This is a blog that posts factoids/opinions on cars or car-related concepts featured in posts or asked about via askbox or (preferably!) post submissions.
It was inspired by @identifying-cars-in-posts, which I love (so much so that, due to its permanent hiatus, I decided to provide that service myself and created @what-is-this-car)... but I thought that, to most people, associating an unfamiliar car to an unfamiliar name must be far less interesting than learning something about it. Thus, this blog!
"Is this just an excuse for you to ramble about cars?"
No, it's a great excuse for me to ramble about cars! It's worked so well I've amassed too many posts to conveniently browse in Tumblr's default archive. Thus, this spreadsheet list!
"Can I spam your notifs/correct you/derail your posts/DM you/send a five paragraph ask about [x]/etc?"
Literally any interaction with me short of breaking into my house is encouraged, and the more you say the merrier! :) I just warn that I may take days, weeks or months to address your interaction, for multiple factors that include a huge backlog and life. But now, if you wish to interact with me and/or other car weirdos, you can join the Discord server-about-cars-in-posts!
"What's this post not about cars?"
DAMMIT I USED THE WRONG BLOG AGAIN
Alfa Romeo Milano, 1987. The XXV Winter Olympics are opening this evening in Milan and Cortina. The Alfa Romeo 75 was the last model developed and released before Alfa Romeo was acquired by Fiat. For the US market, the Tipo 161 was badged as the Milano, reflecting the name of the Italian city where it was manufactured (at Alfa Romeo’s Arese Plant). Its outstanding technical feature was a transaxle gearbox, which endowed the cars with near-perfect 50/50 weight distribution. Note also the U shaped hand-brake
I was going to finish other drafts before anything else, but the opening ceremony has just ended, so I'll strike while the Olympic flame is hot.*
Seeing athletes from all over the world walk across my hometown, in front of the last place mom worked at before that became her job title, gave me a bunch of emotions.
Embarrassment, for one.
Italy is an impressively fragmented country. My great aunt emigrated to Australia decades ago, doesn't speak English, and still won't speak to emigrates who came from the town two miles away from hers. Forget north and south - those are literally (if not officially) on different time zones. So for these to be the first Olympics with two host cities just feels like neither one wanted to concede the honor of being in the name.
And that attitude created a rather perplexing opening ceremony, where the beautiful dances and the speeches and such all happened in Milan's San Siro stadium but the flame and anthem and Olympic oath happened in Cortina as well. And if that wasn't jealous-siblingsy enough, the athlete parades were split between four locations, with each getting a parade of those who would compete there. Meaning dozens of athletes worked their whole life just to get to say...
And if that weren't awkward enough, the Milan ceremony introduced every participating country both vocally and with a ski-glassed lady carrying a cutely icelike sign.
The thing is, when I say "every participating country" you may take that as "every country participating in the Milan parade".
No.
EVERY participating country.
So some countries got announced, the sign for them came out, everybody went "WOOO" for them and no one was there.
Also, the crowd in Cortina was much thinner than it should've been, because the ticket buying experience was so thoroughly broken that even some of our friends quit trying, forget people half the world away. But if I start ranting about what's gone on behind the scenes I just won't stop. I know because I've just cut that section out.
Mariah Carey and Charlize Theron made an appearance! Our country absolutely has talents to show for itself but we're just still too fascinated with America to sorry there's still some rant residue here. How about we wash it off with the best moment of the ceremony: when they played a video.
I don't say it just to be the vehicle guy and bring up Milan's iconic 1930s tram carts being still in use today, and the romantic atmosphere they give to daily travel. It's not a tram take. It's a Subway Take.
Glad you asked, Kareem:
There are endless types of people, but only two types of old people - sweet and mean. (Darn Tumblr and its lack of yellow text.)
And just look at that video. Look at my president. He's such a sweet grandpa.
This may surprise a bunch of you (especially the yanks and their how-could-any-country-work-differently-ism), but I love my president. It always brings me joy to see him, and it filled me with pride to hear the whole stadium cheer when he was announced. :')
*And then Tumblr went down, lol. Well, at least posting this the day after allows me to celebrate Giovanni Franzoni and Dominik Paris earning their first Olympic medal, in their first and possibly last Olympics respectively!
Neither gold, to be sure, but Francesca Lollobrigida earned one as I was writing! And if you think breaking the 3000m Olympic record was the cherry on top, you missed the date - it's her 35th birthday!!!
Sorry to repeat the emoticon, but the commentator wept when he saw her celebrate with her child, what else can I do :')
Also Stefania Constantini and Amos Mosaner won a razor's edge curling match as I was writing (I wrote this for a while)! HYPE!!!!!
If you can believe it, curling's really exciting once you know what's going on!
And if you can't... well, some footage of the driver of that tram will do the trick.
That finish right there played part in winning the 2009 MotoGP title, or his ninth motorcycle World Championship.
Since, however, that may not be qualification enough for a tram driver position in this cutthroat job market, he is also a racing driver. Yes, "is" as in opposed to "was".
Which, for one, I'm never getting a job, and for two, it's impressive he still races anything -hell, it's impressive he still leaves the house- after some of the shit he's been through. Check out his POV 46 (heh) seconds in.
Also, yes, this post went on, but I wouldn't be me if I left this out.
Valentino "The Doctor" Rossi -such a national legend that to not know him because you don't follow MotoGP is as absurd as a yank not knowing Michael Jordan because they don't follow the NBA- drove my dad's Corolla!
Yes I have a model of it. Not even one of the worst liveries I've ever seen could dissuade me.
We need to do most nonbinary cars next. Because it's obviously the NB miata. I mean come on
Alright then, let apostrophe s!
So, we already have one candidate - two if you split them between pre-and post facelift...
...but let's see if we can do better.
The first course of action was to ask an expert in nonbinary, my nonbinary ex. They suggested "that asymmetrical car from the commercial", and I immediately realized, oh right, the Hyundai Veloster!
Literally rejecting the binary between hatchbacks with rear doors and hatchbacks with none, as illustrated by quite a commercial if I do say so myself.
As the ad hints, yes indeed the Veloster's rear door was always opposite the driver's side, including in right hand drive cars - meaning yes, the Veloster's rear door changes side with the market it's sold in...
...a bit like what my ex was actually referring to: the third generation Nissan Cube, another asymmetric vehicle with two symmetrical versions, as explained in my Pike Cars post (and indeed, the Cube also got a spectacular campaign - you really gotta go have a look at that post right there).
So, having gotten their suggestion (and another unrelated pick that they did however approve...)
...I set about hitting up the Discord for completion's sake, where @chevyventure gave a couple suggestions of his own: the Kia Soul.
And let me tell you, the commercials just keep getting weirder.
