#also incredibly ironic to be posting this with my current icon. might change to a different character(maybe the witch again?)

[thebonepirate]

y'know i've had an urge to make a nsfw blog for a while(even thought of a url for it). but the problem is. i have no idea what i'd even post there. i'm not exceptionally involved in horny spaces online. and i'm not very frequently horny in a way that works for words.

[jademonument]

Fire Emblem: Three Houses February 2019 Trailer Impressions

hi! i’ve said a whole lot of nonsense about the new trailer to a bunch of people already, but i’m going to try to compile those thoughts here again in some sort of more official capacity because i keep going back to the trailer and catching new things.

also this got a little out of hand, so it’s under a read more!

The Class System & Unit Customization

so, the first thing that i want to talk about is easily the thing i’m the most excited for since watching the trailer - Three Houses is looking like it’s going to give us a pretty much unprecedented level of fine control over the units that make up our armies!

all of the units we see in this trailer share the Noble class, at least to start, which seems to be incredibly malleable - while each character seems to start with their preferred weapons, you’re given the opportunity to change their Focus, which, taking what we saw of the class change/promotion screen, seems to imply that nearly any character can eventually be lead to just about any class!

notably, the classes presented here are classes that, traditionally, have been base classes - or Tier 1 classes, or starting classes, whatever you want to call them. this seems to imply that Noble is essentially a “trainee”/Shadows of Valentia-style Villager class in role!

from the post-battle screen we’re presented with after Petra here crits and takes out an enemy unit, we can see that she has a multitude of experience bars:

she has a more traditional Level experience bar up at that top that determines her displayed level

under that, she has two “Professor Level” bars that match up with the Sword and Authority skills seen on the Set Goals menu with Linhardt

under those, she has a class mastery bar - this seems to imply some sort of reward for going through a class, which would further imply a benefit for going through multiple classes?

at the very bottom of this list of bars, Petra has a Battalion experience bar, noting that she is currently leading an Empire Infantry Battalion.

now, a note about Battalions - these are assuredly the “faceless soldiers” who are following our characters into battle. the fact that these can be leveled up is very interesting in its own right, but lets also consider for a moment the following:

Edelgard, on foot and with her axe, is seen leading a Battalion of lance-wielding cavalry. of course, there’s no telling exactly what sort of effect this might have on combat, but it almost assuredly will have an effect, rather than just being a peculiar visual gimmick - and, more than that, this implies that characters will be able to lead Battalions that don’t necessarily match up to their own movement or weapon type

(that’s a neat outfit you’re wearing there, Edelgard!)

finally, on this screen with Dorothea, we see that beside Swords and Reason, she has blue arrows pointing upward - and beside Faith, a red arrow pointing downward. because of the menu on the right side of the screen telling us that the blue arrow indicates a “Strength”, we can hazard a guess that the skills with blue arrows pointing upward suggests the skills a unit will be better suited toward, and the ones with red arrows pointing downward will tell us what skills they don’t necessarily have an aptitude for.

of course, all of that is ignoring the other symbols present here - the finger pointing upward next to Swords, Axes, and Reason, as well as the three stars arranged in a triangle across from Faith. for the time being, it’s pretty hard to say what these could mean!

Weapons & Magic

so, we got to see a hint of the new weapons and reclassification of magic once again! let’s talk about the most notable thing here first, though

from the image of Linhardt selecting a skill for “solo study”, we can see that the Iron Gauntlet Caspar is using here belongs to the Fighting classification of weapon. there’s really not... a whole lot to say here? i’m just very much in love with the idea of characters who are rolling into a battle and just. Punching.

putting it in here again because it gives us our best view of the way magic is being handled in Three Houses! here, we can see magic is being split into Reason and Faith, and that Reason has two separate symbols within it. now, this is primarily notable because

if you look to Dorothea (unit in the middle of the bottom-most row of the map) and the currently unknown character located on the rightmost of the map, they are both wielding Reason weapons. each one, however, is being displayed with only one of the two tome icons; Dorothea has the one with the black cover with a few white lines, while the unknown character is using the one with the bright cover and triangles on it. 

(you can also see this in the image of Caspar punching a Western Church Soldier, who is wielding Fire - which notably uses the black cover with lines on it symbol. could that symbol be used for “Anima” magic, while the symbol with a bright cover and triangles be for “Dark” magic? or is this some new distinction altogether?)

its interesting to note three things here - Faith seems to replace the concept of healing staves from other Fire Emblem titles. Linhardt (as well as the Western Church Soldiers pictured above) is not actually holding anything in either hand as he is casting Heal.

but, as far as we’re aware, casting Heal is not costing Linhardt HP to cast. if you go back to the trailer and observe, Linhardt begins healing at 12 HP and ends at 12 HP - so, unless the HP to cast is taken before the combat animations begin, it seems unlikely that Three Houses will be using Shadow of Valentia’s magic casting style.

