1957 Lincoln Mark Ii Base 6.0l on 2040-cars

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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.

Lincoln debuts MKC ads starring Matthew McConaughey

Lincoln is making the decisive commitment that it wants to improve its brand perception going forward. It can't be cheap to hire A-list talent like Academy Award-winning actor Matthew McConaughey and director Nicolas Winding Refn, best known for Drive, for its new ad campaign for the 2015 MKC crossover, but the company is showing that it's serious about the new vehicle and its future. The first three of these five commercials are just hitting YouTube, and they begin airing on television on September 6.
The Live in Your Moment campaign is all about Lincoln trying to sell not just the MKC to customers but also explain the brand's philosophy. It's one of the oldest luxury automakers around, but hasn't exactly had a glorious history, especially recently. Based on these first ads, we can see that there's a definite focus on philosophizing rather than focusing on the crossover. At times, McConaughey seems just a mustache and a mangled beer can away from reprising his role from True Detective.
The first ad (above) is simply titled Intro and sets the mood and concept for the whole campaign. Bull has McConaughey talking to a longhorn in the middle of a road, and I Just Like It has him explaining his affinity for the brand. Lincoln's full release is available below, and you can view the other ads by flipping through the playlist in the video player above.

Everything new at the 2019 New York International Auto Show

Transcript: Welcome to the 2019 New York Auto Show. It's the last auto show, and so far it's my favorite of the year. We have a new buggy, compact pickup and trail ready SUV from Volkswagen. Ford brought the new Escape and a new Mustang performance variant, and we have a brand new Toyota Highlander and Subaru Outback. Let's go take a look around. We're here at the New York Auto Show with the Subaru stand. Normally the Subaru stand is just some white carpet and some show lighting. This year it's like we're in a national park. It's ... Frankly, I'm from Oregon. You're from Colorado. Yeah. It's making us feel at home. And in that way what better place and what better people to introduce this Subaru Outback which is pretty much the official car of Colorado and Oregon. Yeah. You actually have to buy a Subaru before they let you move to Colorado. Now instead of climbing up there and taking a look because we've been told we can't do that we're gonna go over there and check out another one. So the exterior, not that different. No. Looks exactly like an Outback. There's actually oddly a little more black plastic trim on the outside. A little too much for me. Right. It's interesting because it kind of slowly went away from that from the beginning because in the beginning the black plastic trim kind of made it an Outback, and now they're kind of bringing it back. I guess they needed to make it more macho. Right. Right. Now we're inside. Inside it looks pretty different. Swank. It's kind of swank for an Outback which has been pretty plain. Now this is the newly available vertically gigantic touch screen here. 11.6 inches. That is massive. This is how big it is when it's turned on ... just for the viewers. Now this is the onyx trim. So with that you get the black mirrors, the black wheels. This upholstery is special to the onyx, so it's gray and black and you also have this green stitching. Yeah, I like this accent stitching. It's kind of neat. Oh there's also a little tray there. Well this is a deep bin here. You can probably fit a phone. There we go. Almost. Yeah there are two USB ports. There's an additional two in the backseat. So this thing here you pop in the cup holder and it gives you a little more space or less space. These are really big, so if you have one of those Nalgene bottles I'm guessing it's going to fit in there. One of my complaints about my Subaru that I own now which is a naturally aspirated Crosstrek is that up in the mountains. It's slow?