Ever since Bob Lutz walked down from Mt. Lithium with the Volt’s Ten Specifications, the most potentially expensive and critical one was that the battery pack would have a ten year/100k mile warranty. No longer. Gm-volt.com reports that in a survey of potential Volt buyers, a number of Volt parameters were spelled out, in order to gauge how charged up they (still) are. The battery is described as having an eight year/100,000 mile warranty. That’s really going to help the economics, especially in light of a related announcement where the Father of the Volt preaches: “The Volt technology is very exciting, but costs will have to come down before it can become generalized . . . and US fuel prices will have to rise to world levels, meaning $5 or $6 per gallon.” Exciting indeed, despite being unprofitable for its maker, and un-economical for its buyers. One last detail: the survey also calls out the Volt’s price at “$32,000 to $38,000, after a $7,500 tax credit ($39,500–$45,500 MSRP).

Look at the picture above. Now pretend it’s your rearview mirror. That giant set of batwings is right behind you and gaining; now it pulls into the fast lane. A couple of teenagers grin as they zip by you ass-backwards at seventy miles an hour. The front grille of the ’59 Chevy slowly recedes in the distance ahead. If you spent any time on the roads of Cincinnati around 1969, this may well have happened to you.

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All right, all you expert sleuths of vintage chrome moldings and extruded textures. I will once again try to stump you and will undoubtedly fail. I apologize for the lack of resolution, but it’s a small crop. And you’re too good. A shout out to last week’s winner, 6c1500, who nailed the stick-shift Caddy early on.

I find myself floating above an endless sea of thimbleberry bushes. The berries are all ripe, infinite delectable crimson caps punctuating a sea of green. I can’t see the trail, but somehow distant and hidden legs carry me along and know where to go, while I gorge on the fruit. Now I’m behind the wheel of my car, watching an endless movie loop of a winding serpentine road, with a rushing river to my left and a wall of towering firs on my right. I have no awareness of actually driving; the car knows what to do while I gorge on the scenery. The road through Oregon’s deep woods is utterly deserted. Then an image confronts me, so unexpected, so surreal, that now I know I’m dreaming.

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Bob Lutz may well prove that the Cadillac’s CTS-V is the fastest production sedan in the land, thanks to an engine transplant from the Corvette ZR-1. But what about a genuine all-Caddy production racer? Something you could take to Le Mans, and challenge Europe’s finest exotics. Or just down to the local drag strip, and blow away every production car in its day. You’d have to turn the clock back sixty years, when Cadillac’s new V8 was the hottest engine in the land. But if you were serious about racing with it, like Briggs Cunningham did at Le Mans in 1950, or the original owner of this car, you’d have to request the factory to make one important change, which alone makes this hot rod Caddy the most historically significant Curbside Classic find to date. Well, there was that Vega…

Calling all history buffs! Identifying this car shouldn’t be all that hard. But there’s something unusual and extremely rare about this particular variant. An oddity of history, if you please. To win, you need to explain.

Your 2050 Brazzaville Micro-i600 solar-electric personal transportation device automatically glides into the Biodynamic Vego-Taco Loco lot and parks itself. On the way inside, you pass the static display of a 2010 Honda Pilot. Your seventeen year-old son stops in his tracks, looks at it with bewilderment, and asks if you really drove around in one these big, ugly, two-ton carbon-spewing behemoths forty years ago. Will you mumble something incoherently about times being very different then and tell him to hurry along, or will you stop, gaze admiringly, and wax eloquently about your distant but ever-so-vibrant Pilot memories?

Last week’s CC Clue was tough. Juniper was close, but Vanilla Dude nailed it. And he asked for more tough ones. All right, then, try this one on for size. But don’t labor too hard on Labor Day.

Tear the highly practical metal roof off one the most boring big American sedans like a 1963 Olds Dynamic 88, and suddenly it becomes the key ingredient of an intensely romantic scenario: a hot summer day, a full-size ragtop, a beautiful woman to share it with, and the open road. What could be better? It’s got to be one of the top “relive the youthful automotive memories/dreams” recipes for guys my age or so. Except in my case, it’s a nightmare.

Summertime, and the living’s easy, when the warm breezes wafting over the windshield gently rustles through your hair and of the pretty girl sitting next to you. Or not.

A recent study shows that the generation gap has dramatically narrowed. Parents and kids are now each others’ best friends, or something like that. But it wasn’t always so chummy, especially in the sixties and early seventies. I have a theory for that: it was the heyday of the rear-facing third-seat station wagon. Nothing like the generations traveling while facing in opposite directions to cultivate oppositional disorder. And just to add a little more dissonance, how about we examine the two most polar opposite examples of the genre.

We’re going to do this a little different this week. For starters, two CC cars for the price of one. And the identification of this weeks cars are obvious (I hope!). Now tell me what specific feature these two cars share. Okay, not the obvious things like wheels and mufflers. A clue for the clue: this feature was not available on full size wagons from GM and Ford of this vintage. And it was also not available on most of the Saab’s competition. Another clue: it’s not something highly technical or esoteric; even women (oops!) would/could recognize and appreciate it.

Is the owner of this Zap Xebra hoping the trash collector will take away this pile of junk? He may as well, because it’s been sitting there with a For Sale sign for well over six months. When I finally decided to stop and take a look at what he wants for it, I found out why. He’s been Zapped!

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When I was a small child, I would spend hours sitting in a cardboard box pretending it was a car. Now, I spend hours sitting in a car that pretends it’s a box. As a card carrying cubist, I’m always ready to jump in when a new carton appears. The last time I did that, it was about as traumatic as when my older brother tried to duct-tape me inside my favorite cardboard “ride”. I couldn’t get out of the gen2 Scion xB, and my review left no doubts about it. My progeny liked the Kia Soul, but it’s not a real genuine box. But a new package has arrived at the local Nissan dealer, named Cube, no less. So how does it square up?