It's not a Fifth Amendment issue because it's not "testimonial" evidence. It is a Fourth Amendment issue, however, and a big one, at that. I have a hard time believing that the Supreme Court would buy that cops can't get a warrant in the time it would take for the alcohol to metabolize—they've been doing it for…

There is a statutory right to an independent blood test in Michigan, too, as well as most states, I'd imagine. But the statute has no teeth—if a suspect requests an independent test (at the suspect's expense) and the police refuse to honor that request, nothing happens in terms of the criminal case—no application of…

I haven't read Missouri's petition for cert on this, so I'm just going by what's reported in the linked article, but if the main thrust of the state's argument is that exigent circumstances justify the warrantless search because of the risk of evidence being lost through metabolization, it's a fairly weak argument. …

The fact that someone along the way chose to repair what is a quite-rare-and-somewhat-collectible car with the wrong parts is a red flag. IIRC, the 500E's front fenders (and maybe the front bumper cover) are the only model-exclusive body parts on the front end. Pre-'93 W124 body parts shouldn't cost any more, and in…

I fucking love flan! Seriously.

Yeah, well, you might just want to avoid any and all red '83-'84 GTIs to be on the safe side. Or bring a black light with you.

He absolutely did not care if anybody saw him. In fact, I'm pretty sure he thought it would be funny if people did see into the car while he was going at it.

Back in the early '90s, after somebody stole the radio in my Toyota Pickup, I used to play the harmonica while driving around delivering pizzas. But I did it right—I had a holder so I could play hands-free. People who noticed generally seemed pretty amused by it.

I used to work with a guy who copped to doing this in his GTI pretty much every day on his commute home from work. I didn't really believe him at first, but he said he kept a box of kleenex on the passenger seat for just this purpose. A few days later, I walked by his car, and sure enough, there it was.

In a nutshell: the GM 350 diesel's bad reputation scared many would-be diesel buyers away from *any* diesel, the rise in the price of diesel relative to gasoline sent more would-be buyers on their way, and the giant steps forward in gas-engine efficiency took care of nearly all of the rest.

I know the GAZ was a step down from the ZILs that were used by the real heads of state back then, but I've always liked the Chaikas, and of those, I prefer the GAZ-14 to the Mercury/Packard-mashup GAZ-13. It looks appropriately stern, wouldn't you say, Comrade?

Maybe not the craziest, but definitely the coolest.

If these cars were "similarly priced" (which they're not), the Fiat would be the car to have. But the Fiat is twice the price of the Alfa, and the Alfa is grossly overpriced. So the Alfa has less than 12,000 miles—so what? If you drive it regularly, then it won't have ultra-low miles for much longer. If you don't…

But who ever rated it highly?

"Ferrari dealer" does not equal "Ferrari." The thrust of this article is that the Ferrari *dealer* in Toronto threatened Double Clutch unless they took down Mr. Whiny First-World-Problems guy's article.

Certainly better than *some* of Shelby's automotive projects...

I've been eyeing that Eagle in my daily search for AMC products. I dig the SX/4, but the automatic kills it for me. I'd still probably take it over the Subie, though, which is in that awkward period where Subaru had lost some of its quirky cool but hadn't yet reached anything resembling high performance. In other…

Yeah, the idea of limiting it to five (and only five) makes it really challenging. I was also working on the assumption that I would have no cars outside of the five in my dream garage (so no boring/reliable sixth car as a daily driver). More than anything, this exercise made me realize the depths of my automotive…

Thumbs up to you, sir! Your garage is far more interesting than most.

1. 1969 911S