The Crests

i went back to the E3 2018 trailer, just to see what else i could catch, and.

"Some people believe the crests - tokens of the goddess's power - are necessary to maintain order. But they're wrong, teacher. The crests are to blame."

what an interesting line, right? here’s the thing. as of the February 2019 trailer, we’ve seen one of these crests.

it’s a little hard to read, but this Black Beast that Edelgard is taking out is wielding a Fighting weapon called the “Crest Stone of Gautier”. if you’ve watched the trailer, that last bit might sound a bit familiar.

hey Sylvain what the fuck did your family do

jokes aside, this little detail - something easy to miss, especially given the time that has passed between the original trailer and this recent one - has kind of renewed my excitement for this game’s story. i wasn’t really sure how or where this game could go while i was watching the Direct, but now that i’ve done my digging (and gone back and rewatched the original trailer), i can safely say i’m pretty hype again

In Conclusion

please let this game be good

[petstutorial]

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Some Best Dog Foods On The Market [amazon bestseller="best dog foods"] This post has appeared for the first time in https://petstutorial.com/orijen-regional-red-dog-food/?feed_id=42&_unique_id=5e270649e3160 #pets_tuttorial #jane_brody #pet_blog #pet_training #pet_products_reviews #best_dog_products #best_cat_products

[arkenarttechlab]

THE LAST ARTIST - and the cultural desert of Silicon Valley

I’ll remember 2018 as the year the Big Tech industry ultimately turned the area around San Francisco into a cultural desert; a five-star dream for the privileged few. This is a tribute to the lost spirit of art and counterculture - a portrait of one of the last artists.

"What the arts allow us to do is develop the muscle required for discernment, and also strengthen our sense of agency to determine for ourselves how we’re going to tackle a given problem" - MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW

Once upon a time, the area around San Francisco was the stronghold of American counterculture. Artists, activists, entrepreneurs, feminists, race and equality activists dreamed of and fought to disrupt capitalism and create new sustainable humanistic strategies. 40 years later, the Big Tech industry has turned it into a five-star dream for the privileged few. The cost of living there is now so high that one in four in the Silicon Valley area is on the poverty line. It has been called The Silicon Valley Paradox – 26.8%, nearly 720,000 people are “food insecure.” Two years ago, The New Yorker wrote “Silicon Valley has an empathy Vacuum.”  And at the end of 2018 one of the most influential artist of the robotic revolution, Kal Spelletich was ousted.

Portrait of one of the last artists 

- Originally published in SCENARIO no. 1, 2014.

Behind a row of rundown warehouses in San Francisco’s Butchertown grows a wonderland of robot constructs, flame throwers and military metal gadgets between eerie iron trees and magical disco balls. This is where Kal Spelletich lives with his six-toed dog.

“Do you want a cup of herbal tea,” he asks in a friendly manner as he invites me inside into an almost post-apocalyptic universe that besides being deadly is his home. It is at once scary and welcoming. There are no boundaries here: art, fire and a spiritual robot that he is currently building. All the projects that Spelletich have been part of seem to point towards a larger cultural shift. One example is Burning Man, which originated in San Francisco in the mid-1980s, and right now it is developments in robot technology. This is a trend born from the co-creation and open source philosophies of digitisation and advanced methods like 3D tools, with popular examples like Google’s autonomous car, iRobot’s development of a 3D robot that can be used in factory production, and not least the entire startup infrastructure with actors like Lemnos Labs, Robot Garden and Robot Launchpad.

