“It’s just sooooo much better on coke, you just wouldn’t believe it, that’s how I prefer it, really, it’s so much better it almost isn’t worth doing it sober.” Though I remained professionally impassive behind my Prodesign 4360 eyeglasses, I was simply amazed at the story that my old high-school classmate was telling me over a few drinks. Back in 1986, she’d been just another quiet, reasonably pretty girl, and in the present day she’s a suburban housewife with the requisite $70,000 Toyota and the mandatory country club memberships. In between, however, she’d apparently done some pretty crazy stuff, including a couple of cocaine-laced three-way weekend throwdowns in Las Vegas. “You go to Vegas for your car thingies, don’t you?” she inquired, her nostrils flaring in Proustian sympathy.

“Er, not any more I don’t,” I hastily replied. Twenty minutes later I was quite deliberately out the door, heading home on my little Honda motorcycle, and feeling quite square. Not my kind, dear. I’ve never done cocaine. Never plan to. But it seems like every woman I meet nowadays has climbed a veritable Everest of the stuff. Was I missing something? To find out, I decided to ask my resident expert on kink, drugs, department-store clothes-shopping, and all other things vaguely disreputable.

“I suppose sex might be better on cocaine the first few times,” the infamous Vodka McBigbra told me as I knelt in my driveway, scrubbing bugs off my Boxster’s smudged 3M nose shield, “but every guy I ever saw who used coke to enhance sex ended up giving up the sex in order to focus more intently on the coke, you know? There’s just never enough of it, you understand? There are these great hits, but then there just isn’t enough. I don’t think you understand.”

Oh, sweetheart, but I do understand. After all, I’m an automotive journalist.

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This is the fourth—and for the time being, final—submission in this Series, the format of which I described in the introductory remarks of Part One. The two egregious commissions covered in this article have less to do with technology, per se, and more to do with tactic. To re-emphasize an important ground rule I will not violate in this series, I’ll remind the reader that I won’t be pondering the reasons WHY these encroachments have been and continue to be committed against both technician and consumer alike. With BIN FOUR fully laden, it’s now time to UNLOAD!! Read More >

The Subaru SVX, as I explained in the text of the previous SVX Junkyard Find, is one of those cars with a real-world price tag far, far lower than Internet Car Experts would have you believe. So low, in fact, that it is not at all difficult to find Subaru’s amazing last-gasp-of-80s-silliness car in wrecking yards. Here’s a ’96 I found in Denver a few weeks back. Read More >

Bloomberg and car analyst Itay Michaeli spotted a new trend: The second car could be going out of style, and this “may hurt U.S. auto sales,” Bloomberg says.

Indeed, “the average number of vehicles for every U.S. driver has declined since hitting a record in 2007.” Is it a new trend that “Americans are increasingly willing to settle for owning one car or truck?” Read More >

You want rare? This car is rare! Read More >

One of the worst things about the Malaise Era (other than the ascendance of Captain and Tennile) was the lack of cars with convertible tops during the period. The last convertible Cadillac Eldorado rolled off the assembly line in 1976, but the decline of the convertible had started a few years earlier. The top-down drought held until the last of the Malaise years, when machines such as Rabbit Cabriolets and LeBaron convertibles became available. Chrysler kept making the K-based LeBaron convertible until 1995, but you don’t see many of them these days. Here’s a pair of early-90s examples I found side-by-side in a Denver wrecking yard. Read More >

Edmunds compiled a list of the ten best cars “for teen drivers.” Edmunds did not pick the cars according to driftability or their magnetic force on chicks. Edmunds used criteria that should be on the minds of the people who usually buy those cars: Parents. As a parent, says Edmunds, “you’ll need to consider three factors above all others: safety, reliability and true cost to own.”

Once Edmunds was done with the list, it looked like a fresh arrival of exchange students. Except for a lone Malibu, all cars have foreign nameplates. Read More >

TTAC commentator Jerszy writes:

Dear Sajeev;

Hopefully you & your fantastic community can help me here.

I recently purchased a 2002 Dodge Dakota Sport 4X4 (3.9 V6, 67k, Auto).

I bought it to replace my 2002 Cougar Sport Package (2.5 V6, 64K, Manual, speed-limited to 139mph) which as you know is not a good suburban truck and can’t really haul things. The Cougar was a fun car, very agile and could haul me around town and being a kitty-car it really did purr. Unfortunately it had to live outside in the rusty north for the last 6 years and was starting to age rapidly. Since I live in a “snow belt” (avg. snowfall ~120 inches a year) it had to be 4 wheel drive.

