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Thread: Bring Back a Real Car-Truck!

  1. #1

    Exclamation Bring Back a Real Car-Truck!

    Bring Back a Real Car-Truck!

    https://www.ericpetersautos.com/2018...eal-car-truck/

    By eric - April 4, 2018

    VW’s new truck – if they build it, which hopefully they will – won’t be the first one.

    For a couple of years back in the early ’80s, you could buy a pick-up version of the Rabbit. It was even available with a diesel engine.

    Of course, neither of these vehicles are pick-ups, even though they look like pick-ups.

    Both the concept Tanoak “truck” on display at the Auto Show up in New York and the Rabbit-based pick-up of the early ‘80s are in fact cars.

    With beds, certainly.

    But cars, fundamentally.

    Front-wheel-drive, for openers – which automatically disqualifies either from entry into the Truck Club.

    A front-drive truck is like a gentle Nazi or a fish that doesn’t swim.

    FWD is how most cars are built nowadays because it makes sense from a packaging perspective (engine mounted sideways, with the transmission and axle combined into a single unit and bolted directly to the engine) for more room inside the resulting car. It also lightens up the resulting car – which is a desirable thing when it comes to cars nowadays because it means better fuel economy – which the government requires even if buyers don’t particularly care – and less cumbersome handling as well as (usually) peppier pick-up, because there’s less weight to haul.

    There is no heavy rear axle, nor similarly heavy leaf springs. These are truck things. And they are heavy. But they are also heavy-duty and exactly what you want if you intend to haul.

    FWD/FWD-based vehicles – this includes “crossovers,” which are just jacked-up cars made to look like SUVs based on rear-drive trucks – have low tow ratings and aren’t built to handle the abuse trucks are designed to deal with.

    They have all-wheel-drive, sometimes – but never four-wheel-drive, with a two-speed transfer case and 4WD Low range gearing.

    Those are truck things.

    They always have smaller engines – usually fours and sixes.

    Never V8s.

    All of which brings up something no one in New York talked about when VW brought out its Tanoak concept “truck.”

    Why doesn’t someone bring out a real-deal car-truck? A latter-day El Camino? Or even a Ranchero?

    Both of these looked like cars – but had much more in common with trucks than either the Tanoak or the Rabbit pick-up.

    The El Camino (and Ranchero) had beds, just like the Tanoak and the Ranchero. But they also had V8s and solid rear axles and were rear-wheel-drive in their basic layout.

    As trucks are laid out.

    As cars were once laid out.

    Well, American cars.

    Back in the used-to-be days.

    The default for most of the history of the American car until the mid-1980s was engine up front (mounted front to rear, not sideways) with a separate transmission bolted to the back of it that transmitted power to a separate rear axle mounted in the rear, via a prop shaft that spanned the distance.

    Most of these cars were also beefy body-on-frame construction, again like trucks.

    Which – ironically enough – is why the trucks of the past were often “spun off” the cars of the past and – until fairly recently – had much more in common with cars than today’s trucks have in common with cars.

    The El Camino of the ’60, ’70s and early ’80s came with (or could be ordered with) the same small-block V8 that powered Chevy trucks. In the early El Caminos, it was even possible to order a big block V8.

    The Salad Days.

    Then (in 1975) along came CAFE, the federal fatwa decreeing that all cars must use only so much gas, regardless of buying willingness to pay for gas. If a car used more than the fatwa decreed, fines descended.

    Within a few short years, the typical American car became like the foreign car: Smaller, lighter – and based on a front-wheel-drive layout.

    Body-on-frame and V8-powered/rear-drive American cars like the Chevy Chevelle/Impala/Caprice (which were the basis for the El Camino throughout its production run) received the Chicxulub Treatment. Like the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs, CAFE killed off rear-drive/body-on-frame and V8 powered American cars, or at least mostly so. The difference being that the Chicxulub asteroid was a natural event while CAFE is a government-created thing.

    A few of the old stompers survived – kind of like Loch Ness, which is said to be a Plesiosaur – but only in the isolated backwaters of high-performance (e.g., Camaro, Corvette) and high-end (e.g., Caddy CTS, etc.).

    Mass market – affordable – cars of that kind disappeared.

    Which is why the El Camino and Ranchero disappeared, too.

    Which is too bad, because they make a lot more sense as cars that can do truck-ish things than either the proposed Tanoak or the actual Rabbit “truck.” The El Camino/Ranchero could pull and haul, things the car-based VWs aren’t suited for. Their beds are okay for the dog and light loads. For real work, you want a RWD-based layout and – ideally – a hunky V8 up front.

    The problem is there’s no reasonably priced/mass market RWD/V8 passenger car platform to serve as the basis of such a thing. VW hasn’t got one, certainly.

    The only one that comes close that’s still in production is the Dodge/Chrysler Charger/300, upon which the sun is already setting. It is doubtful these surviving Plesiosaurs will remain in production much longer; the CAFE Crunch is sealing their doom.

    So, we’re left with “trucks” that aren’t really – but sort of look like it.
    Another mark of a tyrant is that he likes foreigners better than citizens, and lives with them and invites them to his table; for the one are enemies, but the Others enter into no rivalry with him. - Aristotle's Politics Book 5 Part 11



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  3. #2
    The VW Tanoak.