Experiments in the borderlands

Where the robot industry in general is situated somewhere in the robot evolution’s refinement of arms and hands with an eye to production and finish, a few frontrunners are experimenting with the robot’s brain. One such is Industrial Perceptions in Palo Alto, which deals with intelligent software and in this connection with subjects like perception, manipulation and control. However, where these point towards commercial breakthroughs, Kal Spelletich goes his own ways with his experiments in the borderlands of robotics. ” I often feel a bit like I am working in a vacuum, even when I’m in the eye of the storm,” he says. It is in the tension field between future product opportunities like intelligent robots and the world of arts that he is most at home. His art grapples with the ambivalent state that human beings were planted in when the machine was invented: we are at one and the same time fascinated and frightened by our own power of creation. “I guess art is a bit like staring directly at your own mortality. The more we people choose to stay at home and just sit in front of a computer, playing games or watching movies – instead of going out and getting real experiences – the more we will be attracted by events or art that remind us that we are mortal; that we are human beings and that things don’t always go the way we expect.” As a part of the exhibition Weird Science, Spelletich has recently built a ‘Space Measurer’ from small mirrors and blue laser lights that can measure the speed of light. New York Times has written about his art: “If the essence of science is the development and testing of theories about reality, then you can’t say that the artists in this unfocused but intriguing show are doing science, weird or otherwise. Where the two domains [art and science] can overlap, though, is in playing with technology.” It is in such playing that Kal Spelletich develops robots that tickle our idea about the unlikely and our perception of ourselves as human beings. “People desire real-life adventures. The more this is taken away from you or denied you, the sicker you become. Personally, I have never been particularly good at passive entertainment. Most people have never loaded a gun, hunted an animal, cleaned it and boiled and eaten it. Yet these are the most basic, simple and early experiences. I don’t say that killing animals is the right thing to do, but it is something that most people no longer experience. I try to give people a cathartic experience while also challenging their prejudices about what art and content can be. The key is to add a story or concept to the aesthetic. Parties, celebrations, substance abuse, alcoholism, violence, sex, the human condition breaks down and pulls itself up again. They reflect all the real things that can shape and change our lives: like a carnival.”

Punk

Besides his artistic vision and his playing with the expressions of technology he is known to be one who defines technological directions and who spits out trends long before they land in the time the rest of us live in. Hence, it is not rare that people come knocking on his door. This might be NASA in need of his take on a new invention, Hollywood film producers – like the idea men behind the movie The Matrix – needing to visualise the future, or ordinary Silicon Valley engineers on the run from corporate desks and constricting suits that miss playing with the electronic universe. Spelletich was born in an elevator and grew up as number seven of a sibling flock of nine in Davenport, Iowa.  “The city has recently been elected the worst place to live in the US,” he says with clear ambivalence about his upbringing: “I got a chemistry set when I was nine and experimented with electricity, fire and fireworks. At the same time, I started working in my dad’s construction firm.” When fifteen, he ran away from home and lived in abandoned buildings and on the street. When punk rock hit the 70s, he saw the light. He felt at home in this noisy and anarchic universe of music. “It was the DIY energy and the anti-authoritarian rebellion that fascinated me – that you could create art while destroying the framework,” he says. Kal Spelledich was in the middle of the crucible, and he still is as part of the collaborative SEEMEN, which throughout its history has developed technological DIY platforms and explored future scenarios with interactive robots and kinetic art. However, you will never get him to mention the icons with whom he in his time has experimented and created art. He evaluates his collaborations by their creative, artistic and anarchic value, not by the names that have become part of the history of art, music and movies. It is almost an insult if you ask him for names. In general it is almost impossible to make him answer questions that have to do with specific projects or products he has taken part in creating. He is the eternal punk soul who disappears when a process becomes too concrete. However, even though the many things hanging from ceilings and on walls and shelves with whimsical inventions in his San Francisco cave hisses ‘fuck the system’, they are also nostalgicn memorabilia from his collaborations with everything from Hollywood blockbusters like Titanic to NASA.

Slacker

One thing he can’t run away from is when he was immortalized in the cult movie Slacker (1991) by Richard Linklater (the man behind e.g. the movie trilogy Before Sunrise, Before Sunset and Before Midnight; ed.). They met each other in Austin in 1988. “I met Kal Spelletich at an art event with all sorts of insane experiments. Even then I knew that he was something special. His head was full of ideas, and his art had this particular physical dimension. I remember him saying something like: ‘The art of painting is a dead genre – I don’t even want to talk about it.’ He had made a backpack from a TV set as a commentary on the industry. When I had to devise the scene in Slacker with this guy in a room full of television sets flickering in an endless river of clips, I thought of Kal and his TV backpack. That he himself was a part of the TV was an incredible sight. And then I had always been mad about Kal’s performance and was sure he would be good on the screen. He is a true pioneer and totally badass! He is guaranteed to always be ahead of the pack, never at the back,” Richard Linklater says. Spelletich’s role in the movie – the TV guy – is a description of a particular type of media user that has stopped looking for the truth in the physical world and instead finds it on TV or in a smartphone. “I wrote about this ten years ago, and it is truer now than ever,” he says. “Most of our reality is shaped by the media. We need live experiences; a digital recording will never replace a real-time event, and I’m not talking about a practiced set or playing timed to a heartbeat. Perhaps there would be an aesthetic or beauty in that, but it always contains a loss of spontaneity, of reality.” And Spelletich keeps working with this attitude. Where the robot industry at the moment sets the boundaries for future commercial possibilities regarding the individual experience through recognition and hence also faith, Kal Spelletich is in the process of proving that robots can be built to have a sixth sense. This may seem a smidgen insane, but this has always been the case with Spelletich’s art. He experiments with possibilities we cannot yet imagine.

