The MP4-12C has a wonderful backstory for those who love and admire the McLaren brand. The McLaren F1’s instant Zeus-like status is a large part of the mystique, but not necessarily all of it. That said, for everyone outside of this world (and price point) you are forgiven if you wouldn’t even consider this over the similarly priced Ferrari 458 Italia….as I probably fit into that category.
Andrew writes:
Hi Sajeev,
I always enjoy reading your nuggets of design wisdom and critique on TTAC. From your articles, its obvious you know some rather talented designers, and definitely have some interesting stories.
If you could spare a moment of your time for a TTAC reader, I’m looking for some feedback on my industrial design portfolio; I’m trying to land my first proper design job that I’ll be happy with after graduating in April of last year. I’m currently working in a somewhat related field in a job that pays well but gives me no joy. Read More >
Way back in the Clinton Era, two compact pickups battled each other to an inch of their amortized sheetmetal. The Ford Ranger, which had been the ruler of the small truck roost since 1983, and the Chevy S-10 which fought equally valiantly with rebates, market incentives, a branded clone in the form of the GMC Sonoma, and even a rare-for-America four door configuration.
Not to say the Ranger didn’t resort to many of the exact same tactics. Ford was just as busy trying to crank out the supersized and super-profitable trucks and SUV’s as the General did at the time. These compact pickups were considered a bridge to what both automakers sought for their respective brands; to attract the long-term loyalist who would forever buy the ever higher profit vehicles… preferably on a lease or finance deal.
Price competition became fierce in this segment and profits were minimal. Was it even possible to have big profits for small pickups? Not in most cases as far as the manufacturer was concerned. You could price the top of the line models right near the cost of a base Explorer or Blazer by the late 90’s. But only a salesman with the talent of a Jack Baruth could routinely push them out the door.
By the time America started to head towards the ‘ bigger is better’ buffet line, both vehicles offered very similar… well… everything.
One of the minefields in an interview with the owner of an old car is the custom side of the vehicle.
I’ve seen tens of thousands of cars and done thousands of interviews. In that time, I’ve seen things done to old iron that I would rank as excessive.
I have to remind myself that old vehicles are a very personal statement. You don’t own them because they’re practical. You own them because they reflect something from your past. A mental cue locked in your memory banks triggered a need for a particular old car, or truck, or a look, and eventually you are the proud owner of an iconic ride. That highly impractical vehicle is for you, not mainstream society – otherwise buy a Subaru.
That’s how I rationalize the “off the beaten path” cars, but this 1963 Plymouth pushed the envelope in a big way. Read More >
Today, at 2:46 pm, Japan came to a stand-still, again. Trains and subways stopped. People did fold their hands, faced in the general direction of the northeastern coast of Tohoku, and said a silent prayer. Japan and the world marked the one year anniversary of the earthquake and tsunami that left whole towns razed, more than 19,000 people dead or missing, 344,000 people displaced, and a large area around the destroyed Fukushima Daiichi power plant off-limits for decades, if not permanently.
Writers often like to equate the power released by the quake to the nuclear bombs that had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Depending on who you read and believe, it was anywhere between 31,700 and 600 million Hiroshima bombs. Large parts of the coastal areas are dotted with huge, neatly stacked piles of rubble which nobody wants to take and nobody knows what to do with. The devastation was so big that it turned into an attraction on Google Earth. Considering the immense damage, it is amazing how quickly the country did rebound. On Friday, I visited what was presented to me as an emblem of the amazing turn-around, Toyota’s plant in Kanegasaki, Iwate Prefecture. Here, 1,700 employees are working overtime to build Toyota’s Aqua / Prius c, for which everybody is screaming. Read More >
“All I need is a nice basic car. Something like, maybe, a Saturn or something.” This unassuming, if perhaps ungrammatical, combination of sentences has come to be a long-running joke in my family. You see, one of my relatives married a woman back in the Eighties and subsequently provided her with a string of relatively upscale whips ranging from an Infiniti J30 to a Siebener BMW. Every time it was time to go looking for a replacement, however, she would ardently protest to anyone who would listen that “All I need is a nice basic car. Something like, maybe, a Saturn or something.” My relative ignored her and kept shoveling the Audis, Bimmers, and Infinitis her way, and each time she would accept the new ride reluctantly, reminding us about her preference for “a basic car”.
