Lawrence Ulrich:

I suspect that the 4 Series, buoyed by BMW's shrewdly cultivated customer base, will soon reflect satisfied faces wherever creative, fashionable folks meet for potent cocktails and subtle one-upmanship.

Rebecca Solnit:

The world seems to be made more and more of stuff we're not supposed to look at, a banal infrastructure that supports the illusion of automotive independence, the largely unseen places from which our materials come -- strip mines, industrial agriculture, automated assembly lines, abattoirs -- and where they end up: the dumps. Los Angeles consists mostly of these drably utilitarian spaces, in part because cars demand them, and it is a city built to accommodate cars. These spaces tend to be grey, the grey of unpainted cement, asphalt, steel and accumulated grime; and they tend to be either abandoned or frequented by people who are also discards, a kind of subterranean realm hauled to the surface. Or not.

John Pearley Huffman:

Low expectations don't guarantee happiness, but at least there isn't much disappointment. The reborn Mitsubishi Mirage lowers expectations, strangles them and buries their remains in a deep unmarked grave. If this car wasn't disappointing, it wouldn't be anything at all.

Justin Fox:

That's all a way of ignoring the systems that make the world possible. One example from the '60s that I think is pretty telling is all the road trips. The road trips are always about the heroic actions of people like Ken Kesey and Neal Cassady and their amazing automobiles, right? Never, never did it get told that those road trips were only made possible by Eisenhower's completion of the highway system. The highway system is never in the story. It's boring. What's in the story is the heroic actions of bootstrapped individuals pursuing conscious change. What we see out here now is, again, those heroic stories. And there are real heroes. But the real heroes are operating with automobiles and roads and whole systems of support without which they couldn't be heroic.