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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! Last time, the '72 Stutz Blackhawk blackjacked the Buickborghini and stuffed it in the trunk, for disposal in a hole in the desert later on (the way so many Blackhawk owners in Vegas solved their problems back in the day), according to the 71% of you who voted that way in the Choose Your Eternity poll. Today we're going to go with a couple of choices that allow me to use not-often-seen-in-PCH flags in the poll: Romania versus the Soviet Union! 1989 wasn't such a great year for Romanian strongman Nicolae Ceauşescu , but, even as the rabble beat down the jeweled doors to his palaces, he could console himself with the inspiring thought that the "Romanian Jeep," the ARO 244, was available for sale throughout the world. Even in the evil, decadent United States, a truck shopper could march right into a seedy office above a taxidermy shop in...
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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! The sporty Simca beat up on the magnificent Humber in our last Choose Your Eternity poll , meaning France gets the PCH Superpower trophy… once it's out of the shop, that is. Today we're going to look at the sort of cars that desperate motivated sellers often refer to as "head turners." You know, it's weird and sort of cool, but also sort of horrible… and wouldn't it be fun to own one? The Basement Lambo was great, but who's got that kind of time? You might not want a Fiero-based Fieroborghini , but how about something in between? Say, this tube-framed, turbo Buick V6-powered Lamborghini Countach replica (go here if the ad disappears), which is priced at a low, low, super-low $8,000! Now, part of the reason this car is so cheap might be that the general pall of loserness cast by the sword-sliced Muncie home invaders (see photo...
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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! Yesterday, we saw a 6.9 Benz face defeat for the first time in Project Car Hell history, a feat that generally requires unholy intervention by the Prince Of Darkness himself, or at least the presence of Citroën badges. We've had a run of affordable Hell Projects lately, and that's fine… but sometimes we need to mainline some optimism and look at spending a few more bucks at the gateway to Gearhead Gehenna. We've had some PCH Lambos before, including a Diablo , another Diablo , an Urraco , an Espada , and another Espada. But we've never had the most Lamborghini-ish Lamborghini of them all, the ridiculously awesome Countach . Sure sure, the Countach would get eaten up by a lot of not-quite-supercar factory hot rods these days, but you still need one! The problem is finding one that's an affordable project, which isn't easy… but we've...
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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! It seems that the Japanese won't be celebrating an improbable victory over PCH Superpower Britain this time around, with the Land Rover beating the Nissan Patrol 57% to 43% in our poll . Today we're going to return to a couple of perennial PCH heavy hitters, cars that we all really really want , yet make us stagger back in awe and horror when contemplating the magnitude of the task they represent: the Mercedes-Benz 6.9 and the Jaguar V12! There are ordinary Project Car Hell vehicles, and then there are the heavyweights . The projects that, in the words of the prophet John in Revelations 20:10, will have you "thrown into the lake of burning sulfur, where the beast and the false prophet had been thrown. They will be tormented day and night for ever and ever." In fact, the Book Of Revelations is the only shop manual you'll need with a PCH...
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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! We had another too-close-to-call one yesterday, with the Toyota 4x4 Van and the Dodge Caravan Turbo locked in a 176-171 near-tie, according to the Choose Your Eternity poll . Today we're going to escape from Suburban Minivan Land and roll down the mean streets of the Early Gangsta Rap Era, with the kind of rides that Ice-T wannabes might have selected for high-speed runs to Vegas back in the day. And, yes, it's another upstart challenging a mighty PCH Superpower: Japan versus Italy! It's bad enough shoving a Japanese car into the PCH ring with a Ferrari, but a Honda ? However, when you want an NSX yet you don't want to spend more than 20 grand… well, you have to figure that the Soichiro Stamp Of Approval was probably removed from the car (with 50-grit sandpaper) a few years back. And so it is with this 1992 Acura NSX (go here if the ad disappears...
