Not gonna lie, I do sometimes pine for the "old days". Those old days being the 90s, however. You could get all those sweet 80s cars with their fuel injections and vastly imprved reliability for a pittance and gas was oh so cheap... Yeah, sure, compared to today, the cars were dog slow and had lousy long-term quality,…

We've sure come a long way. My first foray into sporty motoring was a '79 Camaro Z28 - not exactly a car feared for its complexity and capriciousness - which I bought in the late 80s. I sold it not much later because the good ol' Quadrajet was absolutely maddening when it got out of whack, which it did reliably every…

I can see why Mazda have been reluctant to do so, though. The fact that Miatas have such docile engines has to be a big factor in their success beyond the hardcore sports driver crowd. The fact that it's just as easy to drive as an average commuter car.

She clearly doesn't get the STi, but she does admittedly leave some room for those who do in the article's conclusion, saying "if you're someone whose own pleasure were it's own justification" it might just be the car for you - which is a fair assessment of STi buyers, I think. People who like what they like and make…

"We used to make things in this country" - and, thanks to people like Wilson Kemp, we do again! Truck Nutz, representing classic American virtues in a globalized world.

It's supposed to be like that. Don't forget, it took engineers some time to find out about the virtues of the negative camber curve. Which only really works with radial tires anyway.

That must have made for some sweet cornering! I guess it was what you'd call a "momentum car".

Yeah, that's a photoshop that our esteemed author made, which you'd know if you'd read the article.

I think the younger buyers that make up Fiat's target group remembers less of that stigma than one might think. It certainly seems like the lackluster sales of the 500 here in NA have less to do with the Fiat badge and more with the car being not very well suited for the US market.

Nice! Is is just a visual clone, or did you upgrade the drivetrain/suspension as well? Either way, looks bad as hell with that flat black hood with the double bumps!

How unreliable would it be though? They'd most likely build it Japan right alongside the Miata, because everything else just wouldn't make sense economically, so general build quality should be Mazda level which has never been bad. The MultiAir engines so far have a track record as being pretty reliable afaik, so…

I get how the Germany thing works in theory, but I think it's one of these things that works best in the mind of the PR guy who came up with it. I think the bigger problem is that many Americans in the market for an expensive car are very status conscious.

Doesn't really make sense to me, either. "European" doesn't have the same luster and intrigue it used to have. Bush managed to pull amost of the conservatives to the side of "Europeans hate freedom", and they've stayed there ever since. Liberals increasingly view Europe as tired and angsty with a diversity problem and…

To be honest, I don't quite know why Cadillac is so hell-bent on conquering the European market. They've always been the quintessential American luxury car, they have zero brand equity in Europe, but everybody in the US knows what a Cadillac is supposed to be. The model that comes closest to that traditional idea of a…

I think what Cadillac needs is a serious diesel option. Something with 2 liters or less displacement, maybe 150-170 hp that gets an honest 35-40 mpg. Nobody really buys engines with more than 200hp in Europe, because either they just don't have the money, or where they do, i.e. Germany, it seems to be considered…

I think the problem used to be that you could either get a big by European standards V6, with gas mileage that was acceptable for US market, but pretty hefty for European buyers, or an even bigger V8 which was really out of the question for anybody but the rich and extroverted. They've somewhat improved the situation…

Oh yeah, like I was saying, it's impressive how the Cadillac engineers (or rather the Oldsmobile engineers, since they were the ones that designed the whole FWD package) were able to make an FWD car with that big an engine without any issues.

I know if I were to do a spurious test drive for my own amusement, I'd pick the sweetest ride they have around. A loaded Camaro perhaps.

Now if only I had "under 30,000$". The list for me would be "the best performance cars someone on Craigslist would be willing to trade for a '94 Trans Am that's getting tired".

This is a question as old as cars, but I say it's irrelevant. Much more interesting: how much power is enough?