining any sort of technical advantage.

(Cheating? In a car race? Hard to imagine…).

The drivers who have to be between 16 and 26 years old, are selected following a series of audition tests.

The cost is $45,000 (US) for the season, dead-cheap if you know anything about racing. It gives these kids a chance to see how a truly professional series operates.

The Travelling Road Show includes huge tents and garages, technical assistance, and driving coaching, before and after each practice session and race. By the time these kids finish the season, they should know if they’ve got the Villeneuve gene or not.

The series champion gets a cool $100,000. Other purse money totals $50,000.

There are three Canadians in the series this year.

Andrew Cordeiro (I’m sure you can tell which one he is in the above photo) is the only Toronto-area entrant. Andrew comes from a Solo background, and is currently sitting tenth overall in his second year in the series, with two top-five finishes as of late.

Jake Thompson of Calgary was the Canadian National Karting champion in 2004. He won the second race of this year’s TDI Cup season, in just the second car race he had ever competed in. He currently sits fourth overall.

David Richert from Winnipeg is, like Cordeiro, in his second season. Currently 18th in the standings, Richert’s greatest successes may be off the track - he is raising money for water purifying systems to be installed in impoverished regions of the world.

See www.richertracing.com for more information.

This weekend’s race also will see myself and my Montreal auto journalist colleague Marc Lachapelle join the field as guest drivers, which means there will be one journo up front battling for the lead (him) and one trying to stay ahead of the course-closing car (me).

Marc and I figure we raise the average age of the field by about nine years all by ourselves.

Performance testing has proven that Diesel-powered vehicles offer 20 percent more torque than traditional gasoline engines, providing quicker off-the-line acceleration that’s well suited for the race track, although it feels weird to upshift a race car at 4200 r.p.m.

During the season, the Jetta TDI Cup cars will consume approximately two tanks of B5 biodiesel during the ten races.

The Series’s transport vehicles and generators also run on biodiesel. In addition, the Volkswagen program uses biodegradable tableware, lounge furniture with high recycled content, energy-efficient lighting and water stations that reduce the reliance on plastic water bottles.

The series also supports Carbonfund.org, the leading non-profit provider of carbon offsets. Volkswagen and Carbonfund.org are able to reduce the series’s carbon footprint through reforestation efforts such as the Volkswagen Forest, located in northeast Louisiana.

Is loyalty overrated?

Loyalty programs are designed to encourage customers to keep buying from the same suppliers.

Surely, Canadian Tire money was the first.

Now, every airline, every gasoline company, drug stores, department stores, you name it, has a ‘frequent buyer card’ of some sort.

And the Air Miles card works in a wide variety of companies and industries.

These loyalty programs don’t really work, in my opinion, because you tend to sign up for them all, and accumulate points on them all.

The choice of which brand you buy, especially gasoline, is usually more a matter of convenience - who’s closest? - than any deeply-held brand devotion.

OK, some companies in some industries do become favourites. I honestly believe that, day in day out, Air Canada is the best airline in the sky, so I fly with them every chance I get - and accumulate those Aeroplan points.

And, I have every gasoline card you can get (except ESSO - they do have one, but I can earn Aeroplan points instead, so I go that route…) and figure there isn’t really much if any difference in the products, brand to brand.

But I do wish the gasoline companies would get together on how to use these cards.

Most gas pumps now accept your credit card right at the pump. Very convenient.

But some (Petro-Canada, e.g,) require you to put the customer loyalty card in first, then the credit card; others (ESSO again, e.g.) require you to swipe the credit card first, then the loyalty card.

Fail to do it in the right sequence, and the transaction will be canceled. If you screw it up more than once, you might be in deep do-do, because sometimes if you try to use the same credit card more than once in a short period of time, the pump will refuse to accept it because it assumes you’re up to some skulduggery.

Personally, I couldn’t care less which card goes in first. Frankly, loyalty and credit cards are different enough, and the pumps should be smart enough, that it shouldn’t matter.

But apparently, it does.

Is it asking too much that the gasoline companies would get together and agree on one way or the other?

Yeah, it probably is.

Cash for Clunkers?

One thing US President Obama did do to encourage American consumers to buy more fuel-efficient cars is the so-called “Cash for Clunkers” program, whereby eligible older cars (presumably, pollution-spewing gas-guzzling dinosaurs) can qualify for government rebates of $3,500 or $4,500 when traded in on newer (presumably more environment-friendly) vehicles.

