The Cost of a Time Machine
The good news first.
You can legally buy a brand-new car without a single air bag or any of the saaaaaaaaafety equipment mandated by the government since the late 1960s.
No back-up camera,...
The Motor Law
It’s strange to find myself an uncle, with a country place - and an Orange Barchetta out in the garage.
My 1976 Trans-Am.
It is a relic from the ”better, vanished time” Rush...
The Bandit is Gone . . . And Not Just That
Burt Reynolds is gone and with him a different America.
He was in his early 40s when Smokey and the Bandit appeared back in 1977 - at first, regionally. The flick was...
Die-Hard vs. Exide
What makes a fast car appealing?
It’s not just that it’s fast. It’s equally other things, such as what makes it fast - the mechanical erogenous zone under its hood. Which is...
Try Not to Wash Your Old Car
Back in high school chemistry, you may have heard the teacher refer to water as the universal solvent.
Exactly so. It dissolved a mile of rock at the Grand Canyon, for instance.
And...
What’s Missing – and Why!
New cars have many features old cars never had - LCD touchscreens and WiFi, for instance. But new cars are missing some things, too.
Maybe you remember - and wonder why?
Bumpers that...
In the Rearview: AMC’s Almost Corvette . . .
Two cars have vied with the Corvette for the title, America’s sports car. You probably know about the Thunderbird.
You may not know about the AMX.
It came along much later and wasn't...
Start ’em Up!
It's still winter - but not for too much longer. Which means not too long from now, many of us will be pulling cords to lawnmowers and firing up motorcycles (and...
Latent Power
How good do we have it?
If the measure of that is the power and performance delivered by the average new car, the answer has to be: Pretty damned good.
Four cylinder-powered family-haulers...
Not a Four Wheeled-Indenture
The more I work on the ’72 Beetle - aka Sexual Chocolate, the car I am helping my teenage protege learn to work on - the more I realize why most...