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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! Last time we had another PCH Superpower upset, with Germany beating Britain in the Glas Versus Lotus challenge . Britain will come back strong, of course, but for now Germany can enjoy the pool of oil gathering beneath the Project Car Hell trophy. Fast forward to today; since it's Maximum Minivan Day , we're going to have Maximum Project Minivan Hell. For a Toyota to qualify for Project Car Hell, it must be rusty, rare, and packed with impossible-to-find options. We've found all three with this 1989 Toyota 4x4 van (go here if the ad disappears), which has some body rot (in a refreshing display of honesty, the seller sums it up in a single word: "Rusty") and the super-rare-in-North-America 4x4 drivetrain option. There's an assortment of minor (you hope) repairs to do, and it's nearly certain possible that the overheating problem...
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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! We all knew that the Nixonian Cadillac Fleetwood limo had no chance against a Citroën, and our most recent Choose Your Eternity poll confirmed our assumptions. Any Citroën is tough to beat in a Project Car Hell Challenge, due to the off-the-scale readings Citroëns always register on both the Hell-O-Meter and the Cool-O-Meter. And a Citroën SM? Forget it! Even with a fairly nice SM, you'd need some kind of weapons grade project to have any hope against the car made by the French and Italian governments, the pure Essence Of Hell Project centrifuged down from a large quantity of seriously cool machinery and then offered at a price that draws you in like a black hole dragging you past its event horizon. Well, guess what? Even if we'd found an ad for the actual Apollo 16 Lunar Rover , hauled back to Earth by a North Korean spaceship, burned up on reentry...
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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! In our last Hell Project matchup, we learned that two-thirds of Jalopnik readers would choose a Mustang-based Fauxrrari over an Integra-based one as their ride of choice in the Lake Of Fire. The Lake Of Fire, as we know, is rough on body panels… but not nearly as rough as it is on brain-scramblingly complex German electronics. That means we're going to return to Hell Über Alles , with a couple of precision-engineered German machines with bargain-of-a-lifetime price tags. The BMW E23 745i was quite a machine, with the 252 horses churned out by its turbocharged/intercooled 3.2 or 3.4 liter I6 representing a very impressive figure for its era, but they weren't sold in North America. BMW shoppers had to make do with the naturally-aspirated 733i and 735i over here… that is, unless a buyer was willing to brave the wilds of the gray-market import jungle...
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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! After a 24 Hours Of LeMons race, I like to do a PCH pitting the #1 and #2 cars against each other, but this time it's going to be a bit different. You see, the #2 car in Houston was a 2nd-gen Camaro, and they're really easy projects- cheap, simple, and with ridiculously easy parts availability. That means we'll be going for a Japan-versus-Germany 80s Hot Hatch Challenge today, and you Camaro fans can console yourselves with the fact that you can fix most problems on your cars with a pipe wrench and zip-ties. For that matter, the Toyota Corolla FX16 is almost too reliable to show up here, but most of them spend their entire lives with the tach needle bouncing around the 8 grand mark and the body panels scraping telephone poles, with repairs performed by 19-year-old hoons with $9.98 Taiwanese socket sets and 12-packs of Steel Reserve to provide...
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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! In our last foray into the Burning Garage O'Pain™, the Buick Reatta beat the Olds Troféo by a 53% to 47% poll split. We've had unifying vehicular themes for most of our Hell Challenges recently, but sometimes you need to choose between two totally different eternities- say, one in which St. Helena earwig s colonize your bile ducts, and another in which you are stuck in an Amway PowerPoint presentation 24/7. And, just for fun, we're going Warsaw Pact versus NATO, with one machine from the hottest period of the Cold War and the other from the wild and crazy endgame. Back when we were gearing up for some toe-to-toe nuclear combat with the Rooskies, a man could walk into his friendly Dodge dealership and order him up a Town Wagon, to haul six or eight passengers reliably (if not comfortably), or he could opt for the military-truck-based four-wheel...