As the old saying goes, be careful what you wish for.

On a couple of fronts, C4C has been wildly successful. Nearly half a million cars have been moved on the promise of the rebates, which has indeed been a stimulus to the car industry, although foreign brands have benefited as much or more than the domestic brands, two of which (General Motors and Chrysler) the government(s) now have an ownership stake in.

And the technological progress that has been the hallmark of the past decade with respect to both fuel efficiency and cleanliness means that the atmosphere probably is improving for the better with these half-million new cars on the road.

It has always amazed me that the state of California, whose Air Resources Board has been one of the strongest champions of green issues, is also apparently home to the entire world’s remaining supply of 1965 Volkswagen Beetles (nothing rusts out there) whose exhaust is, comparatively speaking, truly toxic. Ironically, it's often superannuated hippies and other tree-huggers driving these air-killers.

You’d think California would have done something like this decades ago, as indeed, many countries around the world have.

But C4C has also run into a few problems.

First, the $3 billion (US, of course) allocated to the program originally intended to last through November, has almost all been spoken for. The program officially ended yesterday.

Second, many dealers, while appreciating the extra business, are on the hook for tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars. The way it works is they give the purchaser the money, either in cash or as a discount on the car, then apply to the government for reimbursement.

If the request for funds is rejected for any reason, the dealer is on the hook. Even if the request is approved, the massive delays which have been very common do terrible things to his cash flow.

Which, if you’ve ever owned any business, you’ll know is the ONLY business there is.

As many as 70 percent of reimbursement requests have yet to be approved.

Many dealers chose to turn new C4C prospects away over the past few weeks, because they simply couldn’t afford the risk.

Nonetheless, Canadian dealers have been clamouring for a similar program. There is a $300 federal grant, which is far too low to have had any effect. B.C. has a richer program which has been quite successful. Some hybrids also qualify for various incentives in some jurisdictions.

But compared to $4,500, that’s all chicken feed.

Now, car sales in Canada aren’t quite as bad as in the US. Much of the “national” decline in 2009 has been in Alberta and B.C., and the year-over-year declines there are based on the hyperactive resource-based economies of those two provinces in 2008.

So the “downturn” in sales isn’t that dramatic when viewed in a broader context.

And if car sales get a boost, store owners in other retail sectors have a right to ask, "Why not me?"

Hyundai Canada announced last week that it will offer additional incentives of $500 to $1,000 based on the C4C principle. At least one Hyundai dealer in the GTA beat his company to the punch with a similar program. Chrysler Canada also offers $500 to $1,500.

Will these programs work?

If the incentive is big enough, consumers will go for it. Incentives like these will 'move iron' - that has been well-proven elsewhere.

What is far from proven is: is this the best use of your tax dollars to achieve either improvements to the environment or improvements to the car industry?

My guess is no.

Raise the price of fuel, keep it high, and let the marketplace decide.

This won't happen, certainly not in the United States, because the political will is simply not there.

So I guess - as usual - we will have to be satisfied with half-measures.

A Bold New Idea for the Environment

I have often said that US President Obama’s demand that car makers build more fuel-efficient cars is pointless without giving the consumers some incentive to buy them. As long as gasoline is essentially free, why buy a car you don’t really want, even if it might be the right thing to do for global warming, freedom from foreign oil, whatever the Cause du Jour might be?

Greg Young, public relations manager for Mazda Canada, has a wildly different idea which might just work.

“Why not force all cars to get 10 miles per gallon?” he suggests. (To keep our style masters’ noses in joint, that’s 22.6 litres per 100 km. We're talking worse-than-Hummer here.)

“If even a short trip to the grocery store is going to cost you ten bucks, maybe you’ll think twice about using your car to go everywhere,” says the out-of-the-box-thinking Young.

Now, there’d be an interesting experiment.

But it makes too much sense; I’m not holding my breath anybody’s going to actually try it.

Who says car companies don't listen?

Buick's three car/three truck product strategy for the immediate future is down to three and two.

The un-named compact Crossover which was also planned to be the first plug-in hybrid in its class has been axed from the product plan.

As we related here and in Wheels two weeks ago, General Motors recently revealed a lot of their future plans both to the media (which is normal) and to prospective customers (which is not).

Apparently it was the tepid customer reaction to the vehicle that caused GM's vice-chair for product development Tom Stephens to (you really MUST pardon the expression) pull the plug.