    Be sweet in a 4WD diesel with manual trans.



  4. #3
    Not nearly as bad ass as this though...


  5. #4

  6. #5

    Don't need a weather man to know which way the wind blows

  7. #6
    Tesla should make one.
    Pfizer Macht Frei!

    Openly Straight Man, Danke, Awarded Top Rated Influencer. Community Standards Enforcer.


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  8. #7
    Quote Originally Posted by Anti Federalist View Post
    The VW Tanoak.

    Be sweet in a 4WD diesel with manual trans.

    Looks like a Honda Ridgeline, which is a car with a bed as well.
    Quote Originally Posted by Andrew Ryan
    In Washington you can see them everywhere: the Parasites and baby Stalins sucking the life out of a once-great nation.

  9. #8
    Does the new upcoming Comanche (wrangler pickup) count?



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  11. #9
    My 1st vehicle:




    My preferred vehicle:

    “The spirits of darkness are now among us. We have to be on guard so that we may realize what is happening when we encounter them and gain a real idea of where they are to be found. The most dangerous thing you can do in the immediate future will be to give yourself up unconsciously to the influences which are definitely present.” ~ Rudolf Steiner

  12. #10
    No matter how the auto companies try, they can't get anyone to buy anything other than useless suvs.
    Quote Originally Posted by Swordsmyth View Post
    Pinochet is the model
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    Liberty preserving authoritarianism.
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    Enforced internal open borders was one of the worst elements of the Constitution.

  13. #11
    Quote Originally Posted by TheCount View Post
    No matter how the auto companies try, they can't get anyone to buy anything other than useless suvs.
    People buy what they want and need.

    People bought station wagons by the millions because it was what they needed, a comfortable car, that could carry 6-7-8 or even more people.

    The SUV is a bastard creation cobbled together by the car companies to try and give people what they wanted, in spite of Uncle Sucker's fatwas and mandates.

  14. #12
    I'm still looking for a long car with lots of room. Even though the old geezer Toyota Avalon looked promising a few years back, it never panned out. I think it actually got shorter and lamer. I knew better, but was still hoping somebody would come up with something innovative. And to toot my own horn, I was saying that the Big 3 should build retro cars long before they built them. Well, they built them, and they were still a hug disappointment.

    Instead of pinning my hopes on a lame car, I'll just keep my 90s Roadmaster. That's about as close as I'm gonna get to anything long.

    Maybe I'm done with a fancy for cars. I might look into getting an actual horse.
    Quote Originally Posted by TheCount View Post
    ...I believe that when the government is capable of doing a thing, it will.
    Quote Originally Posted by Influenza View Post
    which one of yall fuckers wrote the "ron paul" racist news letters
    Quote Originally Posted by Dforkus View Post
    Zippy's posts are a great contribution.




    Disrupt, Deny, Deflate. Read the RPF trolls' playbook here (post #3): http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthr...eptive-members

  15. #13
    Quote Originally Posted by NorthCarolinaLiberty View Post
    I'm still looking for a long car with lots of room. Even though the old geezer Toyota Avalon looked promising a few years back, it never panned out. I think it actually got shorter and lamer. I knew better, but was still hoping somebody would come up with something innovative. And to toot my own horn, I was saying that the Big 3 should build retro cars long before they built them. Well, they built them, and they were still a hug disappointment.

    Instead of pinning my hopes on a lame car, I'll just keep my 90s Roadmaster. That's about as close as I'm gonna get to anything long.

    Maybe I'm done with a fancy for cars. I might look into getting an actual horse.
    Do you need to HB34?
    Never attempt to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and annoys the pig.

    Robert Heinlein

    Give a man an inch and right away he thinks he's a ruler

    Groucho Marx

    I love mankind…it’s people I can’t stand.

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    You cannot have liberty without morality and morality without faith

    Alexis de Torqueville

    Those who fail to learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.
    Those who learn from the past are condemned to watch everybody else repeat it

    A Zero Hedge comment

  16. #14
    Quote Originally Posted by TheCount View Post
    No matter how the auto companies try, they can't get anyone to buy anything other than useless suvs.

    I have pick-up trucks and SUVs mostly. Not sure how they are useless. I even have a bread van which Ron Paul tagged. That is currently useless to me, but I am having a hard time parting with.
    Pfizer Macht Frei!

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    Quiz: Test Your "Income" Tax IQ!

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    The Federalist Papers, No. 15:

    Except as to the rule of appointment, the United States have an indefinite discretion to make requisitions for men and money; but they have no authority to raise either by regulations extending to the individual citizens of America.

  17. #15
    Quote Originally Posted by Swordsmyth View Post
    Do you need to HB34?
    Heh, heh.

    Yeah, I meant "huge" disappointment.
    Quote Originally Posted by TheCount View Post
    ...I believe that when the government is capable of doing a thing, it will.
    Quote Originally Posted by Influenza View Post
    which one of yall fuckers wrote the "ron paul" racist news letters
    Quote Originally Posted by Dforkus View Post
    Zippy's posts are a great contribution.




