Once, several years ago, this thing really happened:

My daily driver is worth about four days’ pay, and I just bought an extra car for my girlfriend which cost two days’ pay (if she wants a new Range Rover, she can buy it for herself). At some point I’ll buy another fun car and I can justify spending $$$ on that, but right now it’s just a tool to do the job; it carries…

The “Invacar” is pretty much what you get if you use historical attitudes to disabled people as the principles of car design. There’s probably room for a long and depressing Jalopnik article on the project that involved well-intentioned people building & distributing a horrible little car which didn’t actually meet…

Unless you’re buying something like a Camry, some driving-appliance to take you from A to B, you have to acknowledge that your heart is making the choice as much as your head is. Sometimes the heart makes mistakes that lead to high costs or long-term practical problems. (Just ask my former wife or my former Mercedes…

This is Jalopnik. We *want* to gawk and admire somebody else who swapped a WW2 rotary aircraft engine into a Landcruiser and drove across the Andes. If you want vanilla engines in vanilla cars you have the rest of the internet to choose from. :-)

This is Jalopnik; what we really need is a 1960s Alfa with a 2-stroke Belarusian tractor engine.

Wait, what? I thought NASCAR was racing between different carmakers, making state-of-the-art racecars! Why would all the cars use a 4-speed? Next you’ll be telling me that wrestling is fixed...

The tech is fine, but I’m not convinced by the styling.

I think there are two separate problems here.

They are cool, but I’m not convinced those prices are so good. https://padh.de/home.html is usually cheaper and has a lot more variety. Or, if you are patient and have an even higher risk appetite, try one of the army-surplus auctions in Austria / Germany / Switzerland &c.

I think it took a few years for the car industry to become completely committed to gasoline. If I try to put myself in the shoes of an engineer 100-120 years ago, it doesn’t seem obvious that one specific petroleum distillate must be the best way to fuel all cars. That world was already full of steam engines; Benz’s…

It looks very 1990s, but I love the 90s!

Incremental solutions are good. I live in a civilised country which has adequate public transport; when I need to go to the big city (for work) I can walk 10 mins to a train station, then sit on the train, enjoying the internet, til it delivers me to the city centre. I can still own a car for fun - and for days when…

That 300TD fills me with regret. When prices were at their lowest, I wanted to buy a W123 as my first car; it was a cheap-ish old car with enough room for my lifestyle, and hopefully reliable. Nobody thought the W123 would be a “future classic”, the reputation was that it would be a basic daily-driver that keeps on…

If you liked (or, at least, tolerated) the VM 2.5l diesel engine, you’ll love all the Jeeps which got it. It was by far the most popular engine for Jeeps in western Europe in that era. I had a glorious XJ with that engine, and it was infuriatingly unreliable but never *completely* died, it just kept on limping through…

I think it’s party a problem of timing and luck. MCC were effectively first to market (unless you want to benchmark against a Honda Z or something like that) and they made some, err, brave decisions in the process. They launched with a tiny petrol engine, supposedly for low fuel consumption, just as a new generation…

Normally, ships are ideal for high-volume long-distance transport; and planes are great at more urgent, high-value long distance transport. Trucks usually can’t compete over those distances. However, the Suez canal was closed for several years, which doubled the distance by sea (from northern Europe to the Gulf), and…

I once met two pleasant Norwegian gentlemen who were driving a Citroën DS across the Sahara. No vehicle could be more refined on the mean streets of Mauritania, if you make it as far as a surfaced road; but I would never sleep at night, worrying about getting stuck in sand, worrying about some exotic suspension…

Most people who *need* 4x4 don’t actually need to cover hundreds of miles off-road. For every person planning to drive across the Sahara there’s ten thousand commuters, delivery drivers, service engineers and upland farmers who just need to get across a few hundred metres of mud or unsurfaced farm-track, or they live…

“No, my friend Dietrich was driving... no, no idea where he lives or what his surname is... no, I don’t have his phone number... it was definitely Dietrich. You didn’t find anybody else’s fingerprints? Oh, he was wearing driving gloves...”