Car Lust

Rinspeed sQuba

Okay, so late last night we covered the early Lotus Esprits and their fictional white submersible doppelganger. The submarine Esprit in the James Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me was obviously fictional--a creation of late 1970s special effects. But what if an actual vehicle could be made to convert seamlessly from car to submarine?

Swiss tuning company Rinspeed, inspired by Bond's Esprit, tackled this intriguing challenge and displayed its sQuba concept car earlier this year. It's a fascinating vehicle, but a close look at the finished project reveals just how difficult it is to create a vehicle adept both on pavement and underwater.

Naturally, Rinspeed started with a white Lotus--in this case, the Elise. The Elise's gasoline engine was replaced with three electric motors and a lithium-ion battery pack. On dry ground, a 54-kilowatt electric motor drives the car, while while two smaller electric motors power small propellers underwater. Two front fender-mounted blow jets pivot to provide directional control. Other technological pieces of gingerbread include an onboard air supply, a salt-water-resistant interior, and a laser sensor to allow driver-less operation (think KITT of Knight Rider fame).

Lotus Esprit S1/S2

Just to get the inevitable out of the way right up front--yes, the Lotus Esprit S1 was the basis of James Bond's submersible car from the film The Spy Who Loved Me. Yes, it was a great movie--probably my favorite of the Roger Moore era--and yes, submarine cars are worthy of lust regardless of their other qualifications. More on that later.

I have always lusted after the earliest Lotus Esprits on their own merits, quite apart from their fictional submarine capabilities. The first Esprits were light, responsive, excellent handlers ... and drop-dead gorgeous. The Esprit would eventually evolve into Lotus' first bona-fide supercar, but in uniquely Lotus fashion--without the excess of the Ferrari Testarossa and Lamborghini Countach.

When it debuted in 1976 to replace the quirky but ungainly Europa, the Esprit was a light, efficient sports car, weighing less than 2,200 pounds--lighter than a Kia Rio. This featherweight packed a punch by the standards of the era, with an amidships-mounted 160-horsepower four-cylinder running through a five-speed gearbox. This combination of power, light weight, and mid-engined configuration combined for handling as sharp as the Giugiaro-sculpted lines.

Not all Toyota sedans are boring . . .

Not long ago, we here at Car Lust pronounced the Toyota Camry sedan the Most Boring Car Ever.

In the Japanese home market, at least, Toyota appears to have realized that it has a problem. This Carina ED is fitted with the optional Exclamation Point accessory group:

(Photo by Flickr user "Samurai Shiatsu.")

--Cookie the Dog's Owner

Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera

We spend a lot of time here at Car Lust blogging about unsung heroes--cars that for whatever reason never received the recognition they deserved. The Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera is not one of those cars. It received all the recognition it deserved--absolutely none.

With its reputation already listing after the torpedo hits of the 1970s, General Motors did the best it could to scuttle the remnants of its good name with a series of relentlessly mediocre sedans through the 1980s and early 1990s. The Cutlass Ciera was one of those sedans, joined in abject mediocrity by its A-body cousins, the Buick Century and Chevrolet Celebrity. Strangely, the A-body Pontiac 6000 STE escaped the curse--despite its mechanical similarities, it was a surprisingly effective sports sedan by the standards of the time.

The Cutlass Ciera and its fellow A-bodies weren't terrible in the same way as Cookie the Dog's Owner's Chevy Monza Wagon. They didn't tend to grenade, or rust away rapidly. They sold well and typically gave their owners many years of grudging, unenthusiastic service. Even now, more than a decade after the last of these cars went out of production, you can see Cieras and their brethren cruising around with scabrous paint and drooping headliners.

Volkswagen Scirocco 16V

By any measure, the 1980s were a watershed decade. From the political (Ronald Reagan's presidency, the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the Tiananmen Square demonstrations) to the cultural (Gordon Gekko, the rise of hair bands, Michael J. Fox's astonishing ascent as matinee idol) to the delightfully absurd (Miami Vice, jelly shoes, astonishgly hairsprayed bangs, Van Halen's shifting lineup, Alf), the 1980s have left an indelible mark on the world in which we live. A weird mark, to be sure, but an indelible one.

So, of all the touchstone events of the 1980s, of all the impactful developments of that wild decade, what was the most significant of them all? Well, that's easy--the mass-market introduction of the 16-valve four-cylinder engine.

