This next car comes as a tip from PA Cyclist who writes: I know nothing about this individual car, but please allow me to take a moment to extol the virtues of the Honda Accord Touring. Conceived to compete with the Toyota Avalon (the next class above), the Touring trim introduced several features which would […]
This next car comes from instagram, which is a strange place to find a car for sale, but our friend Randy from Carchaeology put this car up for sale in an instagram and I figured…why not?! You can probably fix anything that goes wrong with a wrench and a hammer, just don’t get upset when […]
The past few years had been tough on folks looking for a sub $1k car. First, the cash-for-clunkers debacle of 2009 took $3B worth of junky cars off the road and essentially chopped the knees off the cheap running car market. A decade later the COVID thing and related panic caused global supply chain issues […]
If you are not a total BMW fanboy goober, you might not understand this next car. But I hope to transform you into a BMW fanboy goober by the end of this article, so that might be moot point. Hang on, lemme back up. The E39 generation BMW 5-series could be had in 540i V8 6-speed version or a wicked wagon called a Touring Sports Wagon…but you couldn’t get a V8, 6-speed, and wagon from the factory for whatever reason. Today’s example fixes that by shoving the 6-speed from a sedan into the wagon body, but the seller, alarmingly, says it needs “quite a bit of work”. Not sure what that means…but I think it merits a second look. Find this 2000 BMW 540i Touring 6-Speed offered for $8,500 in Hopewell, NJ via craigslist. Tip from Cory.
BMW’s 1994 launch of the E36/5 generation 318ti was the first hatchback on a BMW since the classic 2002 Touring was sent to the glue factory in 1974. Styling response was hit & miss the normal folks, but BMW fanboys love the classic 318ti truncated trunk and the fact that it rode on E30 semi-trailing arm suspension borrowed from leftover bits of the previous generation 3-series parts (also used on the Z3). But that didn’t phase BMW planners, because they were aiming to sell cars to a younger demographic and didn’t care of well todo executives didn’t want their little 4-cylinder powered import fighter. Find this 1998 BMW 318ti E36/5 offered for $7000 in Grantham, NH via craigslist. Tip from Cory.
This next car checks the all boxes; manual gearbox, check. Wagon, check. Inline-6, check. Rear-wheel-drive, check. Headliner…errr…that’s missing….and the miles are high, so you will need to do some tidying before you let the wife drive it…but manual transmission rear-drive wagons don’t grow on trees. Find this 1992 BMW 525iT offered for $6500 in Long Beach, […]
I hate to say it…but the Z33 generation Nissan 350Z hasn’t aged well at all. The interior surface coatings are about as durable as the coating on an M&M and the interior design (eg gauge color) has aged about as well as Miley Cyrus. Sure…there are some people who might find it attractive, but even […]
The BMW 2002 was only sold in two door sedan configuration in the USA – while Europeans and others could purchase the cool looking Touring edition. The 2002 Touring was more of a hatch-back and less of a station wagon, but it ads a lot more headroom and a functional rear hatch to the diminutive […]
Yeah…I know. You could get an E46 M3 with fewer digits flipped on the odo, and you could get a high mileage STI or Legacy GT Wagon for the same pile of dough…but this car calls to the people who remember when BMW built the best luxury/sport wagons with manual gearboxes on the planet. Those […]
There is an old Latin saying: de gustibus non est disputandum, which means “in matters of taste, there can be no disputes.” Now, those old Latin dudes were good at building aqueducts, designing the calendar, and minting coins with their faces on them…but did they really expect us to believe that there isn’t an objective perfect […]