Down here in Australia Ford did a similar thing to create the Ford Landau from the Falcon coupe. The Landau was essentially a Falcon coupe fitted with the full Ford LTD front end, interior and luxury trim, different taillights and a vinyl roof to hide the tacked-in steel panels that shortened the side window openings.

Yup, that’s why hearses have vinyl roofs—hide the wrinkles in the roof’s sheet metal that occur since the roof is so big, so flat as the monster’s skin flexes from going over bumps.

Carjacker: Get out of the car!
Me: Ok, just make sure you throw it into first a second time before you try to get it into second. It can be temperamental.
Carjacker: What?
Me: Oh, and don’t twist the ignition key to hard. The lock cylinder comes loose.
Carjacker: Ok ok...
Me: And don’t open the driver’s side rear window.…

when I fixed everything there is to fix.

Maybe this is one of those reverse ‘Overhauling’ shows where they “steal” a nicely resto-modded car and return it to the rusty piece of crap it was before the resto?

It is an interesting question that got me to thinking about how I have made that decision with my cars and the answer for the most part is I haven’t. Here is the rundown of the fates of my cars:

This is an unassailable fact:

My visor just has instructions on how to “put it into H!”

I feel like this guy stumbled into the wrong web site. Either way, I hope he enjoys the CR-V he ends up getting. 

Almost everybody figured it out on their own, but two thirds of them got it wrong, and half of those people insist their wrong answer is common sense. Some portion of that group will make up 80% of the people writing their congressperson in an effort to enforce their common sense as legislation.

Yes

If only the actual cars were stuck 20 years in the past as well...

5th gear: There’s a lot of automation in stuff like big combines; but they’re still manually driven.

My wife got $50/hr on top of her normal pay to cover a shift on a Friday recently. With her OT pay, travel pay (not her normal hospital), and recent raises she was at $120+/hr that day.

I ignored 3 sales calls and finally took a lunch break to go sit in my jeep and read this story. When I was a kid, I grew up reading 4Wor, JP, and Four Wheeler, and guys like Freiburger, Verne Simons, Nick Cappa, and Rick Pewe were my idols. Getting home from school I’d see a shiny new issue sitting on the kitchen…

That’s some cold calculations there.

Counterpoint: an old chassis means that there will be a lot of parts availability and easy swaps between years.

2007-ish. 120k miles, slush box, $2300. Those were the days of cheap fun...

I’m still not sure why anyone would buy this, much less for $45k, over any of the other comparable mid-size pickups available in the US.

A 1965 Plymouth Valiant is a better winter car than a 2002 Toyota Land Cruiser