It would have been based on a stretched-wheelbase version of the platform of the new Chevrolet Equinox/GMC Terrain. But feedback indicated customers didn't think it looked or felt 'premium' enough to bear the Buick badge.

Odd, because as a Chevrolet, it looks and feels very premium indeed, with high-class materials, good fits and finishes, and lots of upscale features.

But hey, the customer is always right even when he's wrong.

This is perhaps the biggest lesson the new GM has to learn. This quick cut-and-run (Stephens acknowledged that a decision like this would have taken months under the old regime) suggests they have indeed learned it.

The plug-in hybrid capability is scheduled for other vehicles, whose development apparently is not affected by the decision to chop the small Buick truck.

More on the Fiat Cinquecento

Recent news reports that the ‘new’ Chrysler will build the ‘new’ Fiat 500 in a plant in Mexico for the North American market touched a nerve. As mentioned here a couple of months ago, my first car was a Fiat, the 600, which was the original “Cinquecento’s” bigger brother.

Bigger as in all of four cylinders (versus two) and a massive 22 horsepower (instead of a perfectly adequate 13).

I even once hit a moose with “The Beast" (its nickname, as emblazoned with a Dymo label on its metal dashboard) and lived to tell about it. Not sure about the moose - if it was dead, I’d have bought it and had no place to put it; if it was alive, I’d be facing a seriously angry moose.

So once I realized the car was OK (just a flesh wound), I kept going…

We also noted previously that one reader said he had seen on the Motor Trend web site that the 500 would not come to Canada because of some taillight issue with Transport Canada. My sources suggest this is not the case. In fact, Canada’s preference for smaller cars indicates the 500 should be relatively more successful here.

And because Toronto is the fifth-largest city in Italy (after Roma, Milano, Buenos Aries and New York City) you’d think it would be particularly well-received here.

Can’t wait!

In other European industry news, Magna is coming down the home stretch in getting approval to take over Opel. The German government wants Magna to win the battle; apparently the final decision will be down to General Motors.

We should know soon.

Sure could use a little good news today

Seems I'm usually complaining about something in this blog.

But there have been a couple of things I've seen recently on our roads which have made me smile.

Last week, eastbound on the 401 approaching the exit for the 400 north, ALL the cars trying to get onto that highway northbound were properly lined up in the deceleration/off-ramp lane, with NO cars hanging out in the driving or middle lanes waiting to dive-bomb in and barge in.

Exactly how it is supposed to be done.

Usually, this exit is chaotic, with cars two and three lanes wide all trying to line-crash, which of course blocks the lanes of those of us not lucky enough to be heading for cottage country.

Don't know why this day was so different from most days, but it was heart-warming to see.

And just this morning on my way to the airport, again eastbound 401 but further west, just past Highway 10/Hurontario, another happy happenstance:

First, the Collectors split off to the right towards Dixie Road.

Then a bit further along, the 403 joins the Express lanes on the right.

You with me?

At this point, just south of the airport, I guess the road goes from three lanes (the Express lanes) to five, with the two additional lanes coming from the 403.

Usually, any Express lane traffic in any of the three 401 lanes just stays in whatever lane they were in. So even if they WERE in the correct (right-most) lane to begin with, there are now two lanes to the right of them.

Traffic coming onto the Express lanes from the 403 invariably moves left two, three, four or even all five lanes, whether there is open road in front of them or not.

If ever there was a "Jim-only" lane, the right-most lane here would be it. Apart from me, you could practically play tennis on this patch of pavement, even in rush hour.

But this morning, a maroon Ford Taurus (the fish-face model) was coming along with me from the west, driving in the right (also the 'correct') lane.

When the 403 merged, he checked to make sure his way was clear, put on his turn signal, and moved two lanes over into the 'new' right lane.

I wanted to pull alongside him a blow him a BIG kiss...

Hot Hot Hot - and sticky

(...with apologies to David Johansen, a.k.a. Buster Poindexter...)

Picked up a new Volkswagen Jetta TDI wagon test car yesterday.

Now, regular readers know I have a fondness for VWs, and for wagons, and for Diesels.

Which pretty much makes this the damned-near perfect car.

Not just for me. It satisfies about 90 percent of the needs Canadians have for cars.

Wants?

Maybe not.

Needs?

It's got them nailed.

My 'real' car is a 2003 Jetta TDI, which is now about three generations old as far as Diesel technology goes.