And this is not even about the commercial itself, it's how long they kept rolling with the idea, and really, how far they took it too. From its debut...
...to its small restyling in 2012...
...to its redesign in 2014...
...and more: that's not even most of them! But I'll stick to suggesting you look them up on YouTube because we still have to get to our friend's other suggestions.
Luckily, the 5th generation Camry will be quick work, since the main argument for its nonbinariness is that swinging either particular way would imply some sort of characteristic, thus violating the spirit of the Camry, a car so committed to the bland that for years the most interesting thing about them have been their dents.
And so we get to the final suggestion, the second-gen Scion xB.
Okay, so, storytime, I was looking to get some pictures of the car going on, right? So I found this one which is of good quality, a well-representing angle and a color that compliments its enbyness, so I clicked on the Car And Driver article this is from to browse its gallery and find a rear shot and what do I not see as the first picture in the album.
I mean, that is on the nose for my standards.
And I'm not the only one who made interesting finds looking for these pictures...
So, what'll it be?
Most nonbinary car:
NB Miata (pre or post facelift, if this option wins they'll have a standoff)
Hyundai Veloster
Nissan Cube
5th gen Toyota Camry
Scion xB
Scion xD / Toyota Urban Cruiser
Voting ended onDec 8, 2023
"But wait", I hear you think because not only can I hear the sounds you make yes even the farts but also your thoughts, "what was that Discord you were referring to, does this blog have a- wait even that silent one from a minute ago?". And, setting aside the serious work your definition of 'silent' needs, yes it does!!!! Click that blue link to find out more!
Links in blue are posts of mine about the topic in question - if you liked this post, you might like those!
im so sorry... i think fiat has fun cars but im still willing to sacrifice fiat to take out the greater evil (stellantis products) 🥺
EXCUSE ME?!
First off, if we weren't talking about removing their whole contribution from history you could axe Chrysler, which currently makes nothing but the Minivan you yourself have beef with from your encounter of it in Dodge guise.
Second off, since we are, you could axe RAM, and lose nothing you couldn't get from Ford or Chevrolet - well, besides that time they saw a Viper V10 and thought "You know what would be funny?"
Hell, if you really don't think that would sacruffice (that sacrifice would suffice), maybe go for Opel!
Their cool sporty cars are a rebadged Saturn...
...and a rebadged Lotus.
Okay, to be fair, I think I find the Speedster the prettier version, and the GT's first generation was a charming little thing.
Oh, and the headlights! These are the only pop-ups that I know of that were manually actuated - the movement of the lever beside the shifter is what physically moved the headlights.
And how did it do so? Well, have a look. I promise you're not expecting what's ahead.
So okay, the cool sportscars are cool. But also two. And what else is there? The uncool sporty cars.
Like the Tigra, only car for which "It's this or a bus" can be not just a threat, but also an earnest guess as to where this seat picture was taken!
Or the Calibra, which had the lowest drag coefficient of any mass production car!
As long as you picked the slow version, with the least powerful engine and front wheel drive. However, that there even was a 4x4 Turbo 16v is itself fancy enough to question its uncool status (hell, sometimes that AWD system even worked!). However: how do you think these actually ended up.
I mean, look at the Manta, its arguable predecessor. Am I saying it's not a cool car? Far be it from me!
But the jokes about Manta owners being tasteless chintz-splattering dudebrokes were enough to spawn multiple movies and a Wikipedia page reporting as much.
So when the Calibra dropped in 1990 -and especially when it got cheap, in the early 2000s- who do you think got ahold of it?
Hey, at least none of them got the RAM owner treatment.
...it's right below me, isn't it.
Should've kept my mouth shut.
Links in blue are posts of mine about the topic in question: if you liked this post, you might like those - or the blog’s Discord server, linked in the pinned post!x
wait-hold on, i'm getting a message from production-
but-but! how about Opel giving you the option to drive a worse BMW 525tds without swearing off turn signals?
on either side of throwing that shit sideways
no? um, uh, how about Opel's specifically mid-60s big sedans? some had chevy V8s?
(
side note, look at this fuckin thang. it's a one-generation-later Opel Diplomat, just like the green one above, and also like the green one equipped with a che🅱️y V8.
)
wait.
what's that sound.
why it's 4-5 slightly pathetic rally prototypes that never really raced!
In the early 1980s, Opel was doing okay in Group B rally. The venerable Manta B 400 (as seen in the main post!) had been serving them well, but they experimented. In 1984, taking a page from a French book, they tested a Manta 400-engined, rear-wheel-drive version of their Kadett hatchback. The boxy D-generation.
A couple of factors spelled an early doom for the project. For one, the Kadett D was on it way out, with the new E generation set to go on sale soon. More importantly, the rally word was shooketh after Audi taught them how to say 'four' in Italian.
Opel knew the time of rear-wheel-drive rally cars was as outgoing as the Dadett. They needed their own 4WD-user sooner rather than later, and the Eadett was chosen as the starting point.
Of course, it only looked like a Kadett. It was a beast of tube frame and kevlar.
According to what information is out there, it was kinda. bad.
Issue #1 was the engine.
They first tried the Manta engine again, a 2.1L naturally aspirated 4-cylinder. With sub-300 hp, it was way underpowered.
They then strapped a supercharger on it. With 325 hp, it was still underpowered.
They then swapped the supercharger for a turbo. This could do 500 hp, which was good, but it unfortunately had a nasty habit of. blowing up. via head gasket fail.
They then used a 1.8L turbo engine from renowned british tuner Zakspeed. This could also do 500 hp, or more. Slight problem though. Opel was (and still is) owned by General Motors. Zakspeed was tied to Ford. That was Really Bad for GM's PR.
The 4x4 Kadett E was meant to race under the infamous Group B regulations. Unfortunately, 1986 brought the end of Group B before it brought Opel a functional Group B rally car.
Opel still had hope thanks to Group S, a regulation set aimed at rally-going prototypes. The cars' power would be restricted to around 300 hp, which worked for Opel...
...but the same regulations would force Opel to use their naturally aspirated engine. Or come up with something else entirely.
And then, before 1986 was over, Group S was cancelled too. And with it, Opel's whole unsatisfactory rally car project.
because the reblog has a high text:image ratio, here's a colonized Vauxhall Astra 4S that reportedly ran at the end of the 1986 British Rally Championship
You keep bringing the great additions, it seems - gun thoroughly included. And not just because it fits that car's "boxer in a suit" attitude.
May I introduce you all to 40 RA, the car that proved the House Of Commons were damn right to be concerned.