Kal Spelletich Kalman Spelletich (b. 1960) grew up in Davenport, Iowa. He ran away from home at the age of 15 and lived as a squatter for many years. In 1980, Spelletich was accepted at the University of Iowa where he took a bachelor’s degree in Interdisciplinary Arts and in his own words “discovered art through the camera”. He later got a master’s degree from the University of Texas. Spelletich is very active on the underground art scene and has since 1994 exhibited in many galleries, almost always with a focus on deconstructing the machine or experimenting with human-machine relations. In 1988, Spelletich was co-founder of the art collective SEEMEN, which is an “interactive machine art performance collective”. The collective specialises in performances and is particularly well known for its great influence on developing the concept of Burning Man. Spelletich has also worked with other art collectives like Survival Research Laboratories, which also works with machine performance art and especially operates with large technical installations. Spelletich has made special effects for several movies, including Titanic and The Matrix, and he has acted in the cult movie Slacker.

Originally published in SCENARIO no. 1, 2014.    

[backchat]

Techno, Hackers

In the past I have discussed, at length, the ways that electronic music got into my life. But I can trace back that first listen- that promethean moment- to a movie theatre in Tustin, California, in 1995. It was a thing back in the 90's as you may well remember, that a movie had to have a good soundtrack. It made good business sense: one wholly separate revenue stream from CD sales that could make money even if the movie tanked. And since most movie studios either owned or were tied to a record label in some way, it really was low hanging fruit. It was also evil genius: want to break a band without spending boatloads on the requisite music video? Put the song on the trailer, then put the song on the soundtrack and do a compilation music video using footage from the movie, with some antics from the band and BOOM! New band for a fraction of the price. An ironical (and iconic) example is a video directed by Kevin Smith for a song featured in the Mallrats Soundtrack link here. Say what you will about Kevin Smith, but he sure knew how to nail 90′s cliché right on the head. Studio time could even be bundled into the movie budget. It was genius. But the odd thing is just how good some of these soundtracks were/are; "Can't Hardly Wait", "Cruel Intentions", hell the TV Show "Charmed" owes its intro song to "The Craft" soundtrack originally releasing Love Spit Love's far superior cover of The Smiths' "How Soon is Now?" and originally associating that song with magic and the occult. If you go back to the nineties and compare to soundtracks today- with some exceptions granted- it really was the golden age of the medium, even if the accompanying films left something to be desired, or didn’t age well upon review. These compilations ended up being free form dadaism, sampling music across styles and genres in order to generate reactions. Got an emotional yet outsider character on the screen? Throw Stabbing Westward onto the track list (The Faculty), need a sporto get-psyched and rebel song? How about Foo Fighters' "Hero" or "Nice Guys Finish Last" from Green Day (Varsity Blues), or go full Brit pop and launch or revitalize like half a dozen bands' careers a la the Trainspotting Soundtrack (e.g. Underworld, Iggy Pop, New Order, Primal Scream, Bedrock/Digweed). Bear in mind, "Lust for Life" was a cult classic but by no means a well known song (or record) for a whole generation prior to Danny Boyle using it to stunning effect in the film. "Lust for Life” was released in 1977, it didn't exist for babies of the eighties, but there Iggy stood, doing his signature heroin strut on MTV in 1996 alongside the cast of the film. It's absolutely ridiculous. These releases bent and rearranged pop culture, for what seemed like purely capitalistic, or ever anarchic ends. But sometimes, soundtracks changed music. And here we reach "Hackers." Dear readers, Hackers really is a terrible film. Few will ever appreciate such timeless lines like: "You guys! This is insanely great! She's got a 28.8bps modem!" A strong likelihood for someone in their thirties being able to quote Ginsberg can be attributed to this terrible yarn as well. The entire film revolved around consumer technology which was out of date the day the film was released. With a Rotten Tomatoes Score of 33% it does beat the 2015 "Fantastic Four" reboot, but can claim few other accolades. Except for the soundtrack. The soundtrack was apparently successful, so successful in fact, that 2 more compact discs of completely unused-in-the-film music were released. Kind of ridiculous when you think about it: A film that did not do well in any format it was released in had three soundtracks released using promotional material from the film... why? But I digress: a few years ago (read here: 2002-2007) I was one of many moderators on a message board for a now defunct website called the bt-network.org. At the time, discographies- especially for electronic music artists- were a hard thing to come by. Even if the artist was signed with a major label, they might be doing small releases, aliases, white label prints, unauthorized remixes and there was no Soundcloud to help the listener find such things, or really much of any method to post it online, of course leaving out early “deep net” (ICQ and Sharing Boards) that was all a bit too advanced for me. The bt-network website had the entire discography of one artist: Brian Transeau, aka BT. Brian was releasing a huge amount of music... some of it shameless and trashy house, but none of it really bad, in fact, some of it kind of earth shattering. Also, he was using a 303 (with the devilfish mod) to stunning effect on almost every track he was releasing, fusing piano and 303 melodies into a new brand of electronic music. At the time, the term “Dream House” was being thrown around, or Melodic Trance, but then the banner term- and equally pretentious- Progressive Trance label was settled upon. But he was, at the time, working at a prodigious rate: discogs.com credits Brian Transeau with 171 remixes and damn it all if I didn’t try to hear and or collect every single one. Along with that, as if by no effort at all, he released three incredible albums, Ima, ESCM (electric sky church music) and Movement in Still Life (to be referred after this as MISL). Though BT has since released important albums and some solid releases, these three represent my first experience with his music and here, we get back to Hackers. The first release of the Hackers soundtrack includes some truly heavy hitters in electronic music: Carl Cox, my favorite boys from Essex, Underworld, Orbital with the truly timeless “Halcyon & On & On,” Stereo MC’s, Leftfield, The Prodigy and Kruder & Dorfmeister, electronic music’s own Simon & Garfunkle. But the second album had BT, with his jaw dropping release, “Remember.” I think it’s hard to go back and remember that electronic music was so hard to understand back then, it was truly hard to know what sounds were “real” or if everything was synths, how the sounds were made and at that point I had no understanding of music production what so ever. Here is a track with everything; “Remember” opens with pianos and atmospherics, then jumps right into a stuttered two-step break beat, then enters an almost pop hook with clearly ripped off Peter Hook bass, a severely distorted, almost unrecognizable guitar and then finally transitioning into a classic four on the floor sound more clearly reminiscent of BT’s prior releases. Let’s not forget that Jan Johnston is also at her best here, passionately singing of longing and unrequited love. This song has it all, finally reaching a very solid pop/house hook with some truly wonderful production work that still holds up today. It is arguably one of Brian Transeau’s finest songs, his most creative time and at one point when he has not been tied down by his trademark “Stutter Edit.” This was my first discovery of BT and it was an incredibly important song, because his music brought me to discover so many other artists, so many other styles of music. I was locked in to his music for years after this, seeing him live on more than one occasion, again frequenting the bt-network but all of it was due to this first moment and the groundbreaking music that followed it. I can not say that BT’s current releases have moved me as much- excluding “Tomahawk” and some other recent tracks- but this music that he first released are to this day cd’s I still own and music I still listen to. His music was “my” music for so many years, it was the music I tried to get people in to and the albums I loved to share.

