Lovin's Spoonfuls

"Natural Capitalism" Pooh-Bah Amory Lovins Goes to Sweden and Collects a Large Plaque or Something from Volvo

Amory Lovins—copiously mustached environmental guru and longtime apologist for the grasping claws of Big Money—left his mountain redoubt in Colorado late last week to journey to balmy Sweden, not to partake in something so completely unsustainable as the Nobel Prizes (ugh...high explosives), but to accept the largess of Volvo. Mind you, we love our sweetly thrumming old 240s as much as the next impoverished band of underachievers, but we're thinking Volvo has mainlined some serious gobbledygook with this here hunk of hardware, known since its inception in 1998 as the Volvo Environment Prize.

Here's the drill:

"The Volvo Environment Prize was formally instituted in May 1988 by the Volvo Annual Shareholders Meeting,with the objective of promoting research and development across the environmental spectrum, by acknowledging people who have made an outstanding contribution to understanding or protecting the environment through scientific, socio-economic or technological innovation or discovery of global or regional importance."

Lovins and his ultra-earnest Gor-Tex-clad brain trust up at the Rocky Mountain Institute have become players in the advanced-mobility game mainly because they've been pushing systems-oriented design solutions to our car-culture pickle. RMI actually spun off a lightweight composites manufacturer a few years ago, as a result of work its had done on a Hypercar concept vehicle. The Hypercar was allegedly tested at the conceptual level at RMI before the results were open-sourced for every major carmaker to bury in some dank R&D lab.

According to an RMI release: "Earlier in the summer, Lovins won the Asahi Foundation's Blue Planet Prize. By winning the Volvo Prize he becomes the fifth person to receive both awards and the first person to receive both awards in the same year."

Which is making us wonder, Just how competitive is this future-of-transportation racket if the same dozen or so guys pass around all the awards—and one, assumes, the prize money?

You Punks Think You're Ready for Keys to Dad's Car?

Leo Burnett Nabs Creative Firepower to Save Buick from Going
Absolutely Down the Tubes

Rumor has it that the good people at McCann Erickson, comfortably ensconced in their snazzy upmarket Latte Town fortress outside Detroit, were shocked--SHOCKED!--when Leo Burnett swept in and stole the Buick account that McCann had serviced since 1958.

Nineteen-friggin'-fifty-eight!

Honestly, we can't blame them for making assumptions, given that the last time one of their guys was truly nervous, Ike was still in the White House.

Anyway, Burnett recently named the new team that will rescue the vaunted Tri-Shield from its slide toward extinction.

Sounds like they aren't screwing around. Two hotshots, John Wyville and Dave Loew, from a March raid on Y&R Chicago will be making the jump from highly desirable Miller and NASCAR accounts so that they can use their powerful advertising brains to convince carbuyers that Buick is something other than what confused elderly people use to mow down the young.

O-La-La! In La-La Land

Opronistas in L.A. Rejoice as at Least One Citroen SM Takes to the Boulevards of the Gritty East Side

Yep, it's a Citroen SM, from somewhere in the 1970-75 run of designer Robert Opron's long, low-slung, aerodynamically radical masterpiece (how does a drag coefficient of 0.336 strike you?) Evidently, there's a Maserati V6 under the hood, so think twice before you snicker, twitchy little leadfooted Boxster bitch. We caught this rarity, along with its official California historic vehicle plate, up in the undulant hills of the Mt. Washington-Eagle Rock-Highland Park environs, the Eastside L.A. mega-hood that's rapidly turning into Brooklyn West (please don't tell New York magazine, and don't worry, Los Angeles mag already knows and doesn't give a shit). The driver seemed a tad German to us, which we thought was strange, but hey, a pretty car is a pretty car, regardless of two world wars. Note the smooth yet still aggressive—even seductive—arrowlike transition of the window trim into the fastback. Très Opron, who's pretty much the Jean Prouvé of car design. Or maybe the Serge Gainsbourg. Okay, what we're saying is he's a specialized taste. Gotta tell ya, the SM should have seemed out of place in such a sordid landscape, but like a true French beauty, she made it look as if she had been there her whole life. Check out those skirts on the back wheels!

We think we're in love.

A Note for the Design File: Opron was at least a few decades ahead of his time. The man invented enclosed headlamps and put them on all his cars. He also devised headlamps that could swivel to aim the beam around corners. So yes, the current arms race in headlamp design can justifiably be blamed on a man who buffet-line retirees in Provence should probably watch themselves around.

Is That a Car or an Enormous Yet Elegant Paperweight?

Smart Car Makes First Appearance as Lifestyle Accessory That Can Be Stored in Prissily Art Directed Magazine Spread

A studiously low-tech bike, a spilled sack of organic groceries, and a Smart ForTwo Passion Cabrio, arranged with minimal comment next to a house made entirely of cardboard. Now there's some esoteric vehicular product placement, from the style tyrants over at The New York Times "T" rags. Well, we knew it was only a matter of time before the pugnaciously unprofitable Smart franchise invaded our Yank culture's upscale urban lifestyle primers. It's basically the automobile-as-timepiece-or-maybe-necktie, anyway, and at around $13,000, the ForTwo Cabrio costs less than much of the output of Switzerland's Vallée du Joux. Bonus points: as diehard followers of micro-rides will recall, Smart got its start when Daimler and Swatch put their heads together in order to give Those Who Fear Horsepower something with four wheels to put in the driveways of their Dwell houses (SMART, in fact, means Swatch-Mercedes-ART, and yes, that makes out colons feel a little funny, too).

But just so we all know how things really stand in style-land, the Smart Cabrio, already pretty rinkydink, has been cut in half in the photo, thus violating the Number One rule of automotive advertising, even of the stealth variety: Show the car! The environmentally less sinister bike is, of course, lovingly depicted in the fullness of its updated outdatedness. We can certainly see it trumping the Cabrio for street space in whatever the Smart marketers try to convince us is the American Amsterdam. Oh wait... it's...yeah...New Amsterdam.

We're expected the joint infestation to commence any day now.

Annals of Highway Mayhem

We Could Use a Hero Right About Now

Is the California Republic the worst place on planet Earth to drive? If you happen to be concerned about sudden tunnel conflagrations or malevolent seasonal microclimates, quite possibly yes. The recent Tule Fog pileup, which involved an impressive 100 vehicles and led to the deaths of two people, followed close on the heels of October's I-5 tunnel fire, which also notched two fatalities. Stuck in traffic on the 10 just east of the 405 on a Thursday? Feh! You could be contending with two-foot visibility in a low-hanging terrestrial cloud amid wildly veering big rigs in the Central Valley, or worse, dodging exploding concrete as wind-whipped fires transform a Santa Clarita tunnel into a really large blowtorch. The common denominator here? 10-4 good buddy! Eighteen-wheelers of far less spiritual merit that Optimus Prime (a collision between two of them started the tunnel fire, and at least 16 were involved in the Tule Fog incident). Remember when long-haul truckin' meant Greg Evigan and a smartass monkey? Seems like now we should deport them all to the Ice Road, their natural habitat, and let them compete for the chance to crack through the frozen highway and met their rightful end in a cold, watery Canadian grave.

RigWatch: Just in time for Transformers Deux (assuming the writers strike doesn't crush the hopes and dreams of 12-year-old boys in several hemispheres), Peterbilt has phased out its stalwart 379 Class 8 truck, which has been around since 1987 and should henceforth be referred to exclusively as the "Optimus." Beginning next year, all giant do-gooder alien space robots will get their start as as Peterbilt 389s.