I predict that Ford returns the Lightning nameplate to its lineup with the advent of the F-150 EV.
Owning Maserati AND Alfa Romeo has not been good for Stellantis as a brand constellation I feel
is300 first gen with an improved n/a 2JZ with itbs (think around 300hp), an R154 gearbox, and a 4.5 final drive with 1.5 way LSD would be absolutely up there as one of the coolest possible possible daily drivers...
The Lamborghini Sterrato is just a gambler 500 Miata for guys who invest with supercars, but as a rally machine I’d be interested to see what it can do.
Of course you’re spending a ton of money for an overpriced Baja Bug essentially (even more so if you opt for the Porsche Dakar instead) and you’d be better served modding out an Alfa Stelvio for dirt road racing if you really wanted exotic engines for gravel thrasher duties.
Now I'm starting to think that those guys who do EV cannonballs aren't lying about charging issues
I’ve been seeing archival video (and then subsequently modern video) of drift setups for MR2s and I have no idea how the science for that works. The weight and grip should be set up for the opposite from the pop science I’m aware of.
How reliable are Volvo XC70s from the mid 00s? One caught my eye and the idea of a vaguely outback shaped awd wagon is appealing
Why are people suddenly going ape over the Cadillac XLR, which has been described as the ultimate landlord car, when literally any other rwd LS GM car exists
maybe its a “the grass is always greener” type thing but the XLR looks pretty cool and i would drive the hell out of one.
Admittedly, I dislike the styling. It’s like if you smashed an Escalade into a corvette. I think at some point I’ll warm up to it but it feels a lot like those Zimmer motor company cars where they’ve slapped turn of the century styling onto a modern sports chassis without considering whether the lines of the original donor vehicle really support the rebody.
I’ll admit that they were good corvette alternatives when they were cheap (any sub-par suspension and drivetrain details could be easily swapped for corvette performance parts)but with values skyrocketing I just don’t think they’re old enough to be worth it.
Why are people suddenly going ape over the Cadillac XLR, which has been described as the ultimate landlord car, when literally any other rwd LS GM car exists
So in Japan itself, between population density and Mazda-inspired knowledge base, was the assumption that everyone would have access to a mechanic who knows what to do with a Wankel engine?
For a second there they were putting the Wankel in everything (the Vega was set to get one and the rotary corvette was supposed to be the future) so I guess the assumption was that, like electric cars now, the amount of Wankels that would surely continue to be produced would create the needed mechanics through sheer demand.
Now with a automotive job that gives me a solid top-down view of the OEM manufacturing landscape, I realize what a joke personal EVs are for the long term, but I also realize how much infrastructure is going to go into realizing the dream of a hydrogen future
Getting a 3D printer to mock up parts for my nova and the possibilities are endless so naturally my mind goes blank and can only think of making a bracket for the CB radio.
K and B RWD swaps really tickle my fancy right now, but applications should be limited to cars that need it. Swapping out an SR20DE but don’t want to buy a DET only to have it grenade because you’re building a scrappy drift machine? Go ahead. Swapping a Miata? What’s wrong with you?
The calculus runs something like “can’t erase the character of the car, should make more power/be more reliable, same make/era/domestic market is preferred” but I haven’t quite hashed it out yet.
i see where you’re coming from but i also think vehicle application matters.
K24 swapping an E30 makes a lot of sense to me because its essentially an identical spec to the S14 M3 motor, but 1% of the cost to buy and maintain. doesnt fit the era, but improves it in every possible way without making a huge change to power delivery.
alternatively, putting a K motor into *insert any racing car* (eg a ferrari) purely for extreme power potential and weight saving is fine in my books if it does the function it needs to do.
if you wanted to k swap an aston martin XK12 because you need 800hp and 100kg less weight up front for racing, i support that.
the only time i dont support K swapping cars is when its to intentionally upset people, like putting a K20 into a hemi charger because you know people will be annoyed just doesnt sit right with me.
I was trying to cover “vehicle application” when mentioning replacing an SR20 and touching on power and reliability but to extrapolate, if you’re swapping engines for specific use-cases then there are no rules. Tony Angelo is in the process of LS Swapping a 911 for what I’m sure is going to be an impressive drag build.
Great for drag racing! Less so if you’re trying to maintain the character of a car and it’s driving dynamics. The stanceworks ferrari is another (K swapped!) example of this. Or basically any classic mini with a Honda 4 cylinder in it.
Of course if you have a car, it’s your car so do what you want with it. Cummins swap an F40 for the fuel efficiency, no one can stop you. What I’m trying to do here is articulate a philosophy on how different cars benefit from their respective drivetrains
At this point in time it boils down to “EV swapping a Cadillac Eldorado is fine but you lose something if you do the same to a Shelby Cobra” and the personal application of this thought process comes from the debate between sourcing hard to find/expensive replacement parts for 70s Alfas in my neck of the woods and the desire to hoon a vintage Giulia Sedan without worrying about thrashing an expensive powertrain.
