Crave

The paperwork from all those reviews

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The Rolls was a definite high point

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When it comes to pure driving fun, the S2000 is hard to beat

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Today being my last day at CNET, I was clearing out my desk and came across a stack of window stickers for all the cars I have reviewed and driven in the line of duty as an editor on the Car Tech channel. Rather than indulge in dewy-eyed reminiscence on my own, I thought I'd share a few of the highlights with you, the readers who have endured--and hopefully occasionally enjoyed--my automotive observations over the past two-and-a-bit years.

Starting with my review of the 2006 Buick Lucerne, I have been in and out of the driver's seats of literally hundreds of cars, some of which were more memorable than others. The Mercedes S550 with its hard-drive based navigation system, night vision camera, and adaptive cruise control gave me my first real exposure to the rarefied world of automotive technoluxury, an experience I was to revisit many times over. Equally impressive was the self-parking Lexus LS460L, which became the first car to receive a perfect 10 score in a CNET review. And it was while enjoying the heated massage seats in the stunning Mercedes-Benz CL550 in the outside lane of I-280 that I got my first on-the-job speeding ticket. On the subject of beautiful cars, one of the highlights of my first few months was the Jaguar XK, the first real-head turner that we got in to the CNET garage and still one of my all-time favorites. (While the XKR Convertible was more impressive from a performance perspective, I prefer the clean design of the original.)

Performance high points have to include the mighty Shelby GT500, a true modern-day muscle car; the Porsche 911 4S; and the awesome Audi R8, which I got to flog around Laguna Seca raceway. A barrage of BMWs has crossed the CNET garage threshold during my tenure, including the frighteningly fast 2006 BMW M5 and the BMW M6 (in successive weeks!), the 2007 BMW Z4M, and, most recently, the new, brawnier 2008 BMW M3, which I spent a memorable day thrashing around the hills of Northern California. For sheer over-the-top luxury, I have to hand it to the $375,000 Rolls Royce Phantom with its automatically closing doors, in-dash TV, and built-in umbrellas.

Amid such a backdrop of awesome automotive hardware, it was sometimes easy to lose track of the less exotic--but no less remarkable--stream of test cars that showed up twice a week. The Mercedes-Benz SL550, the 2008 Subaru WRX STi, the Audi S5, the Saturn Sky Red Line, the BMW 135i, and the hard-top Mazda Miata MX5 have all brought a smile to my face on the freeways around San Francisco. The impressively economical Mercedes-Benz E320 BlueTec deserves a special mention for nearly getting me all the way from San Francisco to LA and back on one tank of diesel, while the 2007 Honda CR-V remains a favorite for having accommodated no fewer than seven dogs in back on one of our more adventurous practical field tests. The 500-horsepower Porsche Cayenne turbo was probably the most outrageous car I've reviewed in my time here, although the 9mpg 2007 Cadillac Escalade has to come in a close second.

So, what would I choose if I could drive any car from the past two years out of the CNET garage and into the sunset? That's a tough one. Having had the privilege of driving so many cars that I will never be able to afford, my values and benchmarks are so skewed that I am ruined forever as a car buyer. Keeping things in the realm of attainability, I think that for sheer driving enjoyably, the Honda S2000 is still tough to beat.

Thanks for your feedback and comments over the past couple of years: I can say without reservation that it's been a blast.

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As part of our retrospective of this season's auto shows, we've put together a roundup of new hybrids that are scheduled--or likely--to make it to market in the next year or so. Many of them are larger models that make use of the two-mode hybrid system jointly developed by a consortium of major automakers that are scrambling to clean up their fleets.

See our round up of production hybrids here.

The production version of the Chevy Volt will be less exotic than the original concept.

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The batteries may not be ready yet, but Chevrolet is planning to show a production specification version of its electric-powered Volt at this year's Paris auto show. According to a report from the U.K.'s Channel 4 News, the Volt will be shown at the October show with an electric power train and auxiliary gasoline engine in similar configuration to that of the original concept, which debuted at Detroit last year. However, an official teaser shot of the production Volt released by GM suggests that the Paris-bound production version of the four-seater may lose some of the dashing curves of the original concept.

