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Hyundai's Super Bowl ads highlight speed

Having been batted about regarding their fuel-economy claims, Hyundai has decided to use their Super Bowl ad dollars to highlight the raw power of the Sonata Turbo and the Genesis R-Spec sedan. We find the above Sonata ad a whimsical piffle, featuring a couple utilizing their family sedan's turbocharged 2.0L four to handily pass obnoxious/dangerous motorists. We're partial to the whipping, slimy ropes of dog drool.

The Super Bowl's most refreshingly honest car ad

In 2000's High Fidelity, hapless record-store owner Rob Gordon -- played memorably by John Cusack -- opines, “What really matters is what you like, not what you are like." In the year 2000, I was 24 years old and was working on a punk rock magazine, an environment not dissimilar from Gordon's Championship Vinyl. The line made a lot of sense to me; it was a quiet, back-of-the-head maxim that informed much of what my friends and I did and how we saw people. It's a shallow way of looking at things, but for those of us who came of age amid the us-vs.-them liberal identity politics of the '90s, awash as we were in Public Enemy's political consciousness, the post-AIDS gay-rights push and the loud-fast feminism of the riot grrrl movement, there was a good chance that if somebody liked the things you liked, they thought like you and they were good.

Autoweek in review: What you might have missed

The new show Autoweek's Vinsetta Garage, will premiere Jan. 3 on Discovery's Velocity Network. The five most-watched car ads of 2011 were announced, with Volkswagen's "The Force" commercial leading the pack.