Car Throttle

FINALLY.  The friggin' Buick Encore is here.  All my dreams and prayers have been answered, I'm so excited I can hardly...

...oh, sorry, got caught up in Auto Show mode there.  I'm just glad we don't have to deal with teaser images of a small SUV any more.  Look, I love auto show season.  Even after years of this, it still gets my blood going - who doesn't like seeing new stuff for the first time?  But not everything that comes out at the auto shows are worth an entire article.  Thus, Car Throttle News Bites: Detroit Auto Show Edition.  If you missed the earlier coverage, you can find it under the Detroit 2012 Category.

Speaking of that

In order to keep you, our reader, more abreast with current news without taking up an inordinate amount of your time, I'm introducing this column - "News Bites."  One paragraph and picture per topic of today's automotive news.  One article.  If we were a paper publication, we'd say we were going green.  Let us know what you think! Fiat has dropped a load of new photos of the 3rd-generation Panda supermini today.  This pint-sized product (which I still believe Fiat should be selling in the US pitched against the Fit, etc) debuted at the Frankfurt show in September, and is going on sale next year.  Engines are all tiny, ranging from an 800cc TwinAir 2cyl up to a 1.3L diesel.  Full high-res gallery here.

Top Ten is another new featurette I will be producing on a weekly basis.  It's a very simple concept: the 10 best of SOME genre, in order.  You are encouraged to leave comments either praising my choices, or yelling at me for what I missed, at the bottom.  Game on! The public stigma of a station wagon (estate to Europe) is frankly pretty negative these days.  I can't say I understand it; in many ways, wagons are the most useful cars on the road.  They offer car-like handling (since they're normal cars) and loads of cargo space.  I generally think the two-box shape of wagons is a positive thing stylistically speaking, too.  So why are they so universally loathed? Maybe it's this generation's childhood memories of getting sick

The second-coming of the butch station wagon seems to be upon us. After Saab's debut of theirVolvo XC-clone, the Saab 9-3x, Audi is following up at the Geneva show with their own butch pseudo-off-roader station wagon.  Based on the mid-sized A4 Avant, the A4 allroad Quattro is basically a smaller version of the A6-based allroad, which has been around since 1999. It's a pretty simple formula: take a standard station wagon (or Estate, or Avant, or whatever they're calling them this week), raise the ground clearance a bit, tack on some black rubber body cladding for that "tough" look, and there you go.  This is what Audi's done with the A4 allroad. Outside, to differentiate the allroad from standard A4 Avant, Audi has given it a