And all thanks to a ridiculously terrible nineties film, called Hackers.

It really must be said that without BT’s music, I would have had a hard time finding Adam Freeland, Sasha, DJ Rap, Paul Van Dyk, Beber & Tamara, Gabriel & Dresden, Grayarea and dozens more. Through remixes, DJ mixes where BT’s music was featured, raves and parties where he headlined, I found artists that I’ve followed since discovering them. For that, I really am grateful.

Remember, as I have not said it in a long time, keep your headphones on.

[bestautochicago]

2019 Volkswagen Jetta Prototype Review: Der Neue Jetta

Do you know what the best-selling German car in America is? No, not the BMW 3 Series—my initial assumption when the question was posed to me. Why, it’s the Volkswagen Jetta. The iconic brand from Wolfsburg moved 121,107 units of their C-segment sedan in 2016.

Good, right? Well, sort of, until you consider that Honda sold 366,927 Civics and Toyota moved 360,483 Corollas during that same time frame. Hyundai sold 208,319 Elantras, Chevy sold 188,876 Cruzes, and Ford sold 168,789 Foci last year. The Jetta isn’t the worst selling in the segment—it beats the Kia Forte, Mazda3, and Subaru Impreza (don’t feel too bad for Subaru; the tiny Japanese brand still outsells Volkswagen at the brand level).

Obviously, Volkswagen isn’t happy to be in the bottom half of anything, let alone this crucial Brot und Butter segment in the world’s most mature auto market. And with an image that has taken a beating of late (you know, the whole diesel emissions thing), VW needs a win, badly.

So they’re moving their top-selling car onto their best platform, the incredible MQB toolkit/chassis/platform. Mind you, this platform is so good that, back in 2014, we handed our Car of the Year award to the seventh-generation Golf hatchback—the first car to be built from MQB. I don’t even remember what car came in second.

