After my tirade about big fat luxury cars in the 24 Hours of LeMons, I got to thinking about all the once-boring luxury machines I’ve seen with brutal slam jobs. In so many cases— yes, even with a vintage Audi 100— dropping the Chairman of the Board’s luxury ride about a foot works wonders for its appearance. Read More >
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Category: Question of the Day
The Opel/Vauxhall Cascada got a surprisingly warm reception on TTAC, considering that it’s a ragtop with humble origins based on the Delta II platform (thank you, readers, for correcting my mistake).
This essay, which likens supporting a sports team supporting a sports team to being in an abusive relationship, struck a chord with me even though I care little about pro sports. But what about you?
I don’t have any particular bias against American cars, but it’s fair to say that I’ve always preferred imports over American muscle, save for one major exception; the GMC Typhoon.
In the ’72 Dodge Tradesman Junkyard Find earlier this week, I referred to the iconic custom-van airbrush mural with “jousting knights battling Aztec kings in a zebra herd at the Mars Base.” All of those elements were seen on the flanks of plenty of Chevy Vans and Econolines back in the 1970s (though you didn’t often see more than one per mural), and— now that we’ve got the benefit of nearly 40 years of hindsight— we can think about what could be done today with the art form of the custom van. Read More >
The 1st generation Honda Insight seems tiny compared to anything short of a Fiat 500.
Yet I do a lot of driving with it. Commuting. Shopping. A whole lot of errands and an occasional light haul are all par for the daily course.
As for the hatch… I only use it for the really big stuff.
At the Japanese launch of the Volkswagen Up!, VW’s design chief Walter de’ Silva told a group of assembled journalists that “overdesign”, his term for the recent spate of flamboyantly styled vehicles is now passe, and that the future belongs to clean, minimalist design.
The good old days of late summer 2009.
It was a great time to buy a new car. Monthly new car sales in North America had plummeted to under 10 million units. Access to financing seemed to be near impossible for a lot of consumers. Brands were orphaned. Leasing collapsed. Banks were picky. The future was uncertain and… raw materials were cheap.
It was a good time to buy new at a deep, deep discount. Has that time passed?
All credit goes to the rest of the auto blogs who endlessly race to “get it first” with regurgitating the OEM press release. They actually made me want a hybrid car for the first time ever.
The first generation Insight was a commercial failure. Eight years yielded fewer than 20,000 unit sold and a lingering doubt about the genuine interest in two seat commuter cars.
Honda tried again with the CR-Z, and apparently George Orwell’s early Animal Farm analogy about ‘four being better than two’ may be all too true for the American automotive marketplace.
Nobody wants an uber-frugal commuter car with two seats. It’s either four or no sale.
The SUV arms race has been over for a few years now, with four-ton, leather-lined, full-framed trucks no longer appearing to be viable as the middle-class commuter machines they were during the SUV-crazed 1990s and 2000s. Oh, sure, you can still buy the things, but Times Have Changed. If we are to draw a parallel between the Golden Age of the Muscle Car (during which Detroit slapped off-the-shelf luxury-car engines and $27 worth of scoops and graphics on midsize commuter cars and made crazy money) and the Golden Age of the Big-Ass SUV (during which Detroit slapped off-the-shelf pleather and Simu-Wood™ trim and $27 worth of badging on full-sized work-truck chassis and made crazy money), then we are now in the SUV equivalent of about 1976. If so, this means that, in another decade or two, nostalgia for Navigators and Escalades will kick in, just as it did for GTOs and Super Bees in about 1985, and— just as with muscle cars— the love of these absurd luxo-trucks will take on symbolic connotations of past glory, an era before nanny-state killjoys, and so on. Read More >
When I first got wind of the new 2013 Honda Accord Plug-In Hybrid, I was pretty optimistic about its viability. An improved hybrid system from Honda, a plug-in no less, mated to the practical, decent-to-drive package of the Accord? For a city dweller that gets electricity from clean hydroelectric power sources like me, it is, on paper, a decent choice for an everyday car. Until I saw it.
Reader Claude Dickson asks
I was watching Road Testament on YouTube and they were purported talking about the best fast cars to drive slow. Most of their suggestions were ridiculous, but the question they asked is becoming increasingly relevant if the question is refined to what are the best high performance cars to drive at sane speeds on public roads. The point increasingly made by many of your reviews is that fast track times or better performance stats do not dictate a better road car. A good example is your review of the new 911-superior in just about any performance metric you might select,- just not that much fun. So B & B, which performance cars put a smile on your face while driving around town and which just don’t???
Whether you drive a $30,000 or a $1,500 a car, one variable in life stays constant.
You want to minimize your costs.
The concept behind the Year of Your Birth Rally is simple: you must drive a vehicle with a model year the same as your own. Nick Pon, Assistant Perp of the 24 Hours of LeMons, created the idea and swears he’s going to organize such a rally someday. He was born in 1980, which means he has a vast array of terrible-yet-great Malaise Era machinery to choose from. I was born in 1966, which means I could drive my ’66 Dodge A100… or a ’66 Beaumont. What would you drive? Read More >
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