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Here are a few of our automotive guilty pleasures

It goes without saying, but I'll say it anyway. The world is full of cars, and just about as many of them are bad as are good. It's pretty easy to pick which fall into each category after giving them a thorough walkaround and, more important, driving them. But every once in a while, an automobile straddles the line somehow between good and bad — it may be hideously overpriced and therefore a marketplace failure, it may be stupid quick in a straight line but handles like a drunken noodle, or it may have an interior that looks like it was made of a mess of injection-molded Legos. Heck, maybe all three. Yet there's something special about some bad cars that actually makes them likable. The idea for this list came to me while I was browsing classified ads for cars within a few hundred miles of my house. I ran across a few oddballs and shared them with the rest of the team in our online chat room. It turns out several of us have a few automotive guilty pleasures that we're willing to admit to. We'll call a few of 'em out here. Feel free to share some of your own in the comments below. Dodge Neon SRT4 and Caliber SRT4: The Neon was a passably good and plucky little city car when it debuted for the 1995 model year. The Caliber, which replaced the aging Neon and sought to replace its friendly marketing campaign with something more sinister, was panned from the very outset for its cheap interior furnishings, but at least offered some decent utility with its hatchback shape. What the two little front-wheel-drive Dodge models have in common are their rip-roarin' SRT variants, each powered by turbocharged 2.4-liter four-cylinder engines. Known for their propensity to light up their front tires under hard acceleration, the duo were legitimately quick and fun to drive with a fantastic turbo whoosh that called to mind the early days of turbo technology. — Consumer Editor Jeremy Korzeniewski  Chevrolet HHR SS: Chevy's HHR SS came out early in my automotive journalism career, and I have fond memories of the press launch (and having dinner with Bob Lutz) that included plenty of tire-smoking hard launches and demonstrations of the manual transmission's no-lift shift feature. The 260-horsepower turbocharged four-cylinder was and still is a spunky little engine that makes the retro-inspired HHR a fun little hot rod that works quite well as a fun little daily driver.

Peter Max staring down $1M lawsuit over Corvette collection sale

Pop artist Peter Max recently sold off his collection of 36 vintage Chevrolet Corvettes – one each from 1953 to 1989 ­– for an undisclosed amount. The new owners have already announced plans to restore some of them and auction the models off sometime soon. Up until then, the sports cars had been languishing in various garages around New York City for decades and were caked in dust and grime. However, Max's end of the transaction has just become more complicated, because two men are suing the artist claiming he employed them to complete the deal first. The men allege that Max hired them to broker the sale of the 36 Corvettes in exchange for a 10-percent commission, according to the New York Post. They claim to have emails and text messages proving the existence of the deal, and are taking Max to court for $1 million over the squabble. The collection of Corvettes was amassed in 1989 as part of a prize package from the television network VH1, and Max bought the cars from the winner intending on using them for an art project. He never got around to it, though, and parked the sports cars around New York, until he finally sold them over the summer.

Chevy monitors drivers' biometrics while experiencing new Corvette Stingray

We tell you about what a car is like to drive every day, remarking on throttle response, steering weight and feedback, squat, dive, brake fade and a dozen or more other factors of performance. What we can't tell you, though, is what the car does to us - how its performance impacts us, physically. That's what makes this video series from Chevrolet so darn cool.
The Bow-Tie brand rented out Spring Mountain Motorsports Ranch, got several (very) different individuals together, strapped a bunch of sensors to their bodies to record biometric data ranging from heart rate to respiration to brain activity, and then handed them keys to the new Chevrolet Corvette Stingray. The results are explained in a series of videos, devoted to each driver, showing how different people react to the Corvette's performance.
If, like your author, you're a nerd for medical science, this is going to be a fascinating set of videos. If not, it's still pretty cool to see how the body of someone with racing experience, like Gran Turismo creator Kazunori Yamauchi, reacts to tracking a car like the Corvette Stingray compared to the owner of legendary Detroit barbecue joint, Slows BBQ. Take a look below for all six videos from the series, or hop over to the Corvette Vimeo channel for the interactive experience, where you can see all the different metrics.