Auto makers rush to outdo each other in sales, creative concepts
CHICAGO, ILL.—It used to be that Detroit was king of the U.S. auto show circuit. All the manufacturers wre eager to display their newly introduced wares in Motor City, and it was the closest thing the U.S. had to the enormous auto shows of Frankfurt, Paris, Geneva and Tokyo.
In more recent years, there were huge splashes from Los Angeles and New York to displace Detroit from its superior position. But almost quietly, Chicago’s Auto Show has simply taken over. Last year, there were more customers — paying spectators — to the Chicago show than any other U.S. car show. The manufacturers, who used to save up their introductions for Detroit, still spend some of them there and at Los Angeles and New York, but the Chicago Auto Show that starts this weekend is celebrating its 100th anniversary with its biggest display.
Dodge kicked off the show by beating Wednesday’s media preview day with a Tuesday night introduction of the completely revised Dodge Ram pickup truck. At first glance, the look might be familiar, but the truck is thoroughly redone from the bottom up, including engines, suspension, brakes, transmissions and safety and comfort features. [See “The Road Up North” column, page 2.]
Then on Wednesday, Toyota, Ford, Pontiac, Saturn, Mazda, Volkswagen, Hyundai, and other companies rolled ouut a steady stream of new vehicles and concept cars that might offer a glimpse into futuristic cars that could take over our roads in years to come. Also, of course, the new vehicles first displayed at Detroit or Los Angeles also had prominent displays at Chicago, providing the best of the new and the futuristic, all at McCormick Place South.
The show itself opens this weekend and runs through Feb. 18.
Concept vehicles always attract large audiences to the displays, and different companies have taken different approaches to marketing their concepts. Foreign companies have long built concept cars for show, but with the intention of measuring spectator response before refining the cars for production. Audi did that with the TT sports car, among others, and Honda, Toyota and Nissan also have commonly used that technique.
The U.S. car-makers have taken different approaches.
Chrysler, for example, stunned the auto world by building the Viper, then the Prowler, then the PT Cruiser, all off concept vehicles that proved to be show-stoppers. Ford is going to build the don’t-call-it-retro Thunderbird, off a retro concept vehicle of a couple years ago.
So General Motors, which had built concept cars as one-off attention grabbers with no intention of builging them, decided to jump into action and, to the horror of most observers, made that move at the time when it had a truly weird concept vehicle on the show floors, which is how the Pontiac Aztek came about. The Aztek has been so universally criticized for its odd looks that word is, Pontiac is redesigning it now, while it’s still in its first year.
It all adds to the aura of the auto show season, however. For example, Buick has three concept cars on display — a stunning LaCrosse 4-door sporty car, the previously seen Bengal, and the Rendezvous, which, it must be said, looks like a restyled Aztek. We can’t be sure how serious General Motors is about building these three, but the LaCrosse gets my vote.
Pontiac has its Vibe GT, and introduced the REV, which is a sporty, all-purpose vehicle intended for production. Cadillac showed the Vizon, and even poor old Oldsmobile has a flashy concept car up on its display stand. Sadly, the Olds concept vehicle looks pretty good, but doesn’t even have an official name, and, since GM is going to make the Oldsmobile name disappear over the next couple of years, the chances of the Olds concept coming to life are nil.
Ford followed up its rave reviews for the Thunderbird by showing off a Thunderbird roadster at Chicago, and also has a decidedly retro, slinky ’50s-style convertible called the Forty-nine.
Ford’s biggest news, however, was the show of the new SVT (Special Vehicle Teams) Lighting Rod pickup truck, which takes the SVT concept of heightening performance all around in the existing F150 Lightning, and giving it a true custom hot rod look.
But on top of that, SVT boss John Colletti introduced his outfit’s latest toy — an all-new Ford Focus SVT, with a hotter engine, stiffer suspension, trick wheels, a six-speed manual gearbox, and 170 horsepower, 85 more than the hottest Focus currently available. Currently, the Focus has hit Ford’s target with European and Asian marketing, and is the largest selling car in the world. But for those who find the Focus too mundane in spirit, SVT roars to the rescue.
“The Focus SVT is only the beginning,” said Colletti. “We have a whole palette to look at, and we’ll have more coming. We usually have three or four vehicles going at a time.”
The Mustang Cobra still is the product of SVT, as is the Lightning pickup, but Ford discontinued the Contour, so the Contour SVT naturally disappeared. The Focus SVT will go into production in November, and the initial aim is 7,500 a year.
