To me, EVERY bike is an adventure bike. I’ll never buy a GS type bike, because I have a 28 inch inseam. (Also, the sameness of all those boxy panniers and price-of-a-decent-bike rain suits puts me off.) But I rode my Yamaha CS5 up Sandia Peak in New Mexico a few years ago on a ribbed front and K70-clone rear, on the…

When you look at a '75 Valiant next to a '76 Volare, they don't look that different, and I don't think that much changed under the skin, but today you see more of the older cars than the newer ones. What did they do that screwed it up so bad?

When I was a teenager, my dad showed up in a Cutlass wagon with a 350 diesel. Even at that age, I knew he would never learn how to buy a used car.

The NYC subway is still using lots of switching and signal gear from the 1930s, and some from every decade since. My rough estimate for what it would take to bring the system up to date is about half a trillion dollars. And the governor just suspended the congestion pricing that would have generated about a billion a…

I lived in the city for twelve years, then left...I was there a couple of months ago and am happy to report they've come up with a solution to the pee smell: mask it with weed.

Otis heard it and said "That girl done took my song!"

I had an RX-4 with a 13B. Mine was totally worn out when I bought it, but they were rated at 110 HP from the factory. I bet this was competitive with every other Japanese pickup at the time, although the other ones could crack 20 mpg with ease, and not need oil between changes.

The CD player skips over several generations of tech. My folks always bought the cheapest car on the lot, usually a VW or Toyota with AM radio and stick, crank windows and no AC. AM/FM wasn't usually an option, but my dad did have an under dash 8 track for a while in the 70s. I might have had a cassette deck before…

It’s a high beam button.

I still have an ‘89 Ford motorhome with this and I hate it. If I take my foot off it, it's guaranteed I won't find it again before I blind somebody. I've had other cars with the high beam on the floor, but they weren't as bad as the Ford. Another gig beam change: for a long time, the stalk control on cars I drove were…

I don’t know if this just reflects how many Jalops have defected in the last couple of years, but for an all-time list, this isn’t so hot. I had a 13B that I guarantee was a worse engine than the RX-8 had. The stock Vega engine was as unreliable as the Cosworth, but gutless. The Cadillac 4100 was simpler than the…

My first Toyota cost me $1250 and I drove it for over five years, so I feel like I got pretty good value out of it.

I drove pickups from 1996 to 2003. Toyotas, standard cab 4 cyl 5 spd 2WD. I bought the first because I moved and my commute got a lot longer, and driving almost a hundred miles a day in an ‘81 Dodge van didn’t sound fun. I had about a half dozen motorcycles at the time, and I didn’t need to carry one all the time, but…

I grew up in Volkswagens in the '70s, and the color pages of their brochures were so great! More colors than a box of Crayolas, and generally non-metallic until the Champagne Editions came along. But a non-VW that my folks had might be even more relevant: in 1970, Dad bought a Mercedes finback, I think a '64. It was…

I’ve been driving for 40 years and have never bought a new car or truck. I can get a mint 2006 Scion xB for under five grand, so no new car is fairly priced.

Love to be that guy, and I love Ringo, but “You’re Sixteen” was a hit for Johnny Burnette in 1960, and was on the American Graffiti soundtrack which everybody should have memorized.

I owned two Scion xBs, a 2005 and a 2006, and I thought they were perfect. I lived in NYC at the time and those cars must have saved me 20 miles of walking compared to even a Corolla, because I could park where almost no one else could. I used them for business too, and they defied the laws of physics with what would…

Yeah, this price surprised me because I saw a new Accord in 2018 that was about the same price. Must not have been optioned as well.

This makes me think of the “that’s more than it was, brand new” cliche. At this point, anything that runs from before 1970 is worth more than it was, brand new. 1970-85 is a little less predictable because so many cars sucked then, but almost every car should bottom out in value and then start rising, and eventually…

At first, this didn’t even seem worthy of a headline, until I saw what MSRP was for this car. In the ‘90s, the most I paid for anything with 4 wheels was $1250, for a Toyota pickup, so I was totally out of the loop on new car prices. (I also got a ‘65 Cadillac for $850 and an ’81 Dodge van for $300; in hindsight I had…