Car Lust

Some Cars Just Should NOT Have 4 Doors

"You're travelling through another dimension. A dimension not only of sight and sound, but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. At the signpost up ahead, your next stop... the twilight zone." --Rod Serling

Yes, folks, some cars just should not be 4-doors. A lot of folks felt this way when the Dodge Charger was reintroduced in the 2006 model year, but we did get used to it. For the most part. I know the cops sure did.

And usually, if a car has a back seat, I'd like back doors there. I learned my lesson in a 2-door Chevette about leaning forward to let folks in the back.

But there are some cars that no amount of time will ever pass to let them be. They are surely from, or should go to, the twilight zone.

1971-1973 Buick Centurion vs. 1971-1973 Buick LeSabre

"Uh-LLLLadies... and... Gen-tle-men! On the left, weighing 4,329 lbs. and standing 54 inches in height with a wheelbase of 124 inches, we have the 1973 Buick Centurion. And on the right, also weighing 4,329 lbs. and standing 54 inches and with a wheelbase of 124 inches, we have the 1973 Buick LeSabre."

"So, from the Car Lust home office here in the great United States of America..."

"... Uh-Let's get ready to rum-bullllllll!"

Quite a while back in a discussion here at Car Lust, we swapped stories comparing the similarities and differences of Buick's Wildcat/Centurion vs. their LeSabre. If memory serves, the outcome more or less stated that the Wildcat/Centurion was Buick's "sporty" full-sized car while the LeSabre was the more practical one. Of course, the Electra 225, Buick's flagship luxury model, had enough differences to not be included in the discussion.

David's Greatest Hit: The 1992 Mercury Marquis

Nathan of Brainfertilizer Fame:  I never met David. We didn't spend extra time talking via emails, and I never once heard his voice.  We never shared a special friendship above all others.  But we shared something: a silly love for cars that didn't always deserve the passion.

John Donne said, "Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."

Do not ask for whom the car horn honks; it honks for thee.

I hope that my alteration of the quote isn't taken as a lack of respect.  It is my first reaction to try to lighten serious moods, to make it easier to carry the burden.

At times, as I've participated in various online communities, I've wondered what would happen if I died.  How would anyone know?  How would I be remembered?  Would I be missed?  Would my absence even be noticed?

David, you are remembered.  You are missed.  This man, whom I have never met...his friendship, the bond created through a common love, touched me in ways I never realized until he was gone.

$100,000 Challenge, Take 2: Nathan of Brainfertilizer Fame's Max Cars Edition

After reading Chris Hafner's post, I realized that if I hadn't gone so Mazda-heavy, I could have gotten some great 20- and 30-year-old cars in my garage.

I wanted to try again, with a fresh slate.  I hope you'll indulge me, and I hope you even find it entertaining.

But I've got to change the rules, slightly.  I'll still have limitations, because limitations help channel and inspire creativity.

First change: no "car currently on sale" requirement.  All cars need to be 20 to 30 years old.  Maybe 15, at most.  The point is to get cars that are old enough to be great value, but not so old as to be "classic".  The point is to catch cars near the bottom part of the trough, where the value has declined as much as possible, but not to the point where the value starts to rebound from rarity/coolness.

Second change: I have to have exactly 20 cars.  No more, no less.  The point is to see how close I can get to the $100k total without going over, for exactly 20 cars.

Third change: All car prices will be according to the NADA "clean retail" price, but here's the twist: if you can manage to find a 20-year-old car in "clean retail" condition, it won't really be ready to go.  The coolant system will be having problems, or it will consume oil as lustily as Vikings drank mead, or the paint will be starting to flake off, or a few minor rust points, or the alignment will be horribly off, or...you get the picture.  A 20-year-old car that wasn't lovingly restored to new condition is going to have some issues.  So right off the bat, I will budget $2000 per car to get it up to speed.  That might go to a tune-up, or a paint job, or a replacement door + paint, or an alignment, or a new radiator, etc.  That might be an underestimation, but we are starting with a "clean retail" example, so I think an average of $2000 will work.

That leaves me with $60,000 to get 20 cars.  So I'm looking for cars I can get for averaging just about $3000 each.

That's the rules I have.  Let's see what I come up with.

$100,000 Fantasy Garage Challenge: Chris Hafner

When Cookie the Dog's Owner proposed the $100K Fantasy Garage challenge, I was immediately intrigued. Who among us has not dreamed about which cars we'd purchase if only we had the funds available? This challenge is a license to mentally catalog our old and new favorites, weigh pros and cons, and show our tastes and brand loyalties through the creation of a carefully curated collection.

The genius in this challenge is the $100K value limit. Without that, we wouldn't have anything to keep us tied to reality. After all, why add a Mazda to your list when you could add a Maybach? Why add a CRX when you could add an FXX? But the $100K limit, combined with the requirement to include one brand new car, is almost perfect. A cool hundred grand sounds like a lot of money, but it doesn't go as far as one might imagine. I could easily concoct a scenario in which two very nice but still fairly ordinary vehicles consume the whole budget, so turning this into a true fantasy garage requires some creativity.