So, remember how in 1986 the Porsche 959 earned the record for fastest car of all time by doing 320km/h / 200mph? Great. On November 16th 1990, Alex Carlile -now Baron Carlile of Berriew- asked the House of Commons:
"Will the honorable gentleman join me in condemning especially the heavy publicity that has been given recently to a Vauxhall Carlton which is capable, apparently, of achieving 170mph?"
He made two mistakes there. One of them being the top speed. It was 177.
The Parliament sought to ban this car, objecting to these ludicrous speeds being put in the hands of the people... not rich enough to afford a 959. Either that or they didn't trust a Carlton with those speeds - they must have assumed it would lose control, cause a fatal wreck, and quip "Did I do that?". Of course, that's Steve Urkel, but if you question the Lotus Carlton's stability, you don't know your stuff.
Or maybe you do. Because one of the Parliament's classist ass arguments was that it would be used to commit crimes. And three years later, a Carlton owner woke up to its alarm wailing about a gang of presumably-not-Porsche-customers.
When he rushed over they knocked him out and pushed it away with another car, and when he got in his wife's car and gave chase, he was rammed into by yet another.
When they got it fired up, 40(+1) year old Richard Austin had as many Carltons as surnames.
His custom plate, 40 R.A., was about to be feared the land over.
The bandits began a legendary streak of brazen robberies all under the banner of those four digits, which they had no reason to change or conceal: so helpless were the rozzers against that twin-turbo six cylinder that they figured it a pointless danger to even try and keep chase. The car was even reported to slow down to let them catch up before flooring it again and sodding off into the countryside.
For fuck's sake, their eleventh hit was at this store!
THIS IS A POLICE STATION!
This time, however, the gang would learn that once you make enough money, you get a five star treatment. That is to say, the police brought out the chopper.
The street claims they outran it, but in truth they were just headed towards an airport's restricted airspace. Possibly knowing better than to further test their luck, they laid low until, a week later, 40 RA was found... by the bottom of a barge.
Claims that it was never found, or that it was restored, are humbug. After an ultimately inconclusive forensic analysis, it was scrapped under police supervision.
As for Richard, the insurance bought him an equivalent Carlton, which he kept for about two years, and now he owns another still, seen in that first picture. Both were able to officially inherit the 40RA plate.
In the meantime, his son Rob has become a racing driver, and he himself developed a racecar, the Sintura S99.
And if you need any more proof that he is a man of taste, check out what he was driving during those fabled six weeks of thievery. Y'all are not going to believe this.
As far as the rest of the post goes:
Regarding the following Omega, it was sold in America as the bafflingly-bumperstopped Cadillac Catera, in a failed attempt to rejuvenate Cadillac.
And yes, I think "failed attempt to rejuvenate Cadillac" perfectly illustrates why I'm not feeling it.
Regarding the large 60s sedans, let's be real, "our large 60s sedans were cool" is practically cheating. Might as well say you're a good bartender because you make some mean iced water.
And regarding me... or rather, your portrayal of me... you've made the same mistake as Sir Carlile.
Because my objection would never have been this.
Vauxhall is so little more than a badge they put on British Opels that it would be disingenuous not to consider it the same brand.
The ACTUAL objection is this.
These cars are Lotuses from every official standpoint - and specifically because Opel(/Vauxhall) was so opposed to having their sporty Omega 3000(/Carlton GSi) overshadowed that they refused to let the Opel(/Vauxhall) name be used. Why then they didn't just refuse to build it would be the obvious question. If they hadn't. But they did.
Opel built regular Omega 3000s in Germany and they were shipped to Lotus who had to strip them down, fit their mods, send the placeholding factory components back - which may explain it costing nearly double its base car.
Hell, as you can see from the fenders in picture, Lotus even had to cut the fenders to fit their flares - meaning they also had to rustproof them again and touch up the paint.
Imagine being so uncooperative you'd rather leave rustproofing to the British.
So that, my friend, is my final argument. The Lotus Omega is a wicked cool car. But rather than a mark in Opel's favor, that is only further indictment, since it is only true in its spite.
I often hear in motorcycle circles the phrase "you never see a motorcycle parked outside a therapist's office!"
It's a statement that both stigmatizes mental health, therapy, and implies that a simple form of meditation is a do-all solution to anything that ails you. This annoys me.
As a direct response to that, here's a photo of my motorcycle parked outside of my therapist's office.
While the early date there is 2003, that's only because the convertible model arrived much later - the standard New Beetle hit the scene in 1997. Which is incredibly funny because Mexico only stopped making the old one six years later.
A smash success straight out the gate, it inspired a wave of neo-retro designs like the Chrysler PT Cruiser and Chevrolet SSR -thus emulating the original's early years of racking up things to answer for-...
...and, of course, one of the most famous revivals of all: the Mini.
The two share a couple things.
...sure, yeah, reviving cars that outlived multiple attempts to replace them and having been the source of Morgan Aero 8 headlights, but also the front-engine, front-wheel-drive layout. But where that's coherent for the Mini, its original famously pioneering that configuration, for the Beetle it was -quite literally- a complete 180.
This is interesting because, of course, the shape of your car is going to be pretty heavily impacted by where you need to make room for a whole goddamn engine.
But when you look at the two Beetles, you'll notice the front of the one needing to pack an engine in it is notably... shorter.
This is despite the New Beetle not packaging its powertrain any tighter than the Golf it was based on - notice how its steering wheel is exactly as far behind the front wheels.
This all coalesces into something entertaining: the New Beetle's dashboard just goes on for fucking ever.
It's astounding. You have a dashboard about as deep as ordinary that then flows into another set of panels that pick up the baton and keep going for another dashboardful. I highly recommend taking a look if you stumble into a New Beetle.
Or forty.
Yep, I saw a New Beetle meet! And yes, that's the reason for this post: since I culpably failed to post the pics in our Discord server, I set this up as an opportunity to share what I saw.
Not one but two convertibles in that lovely Sundown Orange, the first of which must have something funky going on under the hood if its aftermarket gauge is any indication...
(And don't worry, fans of my biggest post, there's room for arguments here too, since the Volkswagen Group itself called what is clearly the same color Jaipur Red when they painted the Audi A2 with it, but -shocker- I digress.)
Not one but two rear racks with leather luggage (a win for all alliteration aficionados)
Not one but two (well, it follows since they come in pairs, but still, let me keep the thing going) sad headlight eyelids, which was a first for me
Signs of an extremely indelicate passenger (yes, that wood plank keeps the glovebox closed)
A lovely wildflower composition making use of the New Beetle's integrated vase (yes, the New Beetle had a dashboard vase, to harken back to the hippies that adopted the Beetle in the '60s - perhaps a more alluring demographic to lace back to than the Beetle's original target audience, yanno)
P.S. Is it just me or are modern cars throwing much more glare at the poor souls trying to photograph their interiors? Any of y'all know what that could be about?
