Possibly Ed’s rant against overusage of “bias” has escaped the attention of some commenters. “Bias” is no longer a welcome word on TTAC. Usage can result in permanent banning. I am inclined to put the word “bias” on our bad word list. The only thing that keeps me from doing so is the fact that the banning robot is stupid and will also kill comments that contain, “bias-ply tires”, sundry “phobias”, “suburbias” etc.  Don’t make me wipe out whole suburbias.

While on the topic of banning: Read More >

Mackenzie writes:

Hello, I am a 16-year-old girl looking to buy her first car. I am looking at Jeep Cherokees (NOT Grand Cherokees). I am trying to find a decent manual transmission one, but I can’t seem to locate any within a reasonable distance from me (Eastern Virginia).

My dad says I should look for a 1999-2001 Cherokee, but the few that I have found that are stick shift usually have pretty high mileage or are out of my budget. As car experts, would you guys recommend an older (94-98ish) Cherokee or a newer one with higher mileage?

I keep hearing that American-made cars are not as hardy as foreign-made cars, and that over 180,000 miles for a Cherokee is a no-go. My parents have agreed to pay half of the car, but with what I am finding, it’s still going to be a lot of money to pay. At first I was looking at $3500 tops, but I’m thinking I will have to raise that. Any help or advice y’all have on this subject would be greatly appreciated.

Sajeev answers: Read More >

Chrysler has used the LeBaron name on and off since the 1930s, and the prestige level of the LeBaron badge has been on a gradual downward spiral all along. Some may disagree with that assessment, however, depending on whether they judge the transition from the M (Dodge Diplomat) platform to the K platform in 1982 to have been a step up or a step down. I think the presence of a Slant Six under the hood disqualifies any vehicle from claiming luxury status, and that’s what we’ve got here. Read More >

Where were we? Ah, yes. I was fleeing Nashville in defeat after my mystery car ate its water pump on Mile 417 of a 1,210-mile journey. But what was that mystery car? I couldn’t reveal it at the time, for reasons which will become apparent shortly, but now it can be told: I was driving a 1976 Cadillac Fleetwood Sixty Special “Talisman”. For the bargain price of about $14,000 (think $54K today, about the same as a loaded 335i or middling Audi A6) the most discerning among us could purchase the ultimate in full-sized luxury.

In the week after my return to sunny Powell, Ohio, the Firestone shop in Franklin, Tennessee swapped the water pump, thermostat, a few hoses, and the blown-out valve cover gaskets. All was in readiness for me to fly in Saturday, July 2, and pick up where I’d left off. Drama McHourglass promised she would pick me up at the airport:

I will be there. with bells on!

Honestly, dear readers, I had my doubts, particularly given my arrival time of 8:45am, but as I rolled my SKB Strat case through the big glass doors and out into BNA’s Arrivals area, I saw her ’96 Taurus in the lane ahead. She was radiant in a nearly sheer peasant dress and as I took my seat next to her, she said, “You see? Bells.” She wiggled — no, she shimmered — and I heard the strings of bells draped over her wrists, and I felt the solid ground drop away beneath me, the way it does when you hit the coping and tumble all the way down the halfpipe, or hear the jury read your verdict, or fall desperately in love.
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You find some interesting historical documents in junked cars, and sometimes they’re glued to an engine’s valve cover. Read More >

A New Age?

Jeremy writes:

I would like to thank you for your website it is one of my primary sources for automotive information, I read new articles basically every day. And with that covered, this is for the most part a piston slap:

I currently own a 93 Ranger STX approx 108k on the 4.0L V6. I bought it used in about 2000. It has been a good truck and has served me well other than feeling quite sluggish and there being some slack in the transfer case (nothing abnormal from what I am told) It is in good shape and serves me well for driving around town and taking some miles off my 05 Focus ST.

I have been looking for and thinking about purchasing a used full size 1/2 ton pickup, so that I would have a truck more comfortable for road trips (I live 50 miles from the nearest 1000+ population town) and I would like to be able to lay 8’ panels flat. My current requirements are V8 (I need some pulling power for a boat, etc) anything other than a regular cab with an 8 foot box. Its tough to find such a machine being they end up so long and unwieldy. It would be in the garage more often than not and would be used more for the big jobs than anything.

