Take these two, for example: The Anadol A1 on the left was a Reliant-engineered fiberglass workhorse, and the four-door A2 that came after it was the first four-door fiberglass sedan in the world! Here, watch a video about it: And next to the A1 up there is the incredible Anadol Böcek, an asymmetrical off-road wonder buggy first made for the Turkish army and from there, humanity. There’s also the Super Turkish Monster, the STC-16, a sort-of Turkish Datsun 280Z made of fiberglass and dreams:...

Welcome to The Morning Dump, bite-sized stories corralled into a single article for your morning perusal. If your morning coffee’s working a little too well, pull up a throne and have a gander at the best of the rest of yesterday. Toyota Figured Out A Fix For The bZ4X It’s taken months, but Toyota is finally able to resume sales of its bZ4X electric crossover. If you need a refresher on this alphanumeric soup of a vehicle, don’t worry....

The Leeza was an interesting little Kei car, and I’m mostly showing you because I think it has a subtly striking design. It’s essentially a little city car/hatchback, but unlike most Kei cars, the maximization of interior space isn’t so much the main goal as a sort of sporty, hot-hatch look is. Well, as hot as you can get from 660cc, which was either about 50 hp or. up to the legal limit of 64 hp with the turbo one....

The first-generation Golf was a beautiful design often copied by other manufacturers, and originally done by designer Giorgetto Giugiaro. The second-generation was re-done in house by chief designer Herbert Schäfer and was a marked departure, going bigger in most every direction, slightly slipperier, and ending up — in my opinion — the best looking ever. [Editor’s Note: Welcome to “Special Editions,” a new series where The Autopian highlights special edition cars that you probably have never heard of....

[Note: Welcome to The Autopian’s somewhat-regular fiction series, Mack Hardigraw! The predecessor series (well, two of them) of car mysteries can be found here and here. Mack Hardigraw isn’t technically the same since we’d like to cover our asses a bit, but I think if you’d like some background on these characters, those links should work well. When it comes to automotive-based detective/crime short stories — especially ones that feature the taillight subculture — I think you’ll find this to be among the most, um, existent....

Oh, and did you think they put a 318 under the hood? They didn’t. No, there’s a Slant 6 in there, just like in Aunt Janet’s car. Damn, they all showed up for the infamous Stockholm Syndrome robbery! Inside, it gets stranger. When building later Valiants, it looks like SAAB installed their own door handles inside, put in a center console, and blessedly added their own donut-hole-headrest seats in place of the Plymouth’s standard fare, which, from my experience, were some of the worst seats that I have ever experienced in a motor vehicle....

And yet, I can’t find one goddamn silver front bumper cover. I have been searching for a month. I greatly underestimated how hard this is. Listen, I had pretty low expectations out of a $900 Prius, that I saw listed haphazardly with one blurry photo and a two-sentence description in the middle of the night. But, I was pleasantly surprised at how much “car” was there. Yes, it had holes in the front seats from where the previous owner would chain smoke on breaks and seemingly ash his cigarettes directly into the cushions....

Welcome to The Morning Dump, bite-sized stories corralled into a single article for your morning perusal. If your morning coffee’s working a little too well, pull up a throne and have a gander at the best of the rest of yesterday. Stellantis CEO Wants Greater Tariffs On Chinese EVs From BYD to Great Wall Motors, it’s been a big Paris Motor Show for Chinese cars. However, not everyone’s stoked to see models with names like Funky Cat in Europe....

Here’s some context from Yahoo! Sports: You follow that? This is the last race before the championship and the only way to get in was for Chastain to get ahead of Denny Hamlin in two turns. The only way to do that was to slam the damn thing against the wall. This Twitter caption tells the story fairly well: Christopher Bell won the race and advanced to the final four with Chastain, Joey Logano and Chase Elliott....

