Teh Car Blogz

The further along we got in our trip (which wound up being around 4800 miles round-trip - a long time to spend in a car!) the more I realized the importance of roadside attractions in the upper midwest. You see, driving through states like Montana, Wyoming, and South Dakota - states that a lot of people refer to as “fly-over states,” as in lots of people fly over them but no one lives there - there is literally NOTHING on the highway. Just cornfield after cornfield, with a sprinkle of truckstops, Indian Reservations and weird stuff. So when you’ve been on the road forever and see a sign for a roadside museum or attraction, you’ll probably stop - just to alleviate the boredom of being in I-90 in the middle of a bunch of cornfields for hours on end!

Now sometimes these roadside attractions amount to little more than someone’s garage stuffed full of crap. Sometimes you strike gold. I was lucky enough on this trip to find two very good ones - the museum of military vehicles shown earlier, as well as this auto museum that is literally in the middle of nowhere in South Dakota. It’s in a town called Murdo, which is in southern central South Dakota just off of I-80.

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Spotted this gem while I was sitting outside my local Starbucks today, sipping on a cold beverage. This is, apparently, a prototype for the upcoming “Short Bus” edition Mustang Cobra.

Rumor has it that it’s powered by a twin-charged Honda F20C from the S2000, has all-wheel-drive from the Subaru WRX STi Type RA Spec C 5.9 Cummins Type-R LSD R1 Turbo, and that each door comes complete with a poorly made vinyl silhoutte of an utterly retarded Horse on the side. This will be a serious performance car - Lotus had better watch it’s puny little back. Those Elise’s are going to be littering the sides of the road, doors blown clear off, like so many dead leaves during the cold nights of Autumn…

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in a continuation of the last “Uncommon Q-ship” article, we now move our geographic concentration from Sweden to the good old US of A. Or well, sort of. A bit of Japan, too.

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When a manufacturer releases their latest and greatest innovation on society, they usually pump it up with great fanfare, a huge advertising budget, and all the hoopala they can possibly drum up. Sometimes it works, sometimes it’s completely unnecessary (VW sold out the entire US allotment of 5,000 first-generation R32’s without spending a dime on advertising), and sometimes it just doesn’t make a difference to the fact that the car they’re selling is complete, unmitigated crap. Hey, it happens. Just ask Ford:

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One thing I’ve noticed about car magazines in the US (besides the boring ones like Consumer Reports) is that above anything, they like to emphasize acceleration as a defining characteristic of a car’s worth. It’s not hard to notice. On the front cover of the latest Car and Driver, they have a few headlines. The big one proclaims “The Fast Lane!: BMW 135i, 0-60 4.7s.” Further down there’s “Nissan GT-R 0-60 3.3.” At the bottom, in small font is “The Slow Lane: Smart ForTwo, 0-60 14.4s.”

Let me be the first one to say: Who gives a shit how fast a Smart Car gets to sixty miles an hour? No one’s going to be drag-racing from light to light in their Smart. A Smart is an economical fashion accessory, like a Swatch (imagine that!) It’s a conversation piece. It’s the new Prius. The only people racing smarts are the ones with Smartuki conversions, so all three of them. The 0-60 time on a Smart is about as relevant as the fuel efficiency of a dump truck.
But this is America, where we have (comparatively) cheap gas, the roads are wide and straight, and if you’re not going 80 on the highway, you’re getting run over. So magazines shout about how fast a car can reach 60 - which is a pretty arbitrary number.

There are a lot of fast cars out there. But let me let you in on a secret: some of them really, truly suck.

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Nowadays, most people take the safety features of their cars for granted. There aren’t really a whole lot of cars on the market that actually get bad crash test ratings from any of the various agencies that rate them. Rafts of standard airbags, stability control, antilock brakes, brakeforce distribution, electronic brake assist, and built in anti-submarining and crumple zones mean that even a base-model economy car isn’t a bad bet in a wreck. It hasn’t always been like this. There are still a few cars around that I would recommend not driving for the practical reason that they might end your life.
1) 2001-2004 Chevy Blazer 2-Door 2WD

Why: High occurence of rollover-related deaths due to inadequate roof structural integrity

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With some cars, it’s not hard to see the performance hidden beneath a layer of boring, anodyne stockness. Cars like 1.8 Turbo Audi A4’s. They’re not quick from the factory but a few choice extra bits can get you a whole lot of shove. Most people who know cars know this, which seems to me to make the feat a whole lot less impressive.

Many people pick up sport compacts and modify them because they think it makes them more clever than the domestic drivers. “I’m getting 300 wheel horsepower out of my four cylinder!” is a good rallying cry when proclaiming your superiority of dumbestics. (Actually, that’s up for debate.) But really, is there anyone who knows cars who is surprised you can make a really fast SRT-4? If that’s a secret, then so is that whole Clinton-Lewinski affair debacle. I mean, hooray. You can put a chip, a diverter valve and a downpipe on your GTI and then you have a lot of extra power. But you’re not original.

No, what appeals to me are cars that no one would ever expect to be fast. Cars that even surprise true died-in-the-wool car guys. Here are a few ideas.

1) Toyota Matrix

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Many people consider Raleigh to be somewhat of a dead town when it comes to exciting or interesting cars. But if you keep a sharp eye out, you occasionally find some gems in amoung the thousands of Camrys and Explorers. For instance:

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