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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.

Cash-for-clunkers gems: Corvettes, Camaros, Mustangs and one infamous Bentley meet the end of the road

By now, the high-profile casualties of cash-for-clunkers are well documented: a Bentley Continental R and an Aston Martin DB7 Volante from 1997 and a 1985 Maserati Quattroporte all perished under the government-funded incentive program. But scratching beneath the surface reveals that scores of everyday enthusiast rides such as Mustangs, Camaros and even some Corvettes met ignominious endings by having their engines destroyed and their bodies crushed. While it’s likely that many of the nearly 700,000 clunkers turned in actually were at the end of their roads, the final report released by the government reveals the demise of plenty of affordable, likely still-fixable cars that could have been enjoyed by collectors of all ages.

GM donates Insignia prototype to Coventry University

Though the cloud of uncertainty is currently looming over General Motors' Opel and Vauxhall brands, the economic climate hasn't deterred its Vauxhall division from showing a bit of generosity. Recognizing the burgeoning talent at one of the UK's leading design schools, the British arm of the American automotive giant recently offered car design students from Coventry's School of Art & Design an Insignia prototype, which will be used for 'real life' styling exercises. "We are delighted that Vauxhall has chosen to donate this vehicle to the university for our students to work with.