    Disrupt, Deny, Deflate. Read the RPF trolls' playbook here (post #3): http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthr...eptive-members

  18. #16
    Quote Originally Posted by Swordsmyth View Post
    Do you need to HB34?

    even the manly of men needs a HB hug once and a while.
    Pfizer Macht Frei!

    Openly Straight Man, Danke, Awarded Top Rated Influencer. Community Standards Enforcer.


    Quiz: Test Your "Income" Tax IQ!

    Short Income Tax Video

    The Income Tax Is An Excise, And Excise Taxes Are Privilege Taxes

    The Federalist Papers, No. 15:

    Except as to the rule of appointment, the United States have an indefinite discretion to make requisitions for men and money; but they have no authority to raise either by regulations extending to the individual citizens of America.



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  20. #17
    I used to go to Cars at Carlisle. Ended up buying three cars. Chrysler made a lot of crap, but I had decent luck with this one. I measured it once. It was 19.5 feet. It was this exact color. I drove it some in the mid-2000s. I'd drive it to work and it didn't even fit in the parking space. The body and paint were excellent, but the black interior was absolutely immaculate. Funny this is, I can't even remember what I did with that thing.



    Last edited by NorthCarolinaLiberty; 04-04-2018 at 11:11 PM.
    Quote Originally Posted by TheCount View Post
    ...I believe that when the government is capable of doing a thing, it will.
    Quote Originally Posted by Influenza View Post
    which one of yall fuckers wrote the "ron paul" racist news letters
    Quote Originally Posted by Dforkus View Post
    Zippy's posts are a great contribution.




    Disrupt, Deny, Deflate. Read the RPF trolls' playbook here (post #3): http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthr...eptive-members

  21. #18
    I forgot; this is about car-trucks. Okay, I once bought a 75 El Camino. Had fun driving it from Ohio to Arizona. 151k miles with the original timing chain. Was red and looked like this (except the hubcaps).


    Quote Originally Posted by TheCount View Post
    ...I believe that when the government is capable of doing a thing, it will.
    Quote Originally Posted by Influenza View Post
    which one of yall fuckers wrote the "ron paul" racist news letters
    Quote Originally Posted by Dforkus View Post
    Zippy's posts are a great contribution.




    Disrupt, Deny, Deflate. Read the RPF trolls' playbook here (post #3): http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthr...eptive-members

  22. #19
    One time I was at Cars at Carlisle (Pennsylvania). I was looking at a brown 83 El Camino. The owner was a real, real prick. I was checking the fluids & such, and he gets really really mad. I asked him how I would know if it was in good shape, and he belts out "BECAUSE I TOLD YOU SO!" I sort of chuckle, but just walked on.

    Ten years later I'm married and we buy our current house. We have this neighbor down the road who looks strangely familiar. I didn't place him at the time. He's one of these old fiesty geezers, and reputed to still be some kind of career criminal asswipe. He seemed however, nice and mild enough in our meeting.

    The next time I encounter him in his yard, we get into an argument. Really, really nasty MF. He ends up pulling out his gun and takes a shot at my feet.

    Then, it hits me later. I connect his nastiness in the yard with the guy at the Carlisle PA car show. I can still swear it's the same guy. He was reputed to be very petty, so I always wondered if he somehow remembered our Carlisle encounter and was getting back at me. I'll probably never know because he recently died. Apparently, he used to beat his wife, but my wife says she's really really nice. I always wanted to ask the widow if her dumbass husband ever owned a brown 83 El Camino.
    Last edited by NorthCarolinaLiberty; 04-04-2018 at 11:45 PM.
    Quote Originally Posted by TheCount View Post
    ...I believe that when the government is capable of doing a thing, it will.
    Quote Originally Posted by Influenza View Post
    which one of yall fuckers wrote the "ron paul" racist news letters
    Quote Originally Posted by Dforkus View Post
    Zippy's posts are a great contribution.




    Disrupt, Deny, Deflate. Read the RPF trolls' playbook here (post #3): http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthr...eptive-members

  23. #20
    On the virtues of big cars:

    Yet there’s more to a really good-handling car than just making sure it doesn’t belong to you. It has to be big. It’s really hard for a girl to get her clothes off inside a small car, and this is one of the most important features of car handling. Also, what kind of drugs does it have in it? Most people like to drive on speed or cocaine with plenty of whiskey mixed in. This gives you the confidence you want and need for plowing through red lights and passing trucks on the right. But don’t neglect downs and ‘ludes and codeine cough syrup either. It’s hard to beat the heavy depressants for high-speed spin-outs, backing into trees, and a general feeling of not giving two $#@!s about man and his universe.

    Overall, though, it’s the bigness of the car that counts the most. Because when something bad happens in a really big car – accidentally speeding through the middle of a gang of unruly young people who have been taunting you in a drive-in restaurant, for instance – it happens very far away – way out at the end of your fenders. It’s like a civil war in Africa; you know, it doesn’t really concern you too much. On the other hand, when something happens in a little bitty car it happens right in your face. You get all involved in it and have to give everything a lot of thought. Driving around in a little bitty car is like being one of those sensitive girls who writes poetry. Life is just too much to bear. You end up staying at home in your bedroom and thinking up sonnets that don’t get published till you die, which will be real soon if you keep driving around in little bitty cars like that.

