Recall the days all those years ago (probably over a century for some of you), as the time approached for you to start driving. Some of you may have been prescribed a vehicle by the gift of a generous or perhaps spiteful relative. Others received a set stipend from the Bank of Parentus, while the rest worked at a low-end job to scrape up funds for an automotive purchase.
Today, we want to know what your aspirations were at the time; which vehicles did you desire and shop for as your first car?
It’s Tuesday at the North American International Auto Show, and already the big, splashy reveals are fading into the past. The Cobo Center’s parking garage has switched back to monthly pass holders, workers have swept up the errant shrimp tails from the media room, and buzzwords have stopped echoing through the streets of Detroit.
We’ve introduced you to a bevy of new vehicles over the past few days. Now that you’ve had time to process what you’ve seen, it’s time to focus on what you feel. Tell us — is there anger welling up inside you? (Read More…)
It’s NAIAS week in Detroit, signaling a parade of press conferences and more shrimp than what’s found in all the North Atlantic. While buzzwords this year are “mobility” and “disruption,” the Detroit Three still found time to show us new versions of machines in my favorite segment, the full-sized pickup truck market.
Chevy showed off a new Silverado with an octet of trims, Ram dropped its new non-Freightliner pickup, and Ford promised an oil burner for the F-150.
Now we’ve seen them all, here’s my question to you: if forced to choose one, what would you select?
Welcome back my friends, to the show that has yet to end! In this episode of QOTD, I answer the questions that you, the people, have entered into search engine-queries that landed you at TTAC. Let’s get the show on the road:
When Henry Ford began selling his popular Model T around the world, the company bearing his name didn’t assemble all of them in America. Instead, the Model T was the first truly global car, assembled in Commonwealth nations such as England, Canada, Australia, and others like Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Denmark, France, Germany, Mexico, Norway, Spain — hell, even Japan.
But that was a different time. Regardless of which country someone lived in, Ford factory workers made roughly the same amount of money working on the assembly line.
Now things are different.
The Consumer Electronics Show, now known just as CES, is currently in full swing, with legions of auto journos mingling in ever greater numbers with fawning members of the tech press, eagerly awaiting the latest gadget designed to move the proverbial steering wheel further and further from your hands.
To some, especially self-described urbanists who take startup manufacturer predictions seriously, the words “autonomous” and “self-driving” herald a bright future filled with convenience and relaxation; to others, it’s a portent of a dystopian nanny state where human-driven vehicles have disappeared from the streets, all in the interest of safety and responsibility to your fellow man. A future where there’s ever more limitations on personal autonomy, with private car ownership singled out as a particularly problematic pastime.
You can guess on which side of the fence this author falls. (Read More…)
On Friday, I penned a minor rant about the state of the four-door sedan. Many of you read and commented, for which I offer my profuse thanks. It’s the readers who make this place, after all.
Many good reasons and theories were bandied about in the comments, leading me to believe the B&B has a bit more opinion than most on the future of this once-burgeoning segment. Still, we know four-door family sedans are slowly going the way of PalmPilots and Polaroids.
My question for today is this: what’s the next sedan, on sale today, you think will asked to leave stage right?
For 2019, Ford will debut a new Ranger (1982-2011), followed the next year by a new Bronco (1966-1996). While there have been some camouflaged Rangers seen running around, Ford is not showing anybody what the new Bronco will look like.
Since they’re leaving it up to our imaginations, do you think they’re going to ace the new Bronco, or drop a big deuce?
So dawns a new year, ripe with promise and expectation. Millions of babies will draw their first breath in 2018, and those babies’ parents, aunts, uncles, or grandparents will drive off in 16 million or so new vehicles over the course of the coming year. In the U.S., of course.
Unfortunately, to keep the automotive herd healthy, the weakest will have to die. And in 2018, some vehicle nameplates will discover their lifespan has a definitive end point. (Read More…)
It’s sometimes hard keeping up with the specific engineering feats Tesla actually plans to pull off and the forward-thinking visions uttered just to keep the tech press salivating (and its readers buying up shares). Is CEO Elon Musk actually sending a tunnel with an elevator in it to Jupiter? Wait a minute — it’s possible that promise fell victim to the purple-monkey-dishwasher chain of distortion before it reached this author’s ears.
