Well, it looks like the best used car in Atlanta can’t beat out a cream puff from Florida. Hopefully the Intrepid new owner can Dodge a bullet with the potential engine troubles. Today’s choices come from Arizona, the southwesternmost state of the Four Corners, home to the Grand Canyon, Roger Clyne, and millions upon millions of scorpions, many of which end up encased in Lucite and offered for sale as paperweights....
Welcome back to Comment Of The Day! Every day, we read every single comment posted on our site and pick the one that made us laugh, get informed, or feel warm inside. You don’t have to go into our comments sections and write thousand-word stories about why you love a car so much, but a lot of you do, and that means a lot to us. So we’re highlighting some of the most excellent bits of thought that you’ve formed into words and digitized onto our website....
I don’t mean just making a convertible or adding a sloping rear roof to a crossover and calling it a ‘coupe’. We are talking about taking, say, a model that has only been sold as a sedan or coupe and offering it as something totally different like a sport ute. Numerous automakers are discussing it, and some companies have already done it with things like the Mitsubishi Eclipse Cross and the Ford Mustang Mach E:...
Last night was just awful. Trying to remove the rear lower control bolts from my HHR has been awful, as I described yesterday. Here’s a diagram describing the problem: Today my right elbow is absolutely killing me from all the vibrations of that sawzall, which — despite wielding the most expensive saw blade one can buy a Home Depot — was unable to slice through the subframe bolt quickly. It was able to slice off the two aluminum control arms quite nicely:...
It’s at this point in a BMW review I need to prove to you I’ve driven a lot famously wonderful, Biermann-blessed cars. Yes, I have experienced the joy of a track-prepped E30 M3 (not great in Brooklyn). I have eaten up hundreds of miles in a perfectly sorted E46 M3 coupe (I still think about it). I’ve even driven Alex Roy’s legendary E39 M5 (it broke, which was probably Alex’s fault)....
This isn’t to say Kia is completely averse from chasing trends, though. Just in time for Halloween, Kia went and dressed up its refreshed 2023 Telluride as an off-roader. The 2023 Kia Telluride X-Pro doesn’t fully commit to the overland bit, but it has 0.4 inches more ground clearance than the base model, 18-inch wheels shod with all-terrain tires, an increased 5,500-lb tow capacity, and revised suspension tuning. It looks the part and handles simple obstacles with ease....
It’s probably part of my job to have some understanding of every car that’s for sale. It’s probably important for me to be able to tell you the difference between an Infiniti QX50 and QX70 even though I’m like 40% sure I made one of those up. I’ve even driven an Escalade quite recently and I’m sure it had the V8. I was pretty sure it only had the V8....
Welcome to The Morning Dump, bite-sized stories corralled into a single article for your morning perusal. If your morning coffee’s working a little too well, pull up a throne and have a gander at the best of the rest of yesterday. Mercedes-Benz And Sila Think There’s Still Plenty Of Life In Lithium I won’t lie, electric cars are pretty awesome. Clean, quiet, fast, and efficient in stop-and-go cycles, they make killer commuter vehicles....
[Editor’s Note: Since we believe in very full disclosure, I’ll let you in on a secret: Toyota forgot to invite us to the new Prius launch until it was almost too late, so we had to find someone local the day before. Luckily, Emily, a science writer for Cal Tech and avid builder of contraptions, was close by! You may remember Emily from her story about 3-D printing a side marker lamp for her rare Toyota truck, and this is her first go at a car review....
Of course, the kind of alien I’m picturing is a sort of silly sci-fi one. Our world has produced beings as different as Audrey Tautou and a Bigfin Squid so I tend to think that whatever aliens may be, they’re not likely to be anything like us, at all. And by “us” I mean Earth beings, from ear mites to swordfish and everything in between. And still, even with all that in mind, I still think this huge Renault looks like an alien....