At GM, Pontiac is carrying the objective of attracting new and younger buyers, and Ron Zarella, president of GM North America, said seven new vehicles aimed at the youth market will be introduced over the next four years. The Pontiac Vibe is one of those, and the newly introduced REV is another.
“The REV gives a strong indication of the future design vocabulary of Pontiac,” said Zarella. “It showcases the features you might expect from Pontiac, with high performance, surprising functionality, innovative features, and an attitude, based on Pontiac’s athletic style.”
Chrysler, which has had the Dodge Hemi8 out for a while now, also had the new Crossfire up on a revolving pedestal. The latest in a continuing string of dazzling, sleek sporty concepts, this one looks like a winner from the front or the rear, and the only hesitation might be because Chrysler already is making cutbacks under DaimlerChrysler management because it lost a lot of money on introductory costs of the PT Cruiser, Sebring/Stratus coupes and sedans, minivans, and now the Ram pickup.
All the maneuvering by Ford, Chrysler and GM are to answer to the ever-increasing challenges from what they still call “imports,” which is an interesting term these days, with Ford, Chrysler and GM building so many cars in Canada and Mexico, while “import” companies are building more and more vehicles in plants in the U.S.
The great improvements indicated by the U.S. companies doesn’t mean the foreign nameplates are sitting still, however.
Toyota, for example, has the new Matrix, a 4-door, squareback, hot subcompact, with high-performance exuded by its foglights and sleek front, and by a giant tailpipe on the exhaust. And that’s before showing off the RSC — which stands for “Rugged Sports Coupe.”
Similar to the Pontiac aim with the REV, Toyota is bringing out the RSC, which looks like a Celica on steroids. With impressively aggressive bulges all over the place, the RSC is designed to be a strong performer that might prove capable of bridging the sports car/small SUV niche.
Hyundai introduced the HCD6, which is both evidence that the Korean company continues to try to build exotic cars at budget prices, and that automakers are pretty well exhausted when it comes to dreaming up new names.
But the concepts are fun, and thought provoking. There are fewer alternative-energy displays than in recent years, as car companies instead seem to be veering over toward the fun, flexible — and extremely profitable — segments like SUVs, sporty cars, and the combinations of both.
Auto show’s most impressive concepts are headed for showrooms
The Chicago Auto Show is still going on, through this weekend, and it is anticipated that the 100th aniversary version of the show will again lure the most spectators to McCormick Place of any U.S. auto show. The array of futuristic concept cars from all the domestic and many foreign companies can be so dazzling that the newly introduced real-world cars can be overshadowed.
It requires another round of scrutiny to examine the most impressive new stuff, as well as the concepts most likely to make it into the real world.
We dealt with most of the new domestic manufacturers last week, and, frankly, the majority of new and concept ideas are from foreign companies, both because there are more of them, and because the U.S. companies seem to have tightened up their number of introductions for the upcoming year.
But one of the most impressive introductions in Chicago was from Saturn, the maverick arm of General Motors. It is impressive that with GM tightening for the current downturn in auto sales by eliminating Oldsmobile, it chose to keep Saturn, which has been the free-form branch of GM. After adding a second sedan last year, Saturn next is going to bring out its own sport-utility vehicle — the VUE — and it was shown along with first looks at a couple of additional concept VUEs in Chicago.
The VUE itself was first displayed in Miami last October, but production will start later this year, and it should be on sale, with a target market share of 70,000 vehicles, by about October of this year. It is admittedly a little boxy, but the VUE has an identifiable link with the Saturn sedans from the front grille. Inside, the VUE keeps up with Saturn’s idea of being ergonomically sound and useful.
Most impressive is the interiors of the concept cars. Now, face it, making an extremely neat dashboard and interior can’t cost all that much more than making a boring, dull interior, and the VUE has a futuristic look inside. Plus, while a lot of vans and SUVs are now offering tiny television monitors to keep the kids occupied with video games on trips, the VUE has the novel approach of installing two rear monitors in the backs of the front headrests.
A couple of other concepts that I’d like to see come to life come from Volvo and Nissan’s upscale Infiniti line.
Volvo, which has had an amazingly effective redesign plan to eliminate its traditional squarish, boxy shapes, showed two new safety concept cars. Volvo and safety are intertwined, and have been since the Swedish company’s inception, notable in the U.S. for five decades.
