Because it isn’t just a targa, it’s a 3-position roof: closed, targa, convertible. When it goes into full convertible mode, the back of the roof rotates down into the bodywork, hence the name.

While I’m usually a big fan of Gandini’s work and weirdo cars, the build quality of these matches the Mustang-based kit car looks. Maybe for a grand or two more than a contemporary mustang for oddity’s sake and the roof.

Steering wheel came like that. There’s leather paint and it works well. Why they didn’t at least use…

Assuming it’s an updated electronic version of their old system (which I’d bet it is), yes. On the old system, the clutch fork was connected to the brake MC which had, IIRC, a simple valve that sensed when the car was at an incline over a set number of degrees to trigger the Hill Holder function. When on an incline…

Although, I do like a handbrake because I prefer mechanical controls, wouldn’t it be easier to heel and toe?

I laughed out loud the other day when I spotted two be-stickered and body-kitted WRXs in a parking lot, of course, in front of a vaping store.

That doesn’t look like an integration so much as a tumor or the result of a suboptimal sci-fi teleporter incident like in The Fly. While I can vouch for the efficacy of an art vehicle in attracting people—good and bad—I’m looking at the guy behind the wheel and the mouse-with-botfly-larvae body and assuming a…

Honda and Toyota don’t need to jump in on low profit vehicles when they can let others do the R&D and work out the bugs before buying in to an established technology or coming in with the next big thing (Toyota is supposedly “close” to production on solid state batteries, though I can’t remember where I read that and…

You cannot expect a Porschephile to have a sense of humor. And, no, this isn’t a joke about Germans.

I’m old enough to remember when they came out. In magazine comparos, they often scored similarly to C4 Corvettes. Good looking cars and I always thought they’d appreciate once younger generations who didn’t denigrate a car for coming from Japan entered the collector market, but I still can’t believe what they go for…

Other cars that were from the ‘80s or earlier. People tell me they’re better now, but well into the 2000s, Mazdas rotted like their worst competitors from 15 years earlier. I had a couple Datsun Zs and some old Subarus and my Mazda3 surprised even me with the rapidity of its rusting. The preceding Proteges were even…

I assume the garbage mileage (that’s garbage for a car that size, weight, and power—my Focus ST gets and even beats that with more power, weight, and frontal area) is that they insist on stupidly short gearing even though they have 6 speeds and (recently) decent power to work with. The two biggest reasons I’ve never…

Not under $10k unless you’re finding a heap. They would probably be worth going over for, though, as they’re on the upward appreciation curve.

I think any decent G-Body is over $10k now. I was curious about the better Cutlasses and the ones I found that weren’t old person landau roofs were over 10k. A Cutlass. I actually liked the G-bodies, but WTF, people.

I’m not a business guy, so maybe there’s a reason, but I don’t know why large umbrella companies don’t treat the subsidiaries like sub-brands. Maybe Jaguar makes one model, maybe two in whatever strata and of type that makes money. Maybe things change and a third model comes out or they drop from one to two, but why…

Dashboard doesn’t do anything for me, but lower down does: manual shifter in what looks like a decently compact center console.

I hate the F&F movies, but definitely not because I’m above dumb movies and dumb movies are what I go to the theater for. I don’t need to see fairly ordinary life dramas with people larger than life sized and I can fall asleep to them more comfortably on my couch at home, but things like Godzilla or John Wick (the…

The engines, NVH, rigidity, and safety are, but interior space/footprint, most transmissions (though, this area has been a consistent weak point for various makes and models, the industry embrace of CVTs are a massive fall back in terms of durability and nowhere near the typical lifespan potential of the engine),…

Was going to say about the same thing: Elise is the only loss here, but with affordability secondary to it being the only one that I’d own at any price. The rest might as well all be Camrys.

I never liked fashion stylists being called “designers” as it implies a better solution or experience behind the style when most of the time they’re utterly impractical idle ideation sketches brought to life. This looks like they contracted someone who spent a weekend drawing these up while binge watching Star Wars.…

Even in New England, there’s plenty of those assholes. They live in the limits beyond satirization.