Volkswagen flew a gaggle of us auto journo types out to their hot weather proving ground in Maricopa, Arizona, to have a go in a camouflaged preproduction 2019 prototype. Obviously, this new Jetta has to be pretty good, ja? Keep reading.

Volkswagen themselves are burying the lede (a journalist term, meaning that the bigger point of a given article is given short shrift compared to the headline). Dieselgate, Volkswagen’s self-inflicted emissions-cheating software scandal has cost the company—depending on whom you ask—around $30 billion. Ahem, billion. Could be more than that, but it sure ain’t less.

How do you come back from that? Who knows, but one thing Volkswagen North America Region (NAR) would like you to know is that they’ve been in America for a long time, they employ lots of Americans, and they do so in many locations around the country. Counting a plant in Puebla, Mexico, there are currently eight North American locations, with a new one—the Concept and Innovation Center—on the way.

For this demonstration drive, and for the first time ever, Volkswagen opened the doors to its Arizona Proving Grounds to the press. Part of the reason why is to show that post-Dieselgate, the VW brand has decentralized. It’s no longer a top-down organization with a notoriously iron-fisted chairman/dictator (Hallo, Doktor Piëch!) calling all the shots from his throne in Wolfsburg. Or is that Salzburg? The other part of the story is, sometimes you gotta just change the story.

The 1,600-acre Arizona facility has been in operation since 1992—that’s 25 years—and has become essential to VW’s global operations. Over the past quarter-century, Volkswagen has spent $100 million on the facility, which employs around 200 individuals.

As you’re hopefully aware, Arizona, especially just outside Phoenix, is hot. About as hot as anywhere human beings live. In the winter it’s cooler (mercifully VW had us tour the place in December), so Volkswagen has another hot-weather proving ground in South Africa so they can keep abusing their products year round.

The Arizona facility is responsible, however, for more than just baking metal in the desert sun. The proving ground is responsible for corrosion testing, long-term mileage accumulation (there are 49 different routes through Arizona they use to rack up 7.5 million miles annually), static hot weather testing for 100 cars and 3,000 parts, as well as dynamic, severe hot weather testing. Rumor has it that the aforementioned Chairman Piëch laid out nine engineering benchmarks for the Bugatti Veyron. One was that it had to be able to run at 125 mph in 120-degree heat for 10 hours straight. The Arizona facility’s 5-mile long oval sure would make a great place to try that out. In August.

I mention Bugatti for a reason. See, it’s not just the Volkswagen brand that uses this hot weather facility. All the VW Group brands do. I saw Audis, Porsches, Bentleys—even a Lamborghini Urus (under a cover)—if the Volkswagen AG owns it, you can bet it gets tested out in Arizona.

The corrosion testing was my favorite part of the tour. First of all, they have several humidity chambers. Cars are placed inside a garage that’s kept at 125 degrees and 100 percent humidity for 19 hours per day. Once out, they are inserted into salt chambers where you can literally taste the 3 percent salt solution in the air. VW claims that a few rounds of this punishment are equal to 12 years of East Coast driving. After enough sessions have been completed, the cars are then completely disassembled—we’re talking down to the welds—as technicians look for signs of rust, wear, corrosion, and/or rot. If a problem is identified, it’s then (obviously) corrected.

All that leads us nicely to the new seventh-generation Jetta, which—yes—was engineered specifically for the American market. Also, much of the road testing took place in the nearby city of Maricopa.

The new Jetta is solid. No surprises here—it’s basically a larger Golf with a trunk. Actually, there was one surprise. I climbed under the rear of the Jetta to have a look, and staring back at me was a beam axle. Also known as a torsion beam, the last Jetta began life with an inexpensive beam axle but then in 2014 switched to a fully independent rear suspension.

Why the retrograde move? Independent suspensions cost more money, and when you’re near the bottom (in terms of sales) of an especially price-sensitive segment, you save pennies where possible. The good news is that like the old beam-axle Jetta, the new one rides and drives quite well. I doubt any customers will mind the cost cutting, and most compact sedan shoppers won’t be able to tell the dynamic difference in the suspension swap. Also, you can go ahead and bet in the affirmative that we’re going to see a hopped-up GLI version of the new Jetta, one that will sport a fully independent rear in addition to much more power.

Volkswagen turned us loose on a tight and twisty single-lane road course to evaluate how the new Jetta drives. Although it’s not a sports car, the new Jetta displays no bad behaviors. There’s no torque steer, understeer shows up when you drive the car harder than 90 percent of its buyers will ever drive it, and its brakes felt strong and healthy.

