For a long time, I’ve been contemplating entering a car in a LeMons race. If you read Clunkerture, you know I tend to have extremely outlandish thoughts, which thankfully don’t end with me spending any of my meager amount of cash attempting to fulfill them. These involve things like wondering whether I should buy a Centennial-edition 2003 Ford Mustang GT as an investment to installing speakers in the headrest of my car.
Read MoreForgotten Features: Vertical Speedometers
We like how thermometers work. I'm of course referring to your basic mercury thermometer, which goes up or down depending on how hot the temperature is. If you were thinking the digital one, I guess you belong in the 1980s, and shouldn't deserve an exquisite specimen of the car I am now going to discuss.
Read MoreThat Had a Manual?: The Chrysler Minivan Edition
By this point, you've seen the latest and greatest pieces in the right column and you're wondering, "Is he writing yet another column about Chrysler products?" The answer is yes, though I don't think it'll continue much longer, since there's always a past General Motors product foible to discuss on Clunkerture.
Read More2000s Cars We Almost Forgot: Chrysler 300M
A few days ago, I wrote about the Eagle Vision and how I was considering it for LeMons. Well, the Chrysler 300M was actually intended to be the replacement for the Eagle Vision, but since Eagle was killed, the design had a Chrysler badge and an iconic name slapped onto it. Though the 300M was a somewhat popular car in the late 1990s and early 2000s, it's largely been forgotten in favor of the 300C.
Read MorePress Release Rewind: Jeep Trail-Rated Badges
Back in 2003, while planning for the 2004 model year, Jeep needed to find an edge over all other automakers. So what do they do? They come up with a new badge that extols the virtue of a 4x4. Something to signify that your SUV is better than all the other SUVs on the road. On the road. A place where most people could care less whether you can go off-road.
Read MoreYou Don't Really Need That $45,000 Minivan
Recently, I was reading a Baby Blues comic strip. In it, the parents were contemplating why they didn't have a van with the built-in vacuum. They quickly realized that one existed (the Honda Odyssey Touring Elite), but that it was $45,000. The parents then thought about installing a goat instead, at which point the humor was lost on me.
Read MoreSelling Your Cross-Country Record Attempt Car Is Very Difficult
There's been a lot of talk on Jalopnik during the past few months about setting the cross-country record. You know, driving a vehicle from New York City to Los Angeles in the least amount of time possible. It sounds like the greatest record you could possibly set in the world, until you realize that someone set a record for balancing a car on his head and that Guinness doesn’t publish cross-country records.
Read MoreForgotten Features: Headrest Speakers
General Motors in the 1980s was not highly regarded. There was the debacle with the Oldsmobile diesels, which broke all the time and kept diesels from America for another 20 years. The new W-body vehicles on which GM lost $2,000 on each car built. And GM was trying to save money wherever it possibly could, since Roger Smith's goal was to get GM's stock price up. Michael Moore had made Roger and Me which didn't make the company look good one bit.
Read MoreBeautiful, But Horrible: 2003-2005 Mercedes-Benz W211 E-Class
We all have our guilty pleasures. Mine used to be watching How I Met Your Mother, until I got to season seven and decided it was taking way too long to find out who the hell the mother was. Seriously, I think after seven years, anyone would settle for someone and learn to love them later. This, I believe, is the same reasoning as to why the Toyota Camry tops the sales charts. It's buyers will buy it because of the reviews and reputation, live with it for seven years, and then say it's the best car in the world and they love it because there's no reason to have it for seven years.
Read MorePress Release Rewind: Mini Has New Roof Schemes
We all know Mini. They're the brand that makes an excellent hot hatch, but also has a line-up consisting of a mini-SUV (because you loved your old Cooper but had kids), a mini-coupe (if you decided rear seats and/or practicality weren't your thing), a mini-roadster (when you've already made a coupe out of your hot hatch, it's not that hard to chop the top off and call it a roadster), a stretched-hatchback with a third door on the passenger side (which doesn't work in places where cars are RHD, meaning the third door feature is useless in the United Kingdom, where it's made), and a two-door mini-SUV (that one's totally pointless).
Read More