There aren’t many road-prepped single-seat cars out there. Unless you’re talking about the BAC Mono or the Caparo T1, the pickings are going to be pretty slim. Most performance-oriented single-seat road cars, like the Vanwall VPR-12, have been designed to inspire association with one thing: an open-wheel GP car.
But Lamborghini’s first, unveiled just last weekend, wasn’t.
The Malaise Era. When the cars bled power onto the design house floors. A quick history lesson for those of us too young to remember: In 1973, several members of OPEC suddenly attacked Israel, a US ally. After some assistance to Israel with military resupply, the United States became the target of some OPEC smackdown, and they turned off the oil supply to punish the US government.
To Joe Consumer in his big, heavy, V8-powered Detroit hulk, this meant a huge hike in fuel spending and long (very long) lines at the pump. Eager to respond quickly, the Big Three began stamping a new generation of small, anemic cars, cars that would get the job done, and that’s about it.
Now, in some cases, small economy cars were already in the works long before the crude stopped flowing. The Chevrolet Vega, for instance, had been in development since the late ‘60s. But the Embargo, combined with tightening federal emissions restrictions and a firm reliance on old-school carburetion, meant that even the fast, high-powered variants of those cars had to be slow and suffocated.
But what if they hadn’t been? What if the emissions restrictions had never passed and OPEC had remained happily our bros for life? Take a look at three cars that could have been so much more. Continue reading
Dean Jeffries died on Sunday. He was 80. Some great heroes of automotive culture leave behind a vast wake of acknowledgement when they pass. Men like Carol Shelby, who died a year ago today, are known and mourned among their fans and detractors alike. Their names are spoken and recognized in enthusiast circles near and far.
But others don’t really go in for all that. They don’t care much for fame. They don’t need people to buy them drinks wherever they go, and they don’t need to carry a sharpie. Dean Jeffries was one of these men.
To summarize his life is a bit of an injustice. You could call him a pinstriper, movie car builder, and show rod customizer, but to miss the details is to miss most of his life. And Jeffries was all about the details. Yes, he built the Monkeemobile, the Green Hornet Black Beauty, and the Landmaster from Damnation Alley, but the story of how he got there could be a movie in itself. Continue reading
It’s been a little while since I moved from the suburbs into midtown to be closer to Streetside HQ. One of the advantages of my proximity is the ability to ride my awesome bicycle all over the place. What? You exclaim. Stig rides a non-motorized vehicle? Fear not my friends. It’s only for exercise.
At least it was until a snap ring slipped off inside my differential and blasted the whole front unit to spangly little pieces. So the wagon is in the shop, and I’ve been pedaling up and down the exhilarating/excruciating hills of Kansas City.
There always seems to be a war between cyclists and motorists over the dominion of the road. Why? Flared tempers, short patience, comfort zones, and sometimes even political stereotypes are all contributors. Therefore, like some kind of mystical avatar with inconveniently large thighs, I’ve come as a gearhead cyclist to make peace. Heed my words and end the strife. Continue reading
Let’s start our session with a question, shall we? Er, I mean, with another question: Have you ever had to pay for psychiatry? I mean, that time is more expensive than collecting German cars. If your insurance doesn’t cover a session of laying on a couch and delving into your original wounds, perhaps you can analyze yourself for free on the internet. Perhaps you already are. Continue reading
1First, get yourself a dash cam, that little flash-memory video recorder you stick to your car to record your drives. The Russian dash cam is why there are so many videos on Youtube about driving in Russia. “But,” you say, “I don’t want to get a dash cam. It’s Thursday, and I’m tired, and I’m going to see Iron Man 3 tonight, and I don’t care.”
But you will care if you’re driving in Russia (where you’ve had Iron Man 3 for a week, anyway), because Russia is rife with insurance scammers – urchins who will pretend to be hit by your car in order to defraud you. You know, because real jobs are boring. If you’ve already installed the Little Brother on your dash, however, you can foil them, like this clever gentlemen:
That great American childhood consumer of recess, King of the Hill, has likely been banned on playgrounds these days. Heck, they’ve probably just banned all the hills. But some of us remember an age when you could pummel and wrestle your second grade classmates for a full 15 minutes until you were powdered like a donut with pea gravel dust, and your teachers were just glad you were burning off the energy from those sloppy joes you ate for lunch. And we remember that King of the Hill has one objective – knock off the guy on top.
It turns out that the hypercar business plays by the same rules. Continue reading
Earlier this month, the Ford Mustang turned 49. It’s no grand anniversary, but this time next year we’ll be so busy vocalizing our love and/or hate for the redesigned 2015 Mustang that we won’t have time for too many memories. So 49 is the new 50, and since we’ve already covered the great classics through the dark years and the Fox, it’s time to bring everyone up to date.
