I’ve looked, believe me. I searched and searched online – and not just the Anglosphere, either. German-language, French-language, Japanese… Everyone and their cousin seems to agree: the C126 is an absolutely magnificent example of Mercedes at their level best. And it seems CC agrees, judging by past posts on the subject. Such unanimous positivity is pretty rare. Are there any nits that need picking or is this really a case of Benz peaking?
What we see here today is a beater — a cheap car that generally is not well maintained by its owner, who generally cannot afford anything nicer. Our featured car is missing all of its hubcaps, has mismatched quarter panels, and obviously has had some quick and dirty rust repair done. It will be driven by its owner until something major breaks that’s not worth fixing, and they will then move on to their next car. So it goes.
But this car is also something much more than a lowly beater, as it is also one of the last cars marketed by the ‘old’ Hyundai – a purveyor of affordable cars desperately trying to break into the highly-competitive US market. An entity almost entirely unrecognizable to the juggernaut of the global auto industry we know today. But Hyundai’s rise couldn’t have happened without cars like this 2003 Sonata. So let’s appreciate it before it, like all beaters, one day goes to the great big junkyard in the sky.
This consignment lot was my favorite spot to hunt for cars. Unfortunately, they are no longer in business.
I came very late to the SUV game, and I was actually one of those guys that thought that SUVs were over the top and superfluous. “Most families’ needs can be accommodated by a minivan.” I’m sure that you’ve heard that argument before. I’d put almost twenty years of minivan driving before this. Actually the minivan is a better choice if all you are going to carry is passengers and cargo. But if you need to tow, or want, 4WD, then the SUV begins to make more sense.
(first posted 9/3/2018) Yesterday I visited the 2018 edition of La Fête des Limousines, a show focusing on the top models of French automakers. There was this Peugeot that didn’t quite fit in the line-ups of its compatriots. It just had to stand out from the crowd.
(first posted 9/4/2018) Maserati, under the stewardship of Alejandro de Tomaso, introduced the Biturbo line in 1981 with the intention of increasing the brand’s production volume tenfold. Trading on the prestige of the Maserati name and offering a much lower price of entry to the brand, the Biturbo was a promising and modern design that unfortunately suffered from myriad quality and reliability issues. Maserati sales plummeted and with what little capital they had, Maserati was forced to offer countless permutations of the same basic car. The Shamal was the most exciting. Read the rest of this entry »
I was mulling doing my regular two-month round-up of various cars I briefly encountered around the city, but this summer was a little lacklustre, so that will have to wait until next month. Meantime, it’s going to be ‘80s-‘90s German Coupé Week for CC’s Tokyo correspondent – serious with the HP and light on the chrome. We’ll start proceedings with a quick post featuring the well-known butt of the Porsche 928, seen here in its later GT guise.
One more walk through Versteijnen’s jumbo showroom in the south of the Netherlands, with their own Scania T500 V8 4×2 tractor prominently on display. Its first registration was in the summer of 2005, which means it must be one of Scania’s last factory conventionals. In October of that year, the manufacturer announced to discontinue the production of their conventional vehicles.
From the jump, I realize that it’s an understatement to say that deindustrialization had a significant impact on many Rust Belt cities, including in my hometown of Flint, Michigan. Once a vehicle manufacturing powerhouse, we still build trucks and parts, but now at a fraction of the level that was the case up through my early childhood. While Flint continues its reinvention and diversification of its economy, with education and health care coming first to mind, there are still a few reminders around of its past glories as an affluent and enviable blue-collar community. Nowadays, just the continued existence of a long-time business is enough to excite me, as many establishments have since shuttered in the wake of prior decades of General Motors plant closures.
(first posted 8/2/2018) Not all Volkswagen Transporter camper vans go by the name of Westfalia. The German company Dehler Mobile, defunct since 1998, also offered a range of high-quality Transporter-based camper vans. One of them was the Maxivan, using a short wheelbase Volkswagen T4 as a starting point.
(first posted 9/3/2018) CC does not normally go back 90 years – I guess 20 to 60 years is our real sweet spot – but this one was too good to ignore. A curbside (or kerbside, at a preserved steam railway) example of one of the most significant British cars, one that had an impact not just in the UK but in France, Germany, Japan and even the US, out of all proportion to its diminutive size and capacity. Never has 748cc seemed so powerful. Read the rest of this entry »
Here is the final installment of our hubcap quiz to test your curbside identification skills. As I introduced in Pt. 1, my uncle has a hubcap collection which he inherited from his dad, who collected most of them as castoffs when driving around as a mailman in Iowa from the 50’s through the 70’s. If you missed either Pt. 1 or Pt. 2, you can go back and catch up on all the glorious Peak Hubcap Era wheel covers you missed. Read the rest of this entry »
I recently wrote my first CC on a 1978 Ford LTD Landau with an unusual power source – diesel! Regularly seen in the same Atlanta neighborhood is this 1980s Toyota Pickup with an even less likely source of momentum. Yes, this is a partially solar powered electric-converted Truck, seemingly used as daily transportation.
I have spent a lot of seat time in minivans over the years. I have owned an early Honda Odyssey (the under-appreciated version with hinged doors), a 99 Town & Country (possibly “Peak” Chrysler minivan) and experienced over a decade with a 2012 Kia Sedona. I have driven others through the years, but until recently there has been a big hole in my experience – the current Chrysler Pacifica.
An accumulation of unfortunate circumstances recently allowed me to plug that experiential hole, and I thought I might share my thoughts on this vehicle. This is my first time in a Chrysler minivan since the old Dodge Grand Caravan of the 2010s. In fact, I wrote up my last experience with one in 2018 (here). So how was the Pacifica (which is actually not a Pacifica but a Voyager)? It was fine.