Living the Car Lust Lifestyle: Owning One

We here at Car Lust often compose soaring prose to cars which the larger society relegates to the dustbin of history, odd bits of automotive flotsam and jetsam that occasionally rise up from the depths of our personal histories and break upon this little corner of the internet that all may see and wonder at the quirkiness of our collective automotive history. Who among us hasn't clicked over here to see a car that  brings back recollections of youth, maybe your first car? It's always great to see a car your parents owned, one that calls up those warm fuzzy memories of snoozing in the back seat, safe in the knowledge that mom and dad would get us wherever we were going safely.

And so we read these missives to cars gone by and at least every once in a while think how neat it would be to find one of our favorites in good condition, lovingly cared for by its owner, and ready, with minimal restoration, to carry us back to those thrilling days of yesteryear when our main concerns were how much time we could spend hanging out with friends and getting more guys/girls into the car with us. "Yeah," we think, "I'll get me one of those and cruise around town with the old songs playing, the wind in  my hair what hair I have left, and everything will be groovy/cool/rad/[insert-decade-specific-adjective-here]."

And then one day ... you do it. Barring a rapid no-fault divorce for making such a flaky impulse purchase, you're the proud owner of your favorite old car. Now what?

I can tell you first hand, it ain't no picnic.

Gordon Diamond

If you think Car Lust features a lot of weird and quirky cars, then today's car should really raise your eyebrows. If it looks a little strange, well, that's because it is.

The car illustrated here is the Gordon Diamond--built in California by H. Gordon Hanson in the mid-1940s; Hanson conceived the car in 1943 at the height of World War II. He built the prototype in 1945 and licensed it in 1947. No further Diamonds were produced, but the one prototype was enough to blow some minds. Namely, mine.

As the name implies, the Diamond's wheels were arranged in a diamond pattern. Instead of two wheels in front and two in back, the Diamond featured individual wheels at the front and rear, which steered in opposite directions to enhance maneuverability. This presaged the four-wheel-steer systems decades later, which counter-steered at low speeds. The more modern systems steered both front and rear wheels in the same directions at higher speeds to prevent twitchy high-speed handling--an innovation the Diamond did not feature.

Comparing trucks

I don't often link to online road tests--if I did, I'd be too busy to post about anything else. But I thought I'd pass along this Popular Mechanics comparison test of the five full-size pickup trucks.

I thought it was a bit entertaining that the Toyota was described as fast but clumsy and inhospitable, while the Dodge Ram Hemi was sophisticated and refined. Interesting, don't you think? But mostly I'm linking to it because, given the current market conditions, comparing full-size V-8 trucks can be considered a little countercultural. Two years ago, who would have thought we would be able to say that?

--Chris H.

When tuning goes horribly, horribly wrong

Speaking of Mitsubishi Lancers, I would be remiss if I didn't point Car Lust readers to this epic thread at LancerRegister.com.

It starts off a bit slow, but quickly picks up steam, as a well-meaning "tuner" wreaks havoc on an poor, innocent second-gen Mitsubishi Eclipse with a misused file, some dodgy welding, some badly cut diamond plate, and gallons upon gallons of non-strategically applied metallic blue paint. I'm mechanically inept, but when I saw the pictures of the guy filing grooves into the head even I knew something was horribly awry. It just goes downhill from there. Keep a special eye out for the lunched turbocharger and potentially fatal clutch and flywheel modifications.

The video below catches the poor, cringing Eclipse putting on a very expensive fireworks show.

Like any train wreck, this is engrossing stuff, and it has captured the imagination of car lovers everywhere--the thread has more than a million page views and 46 pages of posts as I write this. Thanks for the heads-up go to reader Caddy Jeff, who submitted the Fedora Award winner in the $25,000 Challenge.

--Chris H.

Angry Cars--2008 Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution

Car: 2008 Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution

Condition: Smoldering rage, with occasional frenzied outbursts.

Possible Motivation: If you were a mild-mannered small family car and some mad scientist shot you full of radioactive steroids that gave you 295 HP, a base sticker price north of thirty large, and a schnozz like that, you'd smolder with rage, too.

Defining Overblown High-Testosterone Action Movie Quote:
"What is best in life? . . . To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women."
(Conan the Barbarian)

--Cookie the Dog's Owner