The Volvo SCC, for Safety Concept Car, has beautiful sculpted lines, front, side and rear, and the rear angle bears a resemblance to the late, lamented 1800-sports-wagon, but with a modern flair. And, of course, the design has not compromised for safety, but instead has been done to augment the company’s great safety tradition. Volvo also displayed a completely different station wagon safety concept vehicle. While the Volvo SCC looks pretty far out, it is a logical progression from where Volvo went from its sedans of five years ago to the current models.
Nissan introduced new revisions of recently-released new vehicles, with both the Frontier pickup and the Xterra getting new life. The new Frontier has a full crew-cab, 4-door body, plus a full-length pickup box, while the Xterra has a revised nose on its hard-working SUV face. But the key new element to both the Frontier and Xterra is that Nissan is now going to offer an Eaton supercharger on the V6 engine in both vehicles, boosting it to 210 horsepower, 246 foot-pounds of torque and a 5,000-pound towing capacity. With companies expanding their audio offerings, Nissan also is plugging in a 9-speaker, 400-watt Rockford-Fosgate audio system specifically designed for the pickup cabin.
But the flashiest thing on the Nissan display was at the adjacent Infiniti stand, where the FX-45 concept car lurked. I thought it was relatively homely from the front, but the side and rear of the FX-45 are stunning in design. It looks from the side and the sculptured rear that the FX-45 is as sleek a coupe as you might find, and then you realize that it’s actually a 4-door sedan in coupe clothing.
What is most appealing about such a diverse show as Chicago had this year is the realization that some of these cars on display are headed for the showrooms, some of them immediately.
Honda, for example, which also had a boxy SUV on display, had a stunning blue Acura RS-X coupe rotating on a stand. Acura, Honda’s upscale arm, is discontinuing the Integra name, and its full-line of Integra 2-door and 4-door vehicles, but it is bringing back the coupes under the new name of RS-X. From its introductory look, it will be a sure winner in the sporty coupe segment.
Toyota, meanwhile, also is branching out in the high-performance compact end, with the Matrix. At first glance, it looks like another subcompact 4-door wagon, and it is aimed at combining sportiness with utility. But when you get close enough, you spot the businesslike foglights carved into the front fascia and flanking the grille, then you spot the prominent upper lip spoiler at the rear, and — the surest giveaway — the single, huge tailpipe. The standard 5-passenger Matrix will have a 130-horsepower, ultra-low-emission engine, but the sport model has the 180-horse engine out of the Celica.
Even more pragmatic in their approach to new car introductions are Subaru, and the Korean Hyundai company.
Subaru has always taken pride in building durable, tough cars with flat-opposed engines and full-time all-wheel-drive. With the Forester and Outback compact SUVs on top of the Legacy sedan/wagon and smaller Imprezas, Subaru also has gone racing, although the company has done it, typically, in the harshest of rallies rather than on high-speed racetracks. So for 2002, Subaru is going for performance amplification on its new models.
At Chicago, Subaru showed off the 2002 Impreza WRX, which is an all-out performance version. It also introduced a new Impreza WRX Sport, a sedan that was identified as “blaze yellow,” which, translated from the Japanese, is the most pale yellow I’ve ever seen on a car. The best news is that the sportier Impreza 2.5 RS with the 165-horsepower version of the 2.5-liter 4-cylinder engine can be bought for $18,995, and the wagon for $17,495, while the Impreza Outback Sport with 16-inch wheels and other upgrades, is still only $18,695.
Hyundai, which has battled for respect as Korea’s top automaker, has made great strides with its sedans and compacts in the last two years. But I wasn’t prepared for the first Chicago look at the HCD6, a concept roadster sports car, with dramatic styling and the 215-horsepower, 2.7-liter dual-overhead-cam V6 from the Hyundai Santa Fe SUV. This is only a concept car, but it is stunning, and will probably see life as a $20,000 roadster. All I can say is I hope it’s soon.
[cutlines for auto/motives…]
Cutlines for auto/motives 2-15:
1/ The new Acura RS-X will take over as a high-performance coupe replacing the entire Integra line.
2/ Hyundai introduced the HCD6 sports car concept in Chicago, and it could well become a roadster-on-a-budget for the Korean company.
3/ Nissan’s upscale Infiniti has the FX-45 concept car that is so sleek it belies the fact it’s a 4-door sedan.
4-5/ The Saturn VUE is a compact SUV for General Motors’ most progressive branch, and it offers some unique interior ideas, including television monitors in the backs of the front seat headrests.
6/ Subaru redesigned the Impreza, and gave it a Sport model with 165 horsepower, all-wheel-drive, “blaze yellow” color, and an under-$20,000 sticker.
