I really like the idea, and always liked the 131 rally car....if the work was really clean I’d probably eke out a NP. As Rob noted, the panel fitment, some of the paint work, lack of real abarth wheels, etc. is just a bit sloppy. The spare panels included, complete with a gutter guard grill appears alarmingly shitty.

Its a pretty car but not 25k pretty. I’m sure the twin turbo was novel when it came out in the early 80s, but by 1989 the rest of the world caught up (300zx for example).

The sad look is so much better

The M550 is a better daily and much cheaper -- lots of power, great interior but no need for crazy expensive carbon brakes and whatnot. 

I’ve had a few of these over the years and they are getting harder and harder to find. Mechanically, absolute tanks. The main killer is rust, and sometimes transmission issues...but 95% its rust. This looks rust free, and 185k is nothing on the mechanical bits. Easy NP, these are delightful to drive, work on, and go…

yea my 15 year old e550 gets these numbers

The newest F type is fantastic. It has always been a looker, but the new front end really ties in, too bad they are discontinuing it. I don’t know that I’ve seen more than 2-3 total with the facelift.

Good lord that Hyundai has to be one of the ugliest cars I’ve seen in years. They took a look at the Mercedes CLS and decided it needed to mate with an Infiniti J30 from 1993 and then put the whole thing in a toaster oven to melt. For good measure, threw a little spoiler on the “back” to make it sporty or something.

These aren’t that rare or hard to find, and also tend to be pretty cheap. With the near-guarantee that there will be more rust (clearly been sitting outside a lot), I think you can probably get a reasonable driver for same ornot much more. The hardtop may be the only exception — no idea how tough those are to find.

I always liked these, but they were never worth much. Neither is this one. Cut that price in half and you’re in the ballpark. 

yea good point on washing the oil off the cyl walls -- the fuel itself just burns and causes a rich condition.

the fuel itself burns off but wonder if it impacts the detergents and additives in the oil? Rich conditions will coke up plugs and stuff, and potentially also wash the oil layer off the cylinder walls. I feel like I’m missing a chunk of this analysis though.

yep exactly what happened to mine. LTFTs were like -15 lol

I am not entirely following. I have had a bad HPFP before, and it leaked gasoline into the oil via the seal from the HPFP to the cam driving it. This is a fairly common failure mode, and dilutes oil, sounds like what the article is getting at. It does not cause low oil levels or drive consumption as much as add to the…

IMO the best deal out there right now is the 2017+ BMW M550. The G30 5 series gets the 2nd technical update of the twin turbo v8 and can be had around 30k. It’s 75% of the M5 at half the price or less (and softer/more comfortable), can be tuned easily into the 600s as well. 

Anecdotally I recall those mazda gearboxes weren’t terribly strong for this application, but I always wanted to drive one out of curiosity. I appreciate that Ford was doing something different with these big coupes (see previous gen with the turbo 2.3 as well) which felt quite innovative at the time. For 1989 the…

These manuals are pretty sought after (by a small audience, but still). I always liked the spider, its a handsome GT car. The Ghibli and QP are also-rans in the lux space, which were not competitive vs. the E class and 5 series (and also more expensive). I don’t even know how they sold so many of them -- that said…

This guy gets it. Generative AI saves me probably 2-3 hours a day of writing emails, doing documentation templates, etc. You don’t just dump info into it and go/trust — it requires review but it is SO much faster to put a solid prompt in, and then pick the 60% that it generates in seconds that you already had in mind,…

a 21 year old audi A4. Everything. When it runs, damn its a good drive with the 3.0 howling but the whole fucking thing falls apart and leaks faster than I can fix it. Said leaks have resulted in a biology experiment inside as well.

C4s are so cheap — you can find good, clean running examples for 5k pretty easily, and if you wanted to upgrade to C5s, those are plentiful at 10k. I’d say this is not worth the 2-3k in time and parts to get it operational when marketplace is full of half decent runners that you can take out for a test drive.