Some fifteen years after their marriage, this woman told me at dinner, “You know what I did today?”
“No. What did you do?”
“I rode in a friend’s Saturn to lunch. You know, I’ve talked about how that’s all I really want.”
“And?”
“It was horrible! It smelled weird, the windows rolled up by hand, it was cramped inside, and it was really noisy, like something was wrong with it.”
“So, what’s your opinion now?”
“Well, I still want a basic car. But now I think I’d be happy with just a basic BMW or Lexus.” I thought this was well-said, because it allowed her to continue to champion the usual liberal virtues of “simplicity” and “consuming less” without actually being forced to drive anything worse than a 328i. As it so happens, her current car is just that – a “nice, basic” two-hundred-and-thirty-horsepower, leather-seated, alloy-wheeled Bimmer sedan.
Sixty years ago, a film called “River of No Return” was filmed in Jasper National Park Alberta Canada. The two stars of the movie were Marilyn Monroe and Robert Mitchum.
To state that they were huge Hollywood names at the time is obvious – what’s less obvious is how they transported Hollywood royalty to and from locations on the film. Read More >
There was a time, let’s say in the late 1980s, when the quantity of Pintos in junkyards went from “glut” to “famine,” as if a switch was flipped and all the Pintos just disappeared. The same thing happened with the early Hyundai Excel, too, only they lived, died, and got scrapped within a five-year period versus the 10-to-15-year period for the Pinto. Still, every so often I find a lone Pinto that hung on an extra couple of decades before getting junked. For example, this tan ’74 that showed up in a Denver self-service yard last month. Read More >
Gucci is no stranger to OEM trim packages for major manufacturers. The House of Gucci originally lent its unique Italian flavor to somewhat of an Intercontinental Bastard: a leaf sprung, Chevy Nova based Cadillac with a Spanish name. Read More >
Brian writes:
Sajeev,
Heeding the call for silly, not-really-that-good letters…plus I wrote you a while back about my Freestyle. Since then, my wife actually sat in a minivan, and that’s the direction we are heading. We are looking at replacing it quickly so that she can take the three kiddos to Grandma’s house while I enter Lemons South this March. Read More >
I’ve started this series with all analog clocks, but I think I’m going to dip into my extensive collection of digital automotive timepieces pretty soon. For today, however, we’ll stay old-school with another hand-equipped unit. This one has some heavy-duty-upscale Roman numerals and the right-turn signal indicator built in, so you know it came from a car that at least aspired to prestige (though it’s not a Ford Aspire). Study this clock, make your best guess, and then click the “More” link to see if you had it right. Read More >
I spent a lot of time crawling around this ’69 Dodge A108 van during the last couple of weeks, picking up much-needed parts for my ’66 Dodge A100 Hell Project, and so I became quite familiar with the A108’s junkyard neighbor: this ’79 Jeep Cherokee. Read More >
In yesterday’s Name That Car Clock challenge, we went all the way back to 1965 and admired a beautiful, though admittedly nonfunctional, Oldsmobile timepiece. Today, we’re going with something from my collection of junkyard-harvested clocks that’s a bit newer. Quick, what’s the year/make/model of the car that yielded this clock to my junkyard toolkit? Read More >
In January 1980, Jimmy Carter was in his last year as President, the Soviets had just invaded Afghanistan, and this Camaro was born. A few months later, in April 1980, Robert Mugabe became the leader of Zimbabwe and Alan Kay walked into his local GM dealer to buy this car off the showroom floor.
There were two things that remained constant from early 1980 – Mugabe still runs Zimbabwe and Alan still runs his 1980 Camaro. Read More >
Here’s a car that you still see frequently in Colorado, both on the street and in the junkyard. You see Tercel 4WD wagons on the street here because they’re cheap, sensible winter cars and they tend to keep grinding out the hundreds of thousands of miles in their Tercelian slow-motion fashion… and you see them in the junkyard because they’re not worth enough to fix when something major finally fails. Read More >
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