One of the most tired cliches in all of autojournodom is "Darth Vader's Ride." You've read it one million times, I've used the phrase several hundred dozen times and we think of it every time a pitch-black Corvette Z06 passes by. It's old, it's worn and until further notice, the Maybach Excelero owns that appellation forever. Nonetheless, we're old enough to remember the first time an all-black coupe was mentioned in the same sentence as the Dark Lord of the Sith. Twenty years ago, it was good old Car & Driver that (as we recall) created the trope when they subtitled a piece on the special-edition Buick GNX, "Darth Vader, Your Car Is Ready." For a 12-year-old car nut with Empire Strikes Back bedsheets and two or three shoe boxes filled with Star Wars trading cards, that was enough to peg the GNX as the coolest car ever. Even better, my father's childhood friend Joe Silverman showed up to my Bar Mitzvah in a pitch-black GNX and took me on a joyride. Obviously, that was the highlight of my passage into manhood. Two decades later, very little has changed.