7/ Toyota’s Matrix is a compact wagon with a sporty flair, especially the Sport model, with the Celica’s 180-horsepower engine.
8-9/ Volvo’s SCC, for Safety Concept Car, has softly flowing lines for a distinctive look, front and rear.
[FORD ESCAPE:
1/ The Ford Escape’s impressive first year is only enhanced when you drive through the worst winter has to offer.
2/ Even the daily blizzard routine in Houghton, Mich., failed to bother the Escape with its front-wheel or 4-wheel drive.
[DAYTRIP TO HOUGHTON:
1/ Parking meters have to work to keep their heads up as the snowfall in Houghton heads toward 200 inches — again.
2/ Downtown Houghton retains its rustic look from years ago, but is a haven for the hardy “Yoopers” from the daily snow.
3/ Annual Winter Carnival sculptures attract constant throngs of viewers and Michigan Tech alumni, despite sub-zero cold.
4/ Houses and driveways require frequent shoveling, or else the patience to wait a few months for the spring thaw.
5/ Drivers are required to Stop! Maybe. A pelting snow left only the faint outline of this stop sign in Houghton.
Not enough snow this, or any, winter? Try a weekend in Houghton
Up North residents have a choice during winter: we can complain constantly about cold and snow from October until April, or we can put on the hat, coat, gloves and proper boots and get out there and enjoy it.
If enjoying winter sounds appealing, you might find a trip to Houghton, Mich., appealing, especially during Winter Carnival weekend, to see how a town can enjoy celebrating the worst that wintertime can throw at us.
Winter Carnival in Houghton was two weeks ago, so you missed it for this year. But every hotel, motel and presumably igloo on the Upper Peninsula was booked at double the usual rate for a three-day minimum anyway. So you could always book a room now, for next year. Better still, take the 4 ½-hour drive to Houghton on any weekend before the spring thaw — that is, presuming there IS a spring thaw — and enjoy the Houghton-Hancock area and the Keweenaw Peninsula in general under mellowere, less-crowded conditions.
The Upper Peninsula is not unlike Northern Minnesota, where hardy mining folk once populated the area to establish the roots of the region’s heritage. On the Upper Peninsula, there was more copper mining than iron, and there is more snow than just about anyplace you can imagine. A bit north of the Houghton-Hancock area, there is a tall pole with the markings of the different annual snowfalls emblazoned all the way up.
Hard to imagine how the folks on the U.P. — who jovially refer to themselves as “Yoopers” — got along before the term “lake-effect snow” came along. Before that trendy name, people just put up with the daily snow, which can range from a trace to a blizzard — and sometimes both, alternating by the hour. Maybe shoveling it all or plowing it is an easier task, now that they know it is lake-effect snow.
Prevailing storms that blow across the Up North region of Minnesota from the northwest may or may not drop snow on the Iron Range or the North Shore, but those weather systems pick up enormous amounts of moisture as they pass over Lake Superior, and they eagerly wait to find a chunk of land to drop it on. The first chunk is the Keweenaw Peninsula, that little finger on the north side of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula that juts out into Lake Superior’s South Shore.
For the last few winters, we’ve heard snowmobilers, skiers and winter-lovers complain that there hasn’t been enough snow. We’ve had to curtail the John Beargrease Sled Dog marathon or cross-country ski races some years. You don’t hear people claiming there isn’t enough snow in Houghton, where too much is just about enough. The snowfall accumulation for this winter was 165 inches when I visited Houghton, but that didn’t count the heavy-duty blizzard that hit that weekend, pushing it over 175. By now the area might well be nearing 200 inches.
Snowmobilers are everywhere, and downhill skiing on the incredibly steep slopes of Mont Ripley, which is directly across the river from Houghton in Hancock, comes close to approximating what it might feel like to jump off a 30-story building with long, skinny slabs of fiberglass attached to your feet.
Michigan Technological University, universally known as Michigan Tech to hockey fans all across the country, is located in Houghton. The comparatively remote location is the butt of jokes by those who travel there for games on stormy weekends, but the area proves that one person’s isolation can be another’s solitude.
Winter Carnival is Tech’s annual “homecoming,” with alumni returning by the hundreds to wander around the dorms, frat houses and campus buildings to examine the elaborately designed and usually enormously complex ice sculptures. They are finished in an annual all-night party called, simply, the “All-nighter.” That, alone, is worth the trip.