    From:

    How to Drive Fast on Drugs While Getting Your Wing-Wang Squeezed and Not Spill Your Drink by P.J. O'Rourke
    Last edited by Anti Federalist; 04-05-2018 at 03:46 AM.

  24. #21
    Needs a copypasta of the whole thing...


    What I’d really like is a new label. And I’m sure there are a lot of people who feel the same way. We are the Republican Party Reptiles. We look like Republicans, and think like conservatives, but we drive a lot faster and keep vibrators and baby oil and a video camera behind the stack of sweaters on the bedroom closet shelf. I think our agenda is clear. We are opposed to: government spending, Kennedy kids, seat-belt laws, being a pussy about nuclear power, busing our children anywhere other than Yale, trailer courts near our vacation homes, Gary Hart, all tiny Third World countries that don’t have banking secrecy laws, aerobics, the U.N., taxation without tax loopholes, and jewelry on men. We are in favor of: guns, drugs, fast cars, free love (if our wives don’t find out), a sound dollar, cleaner environment (poor people should cut it out with the graffiti), a strong military with spiffy uniforms, Nastassia Kinski, Star Wars (and anything else that scares the Russkis), and a firm stand on the Middle East (raze buildings, burn crops, plow the earth with salt, and sell the population into bondage).

    There are thousands of people in America who feel this way, especially after three or four drinks. If all of us would unite and work together, we could give this country... well, a real bad hangover.

    P. J. O’Rourke
    Jaffrey, New Hampshire 1986

    How to Drive Fast on Drugs
    While Getting Your
    Wing-Wang Squeezed
    and
    Not Spill Your Drink



    When it comes to taking chances, some people like to play poker or shoot dice; other people prefer to parachute-jump, go rhino hunting, or climb ice floes, while still others engage in crime or marriage. But I like to get drunk and drive like a fool. Name me, if you can, a better feeling than the one you get when you’re half a bottle of Chivas in the bag with a gram of coke up your nose and a teenage lovely pulling off her tube top in the next seat over while you’re going a hundred miles an hour down a suburban side street. You’d have to watch the entire Mexican air force crash-land in a liquid petroleum gas storage facility to match this kind of thrill. If you ever have much more fun than that, you’ll die of pure sensory overload, I’m here to tell you.

    But wait. Let’s pause and analyze why this particular matrix of activities is perceived as so highly enjoyable. I mean, aside from the teenage lovely pulling off her tube top in the next seat over. Ignoring that for a moment, let’s look at the psychological factors conducive to placing positive emotional values on the sensory end product of experientially produced excitation of the central nervous system and smacking into a lamppost. Is that any way to have fun? How would your mother feel if she knew you were doing this? She’d cry. She really would. And that’s how you know it’s fun. Anything that makes your mother cry is fun. Sigmund Freud wrote all about this. It’s a well-known fact.

    Of course, it’s a shame to waste young lives behaving this way – speeding around all tanked up with your feet hooked in the steering wheel while your date crawls around on the floor mats opening zippers with her teeth and pounding on the accelerator with an empty liquor bottle. But it wouldn’t be taking a chance if you weren’t risking something. And even if it is a shame to waste young lives behaving this way, it is definitely cooler than risking old lives behaving this way. I mean, so what if some fifty-eight-year-old butt-head gets a load on and starts playing Death Race 2000 in the rush-hour traffic jam? What kind of chance is he taking? He’s just waiting around to see what kind of cancer he gets anyway. But if young, talented you, with all of life’s possibilities at your fingertips, you and the future Cheryl Tiegs there, so fresh, so beautiful – if the two of you stake your handsome heads on a single roll of the dice in life’s game of stop-the-semi – now that’s taking chances! Which is why old people rarely risk their lives. It’s not because they’re chicken – they just have too much dignity to play for small stakes.

    Now a lot of people say to me, “Hey, P.J., you like to drive fast. Why not join a responsible organization, such as the Sports Car Club of America, and enjoy participation in sports car racing? That way you could drive as fast as you wish while still engaging in a well-regulated spectator sport that is becoming more popular each year.” No thanks. In the first place, if you ask me, those guys are a bunch of tweedy old barf mats who like to talk about things like what necktie they wore to Alberto Ascari’s funeral. And in the second place, they won’t let me drive drunk. They expect me to go out there and smash into things and roll over on the roof and catch fire and burn to death when I’m sober. They must think I’m crazy. That stuff scares me. I have to get completely $#@!-faced to even think about driving fast. How can you have a lot of exciting thrills when you’re so terrified that you wet yourself all the time? That’s not fun. It’s just not fun to have exciting thrills when you’re scared. Take the heroes of the Iliad for instance – they really had some exciting thrills, and were they scared? No. They were drunk. Every chance they could get. And so am I, and I’m not going out there and have a horrible car wreck until somebody brings me a cocktail.

