Drew Dowdell

"The Assembly Line"

I second that!! Congrats Mini-meets would be a great idea. There's the upcoming All-GM Nationals in Carlisle that if enough "club" members register, they provide a free tent. Dates?

There will be more news around that soon. William and I are just getting our feet wet. I'm all for mini-meets if you guys want to do them. I can help organize.

March 2, 2013 - State of the Site As promised, on the first Saturday of each month, I present the State of the Site. Last month's can be viewed here: February 2013 State of the Site. Operations Server - The new server is proving to be dead reliable with no involuntary reboots since it was installed. I still plan on having it performance tuned at some point, but it is not a priority right now. We did get pinged that we've used up 89% of our free disk space, so I will need to buy some additional room there. Software - IP Board has released a small maintenance update that I will install tomorrow or Monday evening. Nothing drastic, but a number of small fixes for annoying little things going in. Look and Feel - The new look is still on the drawing board, but I may hold off on a re-image of the site and just update the logo and header. IP Board has already announced version 4.0. When they do major version changes, the skins are notoriously difficult to migrate. MudMonster has been promoted into the Admin team. This is mostly for Spam fighting purposes. Site Ranking We've fallen back from some of the ranking gains we made in January. Part of that has come from me not being able to be so aggressive promoting the site while I was sick, traveling, and having some personal challenges. Some of the change has also come from growth from our competition. I am not disappointed with the change as a take a much longer view of the direction of CheersandGears.com and realize there will be ups and downs in our rankings. Importantly, we are still inside of one of the insides ;-) In the prior update I mentioned that I found that Google was reporting over 200k broken links to C&G. I installed a fix to address this issue and Google is now down to 120k broken links. At that rate, we should be down to a "real" number by the end of may. There will always be some broken links, but not that many. Visitor Engagement Metrics In spite of our rankings fall, we continue to do excellently with visitor engagement. Put simply, this is a measurement of how much a visitor likes the site once they get here... and by the stats, they really like us. We sport one of the lowest bounce rates among our targeted competitors and visitors spend anywhere from from 6 to 10 times as long on C&G as they do on other sites and visit up to 9 times as many pages. Social Media Engagement We've had a little progress here with some of you sharing our stories on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. There will be a large push here ahead of the NYC Auto Show. News/Review/Show coverage Being rather disengaged myself lately, I haven't finished the review and show templates, but still expect them to be completed before New York. Sales and Advertising We've gained a couple of advertisers in the mix along with our standard advertising networks. I expect to have a formal process for advertisers to buy advertising in the next two weeks. Also starting in March, we will begin aggressive advertising of ourselves. The Biggest News I am starting the legal process to make Cheers and Gears its own company by June 1st. I will continue to be the owner and managing editor. I am making this change for a number of reasons. First, there has been a substantial change in my own personal financial situation that could eventually lead to me leaving my current employment with the energy company. Some of you are aware that I also own some apartment buildings and do private I.T. consulting. I feel that the time for me to make C&G my primary venture with the other ventures providing a stable base and somewhat passive income is rapidly approaching. My ability to do this does not at all depend on rapid growth at C&G, the main change will be my ability to attend more news related events. Making C&G my primary venture has been a dream of mine for a while, but some recent events and meeting certain people over the last 4 months has convinced me that I can do it. That said, while I insist on maintaining the family and community feel we have, I do need to start to run the place like a business rather than just a hobby. Summary CheersandGears.com is one of the oldest continuously running automotive forums out there, but watch us grow now!

Glad you joined up!

AWD is the only reason the GT-R can do what it can do.

and in about 24 months, there should be a nice selection of the next gen Terrain on the lots.

I'm curious if it skips the same gears each time or if it is much more variable depending on conditions.

Well the Evoque is a soft-roader. It's probably the most capable of the breed and will go places no CR-V or X3 would dare to tread, but it is still no rock crawler like its biggest brothers.

any idea how freaking easy it will be for the aftermarket to come up with mods for a GM 5.3 V8 in the Corvette? The ability to cross-sell to the Silverado, Sierra, Suburban, Tahoe, and Yukon guys alone would be enough.. the extra sales from the Vette would be gravy.... plus whatever else the 5.3 ends up in (SS, Caprice, Holdens, Camaro)

With the different modes and skip shift, it will be interesting to see how this drives. I find that even in some small displacement manual shift cars, the low end torque is enough to skip shift during normal driving. In the Sonic RS, if you were driving in normal suburban speeds I would go 1-2-4-6

it will get blasted for using a truck engine...but I support the idea.

Thanks... I was sick two weeks ago, but that's not really it. Just a bunch of different stressful situations all hitting me at the same time.

Same way you switched to it, but pick IP.Board. If that doesn't work, I can force the skin back for you individually.

Sorry guys, I've had a rough couple of weeks here. I'm ok but I'll be laying low as I recover. Good things on the way though.

more unfounded statements....

The states don't have anything to do with it... or at least they don't have to. It's going to be private enterprise that gets in on it.

Is this some data driven insight or simply just because you wish it so? Even if the sales of EVs isn't where manufacturers want them to be, EVs are still a growing segment. The only direction they can go is up. The ELR proves that GM isn't about to pull the plug on Voltec any time soon. Leaf just got reconfigured to decrease price. Toyota is selling their plug-in Pruis. I work for a company that, as a side business, does the installations on these things. We're hiring BTW.... You are literally the old coot on his porch shaking his cane at Henry Ford trying to invent the Model-T and yelling "Well where are you gonna fuel the dang thing?! I can buy oats for my horse ANYWHERE!!"

There will be a lot more failures for purely electric vehicles as the charging infrastructure is built which is why the Fisker, and Pruis Plug-In, and the Volt are offered as a stepping stone to the time where you can plug in your EV at any strip mall or Home Depot.

With those specs, it will probably make a great panini too.

and... I like this new design at least in concept form. I'm thinking some of the rough edges would have been smoothed over by production time.

Disagree. Saab's issue was trying to basically start a car company during a time when credit was really tight. Their issues were entirely of a cash flow nature. Double the size of their credit line and they might have been able to make it.

The Fisker setup is similar to Volt in results only..... the Volt is far more advanced.

Um, you know the Fisker has a gas engine too right? There isn't a single thing stopping you from being able to drive one from your house to Portland Maine.

If you believe that, then the same goes for you.