There is the mandatory mall up over the hill on Hwy. 26 south of Houghton, but the short and simple downtown area has its own charm. The parking meters are positioned right next to the store fronts instead of at the curbs, reportedly so snowplows can simply take care of the sidewalks as well as the streets. Downtown Houghton consists of a one-way street heading west, with shops, bars, an office-supply store, hardware and clothing stores, and tattoo and tanning booths, plus a couple of motels, and one of the great surplus/outdoors stores.
If you turn right at the end of the street, you are on the bridge crossing over to Hancock. You have to go up and around to come back a block up a steep hill on the one-way heading back to the east. Above that, it’s all residential. The hill continues its steep incline, with more residences as you climb. Most of them have short driveways, to ease the burden of shoveling. Others have long driveways, requiring a lot of work. And still others are unshoveled, with cars piled so thoroughly with snow that you know they aren’t moving until April.
One young man, shoveling furiously on a long driveway, identified himself as a Michigan Tech student and said he lives in the house with five guys, but he said the shoveling isn’t rotated fairly because only two of them have cars. So those two shovel. A lot.
Restaurants serve a fairly basic fare, and pasties are a staple of many shops, restaurants and grocery stores, which are mostly located up over the hill at or near the mall on Hwy. 26.
While there are assorted fast food and other light restaurants, the town’s main hotel, the Best Western at Franklin Square, has a very good restaurant and late-night lounge. Another small Finnish restaurant, the Suomi Café, is a couple of blocks west. It’s been renovated, though. No longer does it have the lighted sign by the clock that used to read: “Today’s special: Meat, potato, vegetable, $5.95.”
Never needed changing.
Driving to Houghton, you take Hwy. 53 south out of Superior, cutting east quite promptly on Hwy. 2, through Ashland and on across the border into Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Just past Ironwood, you turn off onto eastbound Hwy. 28 and continue on it to Bruce Crossing, where you make the 90-degree turn left onto Hwy. 26. Stay on it, and you go right on into Houghton, and you can appreciate the rising hills, the increasingly snow-draped fir trees, and the stark, clean white of the contantly refreshed snow cover.
In the spring, summer or fall, the Keweenaw Peninsula — pronounced “KEE-wa-naw” — is beautiful with lush foliage. You can drive up and around the whole peninsula, to Copper Harbor and along Lake Superior on the western side of the peninsula. Fall foliage viewing is unexcelled, especially along the mountainous ridge at the northern tip.
But it should be illegal to visit there in the spring, summer and fall until you’ve made at least one trip there in winter. Bring your snowmobile, warm clothes, maybe a 4-wheel-drive vehicle, and enjoy the worst, or the best, that winter has to offer. Then later, you’ll appreciate the scenic non-wintertime there, and you might appreciate winter closer to home a lot more.
Escape makes it easy to…escape the insecurity of winter storms
The opportunity to drive up to 100 new vehicles each year means road-testing so many varied cars and trucks that I don’t really care what’s coming next. Except for a couple of weeks ago, when it mattered a lot, and it turned out to be the ideal, extreme conditions with which to challenge the new Ford Escape.
After attending the media preview for the Chicago Auto Show, I then had to leave Chicago on Thursday and drive to Houghton, Mich., for a hockey series. There is a lot of hockey on the Upper Peninsula, but a lot more snow. It snows there virtually every day, and it can fall with enough force on any given part of the day or night that I didn’t want to be caught in the wrong vehicle while trying to return to Duluth around midnight on a Saturday night.
Ford’s corporate public relations officer had earlier told me that he wanted to get me another try in a new Ford Escape in the heart of winter. Two weeks ago in Houghton, Mich., it was the heart, and maybe the soul, of winter.
I’ve reported on the Escape at its introduction and again after a short test-term chance to road-test it. But I wanted the foul-weather perspective. The Escape is an all-new compact SUV, and I wanted to prove to myself that I had not made a mistake voting for it for Truck of the Year. It didn’t win, being beaten out by the considerably more expensive Acura MDX, which I ranked second and considered an excellent vehicle. But the Escape is a better mainstream choice, simply because of its $20,000-range price.
Those who don’t need the heft of a full-size SUV, and who basically use SUVs the way most people use station wagons or minivans, would be better off with more compact SUVs. The Escape is aimed at challenging compacts like the Toyota RAV4 and Honda CR-V, with the Nissan Xterra, Subaru Forester and the smallest Jeep Cherokees also players in an ever-expanding segment. Designed by Mazda, the Escape is built by Ford, alongside the companion Mazda Tribute.
