From Rumble Seat: Reviewing a Few Mistakes
In what I hope will soon cease to be a holiday tradition, this is my annual column where I admit to mistakes, errant phrases and overreaching. You should get comfortable.

I will spare myself no embarrassment. Like William Safire, to whom I credit the idea of an annual mea culpa, I will not attempt to save face retroactively. These are not typos, transpositions of numbers or other copy-editing errors (although I had a few of those too). These are errors of substance and judgment. I can be such an idiot sometimes.

First and worst: I was too easy on the Fisker Karma, a range-extended plug-in electric luxury sedan built in Finland and imported by the Orange County, Calif.-based company. I really wanted this car to be great, and I have great respect for Henrik Fisker, whose company, having received a highly vetted Department of Energy loan, got smeared during the presidential campaign, a la Solyndra. As unfair as these attacks were, they should have been inadmissible evidence in my judgment of Karma; instead, I found myself rooting for Fisker as an underdog.

In the review, published in February, I tied myself in knots trying to praise the Karma, even resorting to the “world’s most interesting car” banality. But in the end, I see in hindsight, the car is too heavy, too overpromised in terms of performance and efficiency, and it is just too durably weird-looking to love. Put a jar in your Fisker Karma, and put a dollar in the jar every time somebody asks you, “What the hell are you driving, mister?” You could put a kid through college that way.

Also, in the article on the Karma, I fumbled this joke: “At 5,300 pounds, the Karma is the heaviest four-seater this side of a Cessna.” Flying enthusiasts wrote in to say that I was wildly off the mark. A Cessna 175 weighs about 1,400 pounds. Holy cow, how did I get that so wrong? It’s like being asked the weight of a skyscraper and guessing three hens.

Full story here: From Rumble Seat: Reviewing a Few Mistakes from 2012 - Driver's Seat - WSJ

 

I love reading this dudes work..he is amazing:

The picture above is such an image. I took it while standing on the side of a country road in Emilia-Romagna, near Modena, in Central Italy, at an hour when the local soccer team was playing. The windows of the butter-yellow houses were shuttered and people were scarce. My friend Aaron Robinson, of Car and Driver fame, was behind the wheel of the Pagani Huayra, and we had spent the day shaking the local capellas and duomos in our borrowed 700-hp, seven-figure hypercar. The Huayra, by the way, leapt to the top of any car lover’s all-time greatest list in 2012, shouldering with the Porsche Carrera GT and the McLaren F1.

Aaron wheeled the car around for another pass. I was 20 feet away, kneeling to shoot. A ferocious turbo yelp, a wild flame-front of noise as the car blew past me. I swung the camera lens hard to pan with it, and stumbled. I must have squeezed the shutter button as I was falling down, in just such a way as to keep the car in frame and in focus. The resulting, accidental image captures the Huayra perfectly, an angry archangel, an agent of molecular discord, a missile.

There it is, ladies and gentlemen, my favorite mistake.