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A car writer's year in new vehicles [w/video]

Christmas is only a week away. The New Year is just around the corner. As 2014 draws to a close, I'm not the only one taking stock of the year that's we're almost shut of. Depending on who you are or what you do, the end of the year can bring to mind tax bills, school semesters or scheduling dental appointments. For me, for the last eight or nine years, at least a small part of this transitory time is occupied with recalling the cars I've driven over the preceding 12 months. Since I started writing about and reviewing cars in 2006, I've done an uneven job of tracking every vehicle I've been in, each year. Last year I made a resolution to be better about it, and the result is a spreadsheet with model names, dates, notes and some basic facts and figures. Armed with this basic data and a yen for year-end stories, I figured it would be interesting to parse the figures and quantify my year in cars in a way I'd never done before. The results are, well, they're a little bizarre, honestly. And I think they'll affect how I approach this gig in 2015. {C} My tally for the year is 68 cars, as of this writing. Before the calendar flips to 2015 it'll be as high as 73. Let me give you a tiny bit of background about how automotive journalists typically get cars to test. There are basically two pools of vehicles I drive on a regular basis: media fleet vehicles and those available on "first drive" programs. The latter group is pretty self-explanatory. Journalists are gathered in one location (sometimes local, sometimes far-flung) with a new model(s), there's usually a day of driving, then we report back to you with our impressions. Media fleet vehicles are different. These are distributed to publications and individual journalists far and wide, and the test period goes from a few days to a week or more. Whereas first drives almost always result in a piece of review content, fleet loans only sometimes do. Other times they serve to give context about brands, segments, technology and the like, to editors and writers. So, adding up the loans I've had out of the press fleet and things I've driven at events, my tally for the year is 68 cars, as of this writing. Before the calendar flips to 2015, it'll be as high as 73. At one of the buff books like Car and Driver or Motor Trend, reviewers might rotate through five cars a week, or more. I know that number sounds high, but as best I can tell, it's pretty average for the full-time professionals in this business.

GM laying off 510 amidst slow Cadillac, small car sales

General Motors is laying off about 510 workers from two factories beginning in January, and it could be months before the automaker needs some of that latent capacity to come back on line. A combination of poor sales and high dealer inventories are prompting the cutbacks, according to Automotive News.
The largest changes come at GM's Lansing Grand River plant, where the Cadillac ATS and CTS are made. An entire shift of about 350 workers is being laid off, but the automaker hopes to find positions for some of them at other nearby factories. The decision leaves just a single shift building vehicles there. According to Automotive News, the move is partially spurred by Johan de Nysschen's plan to make Cadillac a more exclusive brand.
The lost shift will likely return for production of the next-generation Chevrolet Camaro at the plant, according to the report, but GM isn't saying when that will be. A previous announcement from the Canadian Auto Workers union indicated that the Oshawa, Ontario, factory would lose the coupe in late 2015 or early 2016.

Remembering Pierre Cardin's automotive legacy

Pierre Cardin has passed away at age 98, and while the designer had a great impact on the world of fashion, he also brought his signature style to the automotive realm, chiefly with the unlikely partner of American Motors. At the dawn of the 1970s, AMC decided to seek out a little glamour for its freshly renewed product lineup by having famous fashion designers work their magic on AMC cars. The first model to get the fashion treatment was the Hornet Sportabout wagon, with a special Gucci edition that became available for 1972. Later that same year, Pierre Cardin's Javelin was introduced. The Cardin Javelin arrived midway through the '72 model year as an interior option package. The designer had submitted as many as 10 proposals to AMC, and the chosen selection was a black interior with a wild multi-hued stripe of silver, white, red and purple that grooved across the seats, touched the door panels and continued onto the headliner. "People should feel like they're sitting in a living room rather than a machine," the designer was quoted in ads introducing his eponymous Javelin. In a press release, AMC said, "Cardin takes an ultra-modern abstract approach to his interior design." The Cardin interior option package was available with specific exterior colors: Snow White, Stardust Silver, Trans Am Red, and Wild Plum. For the '73 model year, Diamond Blue was a new exterior color option. The Pierre Cardin option was only $85 and was offered exclusively on the Javelin SST, although it's reported that the Pierre Cardin option also appeared on a handful of Javelin AMX models. For 1973, you could officially get a Pierre Cardin Javelin AMX. A total of 4,152 were built over the two model years. AMC's next fashion special was the Matador coupe, but the automaker tapped Oleg Cassini for that gig. Pierre Cardin was not finished with the automobile business, though. In 1975, he put his touch on the Sbarro Stash, an obscure supercar based on the SV1, with the result displayed at the Paris auto show. The designer next customized a run of early-'80s Cadillac Eldorados, and this time the treatment extended beyond the interior. A redesigned front end featured hidden headlights behind a full-width horizontal-car grille but unfortunately made the already-considerable front overhang even longer; the rear treatment was similarly modified with the factory vertical taillights replaced with horizontal units.