CLANGING BELL
By Russ Heaps

(May 13, 2012) Wow! I never thought I'd hear myself say this, but Chevy has a compact car that I absolutely love!

I have become a slobbering mess over its new Sonic.

CLANGING BELL
By Russ Heaps

(May 8, 2012) Driving to Key West is always a bit of an adventure. It's easy to forget you are still in the good old US of A, rather than a Caribbean Island.

I am in the Keys at the behest of AAA of the Carolinas for a travel piece. I am one of five journalists in the care of a PR liaison for the Keys. We typically think of getting from Florida City to Key West as just one straight road — and it is — but there is an alternate route from Florida City to Key Largo, the first of the Keys. It's Card Sound Road, a toll road. It costs all of one buck. Be sure and get a receipt!

CLANGING BELL
By Russ Heaps

(April 16, 2012) I drove from Greenville, S.C., to Holden Beach, N.C. over the weekend. It isn’t a bad drive as these things go, but nearly one-third of the 270 miles is on state and county roads.

Infiniti provided the abbreviated version of the FX35, the EX35, for this boondoggle.  Its comfortable surroundings and enthusiastic performance contributed heavily to the “fun” quotient of my drive. The window price sticker in the glove box told me the EPA expects it to get 24 mpg on the highway. I averaged 25.5 mpg on my little jaunt.

CLANGING BELL
By Russ Heaps

(March 29, 2012) Let's talk tires.

Snore…Snore…Snore…

No, really.

I spent yesterday and today with Bridgestone in Las Vegas checking out a couple of new tires they are releasing this spring.

CLANGING BELL
By Russ Heaps

(March 16, 2012) Media day for the Atlanta Auto Show was Wednesday. Actually, it's more like media morning because the show officially opened at noon that day. But the morning was packed with press conferences with a handful of manufacturers.

If you follow this blog at all, you probably are well aware that I'm not keen on media day(s) at auto shows. It's a lot of walking around listening to carmaker PR and marketing types talk about cars that either I've already heard about or will hear about ad nauseum in the coming months.

CLANGING BELL
By Russ Heaps

(March 6, 2012) Often I write here about experiences that are new to me. More often than not, they aren't anything extraordinary for lots of people; they are simply uncharted waters for me: things like frying chicken or seeing a 3-D movie.

This week I did something that isn't entirely new: I was pulled over for exceeding the speed limit. By how much, you might ask. I have no clue.

CLANGING BELL
By Russ Heaps

(February 22, 2012) On the first day of Econ 101, Dr. Schultz, my econ professor at good ole W.U., told us bleary-eyed, hung-over college students that the most basic tenet of economics is guns or butter. That is, a country can only buy more guns if it buys less butter and vice versa. Of course, that was before someone figured out that you can have all you want of both if you just borrow a few trillion from China.

CLANGING BELL
By Russ Heaps

(January 19, 2012) Officially, there are about nine weeks of winter left. I'm not totally sick of the cold, but only because this winter has been mild by normal standards — at least the standards set during the past four years in Greenville (S.C.)

My heating bill for December was only about 70 percent of what it was last year. I'm okay with that.