@kiltedpadre yeah, you could definitely get one you can park outside and drive in the rain for a ca $3,000 pricetag (although lots of people are asking crack pipe money for clean '90s B-bodies these days, though I wonder how many actually sell at those lofty asking prices). It would need to be slightly above scrap value/throwaway play money levels for someone to really be interested.

It's amazing how many people don't think of these things, I've been watching one of those Shay Model A replicas for sale, guy's asking absolute beyond top of the market price for it, but the convertible top (frame, everything) has been completely removed and thrown away, with a padded parade boot installed where it used to mount, so the car is permanently open at all times. Been listed for months now with no budging on the asking price, yeah, good luck with that. You'll have to wait for an 80 year old who just wants something to take the grandkids to the ice cream place in walking distance from the house 6 times a year for a cumulative 12 miles, and who will be happy leaving it in the garage the remainder of the year

@Rusty-Vandura powahhhhhhh!

@WBizarre The RWD platform makes it look super wagoney...at this rate the next one will just be the return of the Country Squire 🤔

@Shoop them's the rules of truck ownership. Your truck is either used for Honest Work, or it is a poser compensating for inferior body parts.

@Cé-hé-sin — They used the name here in the malaise era for a dignified looking family sedan based on a. carryover of a 15-year-old Falcon platform. (Ford jumped into the "malaise era" with both feet.). It sold very well, but you seldom see one anymore even as a side-yard derelict, let alone on the road.

A meter maid who is not into cars mistaking it for a Cadillac is not completely silly, although the Ford badging should have been a bit of a giveaway. In the same timeframe, Cadillac took a similar approach to a smaller car, turning the Chevy Nova (etc.). in to the Seville. They put some work into it and had a big success. Ford, responding to this on the cheap and in a hurry, tarted up the Grenada and called it the Lincoln Versailles. "Let them eat cake," said the market. Its greatest success was as a source of junkyard rear disc brake upgrades for Mustangs.

@pip-bip said in Winner winner:

@ranwhenparked not a big problem here that i'm aware of.

I sense a business opportunity here.

@pip-bip
But did they drive the Darian gap?
https://www.topspeed.com/cars/guides/the-story-of-the-chevy-corvair-rotting-away-in-the-darien-jungle/#why-was-one-covair-left-in-the-jungle

@Nibby All the melt you could ever want

@RazoE it was converted at some point. Just need to get someone to fix it.

@ranwhenparked — without interacting with any other people

Of course, in cars, we do interact with other people, sometimes unpleasantly and even violently due to the dehumanizing effect. Much has been written about driving psychology, but a good tl;dr was provided by J.P. Donleavy 40 years or so ago, when he wrote of people "isolated in their individual mobile temples of discontent."

In other words, driving at its worst is like the Internet at its worst—only with the possibility of actually giving strangers the ability, not just the urge, to maim and kill each other.

Driving at its best is of course wonderfully convenient and even enjoyable...

@amoore100
The Tribute was dropped by Mazda Oz in 2008 after the CX-7 launched. Given the fact it sold poorly by then but still outsold the Escape by some margin, Ford Australia would have been forced by economic reality to ditch the Escape at the same time...like most Australians at the time, I never noticed!

@pip-bip
I feel like Laurence of Project Cactus fame @The-Autopian might know someone deranged enough to take that on.

@pip-bip My grandpa had the 500, that car sitting in the garage is probably my earliest memory of a car that was interesting to me.

@pip-bip you'd have to be pretty oblivious to do that, the trolley kind of splits off from the road and turns away on its own toward the tunnel. Might have been a different traffic pattern back then, but it seems like you'd have to be drunk and zeroing in on the back of the trolley, excluding all else, to do it now

@pip-bip That looks tough as hell

I saw a similar one earlier this year
Awaji-100.jpg

@pip-bip That's a sweet Pinto!

G night

@pip-bip

GET YOUR CAR OFF MY LAWN!

@WilliamsSW said in DOTS: Van-Truck Stash With Corvairs!:

installed aftermarket sunroofs

Pretty much the only use case for one I can imagine. Even then it might have been tight in there.

@pip-bip Pretty 🙂 That's the same color my T-bird was prior to someone repainting it. I like the orange, but the burgundy paint on original Thunderbirds is beautiful.

@pip-bip

Good night.

10:41 am for me.

@kac

Yup. it was such an interesting operation.
I've read somewhere that at Ford they were exceedingly pissed off when the Perana Capri kicked the mighty GT40's ass at some event in SA. Can you imagine? Being defeated by somthing put together (admittedly very nicely) by what at Dearborn must have looked like a bunch of shadetree mechanics in a shed?

they look smaller than factory RS wheels
f367ae47-f328-4bff-b2a9-c77ce660812d-image.png

@pip-bip "...and so easy to park!"

Lol.

@WhoIsTheLeader You know, the Tempo was originally supposed to have one of their Lima 4-cylinders, but they didn't have the production capacity to spare any of those for the little Tempo, so instead they took Ford's long-running 200 ci "Thriftpower" inline six that was about to be retired, chopped two cylinders off, and reused as much of its original tooling as possible to make a "good enough" engine for the Tempo. Of course it would run forever, but it was still based on 1950s technology.