What that fuel crisis did for power in the ‘70s, the motivation crisis did for styling in the ‘90s. We wore, nay, bought jeans with gigantic holes already in place, we donned our wrinkled flannel and grew our hair longer than Joseph Gordon Levitt’s in 3rd Rock From the Sun. After the extreme design consciousness of the ‘80s, we stopped caring.
So like our poor midsections, our cars got flabby and bloated. Lines softened to the point that the 3rd gen Taurus looked like something that wouldn’t be uncomfortable to pass if accidentally swallowed, and “ergonomics” were the new cocaine.
Thankfully, the Mustang, though sporting far softer lines than the Fox-body, managed to keep itself together when it was restyled for the 1994 model year. The hatchback disappeared, and the short deck and long, sloping hood gave the new Mustang, on a chassis dubbed “SN-95,” a look of low-slung malice. Continue reading
Among Orthodox Jews, it’s a common practice while reciting the story of Esther that the audience accompany any mention of the villain, Haman, with a great clamor of dissent. They even have a special noisemaker for this called the gragger. If you’re having trouble grasping why, just think about what happens to your guts when you recall a Mustang II.
This week the Ford Flat Rock Assembly Plant outside Detroit produced its one millionth Ford Mustang. It was fitting, since yesterday the Mustang turned 49, having first been unveiled in its production form on April 18 at the 1964 New York World’s Fair. It’s been almost half a century and since then few American cars have captured our attention like the Ford’s sprinting horse. Twenty-two thousand Mustangs were ordered on the first day it was available.
But why are we celebrating the 49th anniversary? Why not the 50th? Because we have a feeling that we’ll be covering bigger news around this time next year, when Ford pulls the sheet off the 2015, 6th generation Mustang.
We haven’t seen that car yet, so we’ll just take a moment and trace its heroic lineage, starting with the first generation, widely remembered as the best.
Well, we had a good run, folks. But after 237 years of independence, it looks like Kim Jong Un is going to nuke us to Tuesday. Most of us will be instantly vaporized, but those of us with appropriate bunkers/caves/abandoned limestone mines (duh) will survive this to one day furtively glance out of our lead-lined hatches and see a ravaged and immolated America.
Obviously, the first thing to do will be to form up small, tight-knit communities and build sheet-metal castles around our surviving oil derricks to ward off the creepy gangs of sado-masochists who will inevitably show up to take them from us. And we’ll still need to run errands. So here are a few cars we’ve decided will be best for rolling around in after the fire falls.
As humans we share the general weakness of remembering things better than they were. Watch a movie you once loved as a child and you might be disappointed. You remember how good the burgers were at that diner, but did you forget that it smelled like an ashtray?
Or take classic muscle cars. They were beautiful, riotous examples of automotive pageantry, jammed with enough torque to pull the rug out from under your neighborhood and a thunderous exhaust to match. And most of them rode on leaf springs.
Yeah, steering was crap. Braking was crap. Safety was a laugh. Fuel economy meant walking. And starting up that carbureted engine on a cold morning proved a challenge on more than one occasion.
Almost every aspect of new cars is better than its equivalent in old cars. But so many new cars just lack soul. They don’t exhibit the same careless, beautiful vulgarity that we love so much about old cars. The gem about cars, though, is that they can be disassembled, mixed up, and reassembled with newer parts. And that’s what pro-touring and resto-modding are all about- taking great-looking old cars and giving them modern parts to improve their driveability. Continue reading
In a broad, sociological sense, thieves aren’t generally considered the worst villains among the criminal class. Robin Hood, Danny Ocean, and Charlie Croker are all portrayed as brilliant heroes, cooler than a Daniel Craig staredown and slick as an E-Type.
But then we get robbed. Someone makes off with our beloved cars, expensive car parts, or other, automatically less consequential, things, and we begin to realize that thieves are actually thoughtless, terrible children whose sole hobby is to spike our violent tendencies. I first encountered this a few years ago when some used needle kicked in our door and stole my roommate’s XBox (of all things). Then, on Saturday night last week, someone hacked the catalytic converter out from under his truck. It always sucks to work hard for something only to encounter someone who isn’t working hard and takes it from you.
But the worst is when they take something of far greater sentimental value than monetary value. On Wednesday night, someone stole Jalopnik writer Jason Torchinsky’s beloved ’73 VW Beetle. He’d owned it for about 20 years, drove it regularly, patched it up with pennies and love, and some degenerate coward lifted it from in front of his house for the few hundred bucks he’d get for chopping it.
No, I don’t have any sympathy for thieves. Therefore I’ve come up with a few nonlethal theft deterrents that don’t just deter an individual theft, but a whole career path.
Since the hybrid movement began almost 20 years ago, the vast majority of “green car” initiatives have surrounded power. Can we make a more efficient engine? Can we pair it with an electric motor? What about diesel, natural gas, or pure electrics?
Yesterday we covered a few of the surprising number of cool, actually cool, cars to debut at the New York Auto Show. Here’s a few more, and some of them we didn’t expect to respect.