I chose to put my own spin on this challenge by laying out a series of tasks that I want the cars in my garage to fulfill, and then picking the cars I thought would best fill those roles. This required a lot of revision, as I shifted resources from one bucket to the next, and leaves me without some of my all-time favorites (omitting the Porsche 928, E28 BMW M5, and GMC Typhoon was pretty painful). Overall, though, I'm pretty pleased with the results.

Since in some cases I'm linking off to listings on Craigslist and eBay there's a chance that those links will be dead fairly quickly. My apologies for that, but I'll try to capture some of the pertinent details in the text so that the story doesn't suffer too much.

$100,000 Fantasy Garage Challenge: Nathan of Brainfertilizer Fame

Let's start off with the cars my family needs:

2014 Mazda6:

This very nearly was a 2010 Mazda6.  I love my current daily driver car.  It has plenty of power, plenty of room for 4 adults on long trips, handles amazingly well, looks nice, and is generally very satisfying to drive in almost any circumstance.  However, the rules state you have to have one brand new car, and after thinking long and hard, I decided my daily driver would be the best choice to select a brand new vehicle.  The main reason for the upgrade is that the brand new Mazda6 looks nice, has plenty of interior room, has plenty of power, and handles just as well as my 2010...but with the SkyActiv technology, its gas mileage improves by nearly 30%.  To have a non-hybrid family sports sedan that gets 38 mpg highway is very exciting to me, because I am not a fan of the massive batteries necessary for hybrids: the environmental impact of creating, storing, and disposing of the battery pack really bothers me, and I don't like the idea of having to spend several thousand dollars to replace the batteries to keep the car in less than 10 years.

So this will be my daily driver.

Car Disgust: 1997-1999 Oldsmobile Cutlass

(Submitted by Car Lust reader and commenter Al Sapp)

In the late 80’s, Pontiac’s ad campaigns forced themselves right into your face. One such commercial, seen on this blog a few years back, featured a kick-ass hair metal jingle, with people dressed in all white power sliding Trans-Ams and Fieros around dark neon-y streets, high fiving, and pointlessly jumping into the back seats of drop top Sunbirds. The whole theme for all the tin Indians back then was “We build excitement!”  However, this was still a period when the Firebird’s speedometer still only went up to 85. Of course, Pontiac paid no attention to that, and still stressed the “buy a Grand Am or get left in the dust” spiel.

Down the hall at Oldsmobile, things were just a little bit different. From commercials ranging from a car singing about the fact that it “knows the roads from Oregon to Maine”; ads claiming “this is the new generation of Oldsmobile.” And then there’s the one we all fall over laughing at: “This is not your father’s Oldsmobile.” (Note from TCG [Chuck]: Al, I inserted that link; that's my house at 16:00.)

Olds tried telling everybody that they didn’t build bland, dull, boring cars. This was just plain ol’ simple denial. They didn’t build interesting cars. They built hoary cars, and labeled them exciting. The reason we laugh at “This is not father’s Oldsmobile” is because it’s a good source of irony. When Olds was running these ads, the cars they were building were your father’s Oldsmobile.

Studebaker Drivers Club Ohio Chapter Meet, Tallmadge, Ohio, August 25, 2012

I spent several hours wandering around the Studebaker Drivers Club meet in Tallmadge, just east of Akron, on Saturday, August 25 and came away with a pocket full of dead NiCad batteries and an SD card full of photos. Here's some of what I saw:

Test Drive--2012 Chevrolet Malibu LT

At the beginning of last month, a 60-foot tree in my yard was shredded by high winds, dropping a couple thousand board-feet of lumber on the four cars then parked in my driveway. When it came time for my wife's Mazda 5 to go into the shop for roof repairs, the insurance company procured a rental car for her, a 2012 Chevrolet Malibu LT sedan.

We had the car over two weeks, and while my wife was behind the wheel for most of that, I did get a chance to drive it a bit. Here's what I found:

Our Cars--Mom's 1996 Buick Century

Submitted by Car Lust reader and commenter Al Sapp

*Author's note: In order to fully understand this post, it's worth noting that, at the time of writing, I’m 14.

When we think about the 1982-1996 Buick Century, not that we do often, we often think of the driver's age being somewhere between 76 and dead. And you'd be right. My mother bought this prosthetic limb beige Light Sand Rift Metallic '96 Century from a 94 year old family friend back in 2007. She was looking to replace her trusty but unneeded 1997 Dodge Caravan SWB. My brother and I had aged to the point where a minivan just wasn't necessary.

When she came into possession of the Buick, it had something like 38k on the odometer. Without sounding cliché, it was only ever driven to church on Sundays.