Comparison Tests
With nearly a half-million shiners' worth of mobile luxury at our command, we set out to do something, well, costly. Something that involved some real palm grease, some major jack. You know, the long lolly, the heavy spondulicks.
So we drove to the Drake Hotel in Chicago, where we became embroiled in a modest contest to see if we could purchase one of the doormen's fantastic $2500 Russian Army coats with the gold braids and maybe the bearskin hats thrown in for a few extra shinplasters. But even as we freely peeled off the scrip, the scudos, and the blunt, the doormen proceeded to conduct a back-seat test of their own, and then the cars got spirited off to an underground location unknown to us or even to Randy "Duke" Cunningham.
Fortunately, the Drake features a parlor famous for serving dirty vodka martinis in goldfish bowls, and that's where we finally poked noticeable holes in our expense accounts and long-term memories.
When the little phosphorescent butterflies had cleared a day or two later, we tried to drive home but wound up at Chicagoland Speedway and then in Kankakee, a town made famous in the Millennium Edition of the Places Rated Almanac for placing 354th out of 354 metro areas. It took a few hours, but we finally got turned in an easterly direction - thanks to the chauffeurs who didn't know about the martini bar - and fetched up at the art deco Auburn Cord Duesenberg Museum in Auburn, Indiana, where we again felt at home amid status symbols worth the big purse, the large ready, the tall pony.
But here's a little secret: No editor at C/D will ever earn enough to buy either of these cars, so if you expect us to rate them on some sort of credible fiscal scale, well, just know that one of us spent way, way more at the martini bar than for his hotel room. The cars tested here may be Large and in Charge, but we're just large around the mouth and in charge of a lot of debt.
