Having plumbed the depths of the K-Car and now nearing the end of the alphabet its only appropriate that we head straight for the nadir of the auto industry. The 1980’s X cars from GM. X is for xactly what the doctor didn’t order, which is what the X-Body cars of the 1980’s were from […]
The English word wanderlust is combination of borrowed German words wandern (to hike) and lust (desire). Wanderlust was first used to describe a feeling of the need to travel, explore and see new things in the early 20th century, but is now used frequently to describe the urge to go on a walkabout. I feel […]
V is for vicious. V is for viagra, V10 and vindication — it is not for Wagner, so why would you pose a ballet dancer in front of your Viper? These two things are just about as polar opposite as you can get — the brutish and curvaceous Viper versus the lithe and flexible dancer. […]
What can be said about the Unimog that hasn’t already been crushed into the earth under its huge skinny tires? Back when Dr. Ferdinand Unimog had his original idea for a short-wheelbase cabover 4×4 after WWII, it was already unstoppable. After being absorbed by Mercedes-Benz the ‘mog proliferated into basically the most ultimate agricultural / […]
T isn’t for tuetonic tank, no…T is for a tea sipping topless tourer for two. Triumph introduced the TR6 in 1969 to replace the TR5/TR250 which was really just a slight change to the TR4…you could probably trace the roots of most British sports cars back to Roman chariots, but that is a diatribe for […]
The year is 1984. A cyborg materializes from the future to terminate the Scirocco because its light, lithe road behavior and durability would one day serve as the blueprint for a new breed of resistance warriors against the crossover overlords: the hot hatch. The Terminator was subdued so the John Connor of cars (Corrado, GTI) […]
Baby Got Back. That’s all I can think of whenever I see the last big Buick wagon, the final version built from 1992 to 1996 (and its Chevy Caprice cousin). Is it a coincidence that Sir Mix-a-Lot released his immortal hit the same year the GM dropped this big-booty bomb on the world? It would […]
Q is most definitely for quattro – that’s right, with a lowercase q since we are referring to the all wheel drive system and not the vehicle of the same name in which it debuted. That car would be the Quattro, colloquially known as the Ur-Quattro or UrQ for short. The car below is a few […]
P is for poseurs, pansies and petrified pedants. P isn’t for powerful and it certainly isn’t for pants-dropping, unless you are referring to a prostate exam…because PT cruisers are predominantly driven by aging Costco Hawaiian shirt shoppers who picked it out of the lineup of econoboxes at their nearest mile-o-cars because it looked retro but […]
“Honey, I can explain. The car that’s about to do a piledriver on our checking account could really be worth a lot someday. I know it looks like a worthless 30-year-old Dodge crapbox but trust me, because it has compressed air shoved through it and a bunch of SHELBY badges slapped on it, it’s a […]