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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! 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! 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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Welcome to Project Car Hell , where you choose your eternity by selecting the project that's the coolest... and the most hellish! The last time we slammed the rusty doors of the Hell Garage, the Million Euro Gardner-Serpollet beat the double-homicide Stanley Steamer by a significant- yet not overwhelming 57:43 ratio. Today we've got the life sentence answer for those who want to drive some lunatic Carroll Shelby creation, yet don't have a six-figure budget: Shelby Mopars! What would you say about a funky-handling 80s front-wheel-drive coupe that used an early variable-nozzle turbocharger to get top speeds well over 150MPH and burn holes in all the pistons? With Iacocca-class build quality and- it should go without saying here- a K-car-based chassis? Designed by Caroll Shelby? You figure you're going to have to get up off of at least five figures to get a car like that, but no- for only $6,500 you could buy this 1989 Shelby CXS-VNT (go here if the ad disappears). The CSX...
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The Mazda 1500 wagon combined parts-obtainment impossibility with nobody's-ever-seen-one obscurity to beat the right-hand-drive '75 Nissan Fairlady in Friday's Choose Your Eternity poll . We weren't sure how well a non-rotary Mazda would fare in such a matchup, but the win was by a decisive 60/40 split. Today we're heading to Detroit, which always presents certain challenges for this series; how do you find a Detroit Big Three machine that's hell enough? So much standardization of components and so many junked examples surviving- the coolness part is there, but where's the hopelessness? However, let's say you want to restore a 40-year-old police car, complete with the correct engine, vintage cop gear, decals, the works... ahhh, now we're talking! You see some nice mid-60s big Fords , and you can find totally trashed parts cars , but when's the last time you saw a '65 Ford Police Interceptor that actually started life as a police car? You know...
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The Itchy Fiberglass Hell that is the '57 Devin managed to beat out the Dodgy Deal Hell of the Hemi Bantam in yesterday's Choose Your Eternity poll . Of course, we all want basket-case old race car projects against which to dash our hopes and empty our bank accounts, but there's a lot to be said for cheap projects that you can't even identify in their ads. See, there's the "how bad can it be?" lure that suckers you in when the gatekeeper to Hell only charges you a few hundred bucks... but those few hundred bucks are like the few hundred "advisers" Eisenhower sent into French Indochina. Thanks to Jonee (who already has a PCH Tipster T-shirt ) for sending the tips on these fine automobiles! You know, these newfangled cars just don't have the style of the postwar stuff... and we're not talking post-World War II here! Nope, we mean the Great War! Ah, 1919, a year when tens of millions dropped dead of influenza and Red Summer raged across America...
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A French hydropneumatically-suspended diesel managed to win a photo finish against a V8-powered Malaise Lotus in our last Choose Your Eternity poll , which means we'll need to have another English Channel Hell Project Battle right soon. But today we need to go to the PCH Tipster Mailbag (which, sorry to say, I haven't been using as much as I should, due to the fact that I still haven't had a chance to crank up the PCH Tipster T-shirt assembly line) and check out a couple of real humdingers sent in by Bumblebee . These are machines any sane Jalopnik reader would dream of owning... yet actual ownership of either one would lead to plenty of wake-up-screaming nightmares! We saw a Honda 600 in this series not long ago , and three of them before that . However, we have no choice but to return to our favorite motorcycle-engined Japanese car, because this here's a 1970 Honda 600 with truck bed . That's right, a 600amino with the hard part already done! We don't know how...
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The last time we felt the flames of Project Car Hell licking at our flesh , the 2002 Maserati Coupe was beating the 1985 Ferrari Mondial by about a 60/40 margin in the polls. What lessons may be learned from this remain uncertain, but what is certain is that I've got 24 Hours of LeMons fever and I've got it bad; I'm scouring Craigslist day after day, looking for the right car to run in the Altamont race in May (even worse, sellers know I'm looking ). That can mean only one thing: a Choose Your Eternity poll covering the cars driven by the top two teams at the Thunderhill LeMons race! We never would have considered the Mazda Protege a likely candidate to win the 24 Hours of LeMons, but Team Red Meat and Poontang showed us that a near-stock '99 can do the trick. The problem is finding a running late-90s example for under $500; Red Meat and Poontang did it by finding one with horrendous body damage, but it's not an easy task. However, it can be done; here's a '97...
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Whoa, we've had two photo finishes in a row now- first Friday's Repo Man Edition and then yesterday's Lancia Thema versus Baldwin Motion Vette Choose Your Eternity polls have really been too close to declare a winner. And tough choices are what Hell is all about, right? Well, that plus a car that would be really, really fun if you could only get the damn thing working . With that in mind, we're going all patriotic with today's tough choices- some folks think that Detroit never could get the front-drive hot rod done right, but what about the Dodge SRT-4 (or, ahem, a somewhat cheaper facsimile) and the Ford Taurus SHO? Even if you hate the cute lil' Neon (and its overcompensatingly uncute Caliber successor), it's tough to loathe the crazy-ass original SRT-4. But those things sell for well north of $12 grand, and where does that leave us cheapskates? Exactly, you get an early Neon, turbocharge the living piss out of it, and pretend that the stock first-gen suspension...
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Due to technical difficulties last Friday, we had to postpone our all-wagon PCH; since it seems that the liberal application of ball-peen hammer to the Gawker servers has finally fixed the problem (for now), we're ready to jump back into Hell! As we all...
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