www.autoweek.com
[quote]By MARK VAUGHN
Rick Kranz, my learned and award-winning colleague at our sister Crain publication Automotive News, is writing up yet another stellar interview he did--this one with AMG board member Wolf Zimmermann, in which Zimmermann talks about the future.
If you want to read the whole interview, you'll have to spend a small fortune to subscribe to Automotive News, which is, by the way, the bible of the freakin' industry and worth every nickel it costs.
If you do spend that small fortune, sure, you'll get Kranz's article and plenty of inside industry info, but you'll also have to wade through thousands of pages of stuff about dealer ad group funding and how Tier 5 suppliers in Kanoosh are all up in arms about government regulations on widget restrictions.
Do you really want that?
We steal most of Automotive News' best stuff anyway and put it in our news section and on our website. So I will save you the cost of a subscription by telling you that Kranz asked Zimmermann (I'll just paraphrase here) how AMG is going to overcome increasingly restrictive government regulations and still make monster-honkin'-fast autobahn bruisers that eat Fiat Cinquecentos for frühstück.
Zimmermann said he didn't know. Maybe hybrids, maybe smaller-displacement engines with bigger turbos, maybe something, but right at that moment, at a cocktail reception just before the revealing of the mega-fine SL63 AMG roadster out in Palm Springs (about which you'll read in AutoWeek next week), Zimmermann was at a loss.
Which really got me to thinking. If even the vaunted and much revered AMG, iconic maker of autobahn honkers, can't figure it out, at least not yet, what is going to happen to everybody else?
The Europeans, the Japanese, we Americans and everyone else are going to have to grapple with making less CO2 emissions, which means higher fuel economy, in our case CAFE. There are ways to deal with those things, but you can't do it with big displacement.
Which brings me, via the long way home, to my point: This could be it, kids.
Take a good look around you now. Look at the coming Chevy Camaro, the Dodge Challenger, the special-edition Ford Mustangs with all the displacement and the big wings and stripes. Look at those Maybachs and Maseratis, Lamborghinis and . . . What else starts with L? Not Lotus; those small-displacement screamers will thrive in the future. All of the big muscle cars and supercars could fade away forever, the victims of government restrictions aimed at stopping us from destroying the planet.
Yes, your big block could be blocked, and your ground pounder could pound no more.
But don't you shed a tear. Instead of cars that made their points by trying to rotate the Earth in the opposite direction every time they launched from a stoplight, imagine cars that are light and nimble, sprightly and Spartan. Cars like maybe the sports car you had in college that sometimes actually ran. Only now it'll start every time you turn the key.
Imagine a world with little sedans as nimble, fun and tossable as the Mazda MX-5 but with seating for four and a usable trunk as the norm, a world where performance goes hand in glove with handling. This is the future, my friends.
I do not come to bury the muscle car but to praise it. And to embrace the small, lightweight, fun and efficient cars that I believe are just around the corner.
Join with me, friends, in welcoming this brave new world that has such cars in it. Give me a modern Datsun 510 with sound insulation and no rattles anywhere that weighs 2200 pounds; an Alfa Romeo Giulietta that doesn't break down every two days but has satellite radio; something that offers the best of the old British sports cars but with modern circuits instead of Lucas "Prince of Darkness" electrics.
The future is coming, and it won't be that bad. It will be fuel-efficient fun that starts even in cold, rainy weath