A bright yellow Escape got me out of Chicago around noon on a Thursday. Amazingly, heading north on I94 westbound, I could then continue north on Hwys. 141 and 41 in varying combinations, up the Wisconsin shoreline of Lake Michigan, all the way to Houghton. I estimated it would take eight hours. I didn’t estimate driving through all four seasons.
It was 48 degrees and foggy in Chicago when I left. As I drove north, the fog intensified, and it started drizzling rain on the way up I94 to Milwaukee. As I continued north toward Green Bay, the fog lifted but it got colder. Quite a bit colder, and the rain slowed to drizzle, then turned to freezing drizzle.
No problem. The Escape never flinched, with its front-wheel drive that makes it surprisingly stable even in 2WD setting and with higher-performance tires than a self-respecting “Yooper” might have mounted. It also entertained me well, with its firm bucket seats and its six-disc in-dash CD changer offering my random assortment that ranged from Mark Knopfler, to Emmylou Harris, to Bruce Springsteen, to the soundtrack from “Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?”, to the slick guitar blues of Guy Davis, to Sheryl Crow, all led off with a compilation of two early Gordon Lightfoot albums.
As the rain turned to sleet, though, I flipped the switch on the dash and engaged the 4-wheel drive, seamlessly even at 50 miles per hour.
Cutting inland a bit, it started to snow — that neat, post-card-style light powdery snow that is such a vibrant part of the ideal winters of our memory. As I crossed the border into the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, it didn’t take long before my memory of that light, pretty snow was pretty well erased. In its place was a heavy, pelting, driving snow — the kind that makes it worthless to flick on your high beams because the flashback gives you less visibility than the low beams. The Escape’s foglights helped at least to widen the arc of light from the very good low lights.
Driving got more and more treacherous, but the Escape breezed along, and I thoroughly enjoyed the drive, and the adrenaline high that comes with focusing in totally on the conditions at hand.
As the snow turned to whiteout conditions, I passed a snow plow at 45 or 50 on a wide stretch of road, and when I got by, I realized that there was no way to judge what lane I was in except to cast frequent glances at the plowed ridges — the very high, plowed ridges — on either side of the road. When a large truck approached, we’d both sort of lay claim to what we thought was our proper lane, and as we passed, I’d hang on until the blowing wake from the semi could settle down.
One time I inadvertently guessed a tad wrong, and the right-side wheel dropped off the edge of the pavement onto what I’m assuming was the shoulder. No problem, I just eased it back on and the Escape never missed a beat. That, again, is one of its key assets. In larger SUVs, and those with the rear wheels doing the driving, or as the predominant axle of a 4WD system, such a move can lead to a sudden correction, at which time the rear would really like to be passing up the front, and an overcorrection to straighten out can turn a serious situation into a more severe one. With the Escape’s front-wheel-drive
Stopping a couple times for gas and a hamburger, I rolled into Houghton at 9 p.m., with what had approached a kinship with my Escape. I mean, it wasn’t exactly an Antarctica crossing by ski or dogsled, but it helped visualize it.
Snow and ice chunks seemed permanently fused to the running-board rail and the crevices in the front, and the wheelwells, but the agility and secure handling of the Escape made the 20 mile-per-gallon fuel economy, on regular gas, more impressive.
It occurred to me that one of the easiest jobs in the world would be a weather forecaster in Houghton. Each night, you could peer into the camera and say: “Chance of snow tomorrow, 3-5 inches.” That would be pretty accurate, every day. And to get to work, the Ford Escape might be the ideal vehicle — truck of the year or not. Of course, I would mount Nokian Hakapeliitta tires on all four corners, and it would be even better, although I had no trouble with the stock tires, even on ice.
After two days of effortlessly climbing the steep avenues and briefly touring the Houghton area, my midnight drive back to Duluth was similarly a piece of cake — although, as with any piece of cake, the true appreciation is if you can handle the icing.
About the Author
John Gilbert is a lifetime Minnesotan and career journalist, specializing in cars and sports during and since spending 30 years at the Minneapolis Tribune, now the Star Tribune. More recently, he has continued translating the high-tech world of autos and sharing his passionate insights as a freelance writer/photographer/broadcaster. A member of the prestigious North American Car and Truck of the Year jury since 1993. John can be heard Monday-Friday from 9-11am on 610 KDAL(www.kdal610.com) on the "John Gilbert Show," and writes a column in the Duluth Reader.
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