But the funny thing is, there are performance parts for those inline sixes. A lot of them could theoretically be adapted to or directly installed in Ford's lazy solution for the Tempo engine, making it in theory the world's crappiest potential tuner car, but the tuning potential is there nonetheless. You can get better-flowing heads (if you're willing to chop the excess cylinders off), bigger forged pistons, and much more. The most difficult thing to source would probably just be a performance camshaft. If you were crazy enough, you could force the Tempo to be fast.

That's a great blue.

My Dad was a designer for FoMoCo and they had a Escort Cossie as an evaluation car. He'd bring it home for weekends and toss me the keys.

That was such a good car. Lag for days...

@dogisbadob even better…the GM twins share the doors with the Full size vans!

@pip-bip I'll take that Chris-Craft Constellation in the background

@ranwhenparked Oh my goodness, yeah those do look eerily similar.

@pip-bip
It's always amusing when the Thunderbird comes up on Oppo because it always makes me think of the Australian Brush Turkey aka Bush Chook
alt text thanks, Wikipedia!

@Camshaft_Chris yes.

@BurntClutches

Never heard of it. Thanks for the education.

@pip-bip If you wrap your phone cord around your shifter you're a bad person. f2624582-4c1c-4487-9677-e689dee5919b-image.png

@amoore100

Mustang from 2011-14 years for me with updated engines. 2014 is the most refined version of that generation, you get better tail lights, headlights, better fuel economy, performance, better dash, and slightly better interior than 2005-2009 models. My second choice would be a challenger, because it is not trying to be anything else other than being a challenger. It is big and roomy. I don’t know how bad is the drivability, but it just looks good to me. The Camaro is a third for me if it is a 2015 which has really good driving dynamics and improved looks over other generations. Too bad Chevy didn’t make visibility a bit better, they really had a nice package there.

@BurntClutches Since I fixed my horn yesterday I got to see this exact same mechanism in my Thunderbird, though I didn't mess around with it to see if it was the turn signal cancelling mechanism. I was curious what the plastic thing was though, this is pretty neat! My right turn signal stays up but doesn't automatically cancel, so I have to do that myself. Perhaps I should take another look in the steering column...

@Nauraushaun I think those are just the covers that pop off. Which I remember being a thing when I was a kid. I know one of my Dad's friends had a red Gran Prix coupe with them. I remember even then thinking it was list sunglasses for your car.

@HotWheelsAndFriedChicken I've been trying to figure out how to use that ad in SBSD for a couple of weeks now. I can't find a worthy competitor.

@WhoIsTheLeader nicer wheels, too

Love it! Didn't know Zylmex made this one

@Cé-hé-sin Not saying I know what the answer is, but completely leaving the high volume lower end of the market, doesn't feel like Ford knows what it is either.

@Brickman

Canadian National owns a lot of the railway in Louisiana (highlighted blue in the map below) so it doesn't surprise me much that they would have their police down here.

5705d390-e819-4823-9d0f-f1ecfc3f765a-image.png

@LooseonExit Hee hee turbocharged "GT350"

@Longtime-Lurker

Maverick remains on my list - hope it proves to be reliable once the initial kinks are worked out.

Will be interesting to see what Toyota brings to market to compete with it.

@WBizarre They sold the first and second gen Explorers in Europe to little impact. They brought it back to Europe with the current gen as a Plug-In only, and while I can't say how well its doing as its not sold in the UK, it must not be very well as it's being replaced by this.
Apparently the reasoning for using the MEB platform is to get out an EV entry in the segment ASAP, with the rumours saying that it will be a stopgap product until Ford gets round to developing its replacement on its own platform. Still, the Mach-E is based on a C-Segment platform, why couldn't they use that? Is it because it was not a ground up EV platform, but an adaption of an existing ICE one?

@pip-bip
Screenshot_20230326-200806.png

@pip-bip That's a hour and a half drive away from me and my brother used to work there when it was co owned by Mazda.
Small world.

@Roadkilled MA has a very generous program for commercial EVs. Even a Rivian is eligible for a $7500 rebate.

https://mor-ev.org/mor-ev-trucks

@Krusty-Walnut
It's utterly decorative. Pretending to be something it isn't...

@Arch-Duke-Maxyenko said in Ford "Re-Organizes" It's Financial Reporting Because Stonks:

and Ford Model e (for Fuck You, Elon electric vehicles). Please treat Ford Model e as a startup and boost stocks noaw pls.

Doesn't work unless it's a separate legal entity that is publicly traded.

@іди-на-хуй-Влад-formerly-known-as-Distraxi tumblr_n9qvk8570x1r3s3a3o1_500.gif

@Mark-Tucker
That makes sense why other gens look more Mazda 626.

1983
55648784-b375-4adb-b0f8-986412fb9750-image.png

1994
64a77e55-b885-4803-82a1-21f4f6b72fac-image.png

@pip-bip It's like from an alternate history where the 1948 F1 stayed in production at Ford do Brasil into the late 1990s and kept getting clumsily facelifted to stay current

@pip-bip

If my internet search skills are working, this is the current view.

@RallyWrench ¯\_(ツ)_/¯