Anyhow, I really saved the best for last: you know how the Beetle was designed by Porsche, and the first Porsches were based on the Beetle and they eventually evolved into the Porsches we know today? Well, some things have a way of coming full circle.
Yes, the Turbo S badge, which Porsche bestows upon a model's fastest spec even if all the other versions also have a turbo or we're straight up talking about an electric car, also ended up on the Beetle.
Turns out you can get away with a lot of stuff if you both own and are owned by Porsche.
And sure, it might not have made any Porsche dealer lose their sleep, but under its spiffy bodykit and cute (non-turbo s-exclusive) speed-activated rear spoiler was the same power as the Golf GTI - and if that were anything to scoff at, the GTI wouldn't be the best selling sporty car in history.
It even featured, seen here next to a carbon fiber cane because style runs deep, a six speed manual! It was a first for American VWs!
And yes, I do mean American VWs - as you may have spotted by the reflectors, this was an imported example, because the New Beetle's coolest version was never sold in my continent. Fans of Japanese cars may be entitled to a sense of dejavù.
Okay, I lied. There is a cooler New Beetle. But unfortunately, it was too rare to be part of the meet. Hell, it's too rare to be part of this post! I guess it'll have to be its own reblog! ;)
Links in blue are posts of mine about the topic in question: if you liked this post, you might like those - or the blog’s Discord server, linked in the pinned post!
Okay, I lied. There is a cooler New Beetle. But unfortunately, it was too rare to be part of the meet. Hell, it's too rare to be part of this post! I guess it'll have to be its own reblog! ;)
oh hey I know that one!
And I will happily tell you about it :)
As my friend @things-about-cars-in-posts outlined, a comparison between the sole-generation New Beetle and the fourth-generation Golf lends itself. Such as the comparison of their sporty, turbocharged, front wheel drive versions: the Turbo S and the GTI respectively.
The Mark 4 Golf was the first of the two to get a (2.8 liter) V6- sorry, VR6 - combined with all wheel drive. Though, that version wasn't exactly hot. Within the next few years, the New Beetle and the Golf both got sportier, rare, VR6-powered, all wheel drive versions.
Except,
the Beetle was first.
We start in 1999 with a race car. To push the new New Beetle, Volkswagen decided to hit it with their proven one-make racing series beam.
["one-make racing series" - a kind of championship, typically circuit racing with cars, in which everyone uses the same make+model (+often generation) of a car. the car is also pretty much standardized for every driver, so the racing is super close]
Initially, around 40 New Bugs were converted to racing spec. This included standard race car stuff like removing the whole interior, adding a roll cage, a wide body kit, two spoilers, and, oh, the 2.8 liter VR6 from the Golf. Although it only powered the front wheels in the race cars, they were the first six-cylinder New Beetles.
["VR6" - a type of six-cylinder engine layout. It is a kind of extremely narrow V engine, to so much that the cylinders overlap. That allows for just one cylinder head, 1 less than a usual V6. Given identical engine sizes, a VR6 can be shorter than an inline 6 while being narrower than a V6.]
Following a concept car unveiled that same year, Volkswagen brought the race car to the road in 2001. Kind of.
This is the 2001-2003 road-going Volkswagen New Beetle RSi.
It retained a body kit and both spoilers like the race cars, though it got a road use-worthy interior and no roll cage. It also got a VR6 coupled with a manual transmission - a VR6 enlarged to 3.2 liters with some 20 horsepower more than the race car's 204. Best of all, it got 4Motion all wheel drive; which took it to 100 km/h / 62 mph in. uh.
quickly.
One could buy the RSi in any color they wanted, as long as it was silver.
With orange seats.
Unless one was VW Group chairman (and, if I'm allowed to romanticize, the dark lord behind Volkswagen's mad science era) Ferdinand Piëch. Then, blue was possible.
Production was limited to 250 units, making it not just the rarest factory Beetle, but the rarest factory Volkswagen. All 250 were produced at VW's Mexico plant, in a special production line. It was separated from the "regular" New Beetle, and the Old Beetle, which was produced in Mexico until the year of our lord 2003. The location is perhaps bittersweet for Mexico's northern neighbors, as the RSi was never sold in the US or Canada.
Very late into production of the RSi, as if VW didn't want to let the VR6-all wheel drive-hatchback die, came the Mark 4 Golf's halo version.
The Volkswagen Golf R32 had a 3.2 liter VR6 engine (like the RSi, but with 15-20 more bhp), 4Motion all-wheel-drive (like the RSi), a six-speed manual gearbox (like the RSi) or a dual-clutch automatic DSG and, a choice of colors (blue, silver, black and red for the US; unlike the RSi).
And so a comparison continues to lend itself, with one sizable asterisk. The Mk4 Golf R32, itself a rare version, outnumbers the New Beetle RSi 24 to 1.
No, first and foremost thank you for writing this, and for really going above and beyond too: you even omitted the best part to set up this reblog!
Because, like, surely otherwise you wouldn't have acted like the sizable asterisk between RSi and R32 was the production run, right?
I mean, I understand being hesitant to quote figures that, between markups and discounts and options and was this conversion they quote lazily googled or made with the rate of the time, are almost as hard to trust as they are to even find. But even if we keep it ballpark enough to arouse pet play fetishists, the picture is painted rather clearly:
The Golf R32's MSRP was $30k before inflation (one fetish at a time). And that was not cheap for a Golf. It bordered on twice the price of the base model, or to put it another way, closer to the price of one of these.
Okay, to be fair, I just wanted to spectacularize (and use a picture I really like), this isn't what a base Boxster would've looked like - this Boxster S with 18 inch wheels, Sport Design Package and Arena Red Metallic can't have been close to the base price given if Porsche could charge you $500 for the air in the trunk they'd charge you $493 because they don't use round numbers.
Let's get a boggo spec picture going.
Yeah no, I hope you'll agree it's still insane that anything with a Porsche badge was under $15k away from the price of a Golf.
Because if you will, my bait will have worked.
The Volkswagen Beetle RSi cost over eighty thousand American dollars.
So for around half the money of -lest we forget- a sodding Beetle, you could've gotten a mid-engined Porsche roadster that got to 60 a whole [ ] seconds faster.
Whoopsie daisy sorry I forgot to look the time up.
HUH
Okay, this isn't apples to apples, this is the time for the Tiptronic gearbox and the manual is quoted at 6.5s here (I've seen a 6.7 second figure and just don't know what that's about), but like, tom8o tom@o, we're still talking about keeping up with a Porsche - and with all wheel drive to boot should the chase get twisty. So yeah, the Beetle RSi really was quick - and I guess the extra price was for the opportunity to get that same performance in a ridiculous package. And admittedly I'm a sucker for that.