Power from the turbocharged 1.4-liter inline-four was just OK; call it adequate with your tongue firmly not in your cheek. VW is being mum on the actual output, but 150 horsepower isn’t a bad guess. VW also let us play with the 2019 Jetta on the same banked oval as the Veyron once did. An engineer told me the car’s top speed is 127 mph. I saw 128. Like all good German cars, the Jetta was composed and relaxed at Vmax. Even if it’s not much of a Vmax.

More seat time will be needed to provide a real, proper review. Especially time spent simultaneously driving other cars in the Jetta’s segment. This will happen soon. Volkswagen will be showing the car at the Detroit show in January and will then begin manufacturing the finished product in March.

It will be on sale around the third quarter of 2018. All said and done, I probably had about an hour in the preproduction Jetta, and that’s just not enough time. It didn’t help my thought process that the body was wrapped up in black and white camo and the interior was covered with black fabric.

At one point during my time on the proving ground a VW employee quizzed me about my take on the Jetta. I said that I felt it was very solid, drove like a big Golf, and had steering that was in line with the brakes that were in line with the engine that was in line with the chassis. It had no rough edges. It seemed like a well-thought-out commodity product, though one that doesn’t tug at my heartstrings. This person will remain nameless and genderless, but they said, “Yeah. We built a boring car.” Which, in a world of rapidly shrinking sedan sales, might prove to be the wrong approach.

Luckily for Volkswagen, the magic of MQB is that you can quickly and cheaply deploy numerous products from the single toolkit because 60 percent of the engineering work is already done. Might I suggest tiny little SUVs? I mean, just look at how many crossovers Subaru makes. And sells.

Source: http://chicagoautohaus.com/2019-volkswagen-jetta-prototype-review-der-neue-jetta/

from Chicago Today https://chicagocarspot.wordpress.com/2017/12/15/2019-volkswagen-jetta-prototype-review-der-neue-jetta/

[robertkstone]

2019 Volkswagen Jetta Prototype Review: Der Neue Jetta

Do you know what the best-selling German car in America is? No, not the BMW 3 Series—my initial assumption when the question was posed to me. Why, it’s the Volkswagen Jetta. The iconic brand from Wolfsburg moved 121,107 units of their C-segment sedan in 2016.

Good, right? Well, sort of, until you consider that Honda sold 366,927 Civics and Toyota moved 360,483 Corollas during that same time frame. Hyundai sold 208,319 Elantras, Chevy sold 188,876 Cruzes, and Ford sold 168,789 Foci last year. The Jetta isn’t the worst selling in the segment—it beats the Kia Forte, Mazda3, and Subaru Impreza (don’t feel too bad for Subaru; the tiny Japanese brand still outsells Volkswagen at the brand level).

Obviously, Volkswagen isn’t happy to be in the bottom half of anything, let alone this crucial Brot und Butter segment in the world’s most mature auto market. And with an image that has taken a beating of late (you know, the whole diesel emissions thing), VW needs a win, badly.

So they’re moving their top-selling car onto their best platform, the incredible MQB toolkit/chassis/platform. Mind you, this platform is so good that, back in 2014, we handed our Car of the Year award to the seventh-generation Golf hatchback—the first car to be built from MQB. I don’t even remember what car came in second.

Volkswagen flew a gaggle of us auto journo types out to their hot weather proving ground in Maricopa, Arizona, to have a go in a camouflaged preproduction 2019 prototype. Obviously, this new Jetta has to be pretty good, ja? Keep reading.

Volkswagen themselves are burying the lede (a journalist term, meaning that the bigger point of a given article is given short shrift compared to the headline). Dieselgate, Volkswagen’s self-inflicted emissions-cheating software scandal has cost the company—depending on whom you ask—around $30 billion. Ahem, billion. Could be more than that, but it sure ain’t less.

How do you come back from that? Who knows, but one thing Volkswagen North America Region (NAR) would like you to know is that they’ve been in America for a long time, they employ lots of Americans, and they do so in many locations around the country. Counting a plant in Puebla, Mexico, there are currently eight North American locations, with a new one—the Concept and Innovation Center—on the way.

For this demonstration drive, and for the first time ever, Volkswagen opened the doors to its Arizona Proving Grounds to the press. Part of the reason why is to show that post-Dieselgate, the VW brand has decentralized. It’s no longer a top-down organization with a notoriously iron-fisted chairman/dictator (Hallo, Doktor Piëch!) calling all the shots from his throne in Wolfsburg. Or is that Salzburg? The other part of the story is, sometimes you gotta just change the story.

The 1,600-acre Arizona facility has been in operation since 1992—that’s 25 years—and has become essential to VW’s global operations. Over the past quarter-century, Volkswagen has spent $100 million on the facility, which employs around 200 individuals.

