Motorcycle Review: 2023 BMW K1600 GTL
Spend $50K on a new BMW car and you get a four-cylinder engine. Spend half as much on a BMW bike and get a six-cylinder engine and a power-to-weight ratio that’s a lot more favorable. So why does BMW’s K1600 GTL come standard with a six while every BMW car shy of a 7 Series […]
Heterogeneous Cars
As the dreary trend toward the Universal Transportation Appliance or the crossover SUV will soon to be rendered even more drearily homogenous via electrification. It waxes, but it might be worthwhile to look at what wanes in the rearview and recall some of the heterogeneous cars that were once available. The Pillarless Hardtop Try to visualize a […]
Doomed: Studebaker Avanti (1963-1964)
Editor’s Note: This post has been excerpted from the forthcoming book, called Doomed. If you’ve ever hunted deer, you know that a dead deer can run for a surprising distance before it realizes it’s dead. So it was with Studebaker, one of America’s most famous deceased car companies. Though doomed by competition, it could no longer […]
The Yugo had its Merits
The joke goes: How do you double the value of a Yugo? Fill up the gas tank! True enough. And yet, nearly 800,000 of them were made and did you know that they were manufactured all the way through 2008? The Yugo was last sold in the US back in 1992, but it continued to […]
Taking the Time to Make a Luxury Car
The most exclusive and most expensive watches aren’t digital. They are meticulously hand-assembled mechanical things, with intricate wheels and mechanisms–the workings usually partially visible, so you can see and admire the workings and the workmanship. People pay huge money for them–in some cases, more than $50,000–even though they don’t keep time any better than a $5 Dollar […]
The Old Car Experience
If you’ve never driven an old car as opposed to a used car, you have probably never experienced certain things that were once part of the experience of driving a car. Like turning on the AC—assuming the car had AC. Many did not before AC became a given thing in the ’90s. You could feel the engine stagger under the load. It was […]
The Teenaged Car
Cars aren’t just in short supply; they are getting older all the time. IHS Markit, which keeps track of such things, reported that the average age of a currently in-service car is 12.1 years. Almost a teenager! This trend has been ongoing for some time and has nothing to do with the COVID-19 crisis and the […]
The 2021 Ram TRX vs. the ’76 Trans-Am
The ’21 Ram TRX I test-drove recently has more than three times as much horsepower (702) as the 455 V8 in my ’76 Trans-Am made when it was new (200). It also weighs nearly twice as much, 6,396 pounds vs. about 3,800 pounds, and still runs the quarter-mile three full seconds faster than my Trans Am did […]
The Cars We Could Have Bought
The cars you’re allowed to buy today are the cars that the government allows to be manufactured. But what kinds of cars might we be able to buy if the government got out of the car business and left the designing of cars to the automakers and the buying of cars to customers? What if we could […]
Doomed: Li’l Red Express, 1978-1979
Editor’s Note: This post is an excerpt from Eric’s forthcoming book called, Doomed. High-performance trucks are back, but they aren’t new. One of the first of the breeds dates back to the height of the Disco era, 1978, when high-performance cars had all-but-ceased-to-exist because of the then-new government regulations applied to them in the manner of a chokehold […]