P.S. I am kinda salty that you didn't link my VR6 explainer. Did I get blasted with a DEInc. contraption for nothing?
if you had to strike one car/maufacturer (except tesla that's a given) off the face of the planet what would it be
are we talking from now on or also retroactively? if we’re talkin just like kill off a company now without losing everything they’ve ever made, i would say maybe mitsubishi. they’re on their last legs anyway, it would be kind of a mercy killing given what they’ve become. the outlander isn’t awful but if it ceased to be it’s a niche with plenty of better options. i do adore their older models though, love the first couple gens of eclipse and i straight up screamed when i saw an imported jdm lancer evo on the road recently
if we’re going retroactive too, as much as i hate to i think i’d say fiat. their cars now are built terribly and they’re driving chrysler and jeep into the ground. i love their older cars and it would suck to potentially lose abarth, but i think basically every car they’ve ever made has a competitor that’s just as good. it would be tragic to lose the original topolino though
if we’re doing just a single car model though? ford edge. absolutely purposeless suv that i had the displeasure of driving recently. i’m sorry to any ford edge drivers who might follow me but i hated that thing and have never understood why anyone other than rental car companies bought it over a ford escape or other competitor smaller suv
Hi! Evil version of you here (I provide opinions/anecdotes instead of answers), and I'm not sure I would agree - sure, Fiat has released such an incredible array of stinkers in the last 40 years that many models were bought up en masse by state entities because no one else would, but holy HELL did they make a whole bunch of great cars before that.
I really can't blame a yankee for not considering pre-90s Fiat that much, but I mean, surely you remember where the 500 brand name came from?
And what about the 600 Multipla? Can you think of a more charming three-row car?
To say nothing of the original Panda, still a hallmark of Italian roads (and mountains in 4x4 form) over four decades past its debut!
And what about the Uno, whose standard version brought my surgeon dad to work and whose turbo version brought work to surgeons!
And of course let's not forget the spiders - 1500, 124, X1/9...
Sure, Fiat has had a lot more downs than ups, they had and still have a tendency to shave every single thing down to the bone (good will included), my dad did slide his Uno off the road because the tires just transitioned to plastic halfway down the tread, the new Panda I drove had a shifter so vague the numbers on the knob were followed by an "ish" and the old one I drove felt like I was mere feet in front of a car-scooping tornado, but Fiat's story has far too many highlights for where the Durango would be going otherwise to offset.
Also, THEY STOPPED MAKING GREY CARS!!!! AND MADE A BIG DEAL ABOUT IT!!!! COME ON!!!!
Ditto for most of Eastern Europe, which for decades was fed on Fiat's scraps - I mean, the 126 was still being made in 2000!!! The Lexus IS was hot on the shelves and they were still selling a car you could pull-start! And what about the Riva??? The Russians kept that chassis going FOUR DECADES after we stopped making the 124 it was based on!
Bringing this back to say that the willingness to lose the Marea Weekend and the Fivetech engine betrays the fact that op probally dont know about the Fivetech
Okay so this might be more about Brazil's chronic lack of cool cars than about the Marea in itself, and you as a italian should be basically imune to fiat doing weird stuff to what should be just normal cars, but stay with me.
TL;DR check this RCR-esque review if you speak portuguese or wanna try the captions or just jump to 1:16 and listen to it
First lets give you the context of the brazilian abuse turned meme hatred turned idolization of this midsize wagon-shaped bad idea.
It begins in 1991 when, after 15 years of a ban in car imports, we finally passed a law to allow imports and flooded the market with new cars after being sold the same 8-12 cars in 3 or 4 segments (we didnt have fully new cars between the uno in 84 and the kadett in 89, GM´s flagship Opala was sold between 68 and 92). Most national cars were 70s or 80s projects and now we could buy a mx3 or a civic si.
With that we started to see a big revolution in national cars since the import tax of 35~70% wasnt enough to keep their cars fighting for a share in the market. We started to see things like mpfi and releases with a delay of 6 months to a year instead of 2~6 years of the international releases and the first turbo car mass produced in brazilian soil, the abovecited Uno turbo, wich would later bring the Tempra turbo, and then the Marea Turbo.
Fiat wasnt the only one making turbo cars here by the time the marea released, but they were the only one making midsized wagons (not even them, at first, since they imported them for a while before the factory were ready for the wagons) and they would, as far as i know, be the only ones to join those facts, making inline 5 2.0 wagons either NA or turbo. they eventually made a 2.4 NA since the 2.0 wasnt quirky enough i guess?
However there´s a terrible cost to jump from ohv carburated or maybe SOHC efi to I5 20v, and its the fact that you cant pull up to the neighbourhood´s shop and ask them to fix your car, because the poor guy never saw a DOHC engine, let alone a turbo. So you take it to FIAT, and some years later you learn that they didnt know shit either, bc they made a mistake in the owners manual translate, making you change your oil with 30.000 km instead of the required 5.000km. So you sell it for half what you paid before you need to rebuild the engine, and pray to god the next owner already forgot you when the engine fails. This circle repeats itself again and again, however the marea keeps being sold for 6 years here after Italy decided it was boring and went back to playing with their alfas and lancias.
But as i said, Brazil has a lack of cool cars, so if you wanted a secondhand car well equiped but not worth a downpayment in a house, it was either a Marea or Vectra (car that the europeans dont give a fuck about either but we like a lot too). The Marea had a bigger list of factory itens and optinals such as (much needed) airbags, automatic AC and other stuff. Besides the fact that it was faster and sounded much better it was also cheaper, so the choice was obvious.
I guess that by now you can already see where technically advanced car + no resell value + FIAT´s traditonally shitty building lead those cars: being sold dirty cheap, abused beyond a no return point and then scrapped. The car was crowned the worst deal you could make, turned in a meme and heavily associated with post 9/11 slamophobia. Its the flagship car of calling unreliable shitboxes "bombs".
However, do you know what comes after a relatively fast car that obviously can take a turbo to it becomes so cheap and underated? Of course you make a sleeper build. So people did that, and turns out, these cars are really easy to make a lot more power out of them once you had 15 years to map the problems and learn to work around them. Bit too late, now most of them are begging to die and so the good ones are getting more and more pricey so im never getting one.
Also i feel like your point about them being ugly is both mean and kinda unfair bc cmon, all you need is new wheels and maybe a lower suspension
I feel like this is great evidence of how our views on cars are so inextricably tied to their (and our) contexts that, arguably, we're seldom even talking about cars as much as about the role they played in the contexts in question. Is the fact that these are the same car sold on my shores any more relevant than the argument that, had I been born and raised in prev's family, I would still be me? Especially now that the context, from market to service manual (leave it to Fiat to mistranslate a number), has informed the lives they lead, and in turn their current state.
