Exactly. It’s really hard to fake smiles all weekend when you’re surrounded by people who, if they truly knew you, wished you didn’t exist.

Agree with your assessment; also the spark plug wires probably will get melted each time you drove it for more than an hour on a hot day.

Clean.

I think step one would be to swing by the Merc dealership to see what S-class I could drive off the lot that day. Step two would be to call Singer, and get my place in line. Step three is find a place in SoCal where I can enjoy this beautiful machine whenever I wanted, because I’m sure as shit not having them deliver…

I completely agree. I have had a 1995 Ram with the Cummins Diesel since new. The fuel lines run up the drivers side to the bell housing up to the fuel filter and then returns back to the tank. The heat in that area causes the rubber hose to begin to leak pressure but not fuel when sitting making for a hard start.…

Ford Econoline, the official car of “How about fuck you, on all possible fronts”

I grew up in the family auto repair shop and then became an engineer and went to work in the auto industry. Oh, did I catch hell from my cousins.

Supposedly Toyota took the engineering teams for the new land cruiser out in Australia past cell range by 50km and said - “now your system is broken, what are you going to do?”. And the purpose was to show then where the vehicles would actually be used and why it was job #1 above all else to make the components…

The gray-beard master tech saw me struggling to do that once. He unbolted the front engine mount strut, rocked the car back and forth, and stabbed the parking brake with the engine tilted forward. All three rear plugs were staring right up at me.

The biggest pain on first gen Monteros with the V6 when doing the oil pump is popping the engine mounts and lifting the thing up into the firewall to get clearance to get the oil pan off. For an otherwise very easy to service vehicle, that was a weird step to get to in the book. We still tried for like 2 hours to get…

Everything on my wife’s old R53 Mini seemed to be unnecessarily complicated. That damn front bumper and/or wheels had to come off WAY too many times to service things. Add in the plastic thermostat housing that’s basically a wear item and you want to burn the car down.

In the mid to late 1970s Ford interns were given a heater core and the task of designing a car around it. The result was the fox body Mustang. To be honest, the heat works fine. The problem is that if that heater core should leak, the entirety of the vehicle must be disassembled to replace it.

I drive a Subaru, I don’t even want to think about replacing spark plugs.

You poor, poor bastard.

About 10 years ago, I bought a 1992 Caravan with 100k miles for $100 as a daily beater to replace my totaled 1992 RWD 5-speed Geo Tracker (RIP most fun car ever). It of course needed trans mounts, shocks, and a few other worn out pieces replaced.

Those were easy. Not easy? The tune up. Getting to the rear plugs on the…

Engineers will climb over a mountain of naked virgins just to fuck a technician. 

My dad was in NYC around that time taking OCS training. His ship was an ancient Maine class Battleship that had been covered with a giant wooden deck to look like an aircraft carrier (he felt it was more to do with given the OCS candidates extra room on the deck to scrub not to fool spies).

Easy.

Do you want steady decline or wild yoyo? Because the best Mercury Cougar was the first one, without question, but the car kept shifting body style and market position so it's hard to say it always got worse, but it did get dramatically worse multiple times.

Watching the downward spiral of the Chevelle/Malibu is a tough one. The car really peaked in 1970 and everything from 1964-1972 looked awesome (IMHO). Bumper regulations made them awkward in the mid-70's, the boxy Malibu of the 80's lacked character, and the boring fleet car of the 90's is something I don’t like to…