Yesterday brought the big reveal every Volkswagen aficionado has waited breathlessly for: the Golf Mk. 8, VW’s latest iteration of a fun and sprightly hatch that’s put smiles on the faces of Euro-leaning Americans since the debut of The Rockford Files.

And…we might not see a regular Golf again, at least not in the United States. Falling sales of the seventh-gen Golf prompted VW brass to remain noncommittal about the introduction of a next-gen model lacking GTI or R badging.

Looking at the variety of mild and plug-in hybrids offered to Europeans come 2020, one reader recalled America’s not-too-distant TDI love and wondered aloud why greenies in the U.S. (presumably) can not get a crack at an electrified Golf. Do you think they should? (Read More…)

The heart is a strange animal. One day, it despises something, but give it time and you’ll one day  find yourself enjoying something you once turned up your nose at. It happens in the kitchen, the voting booth, and hell, maybe even the bedroom.

As human beings, our individual tastes, preferences, and ideologies evolve slowly over the span of many years, just as the societal trappings around us cast off old clothes for a new wardrobe. Architecture, music, and automotive styling, to name a few examples. Sometimes it doesn’t take long to correct past styling mistakes and light a fire in a person’s heart; other times, it takes many generations of vehicle before an automaker bakes a cake you’d actually want to eat.

What’s one car model you once hated, but now can’t wait to own? (Read More…)

Today marks the final entry in our Question of the Day series discussing bad sporty car design from the Nineties. So far we’ve covered America and Europe, and we now finish up with poor sports car designs from Japan. (Read More…)

Once a fancy feature reserved for legitimately sporty or luxurious vehicles with ample power to generate grins regardless of electronic intervention, “sport mode” is now nearly ubiquitous. It appears in tepid (but efficient!) economy cars. Your mom’s crossover probably has a button, dial, or shift lever position that fiddles with shift points, firms up the steering, and makes the accelerator pedal touchier than a friend whose long-term relationship just went south.

Auto journos quickly make use of the feature when hooning an automaker’s latest and greatest, but does it ever serve a purpose to you, the owner? (Read More…)

It’s Election Day north of the border, meaning you can be sure of one thing once all the ballots are counted in the wee hours — no one’s going to be happy.

Regardless of the Great White North’s political carping, we have three automotive topics on which to cast your vote. So sharpen your pencil, step up to the ballot box, and beware of hanging chads.

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Good morning, all. Your author here just awoke from a nightmare, one whose subject matter should strike fear into the hearts of all vehicle owners. Allow me to describe the dream.

In a rainy and somewhat threatening near future, yours truly noticed something on the rearmost part of his driver’s side rocker panel. A blemish. Maybe dirt or asphalt, I thought, walking over to flick the speck away. Drawing nearer, I realized, to my horror, that this speck wasn’t a foreign object clinging to my vehicle’s blue (why blue?) ⁠paint — it was a hole. Around said hole wasn’t dirt, but a heat rash-like spread of surface corrosion. With mounting dread, I fell to the ground, anticipating worse to come underneath.

Sure enough, my fears were realized. Acres of rust and widespread perforation beneath my relatively new vehicle! I had let a silent killer sneak up on me. (Read More…)

On last Wednesday’s Question of the Day post, we began our examination of terrible styling on sporty cars of the 1990s. First up was America, and the oft-fiddled Mercury Cougar. This week we turn our attention to Europe, and sporty designs from across the ocean that didn’t quite work.

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This past weekend’s Canadian Thanksgiving afforded me the opportunity to converse with non-Twitter “normies,” thus allowing me to learn a thing or two about how such people live their lives. Of particular note was what goes on in my friend’s son’s high school parking lot.

