Gear Patrol | Spirit of Adventure, Passion for Gear

Love it or hate it, the new 2012 BMW 335i (internally, F30) makes a bold statement. A continuation of BMWs design language found in the current 5 and 7 series, especially in the completely reworked front fascia with its exposed kidney grilles and elongated headlamps, the 335i makes no bones about what it’s here to [...]

Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t have a Phantom, you could miss it.

High-speed photography transforms everyday events from the simple to the sublime and few manufacturers can match the slow-mo sagacity offered by Vision Research. The new Phantom Miro M320S (TBA) is their latest product to drop and as usual, is nothing short of amazing. Equipped with a 3.2 gigapixels/second throughput this tiny three-pounder is capable of [...]

Not Karma's bitch

Fresh on the heels of not-so-great news about reliability issues of the Fisker Karma comes some really good news from New York via the all-new Fisker Atlantic. Like a Karma that’s been tossed in a huge dryer set on high, the Atlantic is an electric plug in for the rest of us (mostly) that also [...]

Bruise Control

No longer the poor man’s Rolls, the 2012 Chrysler 300 S (yes, the one in all those “imported from Detroit” ads) is no longer the big bruiser of yore. Though absolutely sinister in black, Chrysler has sent the 300 to finishing school — giving it a German eight-speed automatic and a seductive new interior with [...]

Patek Philippe takes a walk on the wild side

The Gérald Genta-designed Nautilus from Patek Philippe is a bona fide icon in the watch industry, and much like its counterpart from Audemars Piguet, the Royal Oak, which was also penned by Genta, it has seen minimal changes during its nearly 40 years in production. In fact, to the untrained eye, the ref. 3700 would [...]

Rolex reaches for the sky

It is rare enough that Rolex updates their existing model line up, let alone creates an entirely new watch, so it is understandable that one of the most hotly anticipated announcements at Basel is their new Sky-Dweller. Featuring a revolutionary — for Rolex — annual calendar, in addition to a GMT indicator and a healthy [...]

Drivers have their day

We approach track time like a fluffy white cat to Fancy Feast. That is, we lick our chops… which is exactly what happened in sunny Las Vegas on Superbowl weekend in the all-new 2013 Lexus GS and LFA supercar. With a bevy of Lexus staff and race car driver extraordinaire, Scott Pruett, we availed ourselves [...]

Makes going topless classy

The Porsche Boxster is surely here to stay as evidenced by its success, critics’ raves and the fact that Porsche has done it up even better than before with an early taste of their all-new 2013 Porsche Boxster. Though the reworking is nothing earth-shattering, the sheetmetal is clearly an upgrade. It’s downright gorgeous in our [...]

Where its ATS

The 2013 Cadillac ATS is the much anticipated sports sedan from GM, about to make its world debut in Detroit. In development since the early 2000′s, the ATS project had the BMW 3-Series in its crosshairs. But will it be the 3-Series killer it’s intended to be? Cadillac thinks so, and the numbers seem right [...]

All Right

If the resident car nuts here at Gear Patrol can agree on one thing (which doesn’t happen very often) it’s that we consider ourselves “wagon-ites”, for lack of a better term. Practically no one does it better than Audi, or Subaru, and specifically the all new 2013 Audi allroad Quattro. First introduced in 1999 in [...]

Super Natural

We have a big soft spot for pick-up trucks. Not just because they represent so much of what America is and how we get work done, but the fact that when it comes to two-axle haulers, no one does a full-size pickup like the U S of A. Even as fuel prices have rocketed and [...]

Not so nano

Yeah, we know. Another day, another iPod Dock. But unlike the one sitting in your bedroom, the 8-foot by 4-foot Behringer iNuke Boom ($30,000) probably won’t fit on your nightstand. Then again, it won’t win any awards for classy product names either. Inside the 700 pound stereo beast, the iNuke has been endowed with 10,000 [...]

Old school American muscle? We'll take it.

3-Series, 6-Deep

The BMW 3-Series stands as one of the all-time greats. At the top of every automobile magazine’s list of best cars for the past three decades and the performance benchmark by which all other sport sedans are measured, the 3-Series is a modern icon of automobilia. Outdoing the last one is tantamount to making the [...]

Design Within Reach

Volvo has long been seen as the safe car. But no one wants to date the “safe” guy. And only billion dollar corporations afraid of lawsuits give out awards for completing something safely. Needless to say, “safe” isn’t a buzz word that lights up headlines. Armed with this cultural realization Volvo’s designers and engineers decided [...]