Spotted: Corvette Jungle Graveyard

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El Camino, El Ranchero, El... ¡Volvo!

Shame about the '90s rims (and crap pics) but there is no denying the genius at work here. And rare was the original Camino fortunate enough to benefit from a fully functional rear wiper. Bonus points for multiple P1800s and Swedish flag in background, too. If only it were a turbo....

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Jacked Up: 199X Ford Probe

No comment, except that I always thought this was one of the more elegant and underrated designs of the nineties.

Jacked-up Probe stalker

What's Swedish for Deus Ex Machina?

Honestly? I was fine with Saab going the way of all things. Because the Saab of the last fifteen years was an embarrassment, plain and simple. And it made it so I couldn't even go on Saab boards because they were full of people who seemed not to notice and to point it out is just being a dick.

It's like the music genre fan. The guy who just likes Brit-pop or whatever. Never mind that eighty-five percent of Brit-pop is garbage, just like eighty-five percent of anything is garbage. That's what he's into, and his enthusiasm doesn't discriminate. Pulp? Awesome. Ned's Atomic Dustbin? Equally awesome. People who drive GM Saabs and hang out on Saab boards are essentially Brit-pop Guy, completely oblivious to how much their cars suuuuuuck. I know they suck because I owned one and it was a turd. There was nothing Saab about it. It drove like a Buick. Because it was a Buick.

Better just to put this thing out of its misery than carry on as a purveyor of badge-engineered Chevy Tahoes, was my thinking. And then the great GM implosion, and the concomitant sell-off, and who knows, maybe somebody buys it up and restores Saab to some degree of respectable autonomy. Some group of investors, or the Swedish government or something. Measured optimism. And then this.

Freaking Koenigsegg??? Are you kidding me? Radically engineered, environmentally aware, uncompromisingly Swedish Koenigsegg? (Yeah, so it was founded by a Norwegian. Whatever.) How brilliant and awesome is this? How much more insanely cool than any outcome anyone could possibly have imagined? And how perfect? Sit a Koenigsegg next to a Veyron in your mind's eye and how obvious does it become that this is nothing less than the Saab of supercars?

Things go this astonishingly right in the world seldom enough that when they do we kinda have a moral obligation to sit up and recognize. A toast then to the marriage of Saab and Koenigsegg. May their union be long and happy, and may it bear many beautiful children!

Revisionist History: The DaimlerChrysler That Could've Been

Remember when Chrysler and Mercedes merged in the early '90s and they plastered a Spirit grill across the front of a W124 to make the Dodge 300E? These guys do!

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WTFIT?

What The Fuck Is That?



Hint: it's like a Cord, but not!

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Coolest Car Ever in the World, 22,500 Miles, $12,500

How is this shit even possible? People are still paying six figures for dumb old muscle cars and you can buy one of these for the price of a used Kia? Not only would I argue that this is the coolest car ever, it might actually represent the purest and most extreme form of anachronism extant in the world. Think about it: what other fifty-year-old object seems so bafflingly like something returned from fifty years in the future?

Maybe this is truly the onset of pussed-out middle age talking, but seriously: Testa Rossa? GT40? XJR-5? Aston Martin Lagonda? As of this moment I take this over all of them.

(Okay, maybe not the Lagonda.)

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Not Hummer Too! Nooooo!

To quote this blog's best-ever comment: "What are assholes going to drive now?" Sad times indeed.

Click on the pic for the story from U.S. News & World Report

A Perfect Six: 1993 Lexus SC 300

Other engine layouts may claim prizes for ubiquity (inline-4), durability (V-8), sexiness (V-12) or eccentricity (V-4, inline-5, flat-anything), but to my mind at least, none of them can compare with the essential, Fibonacci-like rightness of the straight six. There are sound, physics-based explanations for this, but more importantly, just pause for a moment and meditate on this: how many of the coolest cars ever had straight sixes? The coolest Jags. The coolest Astons. The coolest Benzes. The coolest BMWs. The coolest Maseratis. The coolest Datsuns, coolest Toyotas, and about a billion of the coolest American cars ever, too. And what is a Ferrari V-12 – the coolest engine ever – but two straight sixes sharing a crankshaft?

And yes, by the way, I did just apply the modifier "cool" to the word "Toyota." It's easy to forget that once upon a time Toyota actually built cars that were interesting. Even if most of us failed to recognize them as cool at the time, it's undeniable in retrospect that the Celicas and Supras of the '70s and '80s were exactly that: compact, sporting, rear-wheel-drive, these were bona fide Japanese pony cars, more faithful in many respects to the original concept than many of their bloated American contemporaries. And the Supra? Straight sixes, all down the line. Never mind that the last generation was largely robbed of its dignity by basket-handle spoilers and the 2 Fast 2 Furious crowd. When you think about what cars have become, how much cooler does this seem now? Who wouldn't want to tool around in a '86 Supra, preferably in black? Who wouldn't prefer that to a 4000-pound cartoon Dodge Challenger? I would, anyway. Sorry Chrysler.

I see these early Lexus coupes as being the last of the Supras, the dignified, grown-up Supras – direct descendents of those elegant late '70s Celicas – before they took that weird turn toward boy-racism. And I'll take mine, thanks, with a five-speed and that sweet six, just like this one.

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Lap' Dance: 1966 Volvo L3314

"The purchaser has options to leave the Puppy as is or design and restore it in any way to his or her dream." What other vehicle can you say that about? What do you mean, "all of them"? Psssh. Well, look here then: "It has undercoating, is mobile and suitable for any kind of travel." Did you hear that? It's mobile! Okay, I'm not going to argue with you. I'm also not sure that this is worth $8000 to me. It'd still be fun.

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