    Also, it’s important to be drunk because being drunk keeps your body all loose, and that way, if you have an accident or anything, you’ll sort of roll with the punches and not get banged up so bad. For example, there was this guy I heard about who was really drunk and was driving through the Adirondacks. He got sideswiped by a bus and went head-on into another car, which knocked him off a bridge, and he plummeted 150 feet into a ravine. I mean, it killed him and everything, but if he hadn’t been so drunk and loose, his body probably would have been banged up a lot worse – and you can imagine how much more upset his wife would have been when she went down to the morgue to identify him.

    Even more important than being drunk, however, is having the right car. You have to get a car that handles really well. This is extremely important, and there’s a lot of debate on this subject – about what kind of car handles best. Some say a front-engined car; some say a rear-engined car. I say a rented car. Nothing handles better than a rented car. You can go faster, turn corners sharper, and put the transmission into reverse while going forward at a higher rate of speed in a rented car than in any other kind. You can also park without looking, and can use the trunk as an ice chest. Another thing about a rented car is that it’s an all-terrain vehicle. Mud, snow, water, woods – you can take a rented car anywhere. True, you can’t always get it back – but that’s not your problem, is it?

    Yet there’s more to a really good-handling car than just making sure it doesn’t belong to you. It has to be big. It’s really hard for a girl to get her clothes off inside a small car, and this is one of the most important features of car handling. Also, what kind of drugs does it have in it? Most people like to drive on speed or cocaine with plenty of whiskey mixed in. This gives you the confidence you want and need for plowing through red lights and passing trucks on the right. But don’t neglect downs and ‘ludes and codeine cough syrup either. It’s hard to beat the heavy depressants for high-speed spin-outs, backing into trees, and a general feeling of not giving two $#@!s about man and his universe.

    Overall, though, it’s the bigness of the car that counts the most. Because when something bad happens in a really big car – accidentally speeding through the middle of a gang of unruly young people who have been taunting you in a drive-in restaurant, for instance – it happens very far away – way out at the end of your fenders. It’s like a civil war in Africa; you know, it doesn’t really concern you too much. On the other hand, when something happens in a little bitty car it happens right in your face. You get all involved in it and have to give everything a lot of thought. Driving around in a little bitty car is like being one of those sensitive girls who writes poetry. Life is just too much to bear. You end up staying at home in your bedroom and thinking up sonnets that don’t get published till you die, which will be real soon if you keep driving around in little bitty cars like that.

    Let’s inspect some of the basic maneuvers of drunken driving while you’ve got crazy girls who are on drugs with you. Look for these signs when picking up crazy girls: pierced ears with five or six earrings in them, unusual shoes, white lipstick, extreme thinness, hair that’s less than an inch long, or clothing made of chrome and leather. Stay away from girls who cry a lot or who look like they get pregnant easily or have careers. They may want to do weird stuff in cars, but only in the backseat, and it’s really hard to steer from back there. Besides, they’ll want to get engaged right away afterwards. But the other kind of girls – there’s no telling what they’ll do. I used to know this girl who weighed about eighty pounds and dressed in skirts that didn’t even cover her underwear, when she wore any. I had this beat-up old Mercedes, and we were off someplace about fifty miles from nowhere on Christmas Eve in a horrible sleetstorm. The road was really a mess, all curves and big ditches, and I was blotto, and the car kept slipping off the pavement and sliding sideways. And just when I’d hit a big patch of glare ice and was frantically spinning the wheel trying to stay out of the oncoming traffic, she said, “I shaved my crotch today – wanna feel?”

    That’s really true. And then about half an hour later the head gasket blew up, and we had to spend I don’t know how long in this dirtball motel although the girl walked all the way to the liquor store through about a mile of slush and got all kinds of wine and did weird stuff with the bottlenecks later. So it was sort of okay, except that the garage where I left the Mercedes burned down and I used the insurance money to buy a motorcycle.

    Now, girls who like motorcycles really will do anything. I mean, really, anything you can think of. But it’s just not the same. For one thing, it’s hard to drink while you’re riding a motorcycle – there’s no place to set your glass. And cocaine’s out of the question. And personally, I find that grass makes me too sensitive. You smoke some grass and the first thing you know you’re pulling over to the side of the road and taking a break to dig the gentle beauty of the sky’s vast panorama, the slow, luxurious interlay of sun and clouds, the lulling trill of breezes midst leafy tree branches – and what kind of fun is that? Besides, it’s tough to “get it on” with a chick (I mean in the biblical sense) and still make all the fast curves unless you let her take the handlebars with her pants off and come on doggy-style or something, which is harder than it sounds; and pantless girls on motorcycles attract the highway patrol, so usually you don’t end up doing anything until you’re both off the bike, and by then you may be in the hospital. Like I was after this old lady pulled out in front of me in an Oldsmobile, and the girl I was with still wanted to do anything you can think of, but there was a doctor there and he was squirting pHisoHex all over me and combing little bits of gravel out of my face with a wire brush, and I just couldn’t get into it. So take it from me and don’t get a motorcycle. Get a big car.

    Usually, most fast-driving maneuvers that don’t require crazy girls call for use of the steering wheel, so be sure your car is equipped with power steering. Without power steering, turning the wheel is a lot like work, and if you wanted work you’d get a job. All steering should be done with the index finger. Then, when you’re done doing all the steering that you want to do, just pull your finger out of there and the wheel will come right back to wherever it wants to. It’s that simple. Be sure to do an extra lot of steering when going into a driveway or turning sharp corners. And here’s another important tip: Always roll the window down before throwing bottles out, and don’t try to throw them through the windshield unless the car is parked.

