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Not very shockingly, the Mercedes-Benz 450SEL beat up on the Pontiac Bonneville in our 6.9 Liters Of Misery Choose Your Eternity poll on Friday, no doubt because voters were counting camshafts or dollars in the original purchase price or something. Today we're going to have the traditional post-24 Hours Of LeMons PCH, only instead of letting you choose between the cars that finished #1 and #2 (in this case, a Supra and a Jetta) we're going to choose between two cars we really, really want to see someone bring to a LeMons race. They were expensive when new, featured sophisticated DOHC V8s and rear-wheel-drive, and came equipped with dizzyingly complicated electronics and plush luxury gear… yet it's possible to pick either one up for a LeMons-friendly price today! We've seen the Porsche 928 in the Hel l Garage before ; in fact, we've had more 928s here than any other car! Why is that, you ask? They were insanely expensive, insanely hard to fix, and insanely (for their...
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Welcome to Project Car Hell , where you choose your eternity by selecting the project that's the coolest... and the most hellish! I really wanted to call today's matchup Édition Débâcle , but the heads of our beloved Server Hamsters tend to explode when they're forced to deal with weird furrin letters in our headlines, and headless hamsters don't run on wheels. Never mind the English-only hamsters, though, because we've got to choose between two equally impossible desirable French cars. I tell you what, every time I see that three-across seating layout of the Matra Bagheera , it makes me ache for a Bagheera to call my own. You figure all the possible automotive seating layouts had been established a century ago, and then here come the French with a totally new approach. Sure, it's a crazy approach, but that's why we love French cars so much! The Murena was the successor to the Bagheera, and the seller of this '80 Matra Murena is quick to point out that "Only...
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The French car beat the German one in our last Choose Your Eternity matchup , which means we need to give France's cross-Channel rival an opportunity to snatch the PCH Trophy (which features several rods hanging out the side and a spreading pool of oil below) today. We're going with something a bit different this time, however; ever since the What Should Mad_Science Drive To Work QOTD, we've been thinking about non-petroleum-fueled car projects. Not boring ol' electric cars that can barely buzz up to highway speed, or seen-one-ya-seen-em-all veggie-oil-powered Mercedes-Benzes, though. Something fun! Something... HELL! There's no law that says you have to run dinosaur juice in your diesel; vegetable oil or animal fat works just fine! Oh sure, some worrywarts will tell you that you need to use some kind of witches' brew of methanol, lye, and who-knows-what-all and make actual biodiesel, but that's only if you want to run the stuff in an unmodified diesel engine...
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With today's Engine of the Day being the AMC inline six, it seemed only good and proper that we have a Choose Your Eternity dilemma featuring a pair of vehicles powered by that fine powerplant. It's also good to have a couple of American cars, which I really can't use very often in this series because the stuff out of Detroit is too simple and parts obtainment is too easy to make for true hell. Not so with Kenosha products, though- even though the drivetrain parts are easy to find (thanks to the Jeep connection), the body and interior components are another story entirely. And today's trip into Hell isn't just about restoring an old AMC- it's about hot-rodding the six-cylinder engine so you get at least 300 reliable horsepower out of it. The road out of Hell is steep, you see, and you'll need plenty of power to climb out of the boiling sulfur! When you see an American rear-drive car with a big fiberglass hood scoop, brightly-colored racing stripes, and rear tires...
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In one of the most one-sided matchups ever, the Isuzu Impulse RS Turbo whomped the Bagged Shaved P'Up by nearly 80/20 in Friday's Choose Your Eternity poll. Now let's edge away from the moldering corpse of Isuzu America and head over to one of the top- if not the top- Project Car Hell superpowers: the homeland of Joe Lucas, Prince of Darkness! We could argue for days about whether Britain, France, or Italy deserves the title of Hell Project Homeland, but there's no arguing with the fact that the Rover SD1 might offer one of the best possible combinations of abysmal Anglo-Malaise build quality and inherent what-the-hell-is- that? coolness you're going to find in North America (and I'm sure they're getting hard to find in Blighty these days, too, what with the rust and all). It's big, it's got a V8, and you can have this 1980 SD1 for cheap! There's no reserve price, and the starting bid is just $1,500. The seller wants you to know this: "By the...
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As we all know by now, the '65 Marlin stomped the '66 Charger like the NVA stomped the ARVN back in the day, according to yesterday's Choose Your Eternity poll . Of course, it just isn't fair to stack up an AMC against a homely pre-Bullitt Charger... but what really isn't fair is that we haven't had a PCH for the cheapskates for quite a while. As we keep meaning to say on a T-shirt, this is where Bondo is thick and wallets are thin! So count out 150 greasy one-dollar bills and break out every tool you own... This whole "car with engine" thing is so overrated, we say. See, when you get a car with just a gaping void under the hood, you have nothing but opportunity . No limits! And that's what you should keep in mind when you hand over $150 for this 1968 Mercedes sedan . The owner says it's an SL, but it's not; if you squint real hard at the Blur-O-Matic photos you can almost make out some flavor of W114 sedan. Because the photos are something less than informative, you'll have to take the...
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After listening to the Jack Astro & the Asscrackistanis hit single , we approach the results of yesterday's Mix-n-Match Engine Swap Hell poll with a new understanding. The Ferarri-powered Porsche 912 didn't win because the swap process itself might be slightly less hellish than, say, the Series 60 Morris. No, it won because the spirit behind the swap is most in line with our purist-offending sensibilities! Yes, that's it! So now that there's a howling, torch-and-pitchfork-wielding mob of worshipers of German and Italian machinery clamoring to nail our hides to the wall, let's keep up the pressure, shall we? Please to give Signor Lieberman credit for dreaming up this matchup of a couple of his all-time favorites; this could have been a QOTD but I cruelly snatched the cars from his grasp and hurled them into the abyss that is Project Car Hell . Feel like bombing around some dirt roads in a screaming, get-sideways, turbocharged, classic all-wheel-drive rallying Audi , in fact the very Audi...
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