When I was 16 and just beginning to contemplate expanding my personal automotive fleet beyond a ’69 Corona sedan, I had the opportunity to buy three Audi 100s for 350 bucks. Actually, the deal was more like 3.75 Audi 100s, what with all the random engine parts stuffed in the trunks and oozing oil onto the upholstery. None of the three ran, but I figured I could play mix-and-match with the parts and make one runner, which I would then customize in the finest 1982 style (shudder). I ended up passing on the tripartate-O-100s, due to what I thought was the inherently uncool image of the marque (back then, only orthodontists drove Audis), but the question remains: what can be done to fix the stodgy-yet-vaguely-sporty image of the C1 Audi 100? (Read More…)

The Zaphorozhets (aka “The Soviet Corvair”) didn’t offer much in terms of performance, comfort, safety, or style, but it was the first real attempt by the post-Stalin USSR to offer a car for ordinary citizens. The idea was that the heroes of Soviet labor would enjoy some of the bourgeois luxuries of their capitalist counterparts, and this would lead to increased worker productivity, or something. The proletariat wasn’t going to get ’57 Ford Mainlines, however; the reality of Soviet roads and repair facilities was such that their cars would need to be easy to repair under primitive conditions. (Read More…)

The rumors were all correct: Porsche is selling a GT3 RS 4.0. The weight: 2,998 lbs. The juice: 500 horsepower from a four-liter version of the venerable old GT1 engine.

The price: hold on to your hats.

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Things have been a little quiet around Better Place and their battery switching solution. Everybody is waiting for their Denmark and Israel projects to finally take off. The promised land of EVs of course is China: A huge population, a large untapped car market, and a government that gets nervous when thinking about long and perilous supply lines of foreign oil. The Chinese government demands EVs from its automakers, and just about each had a prototype or more at the Shanghai  Auto Show that had a plug and a cord. Just don’t ask when you can buy one. (Read More…)

Did you miss today’s meetup? Located somewhere else in the country? Are you interested in meeting a sensitive Scorpio? Want a ride around a racetrack? Are you furious about a particular article and want to confront the author directly? If the answer to any of these questions is “Yes”, then take a moment to take a look at my schedule for May and early June.
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Who will be the world’s most profitable carmaker this year? Canada’s CTV thinks that “this is going to be an interesting race. Will it be a big, multi-brand automaker from Germany, or a big, mostly one-brand automaker from the United States?” Both have a blue logo. One round, one egg-shaped. It’s Volkswagen against Ford.

Says CTV:

“Right now Ford is in the lead. (Read More…)

So Saab had called an all hands meeting for today. 3,700 employees attended with great expectations or knots in their stomachs. This could have been the first day of a great future or the last of Saab. Instead  …. (Read More…)

Frank in Boston writes:

Sajeev,

I am the original owner and caretaker of a beloved 1995 Acura Integra LS. The car has only 68K pampered miles with all maintenance done based on “time-out” rather than mileage. It lives on a steady diet of E-10 Mobil regular dispensed in and around greater Boston. It is my ‘Orient Panther’ and ran like the proverbial Swiss watch until…

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We’ve seen a fair number of outstanding engine swaps in 24 Hours of LeMons racing— the Saab B Turbo-powered 300ZX comes to mind— but most such projects tend to have reliability and/or performance issues in the car-slaughtering arena that is LeMons. At the frozen Campaign To Prevent Gingervitis race a couple weeks back, the much-anticipated radial-engined MR2 ate its drivetrain after a single lap, but there was one outlandishly butchered machine that actually contended for the overall win: the Alfa Romeo quad-cam V6-powered Bertone X1/9 of Team Launcha Splatos. (Read More…)

Battered old pickups tend to survive on the steets longer than their car counterparts, since a smoke-barfing, rod-knocky Joad Family-style truck can still haul a load of stolen copper wire just as well as a cherry Adnan Khashoggi Edition™ Blackwood. Still, the time comes when the duct-tape bills (or, in this case, the parking-ticket fines) can’t be paid, and another California veteran hauler faces the cruel steel jaws of The Crusher. (Read More…)

“This is the worst situation we’ve faced since the war,” a source close to Toyota told the Yomiuri Shimbun. The Japanese car industry is facing post-war-like shortages when it comes to auto parts. Toyota is short 150 parts positions, which can be anything from a bolt to a complete dashboard.

Dealerships are empty – of cars. Test drive cars do double duty as display vehicles. “We get a lot of customers coming in, but we don’t have cars to sell them,” a salesperson told the Tokyo paper. (Read More…)

Given the way that Beetles have had all their parts swapped over the decades, I’m always reluctant to try to nail down an exact model year of a street-parked example, particularly when it’s a primered-out survivor owned by a guy who spends a lot of time at junkyards. If we are to go by the taillights and hood latch, this car should be a ’68… or it might be a ’64 with a fender swap… or a ’74 pan with a ’68 body. Anyway, the important thing is that it’s an old air-cooled Volkswagen survivor that gets used as a tow vehicle. (Read More…)

As anybody who has ever listened to an automotive “journalist” knows, automotive journalists are some of the toughest people in the business. We urinate vinegar and chew nails. When the brakes in our Boss 302 fail at the rip-roaring speed of 70mph, we don’t even bother to use that pansy-ass E-brake before promptly lunching the transmission in an effort to slow down “through the gears”. We’re that tough.

But what happens when the irresistible force meets the immovable object? When Godzilla meets Mecha-Godzilla? When two autojournos meet in mortal press-room combat?

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At a meeting of the Automotive Press Association at the old-money, establishment Detroit Athletic Club in downtown Detroit, a stone’s throw from GM’s headquarters, UAW President Bob King warned Detroit auto journalists not to listen to “extremists in the Republican Party,” just like people in Germany and Italy should not have fallen for Hitler and Mussolini. (Read More…)

You’ve probably noticed by now that things haven’t been quite up to speed here at TTAC, as both Bertel and myself are here in Detroit to meet with a few OEMs as well as our corporate overlords (who are actually quite nice people, as corporate overlords go) on the northern side of the border. Oh yes, and we’re making one other acquaintance: each other. Though Bertel and I have worked together for getting on three years now, and he’s been my right-hand man since I took over the reigns here at TTAC, we’ve never actually met in person until now. Needless to say, we’ve had a lot to catch up on, and frankly picking through the post-New York and Shanghai auto show media dead zone is nowhere near as interesting as being regaled with Bertel’s “too good for publication” tales.

The good news: if you’re in the Detroit area tomorrow, you need not wait as long as I did to meet TTAC’s managing editor, as both Bertel and myself will be taking up positions at the Detroit Beer Company (downtown Detroit, directions at the link) tomorrow (Wednesday, April 27th) starting around 7PM, and you are all invited to come down, sip a beer, grab a bite and talk cars. We’ll be hot off TTAC’s first-ever visit to the RenCen, and if the past is an indicator, it could be another three years before TTAC’s Editor-in-Chief and Managing Editor are in the same place at the same time again. So drop your mid-week plans, and come down and say hello to your friendly, not-so-local car bloggers. After all, we’re anxious to meet you, the readers who make TTAC possible… and one of the most vibrant auto-oriented communities on the web.