Hell, even if we boil how good a car is down to how well it does the job it sets out to do and what it asks for in return, and even if we boil that job down to running and those requests to maintenance and repairs, we end up with an upwards line in the care-performance chart. Depending on the shape of it we may call a car from impervious to abuse to impervious to care and anywhere in between, but the most important truth is that the best way to ensure you have a bad car in your hands is to treat it badly.
And not just because you shouldn't think you can just sort by cheapest and buy sight unseen because you're searching for a "good" model (as much as I may culpably have given that impression), but because, if that is true for tools arguably made to do one thing, how can you expect to treat people like that?
How can you think of society as just a matter of spotting the bad people and tossing them away, that building incentive structures -making it easier to do the right thing, making doing the wrong thing less worthwhile, educating on the importance of that choice and its consequences, accompanying them through a change for the better- is just a nice-to-have to tack on if there's time? How can you think that the predominant cause of crime is immutable destiny?
It's a beef I've long held with American culture's mindset - I always make a point to note when I'm looking at one of its blockbusters and, however many plot twists they pile on, there's no corruption or redemption arc to be seen, and everyone was always bad or good all along - and if the latter, not even blowing up a hospital would be scrutinized in the slightest, because anything furthering the good guy's cause is ok.
Why do you think there's such a sea of people seeing no problem with everyone getting access to more barrels than a winery? Because they think the problem isn't everyone having guns, it's bad people being around. If you can have episodes you need to be in a psych ward, if you are in any way corruptible you need to be treated as already criminal, if you have harmful impulses whether you mean to act upon them is irrelevant and you should burn either way - and then all the people left would be good people who should have guns to save the day if the bad ones come!
Truly, this is what happens when a culture drapes itself in the cozy traditions of Christianity and strips away all uncomfortable truths like the idea that we are all born with the potential to cause harm and need mutual assistance to be kept in the right path and fix our inevitable mistakes, until religion just becomes a backpatting assurance that once you do all the rituals your spot in heaven's booked.
Geez, what brought my head to such ugly things?
Anyhow, getting back to the Marea's looks:
Yes -as per 99% of on-roaders- a lower suspension improves it for me
If during the work of whoever was painting those taillight trims black I had been run over by a truck I would have wanted them to finish before coming to help me
I will play my deflection card by pointing out you don't like the Corolla wagon I adore which probably makes a hypocrite of both of us but more importantly of YOU.
Okay I think I also want a front picture to-
Oh well this is a post-facelift example so it's not really what I'm looking for, also this picture was photoshopped for the UK market to have the steering wheel on the right hand side and a British plate and the original version can only be found in 300p...
...I guess if toyota.co.uk had those high-res pictures I can at least hope to find something for the pre-facelift model, right?
Wrong! The only evidence they carry of its existence are two baked-in-caption'd WackyWarehouseside pixelfests of exterior and interior, and I don't know if I'm more disappointed by the former...
...or the ladder.
Truly, finding a matching pair of press pictures for this in any kind of resolution is so hard I'm having to resort to French brochure scans... and even those arent' that flattering.
Hey WAIT A SECOND-
SIDE PROTECTION WHAT?!
Move over Renault 5, there's a new king in town.
Anyhow yeah prev do you think we could send enough Mareas into Brasil to hit economics of scale and turn a profit? Or even just break even actually, it would be reward enough to see them enjoyed away from where my eyes are.
Links in blue are posts of mine about the topic in question: if you liked this post, you might like those - or the blog’s Discord server, linked in the pinned post!
We possibly could, i just dont see why would we do that when the best Mareas are already on this side of the atlantic. On the other hand, if we scrapped all of the italian mareas for parts and sent them here, we could probally keep ours in a much better shape.
Oh, parts would be even cheaper to ship - meaning more of a chance of profit to be found in boating them Brasilward! (Surely there's a term for sending them with a larger type of watercraft, but nothing comes to mind.) If nothing else, given Marea means tide, we have the ingredients for a killer business name!
Yeah, I was mostly talking untrained eye. Also I don't think the Corolla and Marea are in the same size class? I looked it up and the Marea Weekend was 4.49m long and the Corolla Wagon only 4.34m, meaning the closest Toyota equivalent was found one size above the Corolla, in the Avensis Wagon's 4.6m.
(oh but the Avensis gets the proper shoot huh >:C)
To make up from the sheer boredom of that sentence, here's this vaguely-gummy-fruit-slices-reminiscent-light-sporting wagon's obligatory Japan-only cooler version, the Caldina (as it was called there) GT-T.
Though looks are emphatically not the highlight here, if you want it to go harder there's the Active Sports version...
...also available in two tone!
But now, for what makes it as cool as it is: you know the fourth generation Supra? If you don't, heyho, that link's in blue so it's for you! Otherwise, you are familiar with its place among the greatest cars in Japanese history - place that, if we're honest with ourselves, is owed entirely to the engine I spent many of those paragraphs desperately trying to convey the legend status of. Cry Fast And Furious all you want, but it was never going to land that role if its engine's absurd capabilities didn't make it the scene's top dog.
So when you see its GT500 spec, you know what to expect under the hood.
But not what you'll get.
Yes, because of its lower weight, when time came for TOM's to make a racecar out of it, the legendary 2JZ's throne was usurped by an engine two thirds of its size. This is the badass level of the 3S-GTE, other contender for greatest engine Toyota ever made - which wrote the annals of motorsport not just in this Supra, but also in its livery brethren, the rally Corolla and Celica from my recent post.
Except the Celica would get to carry that powertrain into the dealership.
Yes - with the many differences between rally spec and an acceptable mass production vehicle, of course, but Toyota put that same engine and all wheel drive system into the production Celica ST205.
And a station wagon.
See what I mean.
This is starting to become a recurring enough theme that I feel like we need a tag for it. Maybe "Japanese automaking consistently keeping its neatest items to themselves"?
That might be a bit long. Maybe we'll use the acronym.
On the size class thing, here at least, the Marea and the Corolla were marketed on the same segment (thought IIRC the frog eyed didnt coexist with the Marea, as we got the non-frog eyed one produced locally). The "mid-sized sedans" from japanese brands (i.e. civic and corolla, as they were the only relevant ones) were smaller than the european ones, but bigger than the compacts sold here.
They punched up using better tech and more optionals, also more efficient engines, getting around the same PWR for around the same price.
this is kind of a silly question but I am REALLY new to cars-- i know almost nothing about them, but I do like looking at them and im slooooowly learning the mechanical aspects of it
That being said are ppl who are lacking knowledge welcome in the discord 😔 im worried I wont know what anyone is talking about!!!
I have great news for you!
