Angering car lovers

One thing I've learned over the years is that car lovers really don't like it when you insult their vehicular tastes.

Case in point: our Managing Editor Aaron Cole reviewed the '09 Dodge Challenger (read the review here) in today's paper. While the review painted a less-than-stellar picture when it highlights the flaws of the car, he did say it's "impractical, nearly undriveable, tremendously fun and turns every head within a city block."

Just like every other unnecessarily amped-up vehicle from crotch rockets to riced-out imports to big honkin' SUVs, it's oh so fun, but oh so inefficient.

While there's only two comments on the story (so far), we found a thread on a Challenger forum about it with mostly negative reactions about the review.

This reminded me when I was in college and the opinions editor of our newspaper wrote a piece about how super-sized trucks were on the verge of extinction after domestic car companies were posting record losses (shameless plug for my college paper). It was more commentary about how Japanese car companies were winning because of their research efforts on efficiency and reliability than anything else. Regardless, we got lengthy letters from truck lovers who tried disproving everything he wrote in response to the piece.

But one thing that remains constant between these incidents: the key insult is "tree-hugging Boulder liberal" Mark Udall.

(Er... scratch the Udall part, I'm still suffering flashbacks from Bob Schaffer's commercials from the election season.)