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You don't see any Honda 600s on the street these days, although they didn't sell too badly back in the early 70s . You see them at car shows , and that's about it. That leads me to wonder where this example I spotted at an East Bay self-service wrecking yard has been hiding all these years. It looks like the interior is packed with engine parts from several other Honda 600s (or maybe Honda motorcycles), so maybe this was a "last resort" parts car that was finally used up by a 600 freak and discarded like an empty sake bottle. Not many parts left, but a few bits and pieces might be worth salvaging. galleryPost('DOTJHonda600', 12, 'Honda 600 Down On The Junkyard');
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I'd really like to shoot more Malaise Era Civics, but it seems most of them have been crushed by now, victims of their own reliability. The problem is that these cars just did their jobs without showing a huge amount of lovable personality, and thus it wasn't much like shooting Old Yeller when an owner's coldhearted fix-it-or-scrap-it calculus came into play on a broken 20-year-old Civic. Well, that's my theory, anyway. So, here's a '79 that's beaten all the odds and kept on doing its job; I photographed this car just across the street from the '77 Volvo 244DL , making this block a little museum for Malaise Era imports. I've driven many of these Civics, and they're actually pretty fun to drive. Noisy and bouncy, sure, and other vehicles tower over you, but the late-70s Civic didn't feel stricken by the same level of Malaise that was hammering American and European cars of the time. The CVCC engine meant Honda didn't have to put catalytic converters...
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newVideoPlayer("78_Honda_Civic_Hatch_476.flv", 494, 410,""); No car illustrates the concept of Long Term Model Bloat better than the Civic (for a good example of Short Term Model Bloat, compare the 1970 Mercury Cougar with the 1974 version). Here's Honda boasting about the ability of the '78 Civic hatch's ability to swallow four shopping bags. The '78 Civic hatchback weighed 1,708 pounds... about 1,000 pounds less than the '08 Civic sedan .
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Technically, the Peugeot Mi16 beat the Mercedes-Benz 6.9 in last Friday's Choose Your Eternity poll , but we're talking 327 to 317 votes here. When all is said and done, however, France still needs to take on Britain in a PCH Superpower Challenge... but we're postponing that apocalyptic battle for another day, because tipster EdNiedermeyer sent in a mighty Wankelized contender from not-often-seen-in-PCH Japan (earning a half-credit towards a Project Car Hell Tipster T-shirt in the process), and we've found a Rotarian opponent that stacks up pretty well against it. So throw those pistons in the trash and stagger into the sumo ring to face your 800-pound opponent, because it's Rotary Swap Hell Day! We dove into the searing flames of Hayabusa Honda 600 Hell a few months back, but the problem with the Hayabusa is that it has pistons . What a Honda 600 really needs is an engine with no reciprocating mass and an even more deadly potential power-to-weight ratio than the Hayabusa...
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