K and B RWD swaps really tickle my fancy right now, but applications should be limited to cars that need it. Swapping out an SR20DE but don’t want to buy a DET only to have it grenade because you’re building a scrappy drift machine? Go ahead. Swapping a Miata? What’s wrong with you?
The calculus runs something like “can’t erase the character of the car, should make more power/be more reliable, same make/era/domestic market is preferred” but I haven’t quite hashed it out yet.
Ok so long time no cars but I just had a bolt of inspiration:
Third gen Honda Odyssey would make a pretty decent rally car…
They’re 1610kg from factory in fwd guise, and have a k24 motor from factory, along with a very long wheelbase and a surprisingly low centre of gravity.
It has McPherson struts up front and the same rear multi link setup as every other irs Honda of the early 2000s. It would need a manual conversion as they were only sold as autos or cvts but that would t be too tricky.
The best thing about the kerb weight is that it’s a luxurious people mover, making it very very capable of shedding lots of weight. I’d argue you could get the kerb weight down to 1200kg just by getting rid of the seats, rear glass, interior wiring and trim and the sliding door mechanisms and rear hatch.
It wouldn’t take much to move the seating position back about a foot, make it a bit better balanced and improve the seating position.
People have been racing them in lemons for a while as the US versions came with a 3.7L v6 that made around 300hp from factory, but imagining one even further stripped, suspension jacked up and completely caged out, it would be incredible seeing it sliding through a forest.
It’s never really had any sort of off-road testing but assuming it’s built to the same spec as the dc5 and CL9 it should be very very strong and maybe even have to carry over parts.
They were running a 1st gen North American Odyssey (arguably the closest North America got to the more wagonlike international Odyssey) but the BoostedBoiz AWD K swapped one and got it to 1000hp.
Obviously they just drag race the thing, but a stripped and caged Odyssey like you’re describing would make a mean rally wagon. I’d do my best to make one AWD and run it like those Volvo wagons from Finland.
As someone who used to slide one of the V6s on gravel, they fun even in FWD layouts. Made a great sleeper.
Incredible headline from Dion Lefler of the Wichita Eagle, but also, he’s right:
Traffic deaths of pedestrians are up by 70% in the last 10 years and pickup trucks are largely to blame, according to a story from The Hill that we ran this week. The number of walkers killed by “light utility trucks” rose from 732 in 2010 to 1,773 in 2021. The reasons are obvious. Pickup trucks have long since ceased to be the single-bench-seat, utilitarian work vehicles of my youth, and morphed into monsters. It used to be rare to see a large four-door pickup. Now, it’s practically impossible to buy anything else. To make them look brawnier, manufacturers raised suspensions and put huge grilles on the front. The hoods are so hard to see over that one congressman has proposed requiring new trucks to have forward-facing cameras and sensors to reduce “frontover” accidents, which is running over people or things you can’t see through the windshield. There’s a better way: smaller trucks.
They exist. We just can’t buy them. Many’s the time I’ve turned on the nightly news and seen Taliban or ISIS militants tooling around in mini-trucks, mostly Toyotas, with machine guns bolted to the bed “Rat Patrol” style. Every time I see that, I say to myself (or anyone unlucky enough to be in earshot) “There, that’s the truck I want” — minus the machine gun, which I’d only need if I were driving Kris Kobach in a parade. But we can’t get those trucks here because of two reasons: profits and politics. Profits, because car manufacturers make way more per unit selling jumbo trucks. And politics because of an antiquated trade policy levying a 25% tariff on imported light trucks, in retaliation for a European tariff on U.S. chicken. Mini-trucks — mostly Toyotas, but also Ford Couriers and Chevy Luvs — were once ubiquitous on the streets and freeways of southern California, where I lived from the late 1970s to the late 1990s.
The first vehicle my wife and I ever bought together was a 1989 Chevy S-10 pickup, and we’d probably still have it if we hadn’t been blessed with twins and needed space for two car seats. It was a simple, nimble, reliable and comfortable two-person truck. From the time we got it, my wife used it regularly to bring home furniture to replace the mismatched mishmash I had brought into our marriage. I once transported enough salvaged solid oak hardwood flooring to redo our entire kitchen. The S-10’s curb weight was 2,700 pounds. It wasn’t the smallest truck on the road then, but today it would look like a mackerel swimming with a pod of killer whales. The Ford F-150, America’s most popular automobile according to Car and Driver, weighs in between 4,000 and 5,700 pounds, depending on options. The real heavyweights are 8,000 pounds and up. Their high-rise suspensions and oversize tires could get you through the Baja 500, but are way more than overkill for the annual trip to Lowe’s to buy mulch. According to an Axios study, shopping and errands are the No. 1 use of pickups, with 87% of owners reporting they do that frequently. Second was pleasure driving, 70%, and third, commuting, 42%. Only 28% said they frequently use their trucks for personal hauling, and towing was a piddling 7%. That same study showed that in 1985, mini-trucks were slightly more than a quarter of all pickups sold. By 2010, that had dropped to zero, and full-size trucks had over 90% of the market. That’s tapered off slightly with mid-size trucks picking up more market share, but the smallest pickup you can buy today, the Ford Maverick, is still a needlessly beefy 3,500 pounds — 800 more than my trusty S-10.
