With Labor Day in the rearview, the grim prospect of winter now rears its ugly head. For many of you, it’s no big deal. It might rain. You’ll have to put on a light jacket before leaving the house. For others, Mother Nature awaits with several gigatons of snow and ice.

Suddenly, that two-wheel drive vehicle that served your needs just fine throughout the summer is no longer king of the road. Sufficient, sure, but not ideal. Bringing all wheels online would improve your car’s winter prowess and boost driver confidence (possibly by too much of a degree), yet few passenger car makers think of adding it to models lacking boxy, cargo-happy bodies.

If AWD is something you covet, would its presence sway you away from a crossover and into a normal car? (Read More…)

The Labor Day long weekend is nearly upon us and, while your author doesn’t plan to roam more than a couple hours’ distance from home, many of you might already be packing up the car crossover for one last warm getaway.

Nothing is quite as bittersweet as packing up the fam and hitting the road to your favorite destination, knowing all too well that the best of summer is behind you and that soon things will grow cold and dark. The lowering skies will grow heavy with frozen precipitation, the north wind will kick up, and that refreshing summer beer just won’t cut it anymore. Yup, time for the harder stuff.

But I digress! We all remember family road trips that went awry, so let’s drive into the weekend on a road paved with nostalgia. (Read More…)

We’ve all eyeballed a pair of pants in the store, assumed they’d fit just fine, and took them home — only to discover that our waistlines aren’t as svelte as initially thought. Ignore the fitting room at your own peril.

Big-ticket purchases can also backfire, especially if they’re ordered online and come with “some assembly required.” But for the most part, large transactions — houses, cars, furniture — occur only after you’ve parked your ass in it for a little while, given it a once-over, and declared the pending purchase A-OK. For the most part, anyway.

Thanks to the internet, it’s not unusual for collectors or plain-old used car buyers to purchase a cheap, historical, or oddball vehicle without ever slipping behind the wheel, but would you do this with a new car? (Read More…)

We’ve had four different Questions of the Day focused on design over the past few months. Starting with good and bad Nineties design in general, we soon proceeded to the good and bad aspects of Nineties truck design.

Commenter theflyersfan feels we should have a discussion about Nineties sports car styling in particular. So here we are, setting off on a voyage for Nineties sports car bliss. America’s up first.

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The past decade hasn’t been kind to entry-level Lexus cars. From the lackluster HS 250h hybrid sedan (Harmonious Sedan, actually) to the more appealing yet similarly ill-fated CT 200h, hybrid power seems to act as a boat anchor when combined with a lower-priced Lexus.

Yet the brand has no intention of splitting its range between gas-only and electric-only vehicles. Lexus and Toyota still love hybrids, so expect more of ’em. What’s still up in the air, however, is whether we’ll see a new entry-level Lexus positioned below the UX crossover — a vehicle that starts at $33,175 after destination.

What form should such a model take? (Read More…)

Every gearhead reading (and writing for) this website enjoys the thought of a good road trip. One rule which should permeate all voyages decrees that passengers can complain about the type of music or its volume — but not both. This stems from my own belief that a person can complain about the brand or temperature of a beer given to you by a friend — not both.

Rarely do all hands agree, however. What’s your go-to music genre when hitting the open road?

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We know, we know — you aren’t. Almost no one is, which handily explains why new wagons are now rarer in North America than sobriety on the first night of Woodstock. Or virginity on the last. It wasn’t always the case, though, as once upon a time a great herd of long-roofed family haulers roamed freely across the vast expanses of pre-Millenium America.

We’re left with premium niche models, and that’s that. Deal with it. This Question of the Day isn’t designed to make you pick favorites from among the skimpy crowd of remaining estate cars, but to think back to those halcyon (or perhaps traumatizing) days before you earned your driver’s license. (Read More…)

Between 1953 and a few weeks ago, the Chevrolet Corvette stuck to a very specific formula: Engine at the front, driven wheels at the back. With the debut of the 2020 C8 Corvette, all of that changed. Today we want to find out what you think about the metamorphosis of an iconic sports car nameplate.

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For no reason in particular, your author found himself researching the various attributes and eccentricities of Greenland these past couple of days. Again, no reason. And while Greenland itself is pretty sparse and remote, you can’t actually drive very far from what passes for civilization in that big island sort-of country. Something to do with fjords and glaciers and such.

If you’re looking to really get away from it all behind the wheel of a vehicle, there’s better choices closer to home. And, obviously, further. But maybe you already know that… (Read More…)

Over the weekend at Monterey, RM Sotheby’s executed what will forever remain one of the worst screw-ups in auction history. With a piece of is-it-or-isn’t-it Porsche history on the block, the auctioneer started his patter at what the crowd (and the media screen) thought was thirty million dollars. That same media screen quickly rocketed to seventy mil before said auctioneer clarified he was saying seven-teen not seven-ty. Boos rained down upon the room and bidding predictably evaporated like chloroform. The car failed to sell.

Conspiracy theorists will forever debate what really happened, but our question for you today is this: what’s the biggest error — either in buying or selling — you’ve ever seen at a car auction?

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It’s normal to worry about — or at least give a passing though to — the possibility that the airliner you’re about to step onto may, in fact, never reach its destination. The same goes for thinking, hoping, or praying that a road trip you’re about to embark on goes well, with no cataclysmic incidents along the way. It only becomes a problem if these concerns dominate the mind, leading to paralyzing fears and a determined avoidance of certain activities that negatively impacts your life. At that point it’s time to see a psychologist.

We’ve talked in the past about our worst driving fears, the most obvious being the accidental running over of a human being. Understandable! But sometimes, despite our fearlessness behind the wheel, we bake into our daily lives strange little habits, performing these rituals unconsciously until a friend or family member calls us out on our neurosis. (Read More…)

If the global economy were weather, yesterday brought dark clouds, an unsettling calm, and that weird ozone smell that heralds a violent storm. The bond market is waving its hands and flashing a warning sign. Spooked traders waded through a sea of red as Wall Street and other foreign exchanges began resembling the elevator scene in The Shining.

It’s quite possible all those warnings issued by major automakers of a looming recession weren’t made out of an abundance of caution, but something a little more concrete. No wonder the likes of Ford and General Motors find themselves in the midst of “downturn planning.”

As you read yesterday, one possible consequence of another economic meltdown is a return of smaller, more affordable vehicles — products both Ford, GM, and Fiat Chrysler spent the last few years dropping from their lineups. While the entirety of these small vehicles wouldn’t return in such a scenario, some might. Which cars deserve a green light? (Read More…)

In last Wednesday’s QOTD post we covered all the worst examples of automotive collaboration. Commenters racked up the examples, sharing collaboration failures even worse than the Jaguar X-Type selected for textual pillory in the post.

Today we flip it around and discuss the best outcomes of automaker cooperation.

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Cars, like their drivers, often fly so far below the radar that they may as well not exist at all. Despite the best intentions of designers to stimulate (but not over-stimulate) loyal buyers, a great number of vehicles roll off the drawing board and into reality with an exterior tailor-made to avoid being noticed.

Some vehicles are nothing less than rolling anonymity. Which, depending on your line of work, may be just the thing you’re looking for. (Read More…)

The headline refers to the automobile itself, though it can just as easily refer to each and every one of us. We’re all along for the ride as the industry ditches coupes, sedans, affordable cars, and manual transmissions en masse, and there’s no option of tucking and rolling as the ride slows to turn a corner.

With that said, what recent addition to a vehicle’s content do you find most hard to live with? For our amusement, we’ll list a single rule: you can’t bitch about the loss of stick shifts. (Read More…)