New Car Options That Aren’t – but Ought to Be!
It's a shame the government - rather than the market - is the driving force behind what's standard in new cars. Imagine, given the technology available, what options might be on...
Doomed: Jaguar X-Type 2002-2011
American car companies - GM and Ford especially - get heckled a lot and justly for repackaging their economy cars and trying to sell the lipstick-on-a-pig’d result as luxury cars. Examples...
Black Plastic
I hate plastic engine covers, which cover practically all new car engines. They serve the purpose of making all engines look the same. Of covering up what’s under there. Which serves...
Doomed: VW Phaeton (2003-2006)
If you could get a really good ribeye at McDonald’s, would you be willing to pay a Peter Luger steakhouse price for it?
Probably not.
Especially if you had to eat it at...
Doomed: Chevy Cosworth Vega (1975-1976)
It worked better for Pontiac.
The now-iconic black and gold paint scheme made famous by the ’77 Trans-Am that Burt Reynolds drove into automotive history in Smokey and the Bandit failed to...
Doomed: Cadillac Seville (1976-2004)
When did Cadillac start becoming BMW - or trying to?
This can be pinpointed with some precision. It was 1976, the year of the Seville. This was Cadillac’s first small car -...
Encomium to Pontiac
It is coming up on the eleventh anniversary of the death of Pontiac, a fatality not so much of the 2007-2008 financial collapse - which delivered the coupe de grace -...
The Gone Ones
Tempus does fugit.
I've been test driving new cars long enough that the first new cars I test drove are now Antique cars, literally. I recently found myself behind a '95 Mustang...
Gas Guzzling . . . Then and Now
I took my '76 Trans Am out yesterday; I needed a reboot - and it needed exercise. Drove the orange-painted, screaming chickened "gas guzzler" around for about an hour, taking my...
The Yugo and its Merits
The joke goes: How do you double the value of a Yugo?
Fill up the gas tank!
True enough.
And yet, nearly 800,000 of them were made - all the way through 2008, a...