Car owners have a warped view when it comes to their automobile’s cost.
When you ask someone the, “How much did you spend..” question, their usual response is to take the price they paid and just let that be that.
“Oh, I got this Mercedes for $50k.” They then will usually go about telling you the options they chose, and other trivial realities related to the car.
But as we all know, that’s not the question.
Paul writes:
Good Morning Sajeev,
Today is my 2010 GTI’s 15th day in the shop (shocking, right?). Earlier this month it was in for 13 days, I had it back for 6, and I dropped it back off two days ago. The issue is somewhat strange, but in my mind, easily fixable. I have been getting CEL 2294 and when I run my own VCDS scans, I have been getting the following logs (edited down).
- 004501 – Fuel Pressure Regulator Valve (N276)
- P1195 – 000 – Open or Short to Ground – Intermittent
- 008852 – Fuel Pressure Regulator Valve (N276)
- P2294 – 000 – Open Circuit – Intermittent Read More >
Dan Neil says the Maserati Biturbo is one of the worst 50 cars of all time, but I still see Biturbos in the junkyard every year or so. This probably means that Biturbo owners cling to their dead, hopeless project cars for decades before reality— in the form of angry landlords and/or spouses and/or homeowners’ associations— summons the tow truck. Read More >
Murilee’s piece on the Acura Vigor brought back some fond memories for me involving that car, and an utterly bizarre bit of automotive trivia that was thought to be lost forever – a Japanese-market commercial for the Honda Vigor that features sexual deviancy (panty sniffing, anyone), Italian art house cinematography and the requisite badly-garbled English slogans.
This may very well be the nicest 1973 Datsun 510 in existence. The Datsun 510 was a mechanically bulletproof car. You could argue that it lead the charge in the Japanese invasion of the North American market. Despite their reliability, Datsuns were disposable cars.
That’s why this museum caliber 18,000 documented miles 510 is so rare. Read More >
If it weren’t for a Manhattan nightclub shooting in 1999, there’s a very good chance that it would be Cadillac, not Lincoln, that would be undertaking a costly showroom upgrade program, a brand “reboot” to shed a mushy identity and a hail-mary attempt at saving the ailing luxury division.
Remember the Vigor? Probably not. Nobody remembers the Vigor. This car dates from about the time that Honda really got serious about its decline from former untouchable greatness, which may or may not have had something to do with the death of founder Soichiro Honda in 1991. Read More >
One of my Transportation Design teachers insisted that cars were just like restaurants: success depends on proportion, proportion, proportion! And while the mere thought of his lectures makes me want to vomit in terror, the dude is right: cars need to be perfectly proportioned to prove a point. And my goodness, the Fisker Karma is just that. Put another way… Read More >
Chris writes:
Sajeev,
Since you have a background in automotive design, I would be interested in your opinion on this matter…there has been one styling quirk that has always peeved me: the plastic filler panel where something else should have been.
The most (in)famous example is the plastic triangle on the C-pillar of the Dodge Sebring. I first started noticing this about 15 years ago on my brother’s Ford Contour: the rear door had a huge plastic filler panel behind the rear window where every other car made until then had a small fixed piece of glass. And I thought to myself: couldn’t they have come up with something better than a piece of plastic that’s already fading to chalky gray? Read More >
(Today’s guest post comes from Peter Dushenski. While most journalists love to brag about what kind of press cars they can get access to, Peter is here to share the story of how he got banned from from fleets. It’s one you won’t often hear. – DK)
“Also I must inform you that I will no longer be supplying you with Toyota or BMW vehicles.”
That was it.
That was the very last line in an e-mail I received last week from The Press Fleet Manager. No explanation followed. Not even a sign-off remark. No “Sincerely”, no “Regards”. No frivolity.
In the last couple of weeks we have traveled to Georgia (the country, not the state,) Myanmar, Bolivia and the entire world! The success of our exploration of the Top 100 best-selling models in the world last week made me think you might be interested in a similar type of article about Europe…
However, if the whole of Europe is too much for you to handle today, that’s fine because I have sales info for 160 countries for you to visit in my blog, all one by one. So don’t be shy and click away!
Back to your Grand Tour of Europe.
For decades, I’ve been seeing Ford-family vehicles with ugly, pointless warning labels stuck to their instrument panels: Unexpected and possibly sudden vehicle movement may occur if these precautions are not taken. I’d always assumed that these were ex-rental cars, but after I mentioned the warning stickers in this week’s ’75 Ford Maverick Junkyard Find post, several readers pointed out that the stickers were the result of Malaise Era litigation. Of course! Read More >
Just a few years after Toyota confused American car shoppers by badging the early Tercel as the “Corolla Tercel,” they offered two very different vehicles as the 1987 “Corolla GT-S.” One was the AE86 coupe, based on the older rear-drive Corolla platform and much beloved by present-day drifters, and the other was the front-drive FX16 hatchback, built in California and equipped with the same 16-valve 4AGE engine as the AE86. The FX16 was sort of goofy-looking, with sharp angles and cheezy-looking plastic panels, but it was a screamin’ fast competitor to the VW GTI and held together much, much longer than its Wolfsburg rival. Read More >
Most car guys are well aware of the extraordinary sales pitch required to sell a spouse on a car project.
The term “eternal enemies” has been used many times to define the battle between wives with no sense of humor on one side and guys with old cars on the other side.
This incredibly rare 1939 Rolls Royce Wraith was one of those sporadic cases where the bride actually ordered her husband to build a car. Read More >
…when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. — G. Santayana
Wide-light Rabbits. As a child, I firmly believed that there were two kinds of VW Rabbits. There were awesome Rabbits, with round headlights and narrow taillights, and they had all been assembled in the Fatherland by white-lab-coated Germans who, prior to taking jobs on the hospital-clean Rabbit production line, had all been Messerschmitt 262 pilots or actual rocket scientists. Then there were awful Rabbits, with dopey-looking amber turn signals and thyroid-condition, reflector-pregnant asses, which were created by drunken Pennsylvanians who used eight-pound sledgehammers to install body-side molding and who aligned the doors by hanging on the hinges until even the most sausage-like of fingers could pass comfortably through the gap between crooked window frame and mis-welded unibody.
Keep in mind that I couldn’t drive, and that nobody I knew even owned a Rabbit. I received all this wisdom osmotically, hyperbole passing from the diarrheic prose of the Tony Swans and David E. Davises of the day directly from the page to my mind. German Rabbits good. American Rabbits bad. And when VW finally gave up and closed Westmoreland, didn’t that validate what the scribes had scribbled?
Time passes, and we are told that the new, “Americanized” Mark VI Jetta is a disgrace, a stain, a repudiation of all for which the fabulous Emm Kay Five stood. My drive of the current Jetta didn’t quite square with the conventional wisdom. Still, I’ve been fascinated by the idea that Volkswagen deliberately chose to repeat its history, that it made a conscious effort to once again dive whole-heartedly into the American market with products that are locally assembled and directly targeted at us. So far, it’s been a success, but the Bowdlerized History Of Cars fed to us by the color rags cheerfully omits the fact that the original American Rabbits were popular, too. The death of American Volkswagen production had a lot more to do with dismal dealers and champagne-priced, poverty-specced product than it did with Pennsylvania production.
Time to cleanse my palate a bit. Hertz still rents Mark Five Volkswagens, so I requested one and drove it 931 miles over the course of approximately forty hours. A final chance to figure out the truth, before the conventional wisdom becomes fact, before what everyone knows becomes the only thing anybody knows, before history repeats itself.
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