What's The Point?

Why even bother to write a "Top Ten" article if all you're going to do is sneer up your sleeve at the entries?

10 fastest American cars

They've never had much practical use for anything besides bragging rights, but they were as American as a quarter pounder with cheese. Now they ought to be listed with other endangered species like the Eastern cougar and Kemp's Ridley turtle.

I'm talking about fast high-horsepower cars. Really fast cars, like in three times the legal speed limit. The kind you loved in Smokey and the Bandit and Two-Lane Blacktop. Traditional Detroit iron.

Right. Because cars that go ridiculously fast and waste gasoline are uniquely American, right? Ferarri makes econoboxes. Lamborghini makes grocery getters. Bentley makes fuel efficient sedans. I'm sorry, but when your article starts off with a biased opener, you're not setting it up for much.

And you don't help your credibility much with dichotomies such as:

At 14 mpg city/23 mpg highway, though, it sure won't win any fuel economy prizes.

and

As the numbers show, they provide perfectly adequate performance and better than adequate fuel economy. Both cars are rated at 17 mpg city/25 mpg highway.

So 14 mpg city won't win any prizes, but 17 mpg is better than adequate? Seriously?

Muscle/sports cars aren't meant to be economical. They're supposed to be test beds for the latest and greatest - how we get things like four wheel disc brakes, ABS, and five point restraints into everyday cars. They're supposed to be bragging rights winners, auto magazine fodder, and car show spotlights. It's eye candy. One of the cars mentioned was the Dodge Viper - it's arguable that the Viper alone was responsible for bringing Chrysler back from the brink in the late 1980s (it sure wasn't the styling of the rest of the line nor performace...)

The most astonishing thing - and it's unconscionable that this was overlooked - is just how much better these cars are than their 1960s and 1970s counterparts. Safety, performance, price, fuel economy; today's cars are vastly superior to their leaded gas equivalents using any metric one cares to use. The new Dodge Challenger gets 15 mpg in city driving using a large V8 motor. That is, quite simply, astonishing - the 440 CUI block in the 1970s Chargers would be lucky to get half that - on the highway.

You'll not see American muscle cars die out, like the article desires; you'll just see them pushed beyond the reach of the common man like their European counterparts...

That is all.