classic car

We recently had a great family trip circumnavigating the Painted Desert in northeast Arizona. On the itinerary were Sedona, Meteor Crater, Petrified Forest National Park, Monument Valley, the Grand Canyon, and, of course, several iconic Route 66 relics along the way.

At the Phoenix airport we had several vehicles to choose from on the Emerald Aisle. We wanted a mid-size SUV to have plenty of room for two adults, two young teenagers, and associated luggage, and also because we planned to travel a few “unimproved roads” along our scenic route. We chose a Kia Borrego with the V8. First impressions were quite good. Nice styling and fit and finish, and seemingly plenty of room and comfort. We chose one with the “Copperhead” paint job, which fit in beautifully with the surrounding desert and mountain landscape.

Driving impressions were also quite good. Nice road feel, intuitive controls, good ride and handling, low road noise (better than our own Honda Pilot). Performance on the “unimproved roads” also proved to be more than adequate. The Borrego did not miss a beat on rutted and sandy switchbacks. Over the course of several days the Borrego proved to also be quite comfortable, both front and back. Gas mileage was what one would expect for a mid-size SUV with a V8, right around 20 mpg with mostly highway driving. Definitely absent was any sense of copy-cat, “cheap,” or compromise, a sign of the growing maturity for the Kia brand.

One small design issue arose during the trip that was a continual annoyance. Kids can be a bit, well, spastic. Kia attaches the lower ends of the front seatbelts right where spastic feet in the back seat were landing at regular intervals. This resulted in the driver and front passenger continually having their seat belts unexpectedly stepped on and tensioned. This is a small design detail to be sure, but one that proved to be annoying enough that it really should be addressed.

All things considered, though, we really liked the Borrego. It proved to be a vehicle we could easily live with.

Since our writers are human and have been getting slow and lazy, paying attention to work more than the blog, we are looking for extra writers to fill in when we're on a slow streak and any other time (such as these past few weeks). Sadly we cannot offer any pay, but bragging rights come in handy sometimes. If you are interested, send us some info at carnut1blogspotcom@gmail.com. Thanks!

That's right. After all the sightings of extremely-camouflaged Z28 prototypes around Detroit, one of The Car Blog's writers spotted one without any camo heading south on a a trailer filled with GMCs from northern Wisconsin. Though we don't have any photos of the event, we can tell you that the Z28 will have a much more muscular front end with a muscular splitter and a big hood scoop. It will also have a revised rear spoiler and new wheels. But the most striking, if not the most noticeable feature, was the rear fender vents. Two subtle-yet-mean-looking quadrilateral holes stacked on top of each other replace the two slashes in the LT and SS. We will have more information about the car when it debuts, probably at Detroit.

Our lack in posts the past week was due to errors in the Blogger servers that randomly blocked us as a spam and virus-spreading website after we added "repetitive posts with links to suspicious websites". Since when are photos from Jalopnik "suspicious websites"? But we contacted a few Blogspot masters and we are now back online. Thanks for waiting for us to be back online, and we can now deliver you auto posts once again. But because of this, sadly we can't run the Auto News Update feature for fear of being shut down again.

Chevrolet's techs have launched the Chevy Cruze configurator on the Chevrolet site

The Ford Explorer Police Interceptor Utility got its reveal (photo Motor Ward)

The Bentley Continental GT refresh is set for a September 7th reveal