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The ’79 Monza wagon we saw last week was a choice specimen of Malaise Era misery, to be sure, but how did the Vega Monza compare to the Chevette? Read More >

In the last episode of the Impala Hell Project story, Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait in the summer of 1990 made me choose a small-block engine instead of the big-block I’d originally planned as a worn-out 283 replacement. I was still running the factory single exhaust and two-speed Powerglide transmission at that point, so some more upgrades were in order. Read More >

When we think of Japanese four-wheel-drive station wagons these days, we immediately picture a Subaru product. We often forget that, in the 1980s, most of the Japanese automakers made four-wheel-drive versions of their small wagons. Honda had the 4WD Civic Wagovan, Nissan had 4WD Stanza and Sentra wagons, Mitsubishi had the Mirage and Colt 4WD wagons, and so on. Of all of the non-Subaru 4WD wagons from that era, however, the only one you see with any frequency these days is Toyota’s Tercel 4WD wagon. These things are about as common as the AMC Eagle in Colorado, i.e. you see them all the time. Read More >

After Libya, Yemen, Iran, Syria and Egypt, we are back in the Middle-East this weekend to visit Saudi Arabia. A (very dangerous) Saudi specialty is drifting a la ‘Fast and Furious’ in traffic-filled streets, as you can see in the video above. Do not try this at home please!

Now if you’re not interested in knowing more about car sales in Saudi Arabia, then I am very disappointed in you. But there are two things you can do: check out the 19 countries we have already explored each weekend by clicking here, or explore the 154 other countries available in my blog.

One thing I bet you didn’t know is that Saudi Arabia’s tastes for cars are very similar to America’s…

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Photos courtesy of Cars In Depth

Sometimes, as with the Continental Mark II convertible, you track down a car. Other times, you walk out your front door and you see a caravan of two families of Norwegians driving Renault R4s (plus an RV) on their way from Oslo to Los Angeles via New York (and back). How they ended up on a residential street in a quiet Detroit suburb is due to the vagaries of navigation systems, but I don’t believe in coincidences. After all, if the Creator could be concerned with the Brownian motion of a mote of dust, it’s not outside the realm of possibility that He wants you to see these cars.

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Weirdly vivid car colors were all the rage in the early 1990s, along with clear products, and so this Justy’s Cherenkov Radiation Turquoise paint fit right in with the times. Sadly, the jarring hue and econo-four-wheel-drive weren’t enough to save this rust-free, 5-speed-equipped Subaru sedan from The Crusher’s cold jaws. Read More >

I am now on an active quest to import a genuine Soviet people’s car from the former Soviet Union; if all goes according to plan, a ZAZ-968 will go into a shipping container in Odessa and make its way to Chez Murilee later this year. I have a special affection for the Zaporozhets, because it was the product of the downward-economic-spiral, economy-temporarily-propped-up-by-oil-exports Brezhnevian Malaise Era, yet was the only car that ordinary Soviet citizens had any chance of actually owning prior to the Glasnost period. However, when an elitist, Party-members-only 1956 GAZ-M20 Pobeda in not-ridiculously-far-from-Denver Iowa came up for sale on eBay last week, with a starting bid of just six grand, I decided I’d take a shot at buying it instead of a Запоро́жець. Read More >

The controversy over red light cameras, once relegated to websites like TTAC, thenewspaper.com, motorists.org and highwayrobbery.net, is hitting the mainstream media thanks to a new study by the IIHS [PDF here]. The study used the following methodology:

Telephone surveys were conducted with 3,111 drivers in 14 large cities (population greater than 200,000) with long-standing red light camera programs and 300 drivers in Houston, using random samples of landline and cellphone numbers. For analyses combining responses from the 14 cities, cases were weighted to reflect each city’s share of the total population for the 14 cities.

And what did they find?

Among drivers in the 14 cities with red light camera programs, two-thirds favor the use of cameras for red light enforcement, and 42 percent strongly favor it. The chief reasons for opposing cameras were the perceptions that cameras make mistakes and that the motivation for installing them is revenue, not safety. Forty-one percent of drivers favor using cameras to enforce right-turn-on-red violations. Nearly 9 in 10 drivers were aware of the camera enforcement programs in their cities, and 59 percent of these drivers believe the cameras have made intersections safer. Almost half know someone who received a red light camera citation and 17 percent had received at least one ticket themselves. When compared with drivers in the 14 cities with camera programs, the percentage of drivers in Houston who strongly favored enforcement was about the same (45 percent), but strong opposition was higher in Houston than in the other cities (28 percent versus 18 percent).

Sounds like those red light cameras are pretty great after all, doesn’t it? That’s certainly the IIHS’s takeaway…
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The thing about my ’66 Dodge A100 van project that makes it a challenge is that I’m going for an early 1970s customization job, not the far easier late 1970s routine. My van won’t have Aztecs On Mars airbrush murals or a wood-burning stove (not that there’s anything wrong with those things), but it does have a telephone-handset-style 23-channel CB radio, (faux) Cragar S/S wheels, and now it has a Watergate-burglary-era cheap aftermarket tachometer. Read More >