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.

$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.

Carspotters' Challenge #41--Longroof Night at the Movies

For this week, let's try something different. This is the trailer to the forthcoming documentary film Wagonmasters:

And here's a sequence from the movie itself, shot at the 2011 Hershey Auto Show:

See anything interesting in either clip? (Hint: the white Pontiac has appeared in Car Lust before.)

Sam Smartt and Christopher Zaluski made the film as part of their "homework" while earning their MFAs at Wake Forest University. It's been screened at some film festivals, and they're shopping it around for TV broadcast. Expect the DVD to hit the streets sometime next year.

Looks like our kind of film, about our kind of people.

--Cookie the Dog's Owner

October 29 Weekly Open Thread: "♫ A Hearse Is A Hearse (What's Worse, What's Worse) ♫"

Hearses aren't supposed to be funny, but one look at these beauties reveals something of a morbid sense of humor, I suppose. I'll bet they are expensive as well... so much so that one would be buried in debt to pay for it. I mean... you'd be coughin' up money for years just for the gas. But after all, people are just dying to get into these things, right?

"In Praise Of The Hated GM Small Cars Week:" 1971-'73 Vega GT Kammback Wagon

We here at Car Lust have treated the Chevy Vega rather poorly, as even our above banner image suggests (Which just happens to also be a '73 Vega GT). Much of that was well-deserved, but this post is not here to rehash. Rather, let's take a positive look at the car's early years before "it" happened.

The Vega GT Kammback wagon example on the left was seen fairly recently... that's a Prius behind it. Somebody in San Francisco (Please note the wheels turned into the curb, per city law) saw the car and must have appreciated its heritage. And from the overall condition of that car, it looks like a great candidate for restoration.

If we could time travel back to the early 1970s, we would see how good the Vega was meant to be. The new car was, in its own way... pretty cool. I remember them sparkling in the showrooms, and people were crawling all over them. They were good looking, youthful, and fresh, giving the buyer something new to believe in. So much so that a million Vegas were sold in the first two years. Heck, with Motor Trend naming the Vega the 1971 Car Of The Year, what else did one need for an endorsement?

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:

1972 Pontiac GTO Wagon

My brother contributor Big Chris went to his local county fair and came upon what appears to be one of the rarest muscle cars in the civilized world: a 1972 Pontiac GTO station wagon.

"Styling and the Experimental Car" (1964)

Submited for your consideration, a Ford promotional film from 1964, Styling and the Experimental Car.

The Aurora concept wagon, which was our subject on Tuesday, is featured in great detail from 9:39 to 12:00.

--Cookie the Dog's Owner

Ford Aurora

Station wagons are a bit out of fashion these days, their role as middle-class family truckster now largely filled by minivans and minivans with plausible deniability SUVs and crossovers. Even so, they are still in production in the twenty-first century. Maybe it's just my age showing, but I always thought that twenty-first century station wagons would look like, y'know, something from the twenty-first century. There's nothing wrong with the styling of a Subaru Outback or a VW Jetta SportWagen or an Acura TSX, but none of them look truly "space age."

If you want a big old traditional family station wagon with that twenty-minutes-into-the-future vibe, you have to go back in time to 1964.

Breaking News... Pontiac Is Coming BACK!

GM is on a comeback, folks. They almost pulled the sheet over this mega company a couple of years ago, but now there's revitalization and growth. Even the empty GM Assembly Plant near me in Spring Hill, Tennessee, formerly known as the Saturn plant, is revving up to build the Chevy Equinox (The Saturn VUE and Chevy Traverse have previously been built there), as well as a vehicle that hasn't been announced yet.

But the excitement about the return of Pontiac is overwhelming. And though this bombshell has not been announced publicly yet, I recently had the chance to talk with an "insider/consultant" from the plant that wishes to remain anonymous for obvious reasons... let's call him "Mr. X." The information he gave me was surprising to say the least, and the plan is so simple that it just seems so "right."

All I can say about him is that he's British, and it reflects in his words. And for what it's worth, "CL" is/are my initials, and does not stand for "Car Lust," though I guess it could. So after a while (And a few beers!), our conversation soon turned into something of an interview; this is pretty much how it went:

CL: Wait a minute... I am both shocked and amazed. GM is bringing back Pontiac!?!?