    Okay, now say you’ve been on a six-day drunk and you’ve just made a bet that you can back up all the way to Cleveland, plus you’ve got a buddy who’s getting a blow job on the trunk lid. Well, let’s face it – if that’s the way you’re going to act, sooner or later you’ll have an accident. This much is true. But that doesn’t mean that you should sit back and just let accidents happen to you. No, you have to go out and cause them yourself. That way you’re in control of the situation.

    You know, it’s a shame, but a lot of people have the wrong idea about accidents. For one thing, they don’t hurt nearly as much as you’d think. That’s because you’re in shock and can’t feel pain, or if you aren’t in shock, you’re dead, and that doesn’t hurt at all so far as we know. Another thing is that they make great stories. I’ve got this friend – a prominent man in the automotive industry – who flipped his MG TF back in the fifties and slid on his head for a couple hundred yards, and had to spend a year with no eyelids and a steel pin through his cheekbones while his face was being rebuilt. Sure, it wasn’t much fun at the time, but you should hear him tell about it now. What a fabulous tale, especially during dinner. Besides, it’s not all smashing glass and spurting blood, you understand. Why, a good sideswipe can be an almost religious experience. The sheet metal doesn’t break or crunch or anything – it flexes and gives way as the two vehicles come together with a rushing liquid pulse as if two giant sharks of steel were mating in the perpetual night of the sea primordial. I mean, if you’re on enough drugs. Also, sometimes you see a lot of really pretty lights in your head.

    One sure way to cause an accident is with your basic “moonshiner’s” or “bootlegger’s” turn. Whiz down the road at about sixty or seventy, throw the gearshift into neutral, cut the wheel to the left, and hit the emergency brake with one good wallop while holding the brake release out with your left hand. This’ll send you spinning around in a perfect 180-degree turn right into a culvert or a fast-moving tractor-trailer rig. (The bootlegger’s turn can be done on dry pavement, but it works best on top of loose gravel or small children.) Or, when you’ve moved around backwards, you can then spin the wheel to the right and keep on going until you’ve come around a full 360 degrees and are headed back the same way you were going; though it probably would have been easier to have just kept going that way in the first place and not have done anything at all, unless you were with somebody you really wanted to impress – your probation officer, for instance.

    An old friend of mine named Joe Schenkman happens to have just written me a letter about another thing you can do to wreck a car. Joe’s on a little vacation up in Vermont (and will be until he finds out what the statute of limitations on attempted vehicular homicide is). He was writing to tell me about a fellow he met up there, saying:

    ... This guy has rolled (deliberately) over thirty cars (and not just by his own account – the townfolks back him up on this story), inheriting only a broken nose (three times) and a slightly black-and-blue shoulder for all this. What you do, see, is you go into a moonshiner’s turn, but you get on the brakes and stay on them. Depending on how fast you’re going, you roll proportionately; four or five rolls is decent. Going into the spin, you have one hand on the seat and the other firmly on the roof so you’re sprung in tight. As you feel the roof give on the first roll, you slip your seat hand under the dash (of the passenger side, as you’re thrown hard over in that direction to begin with) and pull yourself under it. And here you simply sit it out, springing yourself tight with your whole body, waiting for the thunder to die. Naturally, it helps to be drunk, and if you have a split second’s doubt or hesitation through any of this, you die.

    This Schenkman himself is no slouch of a driver, I may say. Unfortunately, his strong suit is driving in New York City, an area that has a great number of unusual special conditions, which we just don’t have the time or the space to get into right here (except to note that the good part is how it’s real easy to scare old ladies in new Cadillacs and the bad part is that Negroes actually do carry knives, not to mention Puerto Ricans; and everybody else you hit turns out to be a lawyer or married to somebody in the mob). However, Joe is originally from the South, and it was down there that he discovered huffing glue and sniffing industrial solvents and such. These give you a really spectacular hallucinatory type of a high where you think, for instance, that you’re driving through an overpass guardrail and landing on a freight-train flatcar and being hauled to Shreveport and loaded into a container ship headed for Liberia with a crew full of homosexual Lebanese, only to come to and find out that it’s true. Joe is a commercial artist who enjoys jazz music and horse racing. His favorite color is blue.

