Sajeev,Great analysis of the GT-R. Slow day at work, so I decided to cut a few inches out of the middle as you suggested (maybe more than just 2″…). Please excuse the crappy “MS Paint” editing and my poor editing skills… but I still think the profile looks so much better. Like a real super car. And it eliminates the fake fender vent! Read More >
Europe’s new car market continues on its downward spiral with sales down 2.8 percent in June. Half year sales are down 6.8 percent across the EU, data released today by the European Automobiles Manufacturers’ Association ACEA show today. Some countries and automakers do much better, some much worse. Read More >
I’m always on the lookout for weird Mitsubishi products when I’m visiting wrecking yards, but the dawn of the 1990s brought less distinctive styling to Mitsubishis and they tend to hide in the background as I’m walking the rows of cast-off machines. The bullet holes in this 21-year-old Galant, however, caught my eye. We’ll return to the cars of the Brain Melting Vintage Junkyard soon, but today we’re going back to the “traditional” Colorado self-service yard. Read More >
The establishment of a new manufacturing base in North Africa has fascinated me for the past couple months – though few others seem to really care. The leader in this movement has been Renault, which is setting up plants in Morocco and Algeria to build their popular, low-cost Dacia vehicles in factories where employees earn a fraction of what a French assembly line worker would make.
PSA doesn’t have a low-cost brand of it’s own, so jobs haven’t gone across the Strait of Gibraltar – yet. But the closing of the Aulnay plant, where a massive contingent of North African immigrants (now French citizens) work, is a compelling snapshot of the socioeconomic and racial dynamics of France that happens to intersect with the auto industry.
Ramin writes:
Sajeev,
I am not a TTAC member, but I read it almost daily. I suppose I should join soon. Anyway having read your “piston slap: we need your help” post, I have one that has been stumping me for about a year now:
The car is an 08 Impreza STI. For the past year or so, the power steering struggles and whines. It is much worse when the car is cold, doubly so when the weather and the car are cold. There is no belt squeal. I have tried flushing and bleeding, both with factory fluid and also with the Lucas stop-leak stuff. Modest initial improvement only lasts a little while. Subaru forum posts suggest the STI cooks its PS fluid because the fluid lines route near hot turbo components. However it seems now even with fresh fluid, the problem persists, leading me to suspect a component has gone bad. I don’t want to drop over $600 for a new pump. Are there any tricks you know of, like for example, replacing a particular gasket? Or, better yet, some advice on narrowing down exactly what the culprit is (short of replacing the whole freaking pump)?
Thanks a lot and keep up the good work – I love the site and what you all have done with it.
Sajeev answers:
As I’ve mentioned before, Colorado is a hotbed of recreational hearse activity. This means that today’s Junkyard Find— spotted at the Brain Melting Colorado Junkyard— might be able to find someone willing to brave the rust and get this super-rare hearse back among the living. Read More >
In 1980, Chrysler was headed into the financial whitewater rapids of a 2-year recession, paddling a leaky canoe full of weak sales. Their products weren’t moving, and the survival life raft full of government loans was a year away.
Sound familiar?
They needed customers in the worst way, and in early spring 1981, 18-year-old Don Sutherland saw a brand new black T-top 1980 Plymouth Roadrunner sitting in the corner of a local Chrysler-Plymouth dealership. This was his first brand new car.
In theory. Read More >
This is the final part of this series of articles, the ground rules and definitions of which you can find in the introductory comments from Parts One and Two. Without detour, TO THE PODIUM for the final time!
Electronic Fuel Injection:
My attitude toward this technology went from “why bother”, in its infant days, to “why use anything else”, when it hit its stride near the end of the ‘80’s.
It all sure looked complicated when I was first getting acquainted with the Bosch systems on the VW Fast and Squareback models from the early ‘70’s. If I only knew it would get SO complicated that comprehensive on-board diagnostic systems would be required in order to properly diagnose and repair them… and I wouldn’t mind, because these systems work so well, it’s actually WORTH the extra complexity! As it has turned out, my choice of careers has proven in many ways to be an interesting road to self-discovery, but that, as I say, will be revealed in many other stories. Read More >
Tim Cain, our not-quite-in-house sales whiz, has cooked up a ranking of the top 260 best sellers year-to-date for 2012. I won’t spoil any surprises, but the Suzuki Forenza lost. And Honda might be the big winner.
We got an overview of Colorado’s Brain-Melting Junkyard yesterday, and today we’ll take a closer look at one of its residents. This is one of the rarest of Road Runners, a one-year-only version that was based on the downsized B-Body Fury Read More >
No, this isn’t a self-aggrandizing post celebrating my own birthday, but a tribute to the man who started it all for me (literally, and with respect to cars); my father.
I’m looking at you …
Obsessions are a menace. The daughter of a friend had a shower obsession. “I have an obsessive compulsive disorder,” she would readily admit, only to continue: “I’ll be right back, I need to take a shower.” Such a pretty girl. And she always smelled so good.
A prime obsession of the auto blogosphere are the sales of the Lexus LFA. Is it sold out? Is it not?
(To avoid killing you with the suspense: It is. Has been since April 2010 when Lexus had its 500 orders long before production started in December of that year. Not interesting? I don’t blame you. Stop reading. There is plenty of other content.) Read More >
On the LFA’s in-house test track. Each car gets tested for some 50 miles
In this week-long report, we followed the Lexus LFA from raw fiber to body, paint, and assembly. In this final chapter, we take it on the test track in Motomachi.
Each and every LFA that rolls off the line is checked like no other car. 7,000 items of the LFA, all previously checked, counter-signed, eternalized in evidence sheets, are checked again. Each check again is eternalized in evidence sheets. When I said it takes 8 days to make an LFA, I lied. It takes 8 days to make one, and then it takes a full additional week to check it. Read More >
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 >
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 >
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