For one, thanks to the index, you are (already partially, and soon will be completely) able to sift through my many posts explaining from the mechanical to the aesthetic and anything in between.
For two, I am always able and eager to elaborate on anything about my posts you fail to understand - posts which itself are always written to ensure that happens as little as possible.
While the same cannot be said for the Discord, by nature of everyone currently active in it being pretty knowledgeable, I've never once seen the attitude be "Ugh, if you have to be explained this why are you even here?". We often catch each other off guard with what we don't know (sometimes that surprise can look like judgment!) and we're always happy to fill each other in. We're here to talk about cars, and getting someone up to speed is one more excuse to do so. So, whether you'll feel at home or not, I can promise you'll be welcome. And, should you decide it's not for you, not judged.
(Editor's note: while this post was sitting in queue, someone suspiciously matching this anon's description joined the Discord. So I guess we're finding out!)
Happy to see someone getting into the hobby! Keep it up!
im so sorry... i think fiat has fun cars but im still willing to sacrifice fiat to take out the greater evil (stellantis products) 🥺
EXCUSE ME?!
First off, if we weren't talking about removing their whole contribution from history you could axe Chrysler, which currently makes nothing but the Minivan you yourself have beef with from your encounter of it in Dodge guise.
Second off, since we are, you could axe RAM, and lose nothing you couldn't get from Ford or Chevrolet - well, besides that time they saw a Viper V10 and thought "You know what would be funny?"
Hell, if you really don't think that would sacruffice (that sacrifice would suffice), maybe go for Opel!
Their cool sporty cars are a rebadged Saturn...
...and a rebadged Lotus.
Okay, to be fair, I think I find the Speedster the prettier version, and the GT's first generation was a charming little thing.
Oh, and the headlights! These are the only pop-ups that I know of that were manually actuated - the movement of the lever beside the shifter is what physically moved the headlights.
And how did it do so? Well, have a look. I promise you're not expecting what's ahead.
So okay, the cool sportscars are cool. But also two. And what else is there? The uncool sporty cars.
Like the Tigra, only car for which "It's this or a bus" can be not just a threat, but also an earnest guess as to where this seat picture was taken!
Or the Calibra, which had the lowest drag coefficient of any mass production car!
As long as you picked the slow version, with the least powerful engine and front wheel drive. However, that there even was a 4x4 Turbo 16v is itself fancy enough to question its uncool status (hell, sometimes that AWD system even worked!). However: how do you think these actually ended up.
I mean, look at the Manta, its arguable predecessor. Am I saying it's not a cool car? Far be it from me!
But the jokes about Manta owners being tasteless chintz-splattering dudebrokes were enough to spawn multiple movies and a Wikipedia page reporting as much.
So when the Calibra dropped in 1990 -and especially when it got cheap, in the early 2000s- who do you think got ahold of it?
Hey, at least none of them got the RAM owner treatment.
...it's right below me, isn't it.
Should've kept my mouth shut.
Links in blue are posts of mine about the topic in question: if you liked this post, you might like those - or the blog’s Discord server, linked in the pinned post!x
I will admit that I am a petty bitch with a vendetta but FUCK RAM. If every ram vehicle were to mysteriously fail tomorrow, I’d cheer. I used to drive ambulances and didn’t really like the ram vans, plus I once spent 30 minutes stuck behind a white ram pick up truck. I had a kid on my stretcher and we were running lights and sirens. They never got out of my way. It’s been years and I’m still mad. Might be sampling bias but I notice an over representation of ram drivers who are either terrible or assholes or both.
Specific issues with the ram vans: they were so uncomfortable. I don’t have trouble fitting in cars, but the steering wheel was angled such that I had to lean forward to reach the top or have it banging into my knees. Also, you couldn’t get from the driving compartment to the back in case of emergency. The older ford vans, despite having some fascinating mechanical problems, were quite comfortable and had a passage between the front and back. Most of my other issues are usage issues. (Vans are shit ambulances because they’re not well set up for doing CPR. I’ve seen a ram van so overloaded–between patient, power stretcher, crew–that it wouldn’t be able to handle a speed bump, so the weight capacity is insufficient for ambulances.)
As the youth has taken to say, common Citroën W. (Also yeah that is infuriating your reaction is 100% valid.)
Sorry to hear about your woes! The healthcare system always seems to be an unappealing choice for fund allocation
As an ambulance, I think a little red light running is okay. As a treat.
To my knowledge, ute is specific to car-based vehicles
Thanks for the unintentional encouragement to get on with replacing the failed incandescents in my dashboard with LEDs. Some may scream heresy but I urge them to remember that's the first mass production dashboard to use LEDs (for the four warning lights), so it's inkeeping with its spirit. Also if you're screaming heresy for that you probably don't want to see my shifter. Or my wheels. Soon as I get it certified as classic it's over for you bitches.
Fun story about not seeing the speedometer: that was the case for my grandfather in the last years of his driving life, but not due to a mechanical malfunction - he simply filled his car with so much shit that the speedo had to get over 30 to emerge from behind the crap piled into the gauge cluster (which, knowing his driving style, can't have happened on most days)
Sure, for the reasons below, this isn't even coming to my neck of the woods on January 1st, but listen - it's still not been .3% of the year yet! Statistically, I'm doing better than someone wishing you happy birthday at ten past midnight!
Anyway, how'd your New Years celebration go? Did people react as prophesized?
If your year got off to an underwhelming start, that's okay! Remember, your first word is unlikely to have been hot shit either. What's important is where you go from there, so in that vein, one may wonder what is in store for TACIP's 2026. I know I do! The only thing I really know is I have some 230 drafts, and with how many of them are asks, questions, mentions et al. that have lingered in there for mortifyingly long, the goal is something like 230 posts.
Give or take, to be clear - some of them are redundant or unimportant, some of them will be split into multiple small parts. But in all fairness, I hope all of them end up smallish posts. I hope I don't overdeliver. Honestly, that there are that many drafts to get to is the only reason I even hope to post so much this year at all.
Reason being, I'm really not good enough at writing. Not because I am unsatisfied with the posts that I make, but because it takes me far too long to make them: I mull every word over and shuffle them around and reconsider where I'm goi- ⌫⌫⌫⌫ re-⌫ question the structure of the paragra-⌫⌫⌫ the paragraph's structure until by the time I wrote⌫⌫⌫⌫⌫ until I've spent⌫⌫⌫⌫ so much that by the time I'm satisfied with two paragraphs I took as long as I wanted to spend on the whole post.
And while I can hope to get better, I could even take writing lessons to work towards that, that would be even more time spent on what ultimately shouldn't be a main focus.
I love doing this, but I don't think it's the most promising path I have towards a satisfying answer to "What do you do for a living?". So far I've been learning, I've been studying, I've been trying to figure it out, but the part of life in which these are acceptable answers is drawing to a close.