    There’s been a lot of discussion about what kind of music to listen to while staring doom square in the eye and not blinking unless you get some grit under your contacts. Watch out for the fellow who tunes his FM to the classical station. He thinks a little Rimsky-Korsakov makes things more dramatic – like in a foreign movie. That’s pussy style. This kind of guy’s idea of a fast drive is a seventy-five-mile-an-hour cruise up to the summer cottage after one brandy and soda. The true skidmark artist prefers something cheery and upbeat – “Night on Disco Mountain” or “Boogie Oogie Oogie” or whatever it is that the teenage lovely wants to shake her buns to. Remember her? So what do you care what’s on the $#@!ing tape deck? The high, hot whine of the engine, the throaty pitch of the exhaust, the wind in your beer can, the gentle slurping noises from her little bud-red lips – that’s all the music your ears need, although side two of the first Velvet Underground album is nice if you absolutely insist. And no short jaunts either. For the maniacal high-speed driver, endurance is everything. Especially if you’ve used that ever-popular pickup line “Wanna go to Mexico?” Especially if you’ve used it somewhere like Boston. Besides, teenage girls can go a long, long time without sleep, and believe me, so can the police and their parents. So just keep your foot in it. There’s no reason not to. There’s no reason not to keep going forever, really. I had this friend who drove a whole $#@!load of people up from Oaxaca to Cincinnati one time, nonstop. I mean, he stopped for gas but he wouldn’t even let anybody get out then. He made them all piss out the windows, and he says that it was worth the entire drive just to see a girl try to piss out the window of a moving car.

    Get a fat girl friend so you’ll have plenty of amphetamines and you’ll never have to stop at all. The only problem you’ll run into is that after you’ve been driving for two or three days you start to see things in the road – great big scaly things twenty feet high with nine legs. But there are very few great big scaly things with nine legs in America anymore, so you can just drive right through them because they probably aren’t really there, and if they are really there you’ll be doing the country a favor by running them over.






    Yes, but where does it all end? Where does a crazy life like this lead? To death, you say. Look at all the people who’ve died in car wrecks: Albert Camus, Jayne Mansfield, Jackson Pollock, Tom Paine. Well, Tom Paine didn’t really die in a car wreck, but he probably would have if he’d lived a little later. He was that kind of guy. Anyway, death is always the first thing that leaps into everybody’s mind – sudden violent death at an early age. If only it were that simple. God, we could all go out in a blaze of flaming aluminum alloys formulated specially for the Porsche factory race effort like James Dean did! No ulcers, no hemorrhoids, no bulging waistlines, soft dicks, or false teeth... bash!! kaboom!! Watch this space for paperback reprint rights, auction, and movie option sale! But that’s not the way it goes. No. What actually happens is you fall for that teenage lovely in the next seat over, fall for her like a ton of condoms, and before you know it you’re married and have teenage lovelies of your own – getting felt up in a Pontiac Trans Ams this very minute, no doubt – plus a six-figure mortgage, a liver the size of the Bronx, and a Country Squire that’s never seen the sweet side of sixty.

    It’s hard to face the truth, but I suppose you yourself realize that if you’d had just a little more courage, just a little more strength of character, you could have been dead by now. No such luck.




    From P. J. O’Rourke, Republican Party Reptile, first published 1978, pp. 128-137.

  25. #22
    Quote Originally Posted by TheCount View Post
    No matter how the auto companies try, they can't get anyone to buy anything other than useless suvs.
    Why there are SUVs:



    The Last Redoubt?

    https://www.ericpetersautos.com/2018...-last-redoubt/

    By eric - February 14, 2018

    Some of you may remember station wagons.

    Before SUVs and crossovers – before minivans – station wagons were the family car of choice for millions of American families. They were as everywhere as SUVs and crossovers are today. As minivans were, before SUVs and crossovers supplanted them.

    Wagons were natural things, created as the result of market demand for them. They were in demand because they could comfortably carry more than five people and a bunch of stuff in the back plus pull a trailer, if the need was there. Such attributes appeal to families, to people who have kids and often have to cart around other people’s kids, too.

    The big wagons were based on the big sedans that were dominant at the time – the time being the ’60s and ‘70s.

    This was the time before government got into the business of dictating to the car industry how many miles-per-gallon cars would have to deliver in order to avoid being fined for noncompliance. When cars were designed to meet buyer – rather than government – demands

    When that reversed, the car business hit the equivalent of a patch of black ice and skidded in a different – and unplanned – direction. Station wagons disappeared almost overnight, because the large sedans they were based on had been fatwa’d out of existence by fuel economy mandatory minimums which made them too expensive to build, due to the “gas guzzler” taxes heaped on them.

    But – at the time – there was an end-run.

    Pick-up trucks were not yet subject to the fatwas – which only applied to passenger cars. It occurred to someone at one of the car companies – it was Ford that hit paydirt first – that pick-ups share the same basic attributes which made large sedans – and the station wagons spun off from them – so popular with the market. The were big and had lots of room inside. They had big engines.

    And they were rear-wheel-drive.

    Exactly like the big sedans and wagons extincted by fatwa. Just with a bed out back, open to the elements.

    Well, how about we enclose that bed? Lay down some carpet, bolt seats to the floor? Add extra doors?

    Voila – the SUV.

    It was Ford’s Bronco II which began what would soon become a boom. It was a Ranger pick-up with an enclosed bed. Which made it agreeable as a passenger carrying vehicle that wasn’t – in regulatory terms – a passenger vehicle; i.e., a “car.”

    It was – for regulatory purposes – a “light truck” and these skated elegantly past Uncle and his fatwas, as they did not have to abide by the MPG mandatory minimums that had forced an unnatural changed in the way cars were designed. But the most unnatural thing was the sudden effusion of these SUVs, which Blitzkrieged the roads like the panzers into Poland. Within three years of the Bronco II’s appearance as a new model in 1983, others had joined in. By 1990, every major car company had at least one SUV in its lineup – and those that didn’t were working on it.


