Test Drives, Trends & Events

The Chevrolet Stingray concept car - A vision of the future Corvette?

Auto show season is officially upon us and to kick things off the NADAguides.com team traveled to the 2009 Orange County Auto show. Most of the automakers save their big product reveals for a little later in the year at shows like the LA, Chicago, Detroit, and New York event. This year however the Anaheim convention center is filled with some great concepts and a few surprises. More...

The 2010 Hyundai Gensis Coupe (photo courtesy of Ryan Siu)

Somewhere between the world of the Gumball Rally and Cars & Coffee lies the event known as the Targa Trophy. It is a one-day rally event that starts and ends in the same place. This event features luxury brand sponsors, luxury brand cars, and luxury brand people. I was invited to compete in this event and I would be doing so with two friends; Tim Odell, an aspiring auto-journalist and Jonny Lieberman, a professional auto-journalist. The parking lot was already filled with oodles of supercar steel, aluminum and carbon fiber ranging from various Audi and BMW products to a Lamborghini Murcielago. Locating our ride for the event was easy; it's the 2010 Hyundai Genesis coupe - a seemingly meager entry wearing a badge unfamiliar to most in this set. More...

The tenth-annual Cruisin’ for a Cure.

The tenth-annual Cruisin’ for a Cure took place this past weekend at the Orange County Fairgrounds. This “show and drive” is a very important one to keep checked on your automotive event calendar. It is a showcase for hot rods, muscle cars, custom classics, rat rods, modern muscle, exotics and anything else under the sun to show up and show off. Much more importantly however, it is a chance to create an increased level of awareness about a terrible disease affecting 1 in 6 men - prostate cancer. More...

The Hurst Challenger Series 4 is a limited-production “gentleman’s hot-rod”.

If you like cars at all, you have most likely stumbled across an automotive auction on TV. Auction workers screaming at bidders interested in a low-mileage piece of automotive history. I am currently in the driver’s seat of a rumbling and gurgling piece of future automotive history, the 2009 Hurst Challenger Series 4. A supercharged beast of a modern muscle car that will be built in very limited quantities. This car that I have been given the keys to is wearing a dash badge reading “No.00001”. Don’t expect too many low-mileage examples in the future though; Hurst is building these bad boys to be driven daily. For one great weekend, I did just that. More...

Stylish with an aggressive stance, the 2009 Pontiac Solstice Coupe GXP gets it right in the exterior design category.

Making a basic sports car seems like it should be easy. Start with a two-passenger car then add a manual transmission that takes power from an engine with some pep and feeds it to the rear wheels. This is sports car 101. Sure you can expand on this idea and start playing with AWD or semi-automatic paddle-shifted transmissions, but that causes costs to rise and begins to take the driver further away from total control of the sports car. The 2009 Pontiac Solstice Coupe GXP gets a lot of this recipe correct on paper, in reality however it is a different story. More...