Despite the bullshit that Mercedes-Benz likes to spew about the “first automobile” being the 1886 Benz Patent Motorwagen, automobiles were around long, long before that, and in the United Kingdom there was even a sort of automotive boom, primarily in the form of steam omnibuses, in the 1820s and 1830s. Here in America things were a little slower, but there was an automobile of sorts as early as 1805, Oliver Evans’ self-propelled amphibious dredging machine, the Oruktor Amphibolos, which also became the first abandoned car....

Basically, the Inflation Reduction Act, or at least, the EV, PHEV, and alternative fuel (largely hydrogen) portion of the bill, was meant to combat inflation, in part, by stimulating green energy initiatives. It wasn’t an easy bill to get through; the plug-in tax credit portion went through several revisions, with one of the architects of the bill, Senator Joe Manchin, deriding the concept of an EV tax credit entirely, citing high demand for plug-in vehicles....

First, a briefing on the CC8S. This Ford V8-powered targa-topped weapon burst onto the scene in 2002, promising a rawer, more insane experience than was otherwise available from its contemporaries. While its 655 horsepower doesn’t sound crazy today, that was an earth-shattering number 20 years ago, and it helped the CC8S gain reverence the world over. The whole car promised more of everything than typical supercars of the time, from a quarter-mile time of ten seconds flat to a top speed of 240 mph....

Welcome to The Morning Dump, bite-sized stories corralled into a single article for your morning perusal. If you’re morning coffee’s working a little too well, pull up a throne and have a gander at the best of the rest of yesterday. The Longest Jeep Gets The Longest Motor The Jeep Wagoneer may already look like someone threw dubs on the Empire State Building, but customers are craving something even bigger....

Let’s talk about that incredible ’73 Crown wagon up there, though: what a strange and wonderfully fussy-looking thing that is. There’s so much going on! That monobrow of real and false vents above that aperture filled with the main grill and headlights, wrapping around the corners into the side marker lamps. There’s those real air vents on the C-pillars, with what I think are flow-through air exhaust flaps down there by the rear bumper, It’s a lot of creases and chrome and detail all on those massive expansive of mustard yellow, and I’m happy to be the first to stand up and proclaim that hey, I kinda like it....

Welcome to The Morning Dump, bite-sized stories corralled into a single article for your morning perusal. If your morning coffee’s working a little too well, pull up a throne and have a gander at the best of the rest of yesterday. The CPI Update Is Good News It’s easy to get lost in the ups and downs of economic news as reported by financial pubs and networks, which has more of a short-term impact on markets and is therefore more relevant for traders than it is for the average person....

Actually, if we’re really keeping track, I did this about six years ago, before I had to get glasses to read with and when my beard was a little more rich, pigment-wise. But if you have a pulse, you don’t say no to driving a tank just because you’ve done it before; like all really satisfying things, you seize that opportunity and grab onto it, like a cat grabbing a dangling hot dog, and you enjoy there mothertrusting fuck out of it....

Hello fellow Autopians; I’m back. It’s been a hot minute since our last rescue adventure with those four busted Benzes I bought for a song. As I said last time, it’s a pleasure and honor to be here amongst the hardest-working and best writers in this field. It’s awesome how much passion, work and time these heroes put into making this the best car-culture site out there. [Ed note: Thanks, but get on with the wrenching!...

This was our closest vote yet, I think. But it looks like the don’t-call-me-a-Geo is going to take the win. Either one would make a good “beater with a heater” for a couple of years, but like the Highlander versus the Kurgan, There Can Be Only One. [Hi, David here. Just pointing out that, yet again, I have no idea what Mark is referring to -DT]. And that one is the 2002 Chevy Prizm....

Let’s Talk About The N Vision 74’s Design Inspiration The first car Hyundai designed and engineered themselves was the 1975 Pony (shown above), designed by Giugiaro. His initial designs, like the Alfa Romeo Guilia Sprint GT were classically curved with delicate proportions and detailing, but by the early 1970s he was exploring more angular wedge shaped forms with straight lines and sharp transitions between flatter surfaces. The BMW M1 and original Lotus Esprit are prime examples of this look: It wasn’t an aesthetic that was limited to sports cars....