Now the Dakota is a definitely a truck. Almost as big as the ‘76 Silverado I had 30 years ago and just as four-wheelie as the ‘84 Toyota 4X4 truck I replaced it with. (That Toyota rusted, rusted, rusted so much I had to fabricate a wooden bed for it in 1987!) Read More >

Kelley Blue Book, normally not the epitome of cool, nonetheless compiled its list of the ten coolest cars under $18,000. Here is the list: Read More >

In 1980, Fiat shoppers had the choice of two affordable sports cars: the 124 Sport Spider (examples of which remain quite common in wrecking yards, and the X1/9. The mid-engined X1/9 featured 128 running gear and was a lot more fun to drive than its 66-horsepower (for US-market models in 1980) engine would suggest. Read More >

After reviving a few fond memories in some of you by taking you on a trip down memory lane to France since 1949, let’s go back to worldwide rankings one more time if you don’t mind. You saw my April World Round-up and the Top 100 best-selling models worldwide over the First Quarter of 2012, but now I can share with you the most popular cars around the globe for April.

Enough of the world? No worries, you can visit 163 additional countries and territories in my blog, go on, you know you want to!

So looking at the worldwide best-selling cars ranking for April a big question looms: can the Ford Focus ever beat the Toyota Corolla to become the world’s most popular car?

The Focus ranks #2 this month…

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A rear-wheel-drive four-door hatchback with staggered wheels and a mere 2,579 pounds distributed 45/55. From the folks who gave us the Evo. Sounds awesome, doesn’t it? But the Mitsubishi i-MiEV (conversationally referred to as either the “i” OR the “meev”) isn’t that sort of car. Its focus is just as narrow as the Evo’s but could hardly be more different: the cheapest, most energy-efficient electric car you can buy in the United States. How cheap? The i-MiEV’s low-20s price (after a $7,500 tax credit) isn’t much higher than that of a Toyota Prius c, the cheapest, most energy-efficient hybrid.

Read More >

Brian writes:

Hi Sajeev,

Love reading TTAC – thanks for all the entertainment. Responding to your request for more stupid questions, I have one ripe for pontification.

I am a (male) small business owner with two small children and I’m looking for a new vehicle. I’m a big guy and with all the stuff kids have, I can’t get something too small. Nevertheless, in my search I’ve been toying lately with this question: What makes a car “manly/masculine” or “girly/feminine”? I understand that a two ton hunk of metal cannot in itself take on gender-specific characteristics, but there are definitely cars that women tend to call “cute” and cars that men tend to look at as “awesome”. Can anyone really look me in the eye and tell me that a VW Jetta or a small SUV strikes them as “manly”?

But picking such a car before hearing the reactions almost seems counter-intuitive. At first glance you may think that mustang coupes would be “manly”, but lately it seems that more women are buying them than men. SUVs are supposed to be big and tough, but more women use them for carpool duty than for off-road or towing duty. Same problem with trucks these days or, for that matter, just about any other segment. All the online lists of “manly” cars seem to detail special trims of expensive, ostentatious, or otherwise impractical vehicles with twice the horsepower I need. Below the 50k mark, are there any “manly” somewhat normal family-capable cars out there? Does a car have to have some exclusivity to it (i.e. either by price, customization, or a limited edition)? Is it a matter of power/engine/trim (i.e. Audi A4 vs. S4)? Color choice (interior/exterior)? Does size REALLY matter?

Are there elements of car design that tend to appeal more to men than women (or vice versa)?

I know, the answer can largely be in the eye of the beholder, and I’m interested in your opinion. Call me shallow, but I covet the envious stares of others on the road.
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First in a series by car salesman Matthew Guy.

Trying to eke out a living in your early 20s is rarely an easy task. Compounded with fresh debt and a lack of solid work experience, I decided to parlay my knowledge of cars into making money, taking a job selling cars. It was intended to be a gap job –turned out I liked it and, more importantly, I was good at it. Some customers stick out in your mind. The 1000 watt bombshell with fabulous frontage to whom I sold a convertible. A raven haired beauty who was equally as sharp a negotiator as she was a testament to the female form. Read More >

Third in a series, the format of which I described in the introductory remarks of Part One, this article will focus on specific modern technologies—not at all egregious in themselves—that have, in my opinion, been applied and utilized in a most egregious fashion in the modern automobile. One is a direct continuation from Part Two, although covering a new area. The other one is a component technology within one of the technological areas criticized in Part Two. Tally Ho—to THE BIN we go!! Read More >