One thing we’re more or less assured of now, following Musk’s stint at the Twitter pulpit Tuesday, is that Tesla will build an electric pickup truck. Yes, just as soon as the compact Model Y’s out the door. This means Tesla fan club members and curious buyers will have to wait until after the Model Y crossover finishes development and finds a place in which it can be built — not an overnight process by any means.
What we’re left with is a pickup that’s a blank slate in terms of size and design. Grab your pencils. (Read More…)
Ah the Nineties. Lots of cylinders, reliable new technology, and wide-track styling. But enough about Pontiac and the 3800 V6, because we’re talking today about German cars from the era.
Which German vehicles from the best decade really caught your eye?
As I type this, the icy tentacles of major cold snap are beginning to be felt in the Midwest and Northeast, sending frigid residents from Montana to Maine to their computers in search of cheap timeshares in Tampa. Meanwhile, forecasters in this neck of the woods — who smugly called for average to above-average temperatures for the duration of the winter — magically get to keep their jobs.
The onset of a deep freeze stirs up so many memories, none of them good.
Let’s see, there was the Plymouth Sundance with sticky valves that turned over with a series of small explosions on especially frosty mornings. Then there was the ’89 Prelude with a driver’s side window that stopped four inches from the top of the frame. How can one forget the drive home on a morning where the windchill factor hit minus 47 Fahrenheit? (Read More…)
She was only sixteen… only sixteen… with her eyes all aglow.
“She” in this case was my 1995 Ford F-150 XL Regular Cab 4×2, and she was only sixteen thousand dollars plus change. Of course, the equipment list was pretty light: 300 cubic-inch inline-six, three-speed automatic, air conditioning, sliding rear window, argent styled steel wheels, argent rear bumper, full vinyl bench.
You can’t get a truck like her anymore, and in some respects that’s a relief, particularly when it comes to the absurdly skimpy legroom Ford regular-cab trucks had until the Great Change of 1997. Yet as I steer my Iowa-class 2017 Silverado Crew Cab Long Bed around town I can’t help but feel a bit of nostalgia for the sensible size, simple operation, and anvil toughness of the old trucks. Even the loaded-up Eddie Bauer F-150s of those years look fairly basic in retrospect.
My wife, the infamous Danger Girl, has similar feelings about the Chevrolet half-tons she drove around Albuquerque as a teenager. Her 1990 regular-cab 1500 (struck, but not quite totaled, by an undocumented dreamer) and 1995 regular-cab 1500 (struck and absolutely totaled by an undocumented dreamer being actively chased by police) were already pretty beat-up by the time she took delivery, but they each went well past the 150k mark with very few problems. Simple, reliable, and sensibly sized.
With the introductions of the ever-more-medium-duty-ish 2018 F-150 and ziggy-stardust-style 2019 Silverado, maybe it’s time to ask ourselves where the half-ton wave broke and finally rolled back.
No, we’re not talking about Christmas. Chances are you don’t have a hope in hell of getting what you really want under the ol’ tree this year. We’re talking about 2018.
A year of splashy new vehicle unveilings (or unauthorized leaks) awaits, starting just three weeks from now in Detroit. Are you as excited about the 2019 Avalon as the TTAC crew is? It’s all anyone can mention in our Slack chatroom. And what about the electric crossover promise from that automaker you’ve already forgotten about? Or was it that other automaker?
Jokes aside, what we’re getting at is this: are you looking forward to a reveal that’s not the 2019 Ram 1500? (Read More…)
Starting life as a simple show car design that proved popular among consumers, the Chevrolet Corvette is iconic among American sports cars. Throughout seven generations over six decades, the basic formula has stayed the same: engine at the front (for now), driven wheels at the rear, and immediately recognizable styling in the middle.
But how do you sort the generations, best to worst?
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