|
Browse by Tags
All Tags » Choose Your Eternity » 1990S ( RSS)
-
|
Welcome to Project Car Hell , where you choose your eternity by selecting the project that's the coolest... and the most hellish! Yesterday, the Warsaw Pact Hell Truck Projects ran just about neck and neck, with the trio of Romanian AROs beating the Soviet GAZ-69 in a 51:49 split. Today… well, after looking at all the backyard Lambos I've found lately, it seems like a good idea to have some real Lamborghini Hell Projects. Most of the time, it's tough to find a Lamborghini that isn't in great shape, since most of them don't exactly wear out their odometers during their lifetimes, but we've got a couple of genuine projects for you! You know what really counts most in the hearts of rabid highly devoted Italian-car freaks aficionados? Originality. A low-mileage original Italian supercar is sure to shatter your sanity knock 'em dead, but the prices- holy crap! Still, if you're willing to expend a lot of blood a little elbow grease, you can find a nice original...
|
-
|
Welcome to Project Car Hell , where you choose your eternity by selecting the project that's the coolest... and the most hellish! Yesterday, the Warsaw Pact Hell Truck Projects ran just about neck and neck, with the trio of Romanian AROs beating the Soviet GAZ-69 in a 51:49 split. Today… well, after looking at all the backyard Lambos I've found lately, it seems like a good idea to have some real Lamborghini Hell Projects. Most of the time, it's tough to find a Lamborghini that isn't in great shape, since most of them don't exactly wear out their odometers during their lifetimes, but we've got a couple of genuine projects for you! You know what really counts most in the hearts of rabid highly devoted Italian-car freaks aficionados? Originality. A low-mileage original Italian supercar is sure to shatter your sanity knock 'em dead, but the prices- holy crap! Still, if you're willing to expend a lot of blood a little elbow grease, you can find a nice original...
|
-
|
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...
|
-
|
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...
|
-
|
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...
|
-
|
Welcome to Project Car Hell , where you choose your eternity by selecting the project that's the coolest... and the most hellish! With the Dow taking it in the shorts today, we're all thinking about how we'll keep afloat during the hard times that seem to be looming, if not already here. Naturally, federal, state, and local governments are thinking the same thing, and that means they're going to jack up the taxes on booze! Which, as students of Southern United States history know, that means opportunity for enterprising gearheads willing to assist the makers of fine lead-and-glycol-enhanced alcoholic beverages in getting their products to thirsty, unemployment-maddened consumers who won't have the wheelbarrows full of hyperinflated cash necessary to pay the revenoors' bite. Yes, you'll need to convert a big, fast car into a white-liquor-haulin' moonshine runner! You know that cash-strapped police departments aren't going to have any money to replace their...
|
-
|
Welcome to Project Car Hell , where you choose your eternity by selecting the project that's the coolest... and the most hellish! We had what may be our all-time closest vote yesterday, with the 4x4 Econoline beating the lowrider Econoline 202 votes to 200. Today we're going racing! We've had Arse-Freeze-A-Pa-Looza LeMons PCH and the LeMons San Francisco PCH , and now tradition dictates that we have a LeMons South Edition PCH. Just in time for teams still hoping to make the deadline for the Yeehaw It's Texas LeMons event! With Mazda RX-7s taking the first two places at LeMons South (not to mention three of the top ten at the Arse-Freeze-A-Pa-Looza ), you've got to figure you're looking at one of the all-time great budget race cars. Light, simple, and powered by a wailing rotary that's sure to give your competitors a migraine by the time the race is over... and you can get 'em for peanut shells! Say, this '85 RX-7 with an asking price of only $200. Two...
|
-
|
Taking care of recent Hell Project business first, the Bentley roared- or, rather, was towed - right past the Rolls in our most recent Choose Your Eternity poll , winning in a 75/25 landslide. Those cars were all right, but where's the eternal torment when you can simply walk away from your hopeless project after shelling out less than ten Gs for it? No guts, no glory! That's why you need to forget all about ordinary cars, hock all your possessions, and dive headlong into the Inferno. That's right- Ferrari and Lamborghini Hell! The last time we had this matchup , the Lambo drove over the Ferrari like a big angry Italian tractor crushing Enzo's Fiat 128 beneath its wheels. Let's see who comes out on top today! Isn't it great how Ferrari has never built any car you can buy for nickels and dimes nowadays? Maserati has the shameful Biturbo episode cheapening even its best products to this day, but every single Ferrari- no matter how wretched- is worth quite a bit (with...
|
-
|
The extremely cheap, extremely sketchy (putatively) NSX-engine-powered Acura Legend obliterated the dime-a-dozen turbo Civic in yesterday's Choose Your Eternity poll , which is about what we expected. So what if we could find not just an NSX engine but an entire car for cheap (well, maybe entire isn't the right word here, but you get the idea)- what then? Well, then we have quite a dilemma when trying to find something to stack up against the Acura, a car that's equally cool, in spittin' distance of the NSX's price range, and hideously expensive when it comes to part obtainment. Perhaps it's an impossible task, but let's see how things sort out in today's Detroit-versus-Japan matchup! You want an NSX, and so do I. It's safe to say that you wouldn't be reading this series in the first place if you were the sort who doesn't want an NSX (unless your brand of garage masochism requires engines with carburetors... lots and lots of carburetors, in which...
|
-
|
We took a break from the PCH Superpowers and watched the Rotary Honda 600 pound on the Rotary Starlet in yesterday's all-Japanese Choose Your Eternity poll . However, Britain's defeat of Italy last week can mean only one thing: Britain must now take on PCH SuperGigaPower France in an attempt to claim the rusty, oil-leaking PCH Intergalactic Superchampion crown! Why the heck didn't Jaguar put truck beds on their cars straight from the factory? Take the XJ-S, for instance: V12 torque, comfy leather interior, beautiful lines- in short, everything you want in a cartruck! Obviously, it falls to the Jaguar owner to deal with this shortcoming. Those of you who have been planning to build your own XJ-Schero can save many months of hard work by starting with this Rancheroized 1990 Jaguar XJ-S as the basis of your project. For some inexplicable reason, this car failed to sell for the chump-change price of two grand, and that means the seller is likely ready to deal! The seller, clearly...
|
-
|
I thought about maybe sticking with French Car Hell for another day (by the way, the pair of Citröen SMs manhandled the Simca 1000 like Burt Reynolds slapping around his Maserati-owning girlfriend in yesterday's poll), but the descent into Isuzu Pun Hell in yesterday's racing I-Mark post can mean only one thing: All-Isuzu PCH today! You see? You see what happens? You make Isuzu puns, you get Isuzu projects! When your small car gets 22 MPG, is that a bragging point? Apparently so, because the seller of this 1991 Isuzu Impulse RS Turbo (go here if the ad disappears) put that Country Squire-esque mileage figure right in the headline. And when you're shopping for a car, what do you want to know about it? Running condition, maybe what kind of shape the interior's in? Nope, you need to know the bore and stroke of the engine... and this seller gives you just that! So here we have an AWD turbocharged Isuzu, complete with bright blue console trim and pillar-mounted gauges. The photographs...
|
|
|
|