Back when I got a magazine paycheck, the dark, looming locust cloud of the internet held promise of more than unemployment. It promised permanence. When a new magazine issue comes out, the old one is lost behind the toilet bowl forever. Each project car installment has to start with a brief summary of the ones that came before, because your reader may not have seen the one before. In the brave new world of the internet, I thought, everything is always there. You can refer to previous work with a link and never have to explain the same thing twice.
Turns out that's not always how it works.
About a year and a half ago, I wrote a series of stories following Jared Holstein's desperate attempt to build a fast, frugal turbodiesel Rabbit on TopGear.com America. Jared was editor of the website at the time, and the series would be the most popular feature in the site's short history. And then the site folded. In less time than it takes the average magazine to go from toilet to trash, the whole Project Sipster series vanished from the interwebs.
And it may well happen again. We're re-posting this old story even though, technically, we don't have permission to do so. With the folding of TopGear.com America, I've lost contact with anyone who could give us permission or tell us of any plans for them to re-post the story. Meanwhile, all the people who helped us make that car happen were expecting the unending fame of the internet to shine down on them in return. We owe a debt of fame, and this is our attempt to re-pay it.
Of course, if someone at TopGear does object, we'll have to pull the story. If they put it up themselves, we'll post a link here. Meanwhile, read it while you can.
To really get the full impact of the story, remember this story was happening just as the financial apocolypse was unfolding. We had just endured the soul-sucking spike in oil prices and the country was reeling from the sudden disappearance of free money. In fact, my first draft of this story does a better job of putting your head in the times. It started out like this:
A funny thing happened when gas got to $4.00 a gallon. Driving stopped being fun. The pure joy of mashing the pedal, the satisfaction of a powerslide well done, the visceral tingle of an engine at redline, all of it was muzzled by the wet blanket of the $70 fill-up. Pouring Andrew Jackson into your tank each week is easy and painless. The $20 bill is the chump change of the ATM generation. But stuffing Ulysses S. Grant down your fill-pipe really makes you pause, and jamming both those guys in there together, well, it just didn't seem natural.
But that intro was scrapped and the story that finally ran looked something like this:
The new Honda Insight hybrid is expected to get 43 mpg on the Highway. A Toyota Prius or Volkswagen Jetta TDi will get you roughly the same. Look beyond that one number, though, and all three cars share one common thread. They all have spectacularly low lifetime CO2 output because each and every one will bore you to death before you get a chance to refill the tank. Each of these greenies will do 0-60 in about a week, they're all styled like lumps of cold mashed potatoes, and every last one handles like a couch. If this is what it takes to save the world, maybe the world isn't worth saving.
No, if we're going to stop the terrorists, rebuild the polar bears' igloos, and somehow turn on the global air conditioner, we're going to need much more impressive mileage, and more importantly, something that's actually worth driving. You can't honestly expect us to give up driving fun just for a silly little planet, can you?
So if 45 mpg doesn't change the equation, how about 70? Suck on that for a second. 45 mpg is probably a lot better than whatever you're driving, but it's still within the realm of the imaginable, but 70? It's absurd. Perfect, then.
Now, on top of unlikely mileage, we need it from something with a little soul. We don't need supercar performance, but we should at least be able to outrun a minivan. 0-60 in 7 seconds is about as slow as we can stand before our minds wander. Come to think of it, breaking the 7-second barrier will also roast a Ferrari 308, which will help keep that Magnum PI fantasy alive.
And then there's the price. If trees and puppies and little green frogs make your heart go pitter-pat, the Insight's low $20,000 price is downright reasonable. Lovers of the other kind of green will always do the math, though, and inevitably determine that it will take 18 years of fuel savings to pay off their investment, so they might as well keep driving that Hummer. Price, then, is key if we really want to save the world.
For absolutely no other reason than the fact that a good theme seems to be developing entirely on its own, $7,000 seems like the kind of irresistibly low price that would make even Arnold give up his monster truck.
So there it is, then, the top ten cars that get 70 mpg, do 0-60 in less than 7 seconds, and cost $7,000 (and have sexy Italian styling):
1:
2:
3:
4:
5:
6:
7:
8:
9:
10:
No? Well it's official, then. TopGear.com America has a new project.
We've got the ground rules (7,7,7+sexy Italian styling), now all we need is a plan. First thing to think about is where we want that gas mileage. Most hybrid cars get their great gas mileage sitting in traffic, while diesel-engined cars do their best hypermiling on the open road. Never mind the fact that a typical hybrid battery costs more than our entire project budget, we have no interest in driving in traffic. Diesel it is, then.
Now, sexy Italian styling that we can get for cheap and stuff full of Diesely goodness. Lets see, DeTomaso Pantera? Too flashy. Alfa Romeo Spyder? Drop-tops aren't aerodynamic enough. Volkswagen Scirocco?
Don't let that German name fool you, the Volkswagen Scirocco didn't become an international icon of modestly-priced sex appeal based on its cold, calculated engineering efficiency. No sir, it was the mighty Italian straightedge of hired pen Giorgetto Giugiaro that empowered the Scirocco with its babe-magnet charm. Being little more than a half-squashed Rabbit, the Scirocco will also swallow a Rabbit's Diesel engine like it was designed to be there.
But wait… While converting a gas-powered car to Diesel power is technically simple (replace the engine and the gas tank), it's bureaucratically cumbersome. Our creation will need a license plate, and that license plate requires a registration, and renewing that registration will require some kind of emissions test (unless you're fortunate enough to live in one of those hillbilly backwaters where they haven't figured out why the air is yellow). That test will require some state-sponsored bio-robot to perform an inspection where he checks off boxes indicating the greasy bits under the hood look basically like they did in 1975, and that the stink coming out the tailpipe still smells right. If the book doesn't say the Scirocco's pipe gas should smell like a Diesel, we're dead in the water.
So that narrows us down to one last choice. One last Diesel-friendly product of Giugiaro's origami period. The Scirocco's upright, responsible older sister, the Rabbit Diesel herself. Aerodynamically, it's no Pantera, but we can get one cheap, we can put a plate on it, and maybe, just maybe, we can glue on enough aerodynamic wizardry to make her slide though the air.
So just like that, we have a plan.
Step 1: We will buy a 1981 Volkswagen Rabbit Diesel right here in New York City.
Step 2: We will drive it across thousands of miles of frozen tundra to Regina, Saskatchewan, where CWS Tuning will skillfully replace the clattery old oil burner with a modern, computer-controlled, turbocharged VW TDi engine.
Step 3: We'll head south to sunny Southern California to thaw our bones and have UCLA aerodynamics professor John McNulty show us how to make a brick slippery.
Just because the sexy Italian thing was handled so easily, don't expect the three 7's to be dispatched without a fight. Hitting 70 mpg will take more than a Diesel engine and some aero tricks. We'll have to get clever with gearing, we'll have to learn about low rolling-resistance tires, we'll have to use special low-friction oils. Every trick will have to come out of the book.
A quick video ran with this first installment of Project Sipster. TopGear.com actually still has the videos up, though their website makes it impossible to post a link directly to one video, this link will at least get you close:
Or, if you're trying to preserve the suspense and not stumble into the next installment's video, watch the copy we found on YouTube.
The original post:
http://www.motoiq.com/magazine_articles/articletype/articleview/articleid/1717/remember-project-sipster.aspx
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