Still, apart from the front passenger seat catching on fire (they all do that, sir), it has been a terrific car.

The new one is even better.

Roomier, faster - MUCH faster - and even better fuel consumption.

Except - you saw 'except' coming, didn't you? - this one is equipped with leather seats.

Virtually every luxury car has leather seats.

Most wanna-be luxury cars have leather seats.

That's because most people want leather seats.

I just don't get it.

Why do they do this to themselves? Are they punishing themselves for misdeeds in previous lifetimes?

Of course, the car has heated seats. (Everybody pretty much has heated seats these days.)

But the main reason the new Jetta - any new car - HAS to have heated seats is that in winter, leather seats are just too damned cold.

However, the Jetta isn't far enough up the luxury car food chain to qualify for cooled seats.

So in summer - like yesterday, 35 degrees and about 99 percent humidity, admittedly not typical of THIS non-summer - leather seats are just too damned hot and sweaty, even with the air-con set to 'cryogenic'.

And of course, leather seats are just too damned slippery all the time.

Fortunately, you can get a VW Jetta TDI Wagon with cloth upholstery. My 2003 of course has cloth upholstery, the way God in Her wisdom intended.

Although even that catches on fire.

I can't really blame car makers for installing leather seats when most of their customers seem to want them.

But why, people? WHY!?

Over, Under, Sideways - and down

Another embarrassment in a long line of embarrassments over Ontario Provincial Police Superintendent Julian "King Canute" Fantino's strange obsession with speed.

A Durham Regional Police Officer was nailed last week in Fantino's bizarre "street racing" trap, charged with going 50-over on Highway 115 in Peterborough County last week.

(They caught a Toronto Deputy Fire Chief a couple of months ago.)

The Durham officer's undercover role was almost outed, but the O.P.P. is withholding his name to try and retain what's left of that cover.

His unmarked cruiser, however, was impounded (where the heck is the logic in THAT? A $70,000-odd piece of publc property stuck in some tow truck compound for a week?!)

Good grief - here's a cop, doing real police work, and he's run in by some sycophantic O.P.P. weenie, presumably trying to curry favour with his superiors.

That's the only logical explanation, because any traffic cop knows and even a cursory examination of the data clearly reveals that speed limit enforcement of any sort has absolutely nothing to do with traffic safety.

The Durham cop's boss, Inspector Brice Townley, called the officer's suspension "extremely disappointing", given the force's focus on road safety.

Apparently, Insp. Townley, like Supt. Fantino, hasn't read the research either.

This specific "street racing/stunt driving/50-over" vendetta is particular useless, meaningless, and a waste of scarce resources, not to mention spectacularly unconstitutional and massively unfair, making the traffic cop roadside judge, jury, and executioner.

But I guess The Boss can always find minions prepared to do his bidding.

Too bad those minions aren't required to be more like that Durham cop - be expected to do real police work, such as charging and helping eliminate bad driving behaviours that really do matter.

We all know there is no shortage of those.

How old is Superintendent Fantino? Surely there is a retirement package that could entice him to just go fishing for fish, instead of citizens - permanently?

Different Tune, or Same Old Song? Part III of - well, many...

The usual path to the top in the car industry is through the money divisions – accounting, finance, marketing.

Sometimes, it’s engineering.

It’s almost never design.

But there are always exceptions to every rule.

Bryan Nesbitt is perhaps best-known in the industry for designing the Chrysler PT Cruiser ("It's still being sold!" he told me proudly when we chatted during a coffee break at the General Motors Product and Technology media bunfight last Tuesday.)

Nesbitt was recruited to run Chevrolet design, did a stint in Europe, returned a couple of years ago, and was recently named vice president in charge of Cadillac.

"Tom Gale may be the only one I can think of who went from design to general management," Nesbitt noted, referring to his former boss and mentor at Chrysler.

Nesbitt points out that Cadillac's engineers, production, sales and financial people have more than done their job over the past ten years or so; the recurring theme of this Product and Technology event was: how do we get people to consider GM products again?

"We need a consistent design message, for the cars, the advertising, the dealerships, the web site," said Nesbitt.

Perhaps the talents of a designer are just what the doctor ordered.

At forty years of age, Nesbitt is considerably younger than his current customer base. He sports more gel in his stylish coiffure than the entire demographic cohort.

But maybe that's the point. If Cadillac customers don't get younger, their average age will soon, in Car and Driver magazine's famous phrase, be 'deceased'.