The brakes are excellent, 4-wheel discs, but the brake pedal is a fixed mushroom-shaped button that modulates braking force according to pressure, rather than travel like a normal pedal; it’s not an on-off switch, but it takes a bit of getting used to.

Multiple classic Italian-car aficionados who’ve owned models going back to the ‘60s and earlier, including some who’d lived in Italy and one who currently lives in Italy and confirms many still drive that way there today. I don’t mean to suggest family heritage influences how we drive; I’m referring to Italian…

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The typical Italian driver steers by holding the bottom half of the wheel and shuffling it hand-to-hand in their lap, rather than gripping the wheel at 10 and 2 o’clock and spooling it over the top as Americans tend to do. Once you know this and adjust to driving Italian-style, the wheel becomes perfectly placed when…

Indeed, here I’d thought Lincoln’s model nomenclature seemed perfectly designed to foment customer confusion, and now Cadillac follows suit? If that’s intentional, I wonder what the reason for it could be...

If by “shares its number” you mean other Fiat 850 models, those are all longitudinal rear-engined RWD as well, so the Familiare probably shares at least their drivetrain and probably other bits as well.

These cars are so well-proportioned it’s hard to tell from photos how seriously large they are, with incredible presence when you see one in person; pictures just don’t do justice to Giugiaro’s design work here. These cars come across like a burly, impeccably groomed mob enforcer wearing the most rakish, sleek and…

A Lancia Beta is one of the most “modern” 30-40 year old classic cars you can find (and afford to maintain), offering a DOHC 2-liter transverse engine, FWD with a 5-speed transaxle, rack’n’pinion ZF power steering, 4-wheel disc brakes, and fully independent MacPherson strut suspension with an elegantly simple…

If you own the house/mortgage, consider installing double- or even triple-pane windows; not only are they energy efficient enough to pay for themselves by keeping the heat on the right side of the glass year 'round, they also cut down on noise transmission significantly.

Interesting thing I learned from a Car Talk Puzzler is that train engines aren't powerful enough to overcome the inertia of an entire parked train all at once, so they deliberately compress all the couplings together before getting the train underway, so the engines only have to overcome the inertia of one car at…

The Fiat-derived dual-clutch automated manual trannys seem to have widely reported issues, so stick with traditional manuals or automatics for now. Aside from that, I haven't heard any negative reports about the current lineup of Fiat-derived MultiAir I-4s, TigerShark I-4s, or Pentastar V-6s.

Toyota design hit their sweet spot in the late '80s to early '90s, between their sharp-edged "box it came in" period and their shapeless-jellyfish period; nearly everything they made around then had a certain tastefully refined, delicate yet unfussy elegance to it, crisp yet soft, neither boxy nor blobby. Think…

Toyota design hit their sweet spot in the late '80s to early '90s, between their sharp-edged "box it came in" period and their shapeless-jellyfish period; nearly everything they made around then had a certain tastefully refined, delicate yet unfussy elegance to it, crisp yet soft, neither boxy nor blobby. Think…

They're keeping Lancia on life support back at its family home in Italy for now, but whether it ultimately dies there or gets reborn yet again may come down to changing market and political factors in the future.

Funny thing, your discovery of the Scorpion reads almost exactly like my own discovery of the very same model but in Lincoln, Nebraska, biking into a sharp, high-speed corner at the bottom of a hill, finding the Scorp parked curbside just past the apex. My folx had Fiats, a '69 then a '71 124 Sport Coupe and then a…

This is indeed a Lancia Beta spider, sold as the Lancia Zagato in the US market; I've had one as my daily driver for going on 8 years now. Zagato performed the actual coachwork to transform Beta coupe bodyshells (an in-house Lancia design) into the half-targa/half-ragtop spider, though the spider conversion…

The Lancia Beta is arguably the most "modern" 30-plus year old classic one can get: transverse FWD, DOHC engine, 5-speed, 4-wheel discs, fully independent strut suspension — all fairly standard stuff nowadays, but what other car had all of that in the mid-'70s? There's some clever engineering, too: a brilliant,…

The trick is to drive Italian style, using the bottom half of the wheel instead of the top half, shuffling the wheel hand-to-hand with an underhand grip. With this method and the seat adjusted for best pedal reach, the wheel/pedal setup is perfect, and you can cruise comfortably with hands in your lap, lightly holding…