No, I hadn’t heard reports of illicit activity, though you can be sure it’s happening. Damn sure. Instead, my interest lay in what his fellow students drove, and if they drove. Recalling my angsty, awkward high school years during the height of ’90s nihilism, it seemed my school’s student lot would double nicely as a BHPH lot stocked with nothing but aging GM relics. Granted, the school was a rural one, and its student body was hardly a bastion of wealth and privilege. My friend’s son’s school, on the other hand, is urban, and Soundgarden is no longer burning up the charts.

How would these two student bodies differ in their vehicle use, I wondered? (Read More…)

For years now, we’ve watched as the average car/crossover grille has expanded faster than that aunt you got divorced in her 20s and never settled down (the same can be said for a man; don’t send us letters.)

Now, as vehicle grilles — once declared nearly extinct in the Taurus/Sable/Intrepid/Crown Vic era ⁠— reach their zenith, the mind turns to an obvious question: What comes next? You’ve watched on these pages as Toyota and Lexus attempted to swallow galaxies with their gaping front openings. Now, BMW is eager to swallow what’s left. (Read More…)

No, we’re not talking about coming to someone’s emotional rescue, nor are we concerned about that time you pushed your buddy out of the way of that speeding Amtrak while searching for a corpse back in the ’80s.

This is serious stuff. A person can set themselves up for a world of emotional and financial hurt by choosing the wrong car, and, just maybe, you’ve successfully coaxed someone away from the proverbial ledge. (Read More…)

Last week, we wrapped up a trio of posts about the best sporty car designs of the Nineties from around the world. Today we venture into the darker depths of the same subject. First up are the bad designs American manufacturers proffered during the decade.

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No, not depreciation — though that might come into play here, too. A great number of car models are lackluster, deficient in style, reliability or panache, or basically appeal to buyers only for their low cost of ownership. Some vehicles are simply appliances, nothing more.

Yet appliances stimulate little in the way of bad emotion. They’re not meant to. So, despite the blandness of some vehicles, you wouldn’t call them depressing. No, that term is reserved for a very specific cohort of rides. Which models are they? (Read More…)

For an age, car manufacturers were stuck with trying to package an airbag into the centre hub of a steering wheel using technology that — compared to today’s kit — approximated that of what was found on Roman chariots. Most of us will remember the “lunchbox” airbags of the era, especially the enormous rectangular hub from Ford.

Bookending that timeframe, though, there were some nifty steering wheel designs. The acid-trip ’80s provided some good fodder, as does the creative packaging of today’s tillers. What’s your fave? Ours, perhaps predictably, comes from Subaru.

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The badge you don’t see in the photo is the no-longer-Ram-associated Dodge badge, the one we’ll be discussing today. In a post the other day, yours truly waxed on and on, probably to your great annoyance, about the brand’s attempt to stimulate interest in its future via its past. What name would you like to see return, the brand’s Twitter account asked.

Some readers considered the tweet a possible sign of a returning Viper — the low-volume supercar that bowed out Dodge’s lineup not all that long ago. A month before his death, former Fiat Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne poured cold water over the idea, claiming the Viper could only stage a profitable return if it shared a platform with something from FCA’s European collection, and in doing so wouldn’t be able to handle a giant, honking, torque-laden American engine necessary for a Viper to be a real Viper.

Maybe it’s still a good idea to some, though others might feel a Ford GT-like one-off model punted to a Canadian specialty manufacturer and offered at a stratospheric sticker price is a better way to go. (Read More…)

We call upon our vehicles to go the extra mile sometimes; to give us that extra bit of effort to get the job done. And, every now and then, we ask of them too much, as some vehicles just aren’t suited for the task at hand.

Screw it, we’ve thought in the heat and madness of the moment — it’s the only vehicle at hand. Make do with what you’ve got, and all that.

Like the famously lopsided naval battle in the Leyte Gulf that saw a small handful of U.S. destroyers and destroyer escorts successfully fight off a large task force of Japan’s most fearsome warships, our machines’ abilities can sometimes surprise us, even when facing seemingly insurmountable odds. Has your vehicle — or a vehicle in your possession — ever surprised you with its get-it-done spirit? (Read More…)