So if you want to try to make a dent in traffic fatalities, gasoline usage and global warming, call or write your congressperson and ask them to repeal the Chicken Tax. That’s not as far-fetched as it sounds. U.S. trade negotiators made a deal in 2011 to allow Korean light-truck imports by 2021, but President Donald Trump, a big fan of trade wars, pushed that back to 2041. Ditching the Chicken Tax might break the big-truck stranglehold on the market. If smaller import trucks sell, as I suspect they would, our domestic manufacturers might be led to retool and compete. And then, when it comes to buying a pickup truck, we might once again be as free as the Taliban.
Not a wrong word in this except for the comment on the Ford Maverick. The Maverick’s extra 800 pounds mostly (but not entirely) stems from advancements in federal crash resistance regulations. Blame the crumple zone on that one.
Paleocons, preppers, libertarian rugged-individualists and others in their general orbit disliking electric cars is one of the most salient illustrations of "politics is 90% aesthetics" to me. Because here's the thing: gasoline goes bad. It only takes a couple months for it to degrade into non-usability. And extracting new gas out of the ground is hard—it requires massive, organized, often international industry. It requires society. You can't really dig it out of the ground yourself, as a rugged-individualist. And you can't stockpile it either, because as I said, it goes bad. Gasoline makes no sense as a fuel from an ultra-localist rugged-individualist prepper blah blah perspective. You basically have to rely on others to continually produce and provide it for you, from far away, in order for your machinery to run.
Electricity on the other hand? Anyone can generate electricity, it's fantastically simple to do. You can do it with a water wheel, you can do it by burning coal, basically if you have a way to make a thing spin you can generate electricity. And, hell, if you do happen to have some gasoline you can run a generator with it! Electrically powered devices in general are going to be far more portable, far more versatile, and far easier to actually run in the apocalypse or on your homestead when the fed collapses or whatever than gasoline powered ones.
But, well. Gas is old-school, it's manly, it smells like shit, and most importantly—the damn liberals hate it. Electricity is new-fangled, effeminate. Electric cars are for hippies and silicon valley weirdoes.
Pure aesthetics.
Now obviously electric cars as they exist right now have a lot of disadvantages, being relatively new technology and all. But you'd think it would be the preppers and the homesteaders and whatnot who would be most enthusiastic about seeing the technology develop. I mean, you would think that if you were ridiculously naive. But of course they aren't, that's not how the world works.
Wait, what? You use diesel fuel for backup generators, not petrol.
This is a lie, gas does not degrade into non-usability within a couple months. I hate how people will just make shit up to justify sneering at their ideological enemies. Maybe people don't act like this thing is true because it's not fucking true, rather than because their beliefs are only aesthetics.
I actually agree with the point about aesthetics OP is making, and still I think diesel goes bad more slowly than gasoline/petrol.
Gas going bad after six months only really matters for modern, fuel-efficient cars with fancy engines that absolutely need high-octane super mega +3 special pretty please with a cherry on top gasoline. Your average generator, lawn mower, moped, or 1980s eastern bloc car with a two-stroke engine can run on fuel that has gone a bit off with some oil mixed in.
Then again, it's probably easier for a small autonomous community to build two-stroke engines than to build solar panels.
It's not great for a carb but I've run almost year old fuel through my engine and it runs rough but not to the point of engine damage. A good portion of preppers only bank on 3-9 month societal collapses so they're covered (see the people who went off grid during covid)
On top of this, gasoline engines can be converted to run hydrogen (which you can make yourself, using electricity) or even alcohol (you can distill this pretty easily) through further mods.
This doesn't even matter anyway because the pre-DEF/DEF-delete diesel pickup is the prepper/paleocon flagship vehicle, which runs on expired engine oil, biodiesel (easy to make at home from literal lawn clippings!) or even straight filtered veggie oil.
This doesn't even begin to touch on MFV powertrains which will run practically anything remotely fuellike that you throw at them in the first place. Woodgas. Kerosene. Lighter fluid if you have enough.
@the-grey-tribe is right about new Turbo cars etc. probably not running under these conditions but the libertarians aren't buying diesel land cruisers for no reason. They see this too.
This is still aesthetics though, because a solar-charged R1T electric truck is more than adequate enough for someone spending only a couple years off grid and the rejection of what appears to be a perfectly serviceable electric truck comes from the need to not be legislated into a better lifestyle even though their RAM TRX is a much worse daily commuter for the normal life they'll live while they wait for the apocalypse.