    It was like the muscle car frenzy set into motion back in 1964, when John DeLorean pretty much invented the muscle car by taking a mid-sized Tempest coupe and replacing its small V8 with a huge V8 from Pontiac’s full-sized cars – with the difference being that DeLorean was end-running GM’s internal edict that its smaller cars must only have engines so big (and no bigger) while Ford and the rest were end-running Uncle.

    But there was a common thread – the car companies were trying to give the people who bought their cars what they wanted, not for altruistic reasons but rather because that’s how you made money. Well, used to – before it became possible to make money by passing laws forcing people to buy your goods or services (e.g., car insurance, Obamacare).

    And now comes the next end-run, the last redoubt.

    Uncle’s MPG fatwas have been applied to “light trucks” – and so, to SUVs built off them – and these fatwas are already at a level that cannot be complied with. Uncle demands they – like “passenger cars” – average 35.4 MPGs – or else. And the fatwa is on track to almost double, if the National Cockatiel doesn’t intervene. The good news is it looks as though he might. The bad news is that even if he does, the odds of his successor re-imposing the fatwas are high.

    But the fatwas do not – yet – apply to heavy-duty trucks in the 2500/3500 series (and up) class. Why not let history repeat? Why not take, say, a Chevy Silverado 2500 dualie pick-up and enclose the bed.

    Voila – instant super-sized SUV!

    With an even bigger V8!

    If people can no longer buy “light truck” – and SUVs – on account of their having been fatwa’d out of existence, but the same basic thing is still available to them in something even bigger and heavier and – the irony is almost too much – even less fuel-efficient – then they will buy it because the car industry will build it.

    Because there’s money in it.

    It’s what people want – a concept the people who work as Uncle’s minions seem congenitally incapable of grokking. Stifle what people want and people will find a way around it – often, with the net result being more of what the government claims it didn’t want and tried to prevent via the original fatwa.

    Right now, Uncle – his minions (and this includes the media, which might as well be officially christened the Ministry of Truth or some such equivalent) moan mightily about what they regard as the not-so-great economy of the average new vehicle. Which is an SUV – or a crossover SUV, which is the same basic animal (i.e., big, heavy and so, thirsty).

    Which is a class of vehicle that would not exist – not as a mass-market offering – were it not for the distortion of the marketplace caused by Uncle’s fatwas. Trucks would have remained trucks – built in small proportion relative to cars and sold mostly to tradesmen, farmers and so on. Most people would have bought cars – and if the market signaled that most people pined for smaller, gas-sippier cars, the car industry would have made them, no fatwa necessary.

    Because there would have been money in it.

    Doubt this? Check into how many old Beetles VW sold. Or Honda Civics. Pre-fatwa, when market demand for them was what served as the genesis for their manufacture.

    But this was not enough for Uncle. It never is. He had to meddle. Had to intervene – had to supersede and second-guess. And thus was born the arguably grotesque SUV boom, which continues to blossom like an endless far cloud to this day. Vast fleets of jacked-up hybrid truck-car things that suck oceans of gas – not that there is anything wrong with that; people have every right to be as profligate with their resources as they wish to be. Once pumped, gas is their to burn and the idea that a third party busybody should have anything to say about it is as obnoxious as a busybody issuing fatwas about what kind of carpet you may throw down in your own home.

    But it’s silly for so many millions of people to be driving around in these grotesque truck-car things, which are creatures of Uncle.

    And it may just be about to get a lot sillier, once production of of 2500/3500 series SUVs ramps up.

  26. #23
    I liked the Chevy SSR. It was an interesting concept, though unfortunately way to expensive.

    It was a Roadster / Coupe Retro thing and was Rear Wheel Drive.

    Last edited by VIDEODROME; 04-05-2018 at 04:51 AM.

  27. #24
    Quote Originally Posted by Danke View Post
    I have pick-up trucks and SUVs mostly. Not sure how they are useless.
    Not all SUVs are useless, but the majority of the popular models are. In most cases they're a lifted car that's had extra body cladding strapped on such that it doesn't gain any ground clearance or lose many MPGs in the transformation. In the case of some of the euro models, often the exact same vehicle is sold elsewhere with shorter suspension and smaller bumpers. It's all cosmetics with no benefits whatsoever.
    Quote Originally Posted by Swordsmyth View Post
    Pinochet is the model
    Quote Originally Posted by Swordsmyth View Post
    Liberty preserving authoritarianism.
    Quote Originally Posted by Swordsmyth View Post
    Enforced internal open borders was one of the worst elements of the Constitution.



  28. Remove this section of ads by registering.
  29. #25
    Quote Originally Posted by donnay View Post
    My preferred vehicle:

    It's for sale.

    $24,000

    https://classics.autotrader.com/clas...neer/100924707

  30. #26
    Here's a much cleaner 1988, with same 360 block V8

    $18k


  31. #27

  32. #28
    Or for the Zombie Apocolpse.


  33. #29
    Or this one, has had a professional off frame restoration.

    $35k


  34. #30

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