Posts

This image was sent in to Steeda today by a friend of the Mustang tuning company, and it appears to show a high-performance variant of the next Mustang. Why am I tiptoeing around wording? Truthfully, all I know is that I’ve never seen a Mustang that looks like this before. Besides, if I had a dollar for every pixel in this photo, I’d have 75 cents. Still, 75 cents makes change and this photo shows a lot of changes that could potentially come to the 2024 Mustang....

Based on the responses from our last entry, an explanation is in order. If you’ve read David Tracy’s work for long enough, you’ve undoubtedly read an article or several from him about some sort of “Holy Grail” Jeep. He’s been talking about holy grail Jeeps since 2018, and even embarked on quests to obtain some. This has long confused readers at the old lighting site and now here. In legend, there is just one Holy Grail, so the fact that he’s had more than one of them doesn’t fit....

(This is another in our Prove Me Wrong series wherein we tell you the obvious truth and you, for some reason, deign to disagree.) The internet is built for takes and this may sound like the ultimate take if you’re a BIG TOUGH FERD TRUCK guy, but I sincerely believe it. In fact, up until this morning, I wasn’t even aware there was a disgusting prejudice against the 10th-gen F-150....

Six of one, half a dozen of the other, just about. Neither one is really all that exciting, both have some potential pitfalls, either one will probably get you around just fine. Hey, sometimes you need cars like that, that just do a job. Speaking of cars that do jobs, let’s talk utes. Utes never caught on in the US like they did in Australia. The idea of a car-based pickup truck makes sense, especially if it’s going to be your only vehicle....

When the Housecar was built the RV industry was still in its infancy. In 1934, William Hawley Bowlus–the superintendent on construction of Charles Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis–created the aluminum Bowlus Road Chief. That trailer borrowed techniques from aircraft construction. Wally Byam followed it up two years later with his own interpretation of an aluminum trailer, the Airstream Clipper. Motorhomes were around during this time, too, but they weren’t called motorhomes....

I have a hankering to buy something made in a far off land, and some of that desire will show in this week’s list. I’m glad I have an important life event coming up that’s sucking up nearly all of my extra money. I’ll warn you right away, some of these may be downright stupid or crappy cars. Some of them are questionably modified. Some of them may be suspiciously cheap....

But, both of us have noticed, the prices of used Teslas are falling fast. Like, really, really fast. I’ve kept my eye on it, but my friend sent me a link for this used 2019 Tesla Model 3, standard range, RWD, listed at a franchised dealership, for a mere $32,996. Maybe the absolute insanity of the used car market has thrown us off, but we both agreed, that sounds very low....

You can also find episodes on Spotify, Google Podcasts, or you can use the RSS feed and point your favorite Podcast player at it. [Editor’s Note: This was a really fun podcast, because Leonard is such a wonderful kook to have on. Whatever you think of DARTZ and their brand of wildly over-the-top, dictator-target-market, absurdly opulent SUVs, you can’t say Leonard isn’t having an absolute blast. He’s honest about what he sells (both his SUVs and the most expensive vodka in the world, which he also sells) and does everything with a gleefully unhinged charm that I find actually inspiring....

Plaids, as you probably know, seem to be technically “tartans,” which refers to the pattern, as “plaid” seems to have originally referred to the physical textile itself. I mean, nobody today uses the words like that, but according to the Scottish Tartans Museum, which seems to be in my own state of North Carolina, that’s the deal. It even says North Carolina is the state with the highest concentration of Scottish people?...

For some background: Cruise operates a fleet of Level 4 automated Chevy Bolts in San Francisco (as well as Austin and Phoenix) for people to get rides in, between the hours of 10 pm to 5:30 am. The vehicles are driverless, and operate only within a specific area of the city, hence the Level 4 designation, which specifies a restricted operational driving domain (ODD). All of the vehicles involved here were part of this program....

Automotive and motorcycle history is chock-full of blunders. Sometimes, an automaker puts a car on the market, expecting something resembling decent sales, and instead things go down like a brick in a pond. A sad example of this is the quirky Th!nk City car from this week’s Parts Bin Puzzle. And when it comes to motorcycles, countless manufacturers have experimented with rotary power, all to end up at the same dead end....

No surprise there. The convertible, manual Saab walked away with a comfortable win. The automatic Peugeot, when asked to comment on the loss, merely shrugged, lit up a Gitanes, and muttered something about Americans not knowing a good car if it bit them on the… well, anyway. Congratulations to the Saab! But back to David’s dilemma. Here’s what happened: On Sunday evening, while I was cooking up a pot of Juila Child’s famous potato-leek soup, I received a cryptic email from David....

This was, to us, the funniest thing imaginable. I’m a huge fan of this era of Probe and it’s on my list of cars I’d buy if the perfect one jumped onto my plate. Still, every time we walked by the car one of us would exclaim “1996 FORD PROBE!” It was impossible to resist. It’s become a shorthand with my girlfriend (now wife) every time we see a car that proudly proclaims itself in some way, no matter what it is, one of us says: 1996 FORD PROBE!...

To start, let’s talk a little bit about what Allard was. A small car company focused on motorsports, Allard was always about little cars with big engines. We’re not talking about Jaguar straight-sixes, we’re talking about burly American engines with eight or more cylinders. I’ll go into more detail on Allard later on, but all you need to know for now is that Allards were fast cars, capable of embarrassing more expensive machinery....

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. Carmakers Don’t Like The Senate’s New EV Credit Proposal If the Senate’s new EV tax credit deal leaves a bad taste in your mouth, you’re not the only one....

The Autopian Podcast‘s 24th episode digs into the car culture of one of the most automotive cities on earth: Los Angeles. Beau Boeckmann, Jason Torchinsky, and I begin by discussing our weird car-filled booth at the LA Auto Show, the literal wheelbarrow of shrimp we offered at our reader meetup, and the amazing people we met at the convention center. One person, a doctor, told Jason and me that she reads all of our work despite not being a car person at all!...

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 California DMV Is Pissed Off At Tesla I think we all saw something like this coming, right? Reuters reports that the California DMV has an ax to grind with Tesla over the Texas-based automaker’s advanced driver assist systems and potential penalties could be severe....

The sad truth is that at this moment, the Changli may be my most reliable vehicle. The Pao’s body is recovered from the deer-smack incident, but there was an undetected radiator crack from the wreck that caused a coolant leak and subsequent overheating, so now I need to replace the head gasket. My wife’s Tiguan is currently driving me fucking clamshit because the PCV valve clogged and I just dropped a bunch of money to replace blown seals, and now another seems to have blown....

[Editor’s Note: We were off for the holiday weekend, but I wrote a Cold Start for fun on Sunday. Hence the back-to-back cold starts. -DT] Look at that – it clearly says “Le Car” and it’s not really French, since that would be “Le Voiture.” They seem to be using “Le Car” in that bus ad for some specific reason; is “car” in this context in French referring to a large bus?...

In the third quarter of last year, half-ton pickup truck market share slipped to 7.8%, sliding further to 7.5% in October, per S&P’s report titled “Pickup owners moving to SUVs (like everyone else).” That’s the lowest market share since the second quarter of 2012 by a country mile, and the analysts claim that SUVs are a direct cause. Body-style loyalty is on the decline, with SUVs seducing current pickup truck owners with highly advanced luxury conveniences like “enclosed cargo areas....