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A car writer's year in new vehicles [w/video]

Christmas is only a week away. The New Year is just around the corner. As 2014 draws to a close, I'm not the only one taking stock of the year that's we're almost shut of. Depending on who you are or what you do, the end of the year can bring to mind tax bills, school semesters or scheduling dental appointments. For me, for the last eight or nine years, at least a small part of this transitory time is occupied with recalling the cars I've driven over the preceding 12 months. Since I started writing about and reviewing cars in 2006, I've done an uneven job of tracking every vehicle I've been in, each year. Last year I made a resolution to be better about it, and the result is a spreadsheet with model names, dates, notes and some basic facts and figures. Armed with this basic data and a yen for year-end stories, I figured it would be interesting to parse the figures and quantify my year in cars in a way I'd never done before. The results are, well, they're a little bizarre, honestly. And I think they'll affect how I approach this gig in 2015. {C} My tally for the year is 68 cars, as of this writing. Before the calendar flips to 2015 it'll be as high as 73. Let me give you a tiny bit of background about how automotive journalists typically get cars to test. There are basically two pools of vehicles I drive on a regular basis: media fleet vehicles and those available on "first drive" programs. The latter group is pretty self-explanatory. Journalists are gathered in one location (sometimes local, sometimes far-flung) with a new model(s), there's usually a day of driving, then we report back to you with our impressions. Media fleet vehicles are different. These are distributed to publications and individual journalists far and wide, and the test period goes from a few days to a week or more. Whereas first drives almost always result in a piece of review content, fleet loans only sometimes do. Other times they serve to give context about brands, segments, technology and the like, to editors and writers. So, adding up the loans I've had out of the press fleet and things I've driven at events, my tally for the year is 68 cars, as of this writing. Before the calendar flips to 2015, it'll be as high as 73. At one of the buff books like Car and Driver or Motor Trend, reviewers might rotate through five cars a week, or more. I know that number sounds high, but as best I can tell, it's pretty average for the full-time professionals in this business.

Lamborghini Veneno supercar celebrates the bull's 50th birthday

While yesterday's and today's leaks of the 2013 Lamborghini Veneno took some of the mystery out of this 50th-anniversary hypercar, the exotic, street-legal racecar is no less exciting. Now with the official announcement, we get more details about what three lucky people on Earth will get to experience.
The Veneno is named after one of the fastest and strongest fighting bulls ever.
As we suspected, the Veneno name follows the Lamborghini tradition of naming its cars after famous fighting bulls, and this new Aventador-based hypercar is named after one of the fastest and strongest fighting bulls ever, a bull that gained recognition back in 1914 for killing a matador. To match its name, the Veneno gets its strength from Lamborghini's 6.5-liter V12 producing 750 horsepower and tops out at 220 miles per hour.

2013 Lamborghini Aventador LP 700-4 Roadster

What Dreams May Come
The Lamborghini Aventador LP 700-4 Roadster left me stupefied. Despite my experience with countless other high-powered exotics on a variety of racing circuits, including nearly all of its Gallardo siblings, the all-wheel-drive, 700-horsepower flagship dropped my jaw to the ground.
Less than 24 hours earlier, I had been sitting on an airplane at 39,000 feet studying press releases about the Italian automaker's newest range-topping convertible. While everything looked spectacular on paper, I was genuinely concerned that its new cylinder deactivation system and open-roof configuration would spoil some of the fun - soften its personality, to be more specific.