Car Lust

The Bobby Darin Dream Car (1960 DiDia 150)

I spotted Bobby Darin's startling 1960 DiDia 150 at The Museum of Transportation in St. Louis, Missouri. It was just one of several surprises in the Earl C. Lindberg Automobile Center (no relation to Charles A. Lindbergh of the Spirit of St. Louis fame). We weren't sure what to expect, but we were greeted by a very nice couple that owned and were keeping watch over the place. They had every answer ready, and were rightfully proud of their compact but fascinating automotive collection.

I was startled when I saw the Darin car. It took me back to The Simpsons episode where Homer designed a car called ... The Homer. Stuck somewhere between a 1950s show car and the Batmobile, here sat something that Elvis and Liberace would have probably ran away from. Brash metallic red paint (originally 30 coats with real ground diamonds for sparkle), tail fins befitting a Boeing 747, and a glass cockpit that no air conditioning system could ever cool, the boldness of the design is totally unique.

Lamenting the Dodge Demon ...

Submitted by Dale Chang

Since the Dodge Demon hasn't hit the production floor, let alone the showroom floor, lamenting its demise might seem a bit odd. However, there was so much promise in the Demon's design concept, and it seemed so perfect a candidate totransition into a production vehicle, I couldn't help but keep an eye on its development. Its clean, muscular lines, light weight, rear-wheel-drive chassis, and a surprisingly understated interior made this little roadster less a concept vehicle than a pre-production mock-up. Or so it was assumed by everyone at the time.

According to Autoweek, last year Tom Lasorda of Chrysler indicated that in order to "broaden its global appeal" and meet stricter emission standards all in one fell swoop, Chrysler would base the Demon production vehicle on a Chinese front-wheel-drive platform designed by Chery.

Someone please explain to me the logic in this.

Last Rides

For most of us, a hearse the last car we'll ever ride in. For a small minority, it's a daily driver. Out of all the strange automotive obsessions we post about here at Car Lust, owning and driving hearses has to be among the oddest--at least at first glance. Well, okay, maybe at second glance, too.

But there is a method to this apparent madness. Hearses appear to be just basic station wagons, albeit with some specialized features not generally found on the family hauler. But this is not really the case. Heareses are very specialized vehicles built and outfitted to perform a very specific function, in a perfectly efficient fashion, at what are very stressful and emotional times for those who must rely on them. Perhaps no other vehicle has been at the center of some of the most profound and saddening moments in peoples' lives ... and simultaneously been the butt of so many jokes.

First let's get the jokes out of the way:

• No, they don't make His and Hearse models

• Yes, you can have a bier while driving one

• Heavy drinkers may or may not put the quart before the hearse

Now that that's out of the way (for now, at least; the very word "hearse" lends itself so easily to a virtually limitless array of puns), we can begin to delve into the weird and wacky world of the hearse enthusiast.

Car Lust Sweepstakes: Win an Actron PocketScan Plus

A couple of weeks ago I put up a short post describing our cool new e-mail subscription feature that allows you to read all of Car Lust's scintillating content from the privacy of your own inbox. Well, if that wasn't enough incentive on its own, our blog team thought it would be neat to give something tangible to our e-mail subscribers--in this case, an Actron PocketScan Plus code scanner. You can sign up immediately to the right of this post on the Car Lust blog, or click here.

If you're not sure what that is, check out the product link. Basically, it's an on-board diagnostic code scanner. If your car is displaying a check engine light, for example, you plug in this tool, and it displays the car's trouble code. Look up the code online, and you'll know what the problem is. Code scanners are must-have tools for the serious DIY shadetree enthusiast, but even if you take your car in to the shop, it's nice to be educated on the problem behind the check engine light before you throw yourself on the shop's tender mercies.

1958 Edsel

We recently celebrated Epic Fail Week Week and a Couple Days Fortnight here at Car Lust, our tribute to vehicles (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8) that, for whatever reason, failed miserably on the roads and in the marketplace. In all that celebration of failure, we failed (get it?) to mention the big one, the one everybody's heard of, the one the Washington Post called "the most colossal, stupendous and legendary blunder in the history of American marketing," the Alpha Dog, Queen Mother, and Undisputed Heavyweight Champion of Epic Automotive Fail.

You know exactly what car I'm talking about.

