Overview
Don’t wait for stories to appear in the store when you can become a member of Wheelbase Media’s weekly news service and save more than 50 percent while gaining instant access to the new features as they’re produced. Click here to get started.
If you are not a member of the media, but still wish to read this and other feature stories from Wheelbase Media, visit www.shiftweekly.com to subscribe to Auto Shift Weekly newsmag, available for your Apple iPad or for your home PC or laptop in pdf format.
What is Auto Edit?
Welcome to AutoEdit, a new and slightly more irreverent weekly feature from Wheelbase Media.
Rather than your pages being a collection of random auto stories, the AutoEdit feature is intended to be the glue that holds it all together. Just as your editorial page is intended to be the pulse of your newspaper, Auto Edit can also be the pulse of your auto pages.
Auto edit runs 500-550 words and is all about your readers becoming more familiar with our key staff members via their personal views on the automotive world. Of all 18 of our weekly features, AutoEdit is the only one intended to provide weekly commentary. Journalistically speaking, this is just common sense since such commentary does not belong in our other news-type features.
Whether your readers agree or disagree with what’s written, they’ll know exactly how the writers of AutoEdit stand on their chosen topics. And, quite frankly, a little spirited debate is a healthy thing and that seems to be missing from more and more newspapers these days. AutoEdit is all about soul, getting back to the basics of solid content and showing readers that there are real people behind the nine-point typeface.
Story Intro
In a day and age when saving vehicle weight is everything, I think I’ve found five easy pounds to lose. More precisely, 5.14.
Yup, the owners manual in this Lexus ES350 tips the scales at 5.14 pounds, according to the food scale in my kitchen. Translated into meat, that would feed a family of 12. I can only imagine the design and production work to get this thing out the door, not mention the size of the forklift needed to carry them all to their waiting cars.
The compilation of booklets – the manual is like a volume of mini encyclopedias, really – is impressively massive. Too bad most people will only dive in when they can’t figure something out, like how to open the filler cap to put gas in the first time. And if there’s a grain of truth to urban legend, men don’t use instructions of any sort, anyway, strictly out of principle, so there’s no need for manuals in at least half the cars out there.