Old-timers will tell you that the Golden Age of the Sleeper ran from the end of World War II through the late 1960s, when you could take, say, a Grandma-spec ’61 Lancer wagon and stuff the engine compartment full of Max Wedge 413 power. I think the old-timers are as wrong about that as they are about the superiority of film cameras over digital cameras; the current era of computerized engine controls, big turbochargers, and tougher drivetrain components means you can get ridiculous power (and handling) out of quotidian transportation appliances. So, looking at the current lineup of snore-inducing machinery that nobody would ever in a million years suspect of being quick, which new car would provide the best balance of potential performance and invisibility? A Kia Rio with a huge turbocharger and the finest suspension upgrades that cubic yards of cash can buy? Read More >

After admiring the Broughamism of today’s Junkyard Find, and still awed by the Broughamic zenith represented by the ’72 Mercury Marquis Brougham Junkyard Find, I can’t help but think that the automotive industry needs to bring back the Brougham! Only thing is, it’s tough to decide which 2012 American-market car or truck would benefit most from Broughamization. Read More >

Many of our readers have some interesting first-car-ride memories, but most of us had no personal choice in the matter. At some point after your very earliest hazy memory of being in a moving steel room on wheels, however, you remember the first car that made you do a double-take and say the little-kid equivalent of “Damn! Look at that thing!” In my case, this car was a thing, and I mean that literally; the Volkswagen Thing first appeared on California streets when I was six years old, and I was utterly hypnotized by the weird boxy car that looked something like an Apollo Lunar Rover. Read More >

Our own Michael Karesh will be testing out Nissan’s new Altima this week. This is the car that Nissan is hoping will take the Altima from its current second place slot in the mid-size segment and up to the top of the pile. In lieu of Michael’s take, there are a few factors that are worth looking at.

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I wasn’t five minutes before my friend and I had gone to inspect TTAC’s Project G-Body Grand National that we began discussing the next foray into fiduciary stupidity. My friend Joey, not content with his cream puff 1986 Grand National (with a verified 38,750 miles on the odometer) wanted to know how we could “get in to rallying”.

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After writing my earlier post on the Isuzu Statesman Deville, I got to thinking about all the oddball vehicles that have resulted from badge engineering exercises over the years. Some badge-engineered cars end up being successful for the parent company (e.g., the Colt), but most just confuse vehicle shoppers. The Plymouth Cricket. The Isuzu Hombre. The Mercury Mountaineer. The list is long, but I think the Plymouth Arrow Truck gets my vote for the most senseless act of brand-diluting badge engineering in American automotive history. Read More >

Ever since I began writing about cars for various online publications, one argument keeps showing up in readers’ comments: Many European cars that are regarded by Americans as totally flaky (e.g., Fiats, anything French) are considered quite reliable in their home continent. The subtext of this argument is generally “You can’t let Americans have anything nice, because they’ll destroy it like a bunch of chimpanzees given unlimited meth and armed with claw hammers.” Meanwhile, the American readers of these comments usually fulminate about Yurpeans being a bunch of public-transit communists who don’t understand cars. This age-old debate— which I suspect appeared for the first time in an automotive BBS, circa 1979— surfaced again in the comments of yesterday’s Cadillac Catera Junkyard Find. What’s going on here? Read More >

I’m now experiencing my second winter as an ex-Californian in Denver, and I feel as though I’ve been adjusting pretty well— got an Outback in the garage and everything. However, there’s one big automotive mystery here, and that’s the incomprehensible love many otherwise sensible Coloradans have for the Volkswagen Vanagon Syncro. At the risk of enraging the Vanagon Jihad, I have to say that the only way Volkswagen could have made the fragile-at-best Vanagon even less reliable was to give it four-wheel-drive. And yet I see these things being used as very costly daily drivers all the time.

A hooptie is a once-semi-luxurious car that’s depreciated down to just-above-scrap value and is getting its final owner some quality, low-buck miles before being crushed. The Buick Electra 225 was the archetypal hooptie of the 1980s and 1990s, but how about today? More importantly, which current models will be the hoopties of 2025? Read More >

Since my daily-driver ’92 Civic is about to become a much less civilized car (plus it’s finally made the transition from “somewhat rough” to “total beater,” I need to start shopping for another DD very soon. Since I’ve developed a fascination with Japanese luxury cars of the 1990s (the era before the Japanese Big Three de-Yakuza-ized the souls of their American flagships and started out-German-ing the Germans), I’ve decided it’s time I owned one. The question is: which one? Read More >

After I started getting weird diecast toy cars as LeMons Supreme Court baksheesh, my office has become crowded with stuff like a 1:43 scale Leyland P76 and a 1:40 Nissan Prairie. Yesterday, as I pondered the diecast custom vans that got away, I wondered: is it possible to get a diecast toy version of my very first car? Read More >

Since the first Clean Air Act was passed in 1963 Americans have been howling about the pros and cons of The Gubmint controlling what comes out of vehicle tailpipes. The new regs didn’t have any profound effects on what we drove until that raging liberal Richard Nixon— no doubt distracted by the Vietnam War and influenced by the hydrocarbon-o-riffic air quality of his native Southern California— allowed the Clean Air Act Extension of 1970 to become law. The automakers, having relied upon their vast lobbying power to keep them safe from such troublesome government meddling, hadn’t done much to prepare for heavy-duty restrictions on exhaust emissions and had no choice but to go for the low-tech, power-killing solutions that made the Malaise Era feel so endless. We’re talking about good old-fashioned “smog” emissions here, i.e. hydrocarbons, oxides of nitrogen, and carbon monoxide, not greenhouse gases. The stuff that made Los Angeles air nearly unbreathable for decades. California and federal smog standards made a huge difference in air quality in Southern California and elsewhere, but complying with those standards cost the American automotive industry dearly. Was it worth it? Cars sure as hell put out tiny fractions of the pollutants they once did; you can’t smell hydrocarbons on the freeway these days unless you’re behind an old car, and they say new cars don’t even make enough CO to kill you by running in a closed garage. Read More >

I snapped this shot of an Austin Mini (technically a Morris 850) and a Buick Electra 225 parked side-by-side in an Alameda, California parking lot before I left the West Coast, and every time I look at it I wonder: would I rather have an early Mini or a Malaise Era Electra? I can’t decide! Read More >

Here’s a question that may well be impossible to answer, due to the numerous gray areas involved. Sure, we could set all kinds of limitations (e.g., “production run” applies only to engines built by the original manufacturer) and of course you stumble into the quagmire of defining when changes to an engine design become significant enough to result in a different engine… but why should we do that? Read More >

On The Booth Babe’s last article, TTAC commentator, LALoser, stated that he originally thought that I was the Booth Babe! He based this theory “because of the just below the surface Anti-Americanism.” So to address this accusation, I decided to blog the following… Read More >