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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! Last time around, 64% of you opted for an eternity in the trunk of Coyote Shivers' 1984 Volvo DL rather than having your bodices ripped by Fabio's Lancia, according to the Choose Your Eternity poll . But enough with the pseudo-celebrity cars- today we need to get back to basics , with a return to the very soul of project car hell: France versus Italy! Right now, Italy is in sole possession of the PCH Superpower trophy- which is in the shop with a bad oil leak and a rod knock- thanks to a very one-sided Pantera-versus-Lotus drubbing , but can the Italians hold firm against the Tsar Bomba of Hell Projects? We'll find out! Remember the Lancia Zagato? Of course not, and you Europeans are probably totally confused about that name slapped on what's obviously some kind of Americanized Beta , but enough of them were sold on these shores that it's...
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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! Yesterday, we saw the "Bentley" (actually a Rolls with Bentley grille) beat the "Rolls-Royce" (actually a Vanden Plas Princess with a Rolls grille) in the Choose Your Eternity poll in a 59/41 vote. Today we're going to contemplate the concept of fame . Now, none of us can afford to buy JFK's Continental or the Gremlin from Wayne's World , but that doesn't mean we don't have a shot at a famous car- we just need to aim lower! And today… well, we're aiming really low! When you want to drive a car that was once owned by a famous actor, you can expect to pay big bucks, and when the car is a vintage Italian machine with suicide doors? Forget it! Hold on, though, because we work miracles here at Project Car Hell… and we can put you behind the wheel of this 1960 Lancia Appia (sorry, the ad got pulled from Craigslist, so...
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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! Once we gave Germany a second chance against PCH Superpower Italy, they pulled off the upset- that's right, the Mercedes-Benz 600 Pullman (just barely) beat the Lamborghini Urraco in yesterday's Choose Your Eternity poll ! But what about the Japanese? They totally get shortchanged in Project Car Hell, what with their cars' excessive reliability and ease of parts obtainment. Well, how about a couple of bargain-priced subcompacts from Japan, equipped with Detroit badges and jittery, hoon-friendly turbocharged engines? You know every last one of these cars has spent most of its career at shrieking, valve-floating revs with some kid's sneaker mashing the gas pedal to the floor (while operating a four-foot bong and working the gearshift at the same time), all the while getting zero maintenance and running on the very cheapest Stop-N-Rob gasoline...
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There was some grumbling over the choices in our last Choose Your Eternity challenge (which was won by the '77 Levis Edition AMC Hornet AMX by a healthy margin), ostensibly because they were too easy… but we know the real reason: being reminded of the Malaise Era brings up the uncomfortable parallels between the hard economic times then and those now . Of course, there are differences; sure, the current war is more expensive- in dollar terms- than was Vietnam, but inflation isn't the raging beast it was back then (though the bill for our 15-year debt binge looks to be just as painful as 20% inflation was). What we need is a flashback to Morning In America ! The 80s, when the Evil Empire was crumbling and Toyota still built cars that didn't hit you like a triple Valium with cough syrup chaser; yes, it's Corolla Time! As we all know, the problem with Japanese PCH cars is that parts are too easy to find, the build quality is too high, and Japanese engineers- particularly those...
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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! Last time we simultaneously crushed and seared our fingers in the red-hot vise of the Hell Garage, the Shelby-ized Dodge Omni beat hell out of the Shelby-ized Dodge Shadow in the poll. Today, with the New England 24 Hours of LeMons race coming up in just a few days, we're thinking about the kind of car it takes to win the most prestigious trophy of the event. No, that's not the one that goes to the so-called "overall winner" (although a team does get some heavy-duty bragging rights by taking that honor ). We're talking about the coveted Index Of Effluency trophy, the one given to the team that achieves beyond all reasonable expectation in a seemingly hopeless "race car." You contend for the IOE by showing up in a looks-fast-on-paper car that everyone knows is going to blow up for sure (e.g., Maserati Biturbo, Merkur XR4Ti,...
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