CA-127 Dumont Dunes Mercedes tests (0182)

One of the highlights of the advertising side of my journalism career was a period of about two years when I was writing advertorial car reviews for local dealers. They were paid reviews, so they always had to be positive, which often presented a fun challenge for my fiction-writing skills. (Try coming up with something positive to say about a Daewoo Leganza or a Pontiac Aztek.) To keep myself entertained, I made it a point throughout to immitate as closely as possible the breathy style of a syndicated car review guy, whose writing was mostly characterized by a lack of definite articles. I developed a niche following for a while.

The upside of all this was that I got to actually go through the motions of test driving the cars and taking them to someplace pretty so our photographer could shoot them. I never told my editor that it was advertising, so I probably could have written the review without actually going through the motions, but I liked having an excuse to kill a morning outside once a week.

Aztek: I read reviews that said it actually was okay, just bizarre (isn't there a way to tweak "bizarre" into a positive?). Here's a good one:
content.time.com/time/specials/2007/article/0,28804,1658545_1658544_1658540,00.html

If you could write, with a straight-face, "pulsing, throbbing, jet-stream Yugo locomotion", then you clearly have a future as a screenwriter!

You also see car clubs. A number of years ago, while on the way into Death Valley from Shoshone, I was passed by a string of sports cars (Corvettes? Don't remember). There were a dozen or so. And this was in July, so it was not prime tourist time in the Valley! Traffic was very light otherwise.

"...sometimes with bodies wrapped to hide features." I honestly had to read this over and over and ponder context for quite awhile to figure out you weren't talking about crime scenes.

Thanks, I see how that could be interpreted that way. I modified the description to make it a little more explicit.

Oh, darn, I kind of liked it the gory way! : )