OCTOBER 13, 2021
Saturday, October 9, 2021 at 09:12AM 
(Audi)
The all-new 2022 Audi A3 has started arriving in Audi dealerships across the country. The new A3 features a redefined interior, delivering a driver-oriented environment with an available 12.3” Audi virtual cockpit. Additionally, the A3 now has an available head-up display and top-view camera system. It also features Audi’s MMI® touch display infotainment (with a standard 10.1” screen), and a host of standard and available technologies "to make it as immersive as it is intuitive," according to Audi PR minions. The new A3 is powered by a 2.0-liter TFSI engine with 201HP and 221 lb-ft of torque. The hotter S3's more powerful TFSI engine has 306HP and 295 lb-ft of torque. The A3 40 TFSI quattro delivers an EPA-estimated 28 mpg city/36 mpg highway/31 mpg combined, a 24% improvement in combined efficiency compared with the previous quattro model.
(Lexus images)
Editor-in-Chief's Note: Run for your lives! It's the all-new 2022 LX600, complete with its "more cowbell" front end. The multifaceted LX brings "unparalleled capability, luxury and human-centered technology to the Lexus range," according to Lexus PR minions. There's more, of course, because this is the Big Daddy Lexus with everything imaginable. The stuff? An all-new platform with an all-new 3.5-liter Twin-Turbocharged V6 with 409HP and 479 lb-ft of torque, coupled to a Direct Shift 10-speed Automatic gearbox. The Lexus Interface has dual high-definition touchscreens and an available 25-speaker Mark Levinson Surround Sound system, plus, as you can imagine, much, much more. The LX range is expanded to five grades: Standard, Premium, Luxury, and first-ever F SPORT and Ultra Luxury. For some consumers, this new Lexus SUV will be the answer to their prayers. For us, we've reached "peak" grille and we're begging for this trend to stop. Please. -PMD
(GM)
The 2023 Chevrolet Corvette Z06, with the flat-plane crank V8, wider rear fenders, enhanced side air intakes and much more, will be revealed at 12:00 p.m. ET on October 26th. Go to Chevy.com/Z06 for the unveiling.
LETTER FROM L.A.
Beverly Hills. Look, I like EVs. I like the idea of not paying for gas. But the hard and fast reality is that unless there is a way to make those 80% recharges happen in under 20 minutes they simply will not be a replacement for ICE cars. Not everyone has a house. Not everyone has an apartment with a garage. Not everyone has a workplace with charging stations. Even years ago when I wrote about the Volt for this very publication, I ran into situations where the charging stations were taken - not a problem with the Volt with the ICE backup - but I'd be screwed had I been driving, say, a Leaf.
These days developers are jumping on the anti-car bandwagon and asking cities like Beverly Hills to lower parking requirements for new developments if they have some “affordable” units (because those poor people can just order Postmates, I guess), which seems to be a trend. Never mind “range anxiety” - how about charge anxiety? If I have to add to my list of necessities in looking at an apartment - like off-street parking that I can add a charger to (at my expense) - then that's an issue. If I have to worry not only that some d-bag will take a charging space because he feels like it but that there simply aren't enough of them to accommodate people legitimately charging, then that's an issue. If I decide to drive my EV up north to the wine country on vacation, will I need to plan on an hour or more somewhere in Bakersfield to “top off”?
Now, for the moment, I have an apartment with garage parking that I could pay to have hard wired from my electric meter to a parking space for an at-home charger and because of California rules, they can't say no. Even liking EVs, I am not sure that I would want or be able to justify that expense when there are still ICE cars sold.
Hmmm...maybe in ten years when it's all BEVs I can sell that old BMW at a premium.