Meanwhile, Nissan has announced that it has partnered with NEC to start mass production of lithium-ion batteries at a plant in Japan. According to Automotive News, the initial capacity of the facility will be 13,000 batteries a year. The batteries will likely be used to power the electric car that Nissan plans to have on sale in the United States and Japan by 2010.

Source: Channel 4 / Just Auto (subscription required)

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With more than half of the European market share for new cars, diesels are starting to push their way back to the United States. Faced with tough emissions standards, European and Japanese manufacturers are using a range of "clean-diesel" technologies for the new crop of production cars, which they hope will dispel the image of diesels as oil-burning smog-spewers. Check out our roundup of diesel cars from this year's auto show season that are confirmed--or strongly expected--to make it U.S. showrooms soon.

Go to the Production diesels gallery.

That's gotta smart.

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Forget the death-trap jokes: The pint-sized Smart ForTwo, has earned a full five-star crash rating from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) for frontal and side impacts. More than 3 feet shorter and almost 700 pounds lighter than a Mini Cooper--and only a third as heavy as a BMW X5--the ForTwo is the smallest car the IIHS has ever tested. Nevertheless, it scored a maximum safety rating from the IIHS in the standard frontal and side impact crash testing, which involves both a 40 mph frontal offset crash and a 31 mph barrier impact. The IIHS findings follow last month's results from the NHTSA, which gave the ForTwo four and five star ratings for frontal and side impacts, but which found a tendency of the ForTwo's driver door to unlatched during testing, increasing the likelihood of occupant ejection.

Following the release of the IIHS ratings, SmartUSA was quick to emphasize the ForTwo's tridon safety cell--essentially a reinforced steel cage--which it says is designed to "activate the crumple zone of the other vehicle involved in the accident and distribute the impact energy throughout the body of the vehicle."

The IIHS' crash safety tests are conducted using a dummy in the driver's seat fitted with injury sensors that assess head protection countermeasures and the vehicle's structural performance during the impact. Despite the ForTwo's maximum ratings for front and side impact, the IIHS did point out that the absence of a front-end crash zone means that drivers involved in accidents in the two-seater undergo a different kind of experience than those in cars with a longer frontal crush structure. Instead of relying on the car's crush zone to weather most of the impact, the ForTwo relies more on its internal restraint system to protect the driver. "We recorded a high head acceleration when the driver dummy's head hit the steering wheel through the frontal airbag," said IIHS President Adrian Lund in a press release, suggesting that the dummy maximized the use of space in the car's cabin to "ride down" the impact.

You can check out the IIHS video of the crash testing here if you're interested in watching the ForTwo taking a hammering.

The Nissan Denki Cube may provide the platform for Nissan's production electric car.

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For all of the buzz surrounding General Motors' Chevy Volt, it now looks like Nissan may well be the first major automaker to market with an electric car in the United States. A line item buried in Nissan's mid-term business plan reaffirms the company's commitment to "zero-emission vehicle leadership," with a plan to introduce an all-electric vehicle in the U.S. and Japan in 2010 and then mass-market vehicles to consumers globally in 2012. In an interview in today's New York Times, Nissan's boss, Carols Ghosn, said that the company was looking at a range of electric models starting with small city cars, but eventually including minivans, crossovers, and commercial vehicles. At the weekend, Ghosn took the wraps off a Renault-branded electric demonstration vehicle in Israel, where Nissan has a partnership with California-based Project Better Place to provide electric vehicles and half a million electric-car charging stations over the next three years. A more likely vision for Nissan's electric car, however, is the Denki Cube, which Nissan unveiled at this year's New York auto show.

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With the Brisbane SD48, Blaupunkt is proving that it can make car stereos for the digital age. As a testament to the migration of mobile music from CDs to digital files, the system features an SD-card slot, a USB port, an auxiliary input jack, but no disc player.

Check out our full review right here.

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In addition to their wild and wacky blue-sky projects, car companies also use the auto show season to display models that point to their near-term design direction. In addition to giving an insight into the shape of new models and general changes to external styling language, these vehicles often hint at forthcoming advances in drivetrain and cabin technology.

Check out our roundup of design concepts here

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This year's auto-show season threw up a rich crop of cars that are never likely to make it to production in this decade. But who knows what features future cars will have? Solar panels? Mood-sensors? Video-game controls? Built-in Segways?

Check out our slideshow to see some of the more experimental ideas that major automakers are exploring.