I wholeheartedly agree with this one. When I first saw one — I was in second grade — I thought they were the coolest things on the road. They looked like something out of a sci-fi movie. My grandma's then-new Century Wagon was instantly an old-lady car. My grandfather's Grand Marquis was stodgy. The Sable, with…

To me, it always looked like someone took the giant cartoon hammer to a New Beetle...

Keep in mind that this is based on a survey of private owners, not fleet managers. If you were to take fleet accounts into account, then the number of pickup trucks and vans would be skewed much higher.

in 1969, at the height of the muscle car era, the #1 single of the year was the Archies' "Sugar Sugar."

The only Ferrari of that vintage that I have ever seen was this one: They are exquisite machines and the owner actually drives this one around sometimes. I have seen it on the street (once, on a warm May day) and at the Auto Fair a few times. It's funny that the owner worked for Holman-Moody, a Ford racecar builder.

Pic Related....

To be quintessentially Japanese, I think that the vehicle has to have these distinct qualities:

What about something that can be picked up for under a grand, made to outrun any of the cars on this list (in a straight line) for less than $500, and made to handle and brake well for under $2000?

y'all are thinking too big. In high school my cousin built a car that ran sub-13 second 1/4 miles for under $400. This was in 1995.

I'm 6'4" and 320 lbs so fitting into a C3 is difficult at best. There are plenty of late C3s around with LS swaps... which makes the sport back able to pass emissions and get out of its own way.

It was sold for $2500 just three years ago and there doesn't appear to be a huge amount of work done to it. CP all the way.

The C3 and C4 corvettes don't sadden me. It looks like an 84-86 C4 and the C3 is definitely a 1978. The 351 CJ mustang - if it's real - is what gets me. I had a 73 Mustang Convertible with the emissions-choked 351C. The 351CJ was my dream. It breathed fire...

Motherfuckin'

Say, are we cousins?

4 grand for a running, reasonable car of which less than 300 were ever shipped to the US? I would bite. Sure, rowing through the gears is like maneuvering a broomstick in a bucket of racketballs and the 2.0 is lethargic everywhere except the 3-4000 RPM range but as long as it's not a rust bucket, then why not? My…

it was basically a Mercedes-Benz CLK with the 3.2. It wasn't terribly quick but faster than the prowler for sure. The supercharged SRT-6 (basically the same as a CLK32 AMG) was no slouch.

the more I look at the CR-Z the more I like it. It's a funky looking little two-seater. The looks, however, don't make up for the 33MPG "hybrid" with less than 150hp. Come on, Honda. You can do much better. Also, the FR-S needs an inline four that revs to the sky and the name Celica. FFS, Toyota!

I just went through 19 hours worth of comments and haven't seen this one yet. It was a weird, cool little car and it had a funky little badge:

Here's the freakin gas cap. When I was a kid, there were no more gremlins with the stock gas cap. People stole them because they looked so cool. From flickr

Something tells me that this is the continuation of an old trend in automotive design. It is, in many ways, a lot like the "Standard Japanese Coupe" wedge of the 1980s (Pic related).