Yeah, the ones they take to the shows are almost always automatic, because the hot target demographic for the Unlimited right now is the “suburban professional” group, i.e. people who buy them for the image and never take them off road.

Hardly rare. A 5 minute Autotrader search will find dozens of these for sale.

Um, we have like 20 of them in stock right now. 25% of the Unlimiteds we sell are manuals.

The Dodge Viper One of One.

Chevrolet SS with a manual transmission. They’re available from the factory that way, yes... but they don’t exist.

Yes, those are all pretty big and macho.

Like 50 of them?

The 1994 Dodge Ram. With this model the Ram went from a horribly dated, decades-old platform with one engine (the Cummins) being its only saving grace, to an immensely popular new model that put the brand back on the map and shaped pickup truck design for decades to come.

The Dodge Hellcats. Showing that America can still make a totally insane balls-out muscle car. Yeah, we’ve had “muscle cars” aplenty in the years following the malaise era, but nothing like this.

It’s at least 15 years old. I remember watching this video in my freshman year of college, in 1999.

Surely you’re yoking.

Pivo is the Czech word for beer.

Found out where they got the steering wheel.

The Messerschmitt Kabinenrollers, KR175 and KR200 specifically. Basically an aircraft cockpit sitting atop three wheels and a single-cylinder two-stroke engine. It’s the barest definition of what can be called a car.

It takes more than that to kill a bull moose.

The reason for the sudden surge of these around 1990 was that the NHTSA mandated “passive restraint” systems in all vehicles. Going back to an existing design and engineering an entire airbag system and then crash testing it was horrendously expensive, so most automakers just stuck in automatic belts until their…

Most didn’t even have to go that far. There was a wire under the seat that controlled the whole thing, all you had to do was splice it (or was it cut it?) to defeat the whole system for good.

Seatbelt/ignition interlocks. Back in the 70’s various automakers (and government agencies too? I don’t remember) thought they could force people to buckle up by not allowing the car to be started unless the seatbelt was buckled. It didn’t catch on. People found it annoying and the feature was easily circumvented.

If I could be given a different car every three months with the only promise that it wouldn’t break down, I would take the deal.

some jagoff