Last year my wife and I took a trip to Europe that covered several countries. In the previous entries we looked at France, Ireland and Malta. We shall finish off in Greece and Spain. This early Renault 5 was found in a dusty building in Athens and was a highlight, but far from the only unexpected find.
There’s a certain romance about the idea of going completely analog: Turn off the phones, read a book, take a hike, and set the points on your 1965 Plymouth Valiant. The 100 model. With a three-speed. And no radio. Yes, this Valiant’s original owner wanted virtually the cheapest new Mopar they could buy, and it has stayed pretty cheap; this one just sold on Bring a Trailer in Woburn, Massachusetts, for $3,800.
The Willys Tornado OHC six has to be the most unusual engine to find under the hood of a 1960s American pickup truck. I’ve been looking for one on streets here since…forever. Not only have I finally found one, but this Gladiator has two of them! Well no, they’re not both attached to the driving wheels; one is obviously a spare in the bed. Which is a good thing to have when your truck has one of these engines under the hood, as they are very unusual and parts are becoming rather scarce.
Thanks to my ’66 Jeep parked behind it, the two most unconventional American engine cylinder head types of the ’50s and ’60s are represented here: The Tornado 230 six with a race-car inspired OHC hemi head and the F-head Hurricane 134 Four. When it came to engines, Willys went its own way; a true independent.
(Updated 11/09/2026) Have you ever had an amazing dream? A dream that was equal parts awesomeness, fulfillment and a sensation that what you have done was the best thing ever done? Did you find out later that said dream was actually quite dumb? This “Small” Chrysler represented that for me. And I have no idea why.
(Updated 11/9/2026) I can’t decide if the Renault Alliance was really a bad car or if it was somehow broadly misunderstood, it certainly doesn’t get much respect even though it was very highly touted the first couple of years it was on offer. This particular one was brand new soon after I got my driver’s license and I know I had zero interest back then in getting to know one any closer. While they are nowadays extremely rare to find (although two seemed to be in the background of two different posts on CC this week!), this particular one was in the domestic section of the junkyard badged as an AMC. Which of course makes some sort of sense, seeing as how it was the pride of Kenosha, and built there as part of AMC’s alliance with Renault. Read the rest of this entry »
What do you get when you mix a very capable British sports car chassis with top-notch Italian coachbuilding? You’d have thought the answer might have been “success,” but if the Triumph Italia is anything to go by, “financial ruin” would be far more accurate. It wasn’t through lack of trying, though.
Text by Patrick Bell.
Camping has been a part of car culture for nearly as long as there have been cars. Today we are looking at a slice of that; people with luxury cars as a tow rig. Luxury cars were better tow cars in many ways than trucks of the day, and comfort was at the top of the list. We have campers and a few boats in many sizes, but the cars were all large and cushy highway cruisers, so let’s take a look.
For a while there, it looked really exciting. The first new engine design to reach production for ages, decades! And it was so simple. It seemed everybody was taking up licences, producing prototype engines, test cars. But as often happens when something seems simple, there was a lot of careful thought and engineering involved – and testing, testing, testing.
And the result was a tiny engine that thrived on revs, put out a phenomenal amount of power for its size, and was unbelievably smooth… but also unbelievably thirsty. And when exhaust emissions became an issue – oops!
Time showed that rotor seals wore out, much more quickly than rings in a piston engine. You didn’t want to be near a rotary with a blown muffler. But while it was running, it looked like the way of the future – provided you could keep it fed.
It broke NSU. Of all the companies that experimented with it, Mazda alone persisted.
This is, believe it or not, a Chrysler. Not only is there a 1953 Chrysler New Yorker chassis underneath its sleek Italian-made skin, this car was actually designed by Chrysler Advance Styling director Virgil Exner at his home studio in Birmingham, Michigan, to be built by Carrozzeria Ghia in Italy. Only a handful of these handsome Italian-American coupes were ever sold to the public.
(Updated 11/8/2026) For decades, British roadsters had a spell on Americans. The rivalry between the MG and Triumph, the two leading exponents of the genre, was legendary. They each had loyal adherents to the respective marques, and the stiff competition kept the improvements coming, even if not exactly at breakneck pace. But by about the time this TR-6 first appeared in 1969, the race was essentially over: the new MGC was DOA, and the MGB was quickly slipping into its ossification period; meanwhile the Triumph reveled in its final incarnation of the classic formula: old school, but with a healthy kick of life in it yet. Read the rest of this entry »
(Updated 11/8/2026) Why was I not surprised to find a Messerschmitt in Tokyo? That old Axis connection, perhaps. And the well-known local penchant for everything exotic, unusual and left-field, at least in automotive terms (and barring anything called Kia or Hyundai – there are still a few taboos here). Nevertheless, I did do a double take when I saw this sitting in front of someone’s house, because even back when these were made, they looked positively alien.
With the exception of the Transit Connect and Transit City (a BEV from China), all Ford commercial vehicles for the European market are made by Ford Otosan, headquartered in Turkey. Early September, I caught their full-size tractor and smallest cargo van at the same event.
I wasn’t even half serious when I opened Craigslist and typed “Mazda Miata” into the search bar. But it led to something that couldn’t have turned out any better.
Automatic all-wheel-drive is so common in modern trucks and SUVs that its hard to remember a time when it was a novelty, but it certainly was big news when Jeep introduced Quadra-Trac in 1973; it was an automatic all-wheel-drive system that required no getting out to lock hubs and no shift mechanism for the transfer case (in its standard form). Like most elegant engineering solutions, Quadra-Trac is a simple concept with simple execution.