Don’t believe me? Look! See those odd, matte-finish black fenders? They’re rubber! I can’t think of any other car that used actual, deformable rubber as major body panels like this. Sure, there’s been plenty of plastics and rubber-coated materials, and rubber bumpers that may even form parts of fenders, but as far as a whole metal body panel being replaced with a rubber one, I think these GPO vehicles are the lone example....
Located all by itself in the Jayco section of Thor Industries’ display was this little trailer. The sign telling you about it was covered up and it wasn’t even placed in a manner that would have you think it’s something special. I only later found out that the cool little trailer I toured is a new model for 2023, and this is the prototype for it. Maybe I missed a reveal or something because this little guy is so well thought-out that it deserves some attention....
Yes, this was something of a trend in the 1940s and 1950s, where a car’s fuel filler would be entirely obscured behind or underneath a taillight, which was hinged or on some sort of pivot to swing or flip or turn out of the way to give access to the gas cap. They’re fun! Like a bookshelf that hides a door or a secret panel in, well, pretty much anything, designs that offer hidden surprises almost always delight people....
Round taillights have been around since the very earliest of cars, starting with the lone red-lensed kerosene lanterns found on so many early vehicles, and continuing on as a design element on many cars, notably Ford’s affinity for them in the 1950s and 1960s. Unlike headlamps, trapped under the cruel bindings of America’s sealed-beam headlight laws (at least until rectangular lamps were available in the mid-1970s and then shaped ones from 1984), there was nothing that forced taillights to be round....
You can think of the Felicia FUN’s innovation as a sort of marriage between two other small-truck funnovations: the foldable mid-gate, as seen on the Chevy Avalanche and Toyota bB Opendeck, and the seats in the truck bed, as seen, famously, on the Subaru BRAT. Okay, so what’s going on here? Well, the Felicia FUN was, essentially a version of the pickup truck variant of the Škoda Felicia, which was in turn an update of the Škoda Favorit, which was Škoda’s first transverse front engine/front wheel drive car after years and years of Škoda sticking with rear engine/rear wheel drive cars....
Welcome to The Morning Dump, bite-sized stories corralled into a single article for your morning perusal. If your morning coffee’s working a little too well, pull up a throne and have a gander at the best of the rest of yesterday. Mercedes-Benz Brings Back The V8 For 2023 When it was announced that Mercedes was largely discontinuing its four-liter biturbo V8 for 2022 models due to claimed supply chain issues, I couldn’t help but feel a bit sad....
source: Mecum and Cars&Bids So what if the Pacer got a second chance, and came back to life as not only something acceptable, but actually cool? What if the spirit of the Pacer had returned in, of all things, an AMC sports car? Welcome back to AMC What If?, a semi regular series where we look at alternate realities for American’s last independent automaker. With American Motors always struggling to be profitable in the domestic market, the last thing they should have done was to make a competitor for the Fiero, a car that General Motors killed after a few years due to disappointed sales....
Luckily, we have good access to a lawyer, because our own Mercedes Streeter was smart enough to marry one, one named Sheryl Weikal. I asked Sheryl to explain this to me like I’m a curious idiot, just like it says on my business card, and boy did she. This is in terms a layperson should be able to understand, but it’s also nice and detailed. So, if you want to know how a car insurance company can be on the hook for someone’s bad sex practices, read on....
What are we doing? All the info you need is coming tomorrow, but the short version is that we’re going to be giving our dear readers/commenters/haters more ways to get involved in the community as members, and we’re going to set the groundwork for a new and better commenting system. We’ll be transferring everyone’s account to a system (called Memberful) that will handle memberships as well as commenter accounts. Don’t worry, all of your brilliant comments (and all of your less brilliant ones) will be retained and transferred over and, hopefully, it should all be pretty seamless....
But first, a quick public service announcement. I spotted this Jeep Cherokee at my local chain auto-parts store this weekend: The window sticker is hard to read because my phone camera is lousy, but it says “Certified Shitbox.” I checked our extensive database, and determined that this vehicle has not, in fact, been certified by Shitbox Showdown Industries, Inc., or any of its subsidiaries. It has not passed our rigorous 147-point inspection....
