|
Browse by Tags
All Tags » Choose Your Eternity » 1986 ( RSS)
-
|
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...
|
-
|
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...
|
-
|
We saw the Gremlin beat the Spirit by quite a margin in our last Choose Your Eternity poll . Maybe it was the Wayne's World connection, or maybe it was just the obscurity of the AMC Spirit. Either way, we're going to follow up a pair of quirky American machines with a pair of equally quirky Japanese machines. Sure, Subaru is plenty mainstream in North America these days, but remember when Subarus just seemed vaguely weird , say a couple decades back? When you only saw the little boxer-powered cars in areas with huge amounts of snow and NPR listeners? Those 80s Subies are semi-rare and quite cool, not as bulletproof as your Japanese Big Three machines of the era, and parts are getting tough to find... which makes them great raw material for your exile adventures in the garage! The acronym behind the Subaru BRAT's name stood for "Bi-drive Recreational All-terrain Transporter," which doesn't sound as good as "Leonamino," but we can't fault the marketers...
|
-
|
Since yesterday's Packard Straight Eight Swap Edition (which was won by the '37 Pontiac) was so much fun, we're going to stick with Alternative Powerplant Hell for another day. All engine swaps are fun, of course, but the best ones involve stuffing an engine much, much larger than anything the car's designers ever considered. When you accomplish such a swap, you get respect ; when you start with the knuckle-shredding, sanity-destroyingly tight engine compartment of a small mid-engined car (say, a Fiero or MR2)... well, that's when folks start treating you with the deference reserved for the truly mad! We're going to pull our punches here and choose a V8 that's not only fairly small for a DOHC unit but already set up for a front-wheel-drive application. That means the engine and associated transaxles are already lined up in correct orientation in the recipient cars' chassis. So whip out $1,600 and drop a Buy It Now bomb on this 300-horse late-90s Northstar...
|
|
|
|