Tom Pease
The AE Song of the Week:
On a bus to St. Cloud, Minnesota
I thought I saw you there
With the snow falling down around you
Like a silent prayer
And once on a street in New York City
With the jazz and the sin in the air
And once on a cold L.A. freeway
Going nowhere
And it's strange, but it's true
I was sure it was you
Just a face in the crowd
On a bus to St. Cloud
In a church in downtown New Orleans
I got down on my knees and prayed
And I wept in the arms of Jesus
For the choice you made
We were just gettin' to the good part
Just gettin' past the mystery
Oh, and it's just like you, it's just like you
To disagree
And it's strange but it's true
You just slipped out of view
Like a face in the crowd
On a bus to St. Cloud
And you chase me like a shadow
And you haunt me like a ghost
And I hate you some, and I love you some
But I miss you most
On a bus to St. Cloud, Minnesota
I thought I saw you there
With the snow falling down around you
Like a silent prayer
"On A Bus To St. Cloud" by Trisha Yearwood from the album "Thinkin' About You" (1995).* Written by Gretchen Peters. Publisher: Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC; Lyrics licensed and provided by LyricFind. Watch the Official Music Video here.
*Maps are great for evoking images for a songwriter like Gretchen Peters, who wrote this song. She loves maps for the names of the towns and cities, and the sorts of images they can conjure in her imagination. "I can just get lost in a map, very easily," says Peters. "It's like a fresh new well, looking at a map." This song came about from a road trip she was planning out West or to the upper Midwest towards the West. "I was thinking about going up that way, and I saw the name St. Cloud, and I just thought, what an evocative name. I had really no particular image of what that place would be like, except I knew it was in Minnesota, so it must be snowy. But I hadn't been there, and so I really just started with that name. And I remember really well the day I was writing. I didn't finish it in one day, but the day I sort of started it and got the main bulk of that song. It was snowing in Nashville, and that I'm sure was responsible for a couple of the lines, like 'With the snow falling down around you like a silent prayer,' and those sorts of things." Peters envisioned the song as being about a person talking about someone who committed suicide, but in order to allow the listener more freedom for interpretation, she was deliberately vague with the lyrics. She says, "In order to get to the emotional space that you need to be, I don't think that necessarily means that you have to be explicit, or put every detail in. In fact, I think songs are better when they are a little bit more murky, or fuzzy around the edges. Let the listener participate, too, in other words. Let them put their story in. And I didn't feel it was good songwriting, frankly, to put that in there in sort of a blatant way, so the only reference to it in the whole song is, 'I wept in the arms of Jesus for the choice you made.' But of course that choice could have been anything. It was just really something I did for me in order to get emotionally down deep into it, envisioning that scenario. I didn't feel it needed to be an explicit part of the song." Indeed, when Trisha Yearwood cut this song, she was completely surprised when Peters told her what she'd meant when she wrote it, because she hadn't interpreted it that way at all. Which is fine with Peters. "Trisha sort of overlaid her own story on that, because it really can be about any sort of a scenario where you've lost someone." When writing songs, Peters at times will allow the words to lead her. "There's that period in songwriting, the wonderful, early magic period, when lines just come to you," she says. "And they seem full of possibility and they evoke certain things, and they point you in certain directions, and they seem to come fully formed. They're sort of miraculous. There were a lot of lines like that in this song, and I just sort of had them all sitting there. Then the sort of second half of writing a song for me normally is, okay, I'm looking at all these different lines, what is this telling me? What is this story? What does this song want to say? And then it's almost like following clues, really, and changing things. It's sort of then your intellect kicks in, and then you have to go, 'Okay, well, I have to tighten this up, and this doesn't agree with this, this thought doesn't agree with that thought.' And then you have to do the part that Stephen King, in his book on writing, calls 'Kill your darlings.' You have to take lines that you love and say, 'Well, that's not going to work here.' Take it out. But at the beginning, I really believe that the best thing that you can do is leave the door open for those wonderful magic ideas to pop in for as long as you can, because those are the lines inevitably that are the best ones in the song. The ones that just come fully formed like that." (Check out our interview with Gretchen Peters. Her website is gretchenpeters.com.) (Knowledge courtesy of Songfacts.com)