J.D. Power has released their U.S. Initial Quality Study for 2014, where General Motors, Hyundai and Porsche earned top marks despite consumers still struggling with the gizmology taking over their vehicles.
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All the way from Santiago, Chile, reader Carlos Villalobos invited us to drive his Skoda Octavia vRS. Sadly, none of us could make the 12+ hour flight to the other end of the globe, so Carlos sent us his review instead.
Lusting after forbidden fruit isn’t a concept known only to North Americans, salivating over diesel hatchbacks and hot VAG variants. Here in South America, we also are afflicted with the same problem every other human being has: wanting what they can’t have.
Except in my case, I am lusting after a Jetta GLI.
Ford’s first American-built front-wheel-drive compact car was so much better than the miserable Pinto it replaced that it sold in huge quantities. The first-generation GT wasn’t especially quick, but it looked cool (by 1980s standards) and probably swiped a few sales away from the Civic Si and Volkswagen GTI. Nearly all of the pre-Mazda Escort GTs wore out, depreciated to oblivion, and got crushed during the 1990s, but I still see the occasional example in wrecking yards these days. Here’s one that I spotted in Northern California in December. Read More >
Honda may have been the first OEM to bring Chinese-made cars to North America, but their Made-In-China Fit never arrived in the United States. Now, it looks like Volvo will be the first brand to import Chinese-made cars to America.
Sajeev writes:
Have I told you that I love you? Very, very much? Well it’s true, as your questions are the lifeblood of the column I envisioned many moons ago. And that’s why I’m again asking for your help to keep it running. Otherwise I’ll be forced to continue progress on my Edelbrock crash cymbal. Read More >
We’ve had quite a few Ford LTD Country Squire Junkyard Finds, but just a couple of regular non-wagon LTDs. This ’71 LTD Brougham and this ’69 LTD were about it prior to today, and both of those cars were four-doors. Today we’ve got a big green LTD Brougham coupe, which I photographed in the San Francisco Bay Area back in March. Read More >
Just prior to Ford’s fuel economy ratings adjustment, I returned a brand new Fusion with a 1.5L Ecoboost engine. The last car I’ve driven with 1500 cc’s worth of displacement was my grandmother’s 2000 Civic, with its D-Series, single cam engine and 4-speed automatic. You would think that such a tiny engine would help Ford’s mid-sizer deliver solid fuel economy, but the best I could do was a mere 21 mpg in mixed driving.
One of the many Hummers I saw in Ulaanbaatar
This is the next step in our Trans-Siberian adventure. We stay in Mongolia, and after one week in the Gobi desert, saying that getting back to the Mongolian capital Ulaanbaatar (nicknamed UB here) is a total shock is an understatement. You would assume that civilisation progressively creeps back to culminate in UB, but it’s not so. Anything outside of UB is desert steppe, and when you arrive in the city it’s like turning a huge switch on: you instantly are in traffic jams going for kilometres! I saw in 10 seconds the amount of cars it took one week to spot outside the capital…
I couldn’t go on without pausing on one of the most surprising particularities of the UB car landscape: the astounding frequency of Hummers…
If you can’t wait for the next report, you can follow my trip in real time here, or check out 174 other car markets on my blog.
The Subaru XT is a car you won’t see often in most parts of the country, but Denver junkyards have tremendous quantities of old Subarus and so I see them on a regular basis here. So far, this series has had this ’85 XT Turbo, this ’91 XT, this ’91 XT6, and now today’s ’87 XT. Read More >
Bruce writes:
Sajeev,
A couple of years ago my son bought a 2004 Saturn Ion sedan from a friend of ours. It has about 90,000 miles on the clock and ran fine…until I insisted that he bring it in and get the ignition recall done. A few weeks after the recall work was completed, he was driving on 2 lane road at about 40 miles per hour and the car competely shut down…no power steering, weak power brakes. He was glad he wasn’t going faster & he wrestled the car into a parking lot, let it sit for a while, restarted it and drove home. He called the local GM dealership and they downplayed the incident and told him to bring it in at his convenience.
Now I’m really scared for him. Any advice? Read More >
The inaugural season of the “World Racing League”, and the final season of operations at soon-to-be-McMansion-ized Texas World Speedway, experienced a little celebrity excitement Saturday evening when our own Sajeev Mehta took the checkered flag in an AMC-liveried Thunderbird.
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Make no mistake: our van is a Silver Mustang.
Today we continue on our Trans-Siberian adventure, with the last report dedicated to the Gobi region in Mongolia. We have seen in the previous Gobi post that the UAZ vans and jeeps were by far the most popular in the Gobi desert. It’s no surprise then that we did this whole trip in one of them, the UAZ Bukhanka. In Russia, this off-road van (real name: UAZ 452) has earned a few nicknames – Bukhanka: (loaf of bread), Tabletka (pill) or Golovastik (tadpole) – in Mongolia our driver has baptised its own Silver Mustang, because of its grey colour and its ability to gallop to the most isolated stretches of the Gobi.
If you can’t wait for the next report, you can follow my trip in real time here, or check out 174 other car markets on my blog.
The Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz was made for the 1976 through 1991 model years, but the real Biarritz existed only through 1985. Today’s Junkyard Find is a final-year example of the proper, stainless-steel-roof-equipped Biarritz. Read More >
There has been no shortage of words written about the Honda S2000 on the internet. In fact, when a RRR request came in from Ryan in the ATL for his new-to-him 2000 AP1 S2K, my first thought was, “Why? It’s been done to death.”
Okay, that’s a total lie. My first thought was “Hell yes. When and where?”
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