My first car didn’t even have pistons! It was a Mazda RX-4. Mom said I had to get a car, so I could take my grandmother to doctors when mom was out of town, but it had to be cheap and I had to find it, buy it, insure it and register it by myself. I figured, Japanese cars are reliable, right? What could go wrong? (This…

Did he get DQ'd for not running the accessories, or did he get to take advantage of the power boost?

I’ve read, and it makes sense, that GM stuck with the Corvair till ‘69 BECAUSE of Nader. The Chevy II went from zero to production in less than two years because GM could see the Corvair was too weird to compete with the Falcon. By the time the 2nd generation came out, all body styles except the 2 and 4 door hardtops…

On top of that, the 2nd gen Corvair coupe was (to me, at least) one of the prettiest American cars this side of World War II.

In hindsight, I have to say they didn’t totally ruin the Giugiaro styling of the Golf by tacking on a trunk. I also have to say that almost every VW of this generation that I see anymore is a diesel. That has to mean something. I did my time in VWs and I could get a few neat old bikes for this money.

In my family, the '60s, '70s and '80s are why we think VWs have reliability problems.

How can any Ferrari be a hot rod? You have to start with something boring and make it exciting.

Torque steer? To this day, nobody knows where the voice came from that said "We turn when I say we turn."

My family are masochists. From 1965 to 2020, my parents, sisters and I owned 12 or 13 VWs. In hindsight, I don’t know why. Mom had a ‘79 Rabbit and I had an ‘82, both 2-doors, and I have to say I still appreciate the packaging: Giugiaro design that VW (and, to me, as small hatchbacks go, anyone else) never topped,…

6 cylinders/4 cylinders seems unnecessary to add. They were both around for decades before the Pagoda appeared, they're both appropriate for different uses, and today most 4s would embarrass the Mercedes six in this car. And Volvos of the sixties filled a different niche in the market than they do today, while dozens…

This reminds me of a court case from maybe 20 years ago, when GPS was still pretty novel. A rental company offered GPS in their cars as a feature. Somebody rented a car from them, and a while after returning the car, they got billed like $200 for speeding in their rental, which was the real reason for GPS being in the…

Why did the British bother with the Himalayas when they could have just stayed home and driven a Peel up to Rivington instead?

I don’t care about the year it was designed, I pick the Caterham 7. I prefer bikes to cars, and the 7 is a 2-pack of motorcycles that you can't split up. And it's the only car that didn't need hundreds of pounds of tech to get a reasonable power-to-weight ratio with an '80s engine.

Eventually, anyway.

I’ve never owned anything newer than an '06 Scion, so I never would have known this either.

A couple of years ago, a friend was looking at an electric Fiat 500, till she saw that it had a 90 mile range. There's an excuse for that. There's no excuse for this. But hey, their cool new straight six will be ready in another couple of years, and they're THIS close to getting those pesky apex seals right!

Mid ‘50s El Dorado, ‘56 Packard Caribbean, Continental Mark II, ‘64 Riviera, ‘67 Toronado, Facel Vega, Citroën SM. I don’t reckon you can get a Cadillac-engined Kaiser Darrin for under $120k, at least ready to roll, and I’d feel worse putting disc brakes on the Kaiser than the others. I met a guy in Long Island once…

The SM was totally going to be one of my suggestions. What are they getting for Facel Vegas these days?

I bought a ‘74 Beetle and a ‘66 Microbus in 1987 and both had ‘71 Beetle engines. When my Beetle got T-boned, that engine went into a buddy’s ‘71 bus. Him pulling it out of the Beetle was like watching somebody change a tire. And all the long & short blocks just in the JC Whitney catalog...

Like, one way ticket to Squaresville, Daddio!