Spotter's Guide To The September Road&Track

About eighty days ago, I spent most of a week driving a BMW i8 from Los Angeles to Woodinville, Washington state. Along the way, I stopped everywhere from the Chateau Marmont to the Nipomo, CA swap meet to See See Motor Coffee in Portland to the RainSong Guitars factory. I also had the chance to talk about design with the fellow who penned the BMW i3, Richard Kim. The resulting story is about as far as it's possible to get from the NEW MUSTANG TELLS THE CAMARO TO STEP OUTSIDE! stuff that keeps Motor Trend at the top of the YouTube charts, but if you are of a slightly more intellectual bent than the average MT reader, I think you'll enjoy it.

It was a real privilege to see how the entire West Coast responds to the i8. The best way to explain it is that Portlanders and the like are as excited about the i8 as people in Ohio were about the Z51 Stingray when it debuted. It's the eco-supercar and it somehow avoids the new-money gold-chain image that comes along with driving something like a Huracan or 458 in Cali.

There were more highlights to the trip than I could possibly cover in 3,700 words, and some of the things I did get to cover would have been worth an entire story on their own. For me, the highlight of the trip was visiting RainSong, meeting their production team, and ordering my own "Black Ice" guitar for them to build and ship to me in the following weeks. Given that I'd brought my own RainSong all the way up the coast to visit its birthplace, it was also neat to talk to the people who'd built and and tell them all the stories from my travels. Some of them even stayed awake for the discussion.

I hope you'll enjoy the story. While I'm sure it will eventually be available online, clearly the best thing for you to do would be to go to your local bookstore and help Road&Track disappear from the shelves. After all, if this kind of stuff doesn't sell, we'll be back to doing ten months a year of MUSTANG VS CAMARO ROUND EIGHTY-FOUR!