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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 stepped into the Liquid Sodium Garage, 78% of you felt that the WRX-powered VW Beetle would be your eternal torment , leaving the poor Granada hearse unwanted and unfeared. But that was last week; today we're locked into Presidential Election Hell, and that means it's time to vote on projects similar to cars driven by two of the 20th century's most powerful presidents. Men who didn't hesitate to grind political enemies to dust (the way your project will grind you to dust)... men who bombed the living crap out of third-worlders who threatened their empires (the way your project will bomb the living crap out of your bank account): Richard Nixon and Charles de Gaulle! While Richard Milhous Nixon drove a man-of-the-people-esque '48 Mercury woodie wagon during his first senatorial campaign, once he got to be president, by God,...
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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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We had a bit of an upset in Monday's Choose Your Eternity 3-way Superpower Showdown poll , with the French car coming in last! Yes, the '63 Alfa Romeo Giulia Sprint won handily, with a 55-24-22 split. That means the Italian car industry can feel the pride that comes from building the coolest- yet most nightmarish- cars very large sums of squandered money can buy! Just to show that we haven't forgotten the special place held by France in the Project Car Hell Pantheon, however, we're going to do an all-French matchup today. Thanks- and a Project Car Hell Tipster T-shirt - go to Hotrodelectric for these tips! Just where do we draw the line between a project car and a parts car? Always a tough call, but we've found an even tougher question: when does a single part become a car? Because of the near-impossibility of reading the huge, CAPS LOCKED, red-and-blue font used by the seller of this 1925 Renault Type 45 , it took me a while to realize that this auction is for just...
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In a stunning upset, the Borgward Hansa wagon handed Germany a one-sided victory over the Peugeot 304 in our most recent Choose Your Eternity poll . With France long reigning as the world's lone HyperGalactic PCH OmniPower, we would be remiss if we didn't give the French a shot at prying the oil-leaking, stripped-fastener-thread PCH CryptoChampion trophy from the Germans, in order to prove that the Borgward's victory wasn't just some one-shot fluke. That's why we're rolling out some Hell Project heavy artillery today, with a pair of undeniably cool- yet just as undeniably nightmarish- machines vying for long-term residency in your Garage Of Torture. It wouldn't be fair to break out the H-bomb of French Hell Projects (the Citröen SM ), because we're fairly certain that nothing on the planet can beat the SM in a Project Car Hell matchup. But how about the Citröen CX ? The early CX has many of the features that made the SM so wonderful and terrible, but with...
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The '38 Graham-Paige did a number on the '38 Mercedes-Benz in yesterday's Choose Your Eternity poll , similar to Marshal Zhukov's number on Berlin (and our poll would have been even more one-sided if we'd stacked a Pobeda against the Benz). Today I feel like returning to the perennial struggle between PCH Superpowers Italy and France, because a Project Car Hell without one of the Superpowers is like knuckles without fresh scabs. The last time we saw a Simca 1000 in this series , it got walloped by a matchup even more unfair than yesterday's (and that was without the taint of National Socialism hovering around one of the contestants like a vile stink-cloud). The Citröen SM is the H-bomb of PCH entrants, and two of them... well, the Simca never had a chance. But the Simca 1000 is a powerful contender in its own right, with the combination of a history packed with wild rally hoonage (see the video above) and French design. And we have just the '64 Simca 1000GL for...
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With Italy edging out a narrow victory over Britain in yesterday's Choose Your Eternity poll and advancing to the first-ever Project Car Hell Superpower Showdown with France, I decided we needed to add an extra layer of Hell to each nation's entrant in order to honor this occasion with the solemnity it deserves. Not that we won't repeat the Superpower Showdown schtick over and over, of course, but this one is first! So, what we got here is PCH Superpower cars with Japanese engines. Now, you figure maybe a Japanese engine would make such a car more reliable, but I've been careful to select car/engine combos that involve twin-turbocharged complexity and fragile-chassis-twisting power. France? Italy? You decide! The Renault 4CV was a sort of French interpretation of the Volkswagen Beetle... which meant that it wasn't much like the Beetle at all, other than having an ass-engined configuration and being cheap. Would you like suicide doors on your tiny econo-car, monsieur...
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The plan was to have the PCH superpower whose vehicle won yesterday's Choose Your Eternity challenge pit one of its finest, most hellish machines against an offering from the remaining PCH superpower, France. Unfortunately, the Gawker poll thingy appears to have been designed by Joe Lucas , and the 2-0 tally in favor of the Austin Gipsy seems even shakier than Kennedy in Illinois, 1960, or Bush in Florida, 2000. Anyway, it's been a month since our last all-French matchup , so let's just postpone the showdown between Italy, Britain, and France for another day. Back when I was a young college hoon with a lifetime-unemployment-ensuring art/English double major, my state-funded university went ahead and took a bunch of California taxpayers' money and bought Yale's English Department. They got the works, right down to the office furniture and some French dude named Jacques Derrida . Suddenly, being an English major meant that you had to get serious about literary theory in...
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Well, the Jeep FC-150 obliterated the Spanish 2CV in yesterday's Choose Your Eternity poll, no doubt because even an Hecho en España label doesn't add enough weight on either side of the Cool/Hell scale when you're looking at a 2CV. However, we shouldn't start to thinking that France isn't a PCH superpower just because the 2CV was too simple to be truly hellish... which is why we're going with an all-French matchup for today's choices. How much fun can you have in a car with less than one liter of engine displacement? Aside from jumping a Chevy Sprint , that is? Just watch the video below to see: That's a Simca 1000 there (and yes, we know the car in the video probably has more than the factory's 944 screamin' CCs of displacement), and you can have one! Just hand over $1,300 to the seller of this 1968 Simca 1000 GLS (go here if the ad disappears), and you'll have taken the first- and no doubt easiest- of many, many, many steps towards your goal...
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Is an air-cooled Japanese cartruck both cooler and more hellish than an airbrushed Malaise Detroit Vantruck? According to almost two-thirds of you , it is! Today we're going to hit the mailbag again, adding yet another reader to the waiting list for the next run of PCH Tipster T-shirts , because McGyver managed to come up with a pair of totally irresistible choices. How about a Spanish-built French car with an air-cooled two-banger... versus a forward-control Jeepamino? The agony! You know you're looking at a genuine deal when the seller starts off his description with "YO!!!!!!!!" and finishes it with "BUT ITS ALL THERE!!!!!!!!!" See, that's because extra punctuation equals sincerity. And Philadelphia, where it's OK to pass out on the gas pedal of your Audi , is all about the sincerity. So feel confident when you drop $2500 on this 1963 Jeep FC-150 (go here if the ad disappears), because it "runs good." Oh, sure, even the seller will admit...
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It was pretty close, but the Mazda 323 GTX squeaks out a 55/45 victory over the Turbo Geo Metro in yesterday's Choose Your Eternity poll. I've been happy to find some Japanese PCH candidates, of course, but it's become apparent that we've been neglecting one of the primary Project Car Hell superpowers; yes, it's been over two months since we last saw a French PCH candidate , and that's just plain wrong! Maybe the first thing you should consider for a potential Project Car Hell candidate is its HJIYC score . Weighing in with a respectable 120 points is this '81 Citröen CX Pallas diesel (go here if the ad disappears), suggested by none other than the Loverman himself and available for just 6,000 frogskins. It would have had more points, only the latitudinally mounted "Euro-trash diesel" cost it 30 points. But don't worry about that; since you'll likely be the owner of the only Citröen diesel in your time zone, the Hell-O-Meter is going to be registering...
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