As you’re hopefully aware, Arizona, especially just outside Phoenix, is hot. About as hot as anywhere human beings live. In the winter it’s cooler (mercifully VW had us tour the place in December), so Volkswagen has another hot-weather proving ground in South Africa so they can keep abusing their products year round.

The Arizona facility is responsible, however, for more than just baking metal in the desert sun. The proving ground is responsible for corrosion testing, long-term mileage accumulation (there are 49 different routes through Arizona they use to rack up 7.5 million miles annually), static hot weather testing for 100 cars and 3,000 parts, as well as dynamic, severe hot weather testing. Rumor has it that the aforementioned Chairman Piëch laid out nine engineering benchmarks for the Bugatti Veyron. One was that it had to be able to run at 125 mph in 120-degree heat for 10 hours straight. The Arizona facility’s 5-mile long oval sure would make a great place to try that out. In August.

I mention Bugatti for a reason. See, it’s not just the Volkswagen brand that uses this hot weather facility. All the VW Group brands do. I saw Audis, Porsches, Bentleys—even a Lamborghini Urus (under a cover)—if the Volkswagen AG owns it, you can bet it gets tested out in Arizona.

The corrosion testing was my favorite part of the tour. First of all, they have several humidity chambers. Cars are placed inside a garage that’s kept at 125 degrees and 100 percent humidity for 19 hours per day. Once out, they are inserted into salt chambers where you can literally taste the 3 percent salt solution in the air. VW claims that a few rounds of this punishment are equal to 12 years of East Coast driving. After enough sessions have been completed, the cars are then completely disassembled—we’re talking down to the welds—as technicians look for signs of rust, wear, corrosion, and/or rot. If a problem is identified, it’s then (obviously) corrected.

All that leads us nicely to the new seventh-generation Jetta, which—yes—was engineered specifically for the American market. Also, much of the road testing took place in the nearby city of Maricopa.

The new Jetta is solid. No surprises here—it’s basically a larger Golf with a trunk. Actually, there was one surprise. I climbed under the rear of the Jetta to have a look, and staring back at me was a beam axle. Also known as a torsion beam, the last Jetta began life with an inexpensive beam axle but then in 2014 switched to a fully independent rear suspension.

Why the retrograde move? Independent suspensions cost more money, and when you’re near the bottom (in terms of sales) of an especially price-sensitive segment, you save pennies where possible. The good news is that like the old beam-axle Jetta, the new one rides and drives quite well. I doubt any customers will mind the cost cutting, and most compact sedan shoppers won’t be able to tell the dynamic difference in the suspension swap. Also, you can go ahead and bet in the affirmative that we’re going to see a hopped-up GLI version of the new Jetta, one that will sport a fully independent rear in addition to much more power.

Volkswagen turned us loose on a tight and twisty single-lane road course to evaluate how the new Jetta drives. Although it’s not a sports car, the new Jetta displays no bad behaviors. There’s no torque steer, understeer shows up when you drive the car harder than 90 percent of its buyers will ever drive it, and its brakes felt strong and healthy.

Power from the turbocharged 1.4-liter inline-four was just OK; call it adequate with your tongue firmly not in your cheek. VW is being mum on the actual output, but 150 horsepower isn’t a bad guess. VW also let us play with the 2019 Jetta on the same banked oval as the Veyron once did. An engineer told me the car’s top speed is 127 mph. I saw 128. Like all good German cars, the Jetta was composed and relaxed at Vmax. Even if it’s not much of a Vmax.

More seat time will be needed to provide a real, proper review. Especially time spent simultaneously driving other cars in the Jetta’s segment. This will happen soon. Volkswagen will be showing the car at the Detroit show in January and will then begin manufacturing the finished product in March.

It will be on sale around the third quarter of 2018. All said and done, I probably had about an hour in the preproduction Jetta, and that’s just not enough time. It didn’t help my thought process that the body was wrapped up in black and white camo and the interior was covered with black fabric.

At one point during my time on the proving ground a VW employee quizzed me about my take on the Jetta. I said that I felt it was very solid, drove like a big Golf, and had steering that was in line with the brakes that were in line with the engine that was in line with the chassis. It had no rough edges. It seemed like a well-thought-out commodity product, though one that doesn’t tug at my heartstrings. This person will remain nameless and genderless, but they said, “Yeah. We built a boring car.” Which, in a world of rapidly shrinking sedan sales, might prove to be the wrong approach.

Luckily for Volkswagen, the magic of MQB is that you can quickly and cheaply deploy numerous products from the single toolkit because 60 percent of the engineering work is already done. Might I suggest tiny little SUVs? I mean, just look at how many crossovers Subaru makes. And sells.

The post 2019 Volkswagen Jetta Prototype Review: Der Neue Jetta appeared first on Motor Trend.

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