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Vile Gossip: My Jeep Wrangler dreams

Jean Jennings has been writing about cars for more than 30 years, after stints as a taxicab driver and as a mechanic in the Chrysler Proving Grounds Impact Lab. She was a staff writer at Car and Driver magazine, the first executive editor and former president and editor-in-chief of Automobile Magazine, the founder of the blog Jean Knows Cars and former automotive correspondent for Good Morning America. She has lifetime awards from both the Motor Press Guild and the New England Motor Press Association. Look for more Vile Gossip columns in the future.The new 2018 Jeep Wrangler's model designation is JL, my original initials, as in Jean Lienert. Don't Google that. You'll find I died in 2014 in Pittsburgh at age 85. I take this JL thing as a sign from God that I am supposed to finally buy a new Wrangler, the very first car of my dreams when my dreams included saving $25,000 and living off the grid in a one-room log cabin with all of my cast iron pots and pans. I did live in a tiny log cabin once, but when I discovered there was no line for phone, fax and printer, I trudged down the dirt road a half mile, knocked on a stranger's door and borrowed their phone to call AT&T. So much for living off the grid. And so much for the Wrangler. I bought a truck, which was useful, but it was not a Jeep, a fact confirmed when I landed a job writing about cars. Among the Porsches and Fords and Ferraris and Dodge Power Wagons were Jeep Wranglers. Wranglers meant adventure. Here are two favorites:1981 — Delivering the Pig of Bronze, Car and Driver's over-accessorized 1978 project Jeep CJ-7 (named for its chrome hood ornament), to the police chief of rural Waterloo, Neb. He got it because he wrote the editor a letter asking for it. It was my assignment to drive it there. I plotted as many miles of dirt roads as possible between Michigan and Nebraska, not wanting to waste my first big Jeep adventure on pavement and never questioning the ability of this denim-trimmed orange Jeep and its aftermarket aluminum wheels to get us there.So naive. Somewhere in deepest Iowa with the windshield flipped down to the hood for maximum coolness, the Pig's rear end began to shudder. As we rolled to a stop, the photographer looked back in time to see one of the five fancy extra-long chrome lug nuts plop into the dust. Two others had vanished. The last two had backed off to the ends of their studs.

UAW Chief Shawn Fain disrupts Detroit's labor tradition

He's known to quote the Bible and Nation of Islam civil rights leader Malcolm X. He's a social media fanatic who keeps the pay stubs of his union member grandfather in his wallet. And now, Shawn Fain is representing nearly 150,000 auto workers in one of the biggest labor strikes in decades. In taking action against all three Detroit carmakers, Fain, the head of the United Auto Workers, has remade the strategy of the union he leads, choosing a bolder, much riskier path than his predecessors after he won office by a narrow margin in a first-ever direct election earlier this year. The strike started as the clock hit midnight on Friday, and followed Fain's decision to open negotiations with Ford Motor, General Motors and Stellantis simultaneously and eschew public niceties involving choreographed handshakes that famously kicked off previous negotiating efforts. The strategy is not without risk. A weeks-long strike would hit workers who live paycheck to paycheck, while the Detroit Three automakers have billions in cash to withstand the walkout. Fain, 54, has made creative use of social media, appearances on network and cable news programs and alliances with high-profile progressive politicians such as U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, to reframe the UAW's contract bargaining as a battle to re-set the balance of power between workers and global corporations. He has rebutted automakers' concerns about labor costs by pointing out that they have poured billions into share buybacks to benefit investors. "If they’ve got money for Wall Street they sure as hell have money for the workers making the product," he said. “We fight for the good of the entire working class and the poor." In lengthy social media talks to UAW members, Fain alternates quoting Bible verses with the use of charts and graphs to dissect wage and benefit offers from the automakers - details his predecessors kept behind closed doors during bargaining crunch time. Fain, in his unorthodox approach, ran what amounted to a public auction among the companies to push each one to top the other to avoid a costly walkout. Prior UAW presidents picked just one automaker to set a pattern for the other two. Over and over, Fain has told UAW members at the Detroit Three that they can reverse 20 years of wage and retiree benefit concessions, stop further plant closures and end a seniority-based, tiered compensation system that pays new hires as much as 44% less than veteran workers.

Watch a Cayenne Turbo S, Range Rover SVR, and Cherokee SRT drag race

We live in a weird world where high-performance SUVs could win a 60-mile-per-hour sprint against sports cars from just a few years ago. Here, Top Gear sets up a three-way drag race against the Porsche Cayenne Turbo S, Land Rover Range Rover Sport SVR, and Jeep Grand Cherokee SRT, and the results show just how quickly these high-riding models can cross the quarter mile. The Cherokee SRT is the patriotic choice among the three, but it's down on power in this fight. Meanwhile, the Range Rover's menacing growl sounds the best, and the Cayenne Turbo S has the most horsepower. You'll have to watch the video to see which SUV will win this battle. Related Video: