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All cars will be electric soon enough. Get used to the wheezeing sound.
Great Cars
- Thread starter OfficePants
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All cars will be electric soon enough. Get used to the wheezeing sound.
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Acura make the ugliest cars ever lately. The new NSX notwithstanding.
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Yeah. Lexus, Acura, and Infinity all decided to pop up at the same time, but Lexus has overrun the other two by miles.
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It's a shame, as Infinity has a lot more potential. Much better motors. The new Q50 is a pretty sweet looker too.
Their SUV looks like Moby Dick and an Airbus 380 had a baby though.
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The Japanese are making some ugly shit these days. I really thing they are tailoring this shit for the North America market as they think we want round jelly roll Boulevard cruisers. Most SUV's are butt ugly. But then again, look at Audi's SUV's and Porsche's is not too far off in looking completely suck ass too
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Examples of Japanese ugly in your eye?
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Toyota's entire line up. Ugly Tundra, their SUV's. Nissan is shite, even the z is too rolly poly
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All the new Toyota, Honda and Nissan cars out? They pretty much went full on boxy American car, while the US makers all figured out how terrible that looks and are drawing a much sleeker line.
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Way too chunk and when they do have some lines they are still kind of ghey. Nissan GT-R track edition is a different story though.
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A couple of photos from a car museum in rural Japan that I visited a couple of years ago.
It was good to see that most of the cars were quite clearly driven regularly. There was a maintenance garage building next to the museum café with large windows that you could look through while having a snack and I could see a couple of men working on a Ferrari Testarossa and a Porsche 911. Most of the cars at the museum had racing harnesses fitted to them and when I spoke with one of the staff, he said that the museum owner - who owned all the cars in the museum's collection - liked to take the cars out on the track regularly.
It was good to see that most of the cars were quite clearly driven regularly. There was a maintenance garage building next to the museum café with large windows that you could look through while having a snack and I could see a couple of men working on a Ferrari Testarossa and a Porsche 911. Most of the cars at the museum had racing harnesses fitted to them and when I spoke with one of the staff, he said that the museum owner - who owned all the cars in the museum's collection - liked to take the cars out on the track regularly.
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A few more photos:
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A couple of photos from a car museum in rural Japan that I visited a couple of years ago.
It was good to see that most of the cars were quite clearly driven regularly. There was a maintenance garage building next to the museum café with large windows that you could look through while having a snack and I could see a couple of men working on a Ferrari Testarossa and a Porsche 911. Most of the cars at the museum had racing harnesses fitted to them and when I spoke with one of the staff, he said that the museum owner - who owned all the cars in the museum's collection - liked to take the cars out on the track regularly.
2000GT; sweet car. Shame it was made for such a short period
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Absolutely. It's the only example that I've ever seen in the metal, so to speak, and it is lovely.
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'Tis. Jay Leno has a convertible version I beleive
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If so, its like the only one in the world. Was made for that Bond movie.
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just looked up a list of Leno's cars and the 2000GT is not on it. my bad.
Edit:
found this. he drove it.
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Goddam this car was beautiful.
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I've got a soft spot for older Lancias.
It's not the same car, obviously, but back in the late 1990s, I helped a friend restore a 1969 Alfa Romeo GTV 1750. We managed to track down a lovely chrome steering wheel with a wood rim and various other period touches, including getting a pair of restored Recaro seats upholstered in leather with a striped fabric trim down the middle.
Damn, that was a great car, and it had an absolutely sensational exhaust note.
It's not the same car, obviously, but back in the late 1990s, I helped a friend restore a 1969 Alfa Romeo GTV 1750. We managed to track down a lovely chrome steering wheel with a wood rim and various other period touches, including getting a pair of restored Recaro seats upholstered in leather with a striped fabric trim down the middle.
Damn, that was a great car, and it had an absolutely sensational exhaust note.
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Those old Lancias have a few soft spots for you too - what with the rust and all. Ditto the Alfas.
While we are on Euro rustbuckets...
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Those old Lancias have a few soft spots for you too - what with the rust and all. Ditto the Alfas.
While we are on Euro rustbuckets...
I always loved the shape of the A110. The beauty of sportscars is in part due to their impracticality, finicky behaviour, build quality and other quirks. This one had it in spades.
A lot like menswear, no?
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I've still got a 1990 Mazda MX-5 (Miata in North America) in the garage, and it gets driven occasionally. Certainly impractical, but thankfully has none of the other traits mentioned above.
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Well, once the Japanese starter using better steel, that coupled with their reliability eliminated rust and bits falling off.
Way more "cottage built" for euro brands.
Fix It Again Tony!
Even BMW, remember their thermal reactors instead of catalytic converters that always cracked?
But then the Japanese never got the pure sex of Italian or even British styling; only once in a while.
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BM Trouble-You.
I have an old D Citroen sitting in the garage at home. Occasionally start it up to send some blue smoke signals over to my neighbours. It gets a few looks and nods of approval when you take it out on the road, right before the tow truck arrives.
I have an old D Citroen sitting in the garage at home. Occasionally start it up to send some blue smoke signals over to my neighbours. It gets a few looks and nods of approval when you take it out on the road, right before the tow truck arrives.
Pauly Chase
Hip Dairy Farmer
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A few more photos:
Prefer this Bugatti than the current Vyron
There was private seller in Kansas City a few years ago selling an unmodded '97 6 speed turbo Mark IV Supra for only 45k. It had 13k original miles. Only wish I had cash on hand.
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How could I omit one from my own past? Not great in any measureable way, but great.
No friggin trunk, no cover on the glove box, a wacky transverse leaf spring front suspension that the engine sat behind. Bumpers were purely ornamental, and the heavy mechanical-link-activated rotating frog-eye headlight buckets were the sex when they worked. Fun-fact: that headlight-flipping lever on the center console looks like a knife handle to cops.
The car Maxwell Smart drove a bit, the Opel GT
No friggin trunk, no cover on the glove box, a wacky transverse leaf spring front suspension that the engine sat behind. Bumpers were purely ornamental, and the heavy mechanical-link-activated rotating frog-eye headlight buckets were the sex when they worked. Fun-fact: that headlight-flipping lever on the center console looks like a knife handle to cops.
The car Maxwell Smart drove a bit, the Opel GT
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This is very, very impressive engineering feat. About 1/2 way in you get an understanding of how the car is able to perform the way it does, and it really is amazing.
What if I told you a 300hp race car with 2 x 10cm front tires about 50 cm apart with springs so small the came from a mountain bike, and the steering rod was 1.5mm thick? It's very impressive.
What if I told you a 300hp race car with 2 x 10cm front tires about 50 cm apart with springs so small the came from a mountain bike, and the steering rod was 1.5mm thick? It's very impressive.
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What a great read. Chris Harris is the guy that does a lot of the tests I've posted here. I'm very impressed with his candor about the Ferrari machine.
Unfortunately, this message control bullshit is a global phenomena and Ferrari are just following along because, well, people accept it. Chris is probably the best auto journalist going at the moment.
http://jalopnik.com/5760248/how-ferrari-spins
Unfortunately, this message control bullshit is a global phenomena and Ferrari are just following along because, well, people accept it. Chris is probably the best auto journalist going at the moment.
http://jalopnik.com/5760248/how-ferrari-spins
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Ferrari has been full of shit for years, this isn't really news.
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Maybe, but it is for me. I didn't know any of this went on. You know when you said in that other thread it was stuff everyone already knew? This was one of them.
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Yeah, I didn't mean it that way. I like Chris Harris stuff too. I meant more as an institution, Ferrari is full of shit.
Possibly because I despise most of their cars. The F12 notwithstanding.
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The F40 too.
To me Luca Montozemelo sorta represented Ferrari as a lot of slick talk and shiny shoes. Their cars sorta became the Gucci of automobiles: storied past, still good quality, but a name that outweighs their product.
In this respect companies like Koningsegg and Pagani are eating their lunch. But Ferrari had that period, and in reality these cars are all about their collector value anyway, very few ever get driven much.
Irrespective, it a pretty fucking douchey to juice up your cars for journalists. I had accepted that their product was now slightly more normalized, in the way Porche and Aston Martin became, and it's not always a bad thing. Reliability is valuable, and so when the era when Ferrari was the GT40, you had amazing cars respective of their rivals, but they broke like a joke.
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Yessir.
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The reality is a lot of manufacturers play this game. This is why you have to take the test results with a grain of salt.
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Man. Sad.
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It is. Porsche has been known to do it and so have American makers.
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Carrington? How fucking terrible are the British tabloids? I read an article the other day that talked about "Saville" Row.
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That's insane.
I am a bit tired of the "horsepower wars", though. Let's get back to "adding lightness", as the late, great Colin Chapman used to say of his Lotus cars. Let's see some well-designed, really light and nimble cars.