Somewhere between Brigadoon and Bora Bora
Life has been good. Well, let’s just call it a nicer shade of OK with a few interesting surprises along the way.
You get out of your morning cobwebs, and walk up to your driveway knowing that the car in front of you will be your last ride ever.
You don’t need a good reason to visit the Mecca of Colorado wrecking yards on the Fourth of July, but we had one: I was tagging along on a mission to grab a couple of dead Rabbits that could be turned into cash at Denver’s ever-ravenous Crusher/shredder. Here’s how the scrap-metal food chain that (mostly) ends in a Chinese foundry gets its roughage. (Read More…)
In case you’re all wondering why I’m so blasé about compact hatchbacks and wagons, a good chunk of it has to do with the fact that I see them everywhere, every single day (the other portion is simply because it’s fun to needle you folks every now and then).
Volkswagen has published group sales for June and the first six months, and they are better than those of most other European makers. Global deliveries for the half year are up 8.9 percent to 4.45 million. June looks surprisingly good with sales up 11 percent to 798,500. Nevertheless, Volkswagen looks like no threat to the leading positions of Toyota and GM. (Read More…)
That AMC Matador Barcelona we saw last week was quite a Junkyard Find, but it represents approximately 0.01% of the staggeringly tempting potential Hell Projects in this particular Colorado yard. Located not far from Pikes Peak (which I couldn’t see because of all the wildfire smoke), this not-open-to-the-public junkyard/open-air automotive museum is owned by a man with an eye for interesting Detroit iron and all the land he needs to store what he finds. After all my years of junkyard crawling, I think this may well be the Greatest Yard of Them All, and that includes the now-defunct Seven Sons yard and this 70-year-old yard north of Denver. Let’s take a little tour, shall we? (Read More…)
I came across this vehicle in a parking lot in Beijing. It is a Ford Tempo GL. The Tempo was made in the US from 1984 until 1994, the white car in the parking lot was a second generation Tempo, which would put it in the 1988 the 1994 timeframe. How did it get to China? Ford never officially exported the Tempo to China. It is not the first Tempo I had seen in Beijing, I have seen many over the years. One could be a diplomat’s car, two also, but ten? There had to more to this Tempo-invasion of China, and there is… (Read More…)
Luke writes:
Hi Sajeev,
Thank you again for publishing my question on the LR3. While the beautiful white Landy that originally set a hook in me was a possibility up to the very end, ironically the air conditioning stopped working while my wife was test driving it. That told me everything I needed to know. We’ve been doing some hardcore car shopping over the past week. We have decided on a vehicle, but first I’ll tell you about the ones that didn’t make the cut: (Read More…)
An anonymous reader sent us these Erlkoenig photos. Apparently, they show a car in full leather get-up.
Since we have no idea what it is, we ask you for help. (Read More…)
Sometimes, the Ford Facebook pages bring you horrifying news like “We commissioned Tanner Foust, Vaughn Gittin Jr., Brian Deegan, Ken Block, and other amazing drivers to take the Focus ST through its paces against competitors for our upcoming video series dubbed, ‘ST Sessions.'”
If the thought of indirectly paying those four, ah, individuals to “hoon” by purchasing a new Focus ST hasn’t completely made you lose your appetite, there’s now some actual news regarding the car to share:
I’m 27. I’m not old! You can call me Dennis.
Nearly every state offers some type of tax exemption for an older car.
My home state of Georgia is probably the greatest benefactor of the old car owner.
This being Colorado, I see many old Jeeps in my local self-service wrecking yards. Just about all of them are Cherokees and Wagoneers, so this four-wheel-drive pickup caught my attention earlier this week. (Read More…)
The volume at the last sale I went to yesterday was down be nearly a third. Apparently, the powers that be wanted to move some of their vehicles to another location and see whether that market would yield higher returns.
They could have saved themselves the tow fees and the hassle of it all. When I liquidated vehicles, it seemed like almost every major seller would try to do a ‘test’ of sorts. Chasing money. Chasing the wind, and chasing their own tail.
In the preceding chapters, we followed the Lexus LFA from raw fiber to body, paint, and assembly. Today, the LFA gets its engine. Tomorrow, we’ll test it, and then, we’ll say good-bye to the LFA Workshop in Motomachi.
On its slow road to completion, the LFA travels down a main line, where it is met by components that come from smaller sidelines. One such subassembly is the LFA’s V10 engine. Covered by a thick sheet of plastic, it comes from Yamaha where it was built and assembled. The engine was a balancing act, in more ways than one. (Read More…)
The Opel mess claims another victim. “Opel’s Karl-Friedrich Stracke stepped down from his position as chief executive of the embattled carmaker to take on “special assignments”, where he will report to the Chairman and CEO of parent General Motors,” Reuters says. (Read More…)
The new energy relationship between PSA Peugeot Citroen and BMW is just about done now that BMW and Toyota intensified their cooperation. An Opel executive dashed hopes that the French will be able to use GM technology instead. “The honest answer is I can’t imagine that,” Opel development chief Rita Forst told Reuters, when asked if the two companies would share green car technology. (Read More…)
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