Requiem for a Dakota

Every car owner, sooner or later, reaches a point with their vehicles where they have to make a decision: Do you cough up thousands of dollars to keep your car going, or do you just take it out back, shoot it, and get a new one?  When faced with this decision, a number of issues come into play:

• How good a vehicle can I get for the repair price? Will it run better than the one I have?
• How long until the next big repair?
• Does the vehicle meet my needs well enough to justify putting money into it?
• How much do I like the vehicle?

Today, on my way to work, my 1993 Dodge Dakota made a noise from the transmission area that convinced me to pull over and get towed back home. After a little bit of troubleshooting, I figured out what the problem was--the overdrive was shot. 

At first, I flirted with the idea of fixing the overdrive myself. I read the Chilton manual's procedure on removing the transmission. I searched online for the service manual for my Torqueflite-inspired A500 transmission, then pored over its 94 pages intently, searching for hope. It turns out that, on the A500, the main transmission is a separate unit from the overdrive module; consequently, the worst that I would have to do is replace the overdrive module.

Cimarron Toilet Humor

Proving that there is no low that Car Lust will not reach, I'm proud to present the first verifiable bit of Car Lust-themed toilet humor:

If you don't get the joke, this will help.

Dodge Aspen/Plymouth Volaré

This is a compact. That Family Truckster-colored monstrosity to our right is a compact on drugs. 

Any questions?

One of the stranger facts in American automotive history is that, in 1976, Chrysler was able to sell the F-body Dodge Aspen and Plymouth Volaré as "compact cars" with a straight face. To put these cars into a more modern perspective, the coupe version of the Aspen is 198.8 inches long. A brand new Chrysler 300C, on the other hand, is only 196.8 inches long--the "compact" Aspen is two inches longer than a modern full-size luxury car. That station wagon to the right, meanwhile, checks in at 201.2 inches, which is only an inch shorter than a base trim Escalade.

At the time, of course, none of this was unusual. A year later, GM would release the New Chevrolet, spearheaded by the "downsized" 212-inch long Caprice, and people would marvel at how small it was.  Indeed, this collective hallucinatory perception of space-time would eventually lead to Disco Demolition Night and the War on Drugs.

Kaiser Henry J

The ill-fated Hudson Jet has been called "The Car That Torpedoed Hudson." However, it's not the only car from the 1950s that can legitimately be charged with patricide against its manufacturer. There's a fair case to be made that the "Henry J" compact of 1951-54, intended to be the Model T of its day, was a major contributor to Kaiser exiting the passenger car business in North America.

Chevrolet Citation

If a research company conducted a scientific survey of Americans' opinions of the worst cars ever sold in this country, I would bet the top results would be made up of some combination of the usual suspects--the Yugo; the AMC Pacer and Gremlin; the Chevrolet Vega and Chevette; and the Ford Pinto. Those six stinkers are justly famous for their automotive ineptitude and would likely dominate the list. But I would guess that, trailing just behind those all-stars, the Chevrolet Citation and its General Motors X-car brethren would slot in a solid seventh on the definitive list of automotive awfulness.

My head tells me that this popular disapprobation is well-justified. The X-cars were deficient in many of the criteria that cars are judged upon--namely, they drove poorly, they weren't well-built, and the design was fundamentally flawed. Add to that list of negatives the huge investment GM made in the X-car, the public's sky-high expectations for the car, and, paradoxically, the X-car's strong sales early in its life.

The net result was that GM paid billions of late-1970s dollars to give an entire generation of American car buyers an incredibly convincing first-hand lesson that American cars weren't worth buying. If, as I've argued, General Motors spent three solid decades trying to dissuade customers from buying its family sedans, the X-car can be seen as the most effective effort in that campaign. By any logical set of criteria, the X-car deserves its inclusion in Epic Fail Week. In fact, it should arguably be the headline act in this tuneless concert of shameful failure.

Regular readers of Car Lust can feel free to begin rolling their eyes here, because what's coming next is as predictable as chilly weather in Antarctica. You see, while my head is convinced, my heart thinks the Citation and its much-maligned siblings are interesting, pretty little cars that don't deserve the level of abuse they have endured. The court of popular opinion has already tried and convicted the Citation, but I'd like to reopen the case and defend the poor, cringing X-car.