I am fortunate to have a lot of things on my table that could become anything from a fun side gig to the main path of my life; but for any of that to happen -especially for that main questline to emerge- I need to be able to dedicate my whole self to them until the jury's out on whether they have legs. I cannot afford to jump around from thing to thing and chase my attention wherever it's pulled. (Yes, I have a wandering mind and focus issues - feel free to take a moment to reel in from the shock.)
Honestly, a lot of the content this blog put out last year can be attributed to poor priority management. Many of the posts you read came from days mainly or entirely dedicated to them, even in the face of all the aforementioned. That's a romantic approach I may miss, but it's time to put it behind me and put something sustainable in its place. A familiar realization to the car enthusiast of today.
Just like in that context, I hope I can preserve the madness and bring it to you all, but in a controlled dosage that doesn't mess with what I need to live. I hope I'll be able to pick efficiency up along the way, because it would help me preserve a part of my life I don't want to give up.
My ability to write down what I need to do has a nasty track record of not turning into that happening, so nothing much may change. And perhaps, if I do improve my focus, I'll be able to write posts faster and offset the change. But if you do see me post a lot less, just know it's not necessarily bad - I might be working on something greater.
Or my resolve is only managing to stop me from distractions over a certain length and I'm spending that same time ceding to shorter ones over and over. I hear that's how they getcha.
if you had to strike one car/maufacturer (except tesla that's a given) off the face of the planet what would it be
are we talking from now on or also retroactively? if we’re talkin just like kill off a company now without losing everything they’ve ever made, i would say maybe mitsubishi. they’re on their last legs anyway, it would be kind of a mercy killing given what they’ve become. the outlander isn’t awful but if it ceased to be it’s a niche with plenty of better options. i do adore their older models though, love the first couple gens of eclipse and i straight up screamed when i saw an imported jdm lancer evo on the road recently
if we’re going retroactive too, as much as i hate to i think i’d say fiat. their cars now are built terribly and they’re driving chrysler and jeep into the ground. i love their older cars and it would suck to potentially lose abarth, but i think basically every car they’ve ever made has a competitor that’s just as good. it would be tragic to lose the original topolino though
if we’re doing just a single car model though? ford edge. absolutely purposeless suv that i had the displeasure of driving recently. i’m sorry to any ford edge drivers who might follow me but i hated that thing and have never understood why anyone other than rental car companies bought it over a ford escape or other competitor smaller suv
Hi! Evil version of you here (I provide opinions/anecdotes instead of answers), and I'm not sure I would agree - sure, Fiat has released such an incredible array of stinkers in the last 40 years that many models were bought up en masse by state entities because no one else would, but holy HELL did they make a whole bunch of great cars before that.
I really can't blame a yankee for not considering pre-90s Fiat that much, but I mean, surely you remember where the 500 brand name came from?
And what about the 600 Multipla? Can you think of a more charming three-row car?
To say nothing of the original Panda, still a hallmark of Italian roads (and mountains in 4x4 form) over four decades past its debut!
And what about the Uno, whose standard version brought my surgeon dad to work and whose turbo version brought work to surgeons!
And of course let's not forget the spiders - 1500, 124, X1/9...
Sure, Fiat has had a lot more downs than ups, they had and still have a tendency to shave every single thing down to the bone (good will included), my dad did slide his Uno off the road because the tires just transitioned to plastic halfway down the tread, the new Panda I drove had a shifter so vague the numbers on the knob were followed by an "ish" and the old one I drove felt like I was mere feet in front of a car-scooping tornado, but Fiat's story has far too many highlights for where the Durango would be going otherwise to offset.
Also, THEY STOPPED MAKING GREY CARS!!!! AND MADE A BIG DEAL ABOUT IT!!!! COME ON!!!!
Ditto for most of Eastern Europe, which for decades was fed on Fiat's scraps - I mean, the 126 was still being made in 2000!!! The Lexus IS was hot on the shelves and they were still selling a car you could pull-start! And what about the Riva??? The Russians kept that chassis going FOUR DECADES after we stopped making the 124 it was based on!
Bringing this back to say that the willingness to lose the Marea Weekend and the Fivetech engine betrays the fact that op probally dont know about the Fivetech
Okay so this might be more about Brazil's chronic lack of cool cars than about the Marea in itself, and you as a italian should be basically imune to fiat doing weird stuff to what should be just normal cars, but stay with me.
TL;DR check this RCR-esque review if you speak portuguese or wanna try the captions or just jump to 1:16 and listen to it
First lets give you the context of the brazilian abuse turned meme hatred turned idolization of this midsize wagon-shaped bad idea.
It begins in 1991 when, after 15 years of a ban in car imports, we finally passed a law to allow imports and flooded the market with new cars after being sold the same 8-12 cars in 3 or 4 segments (we didnt have fully new cars between the uno in 84 and the kadett in 89, GM´s flagship Opala was sold between 68 and 92). Most national cars were 70s or 80s projects and now we could buy a mx3 or a civic si.
With that we started to see a big revolution in national cars since the import tax of 35~70% wasnt enough to keep their cars fighting for a share in the market. We started to see things like mpfi and releases with a delay of 6 months to a year instead of 2~6 years of the international releases and the first turbo car mass produced in brazilian soil, the abovecited Uno turbo, wich would later bring the Tempra turbo, and then the Marea Turbo.
Fiat wasnt the only one making turbo cars here by the time the marea released, but they were the only one making midsized wagons (not even them, at first, since they imported them for a while before the factory were ready for the wagons) and they would, as far as i know, be the only ones to join those facts, making inline 5 2.0 wagons either NA or turbo. they eventually made a 2.4 NA since the 2.0 wasnt quirky enough i guess?
However there´s a terrible cost to jump from ohv carburated or maybe SOHC efi to I5 20v, and its the fact that you cant pull up to the neighbourhood´s shop and ask them to fix your car, because the poor guy never saw a DOHC engine, let alone a turbo. So you take it to FIAT, and some years later you learn that they didnt know shit either, bc they made a mistake in the owners manual translate, making you change your oil with 30.000 km instead of the required 5.000km. So you sell it for half what you paid before you need to rebuild the engine, and pray to god the next owner already forgot you when the engine fails. This circle repeats itself again and again, however the marea keeps being sold for 6 years here after Italy decided it was boring and went back to playing with their alfas and lancias.
But as i said, Brazil has a lack of cool cars, so if you wanted a secondhand car well equiped but not worth a downpayment in a house, it was either a Marea or Vectra (car that the europeans dont give a fuck about either but we like a lot too). The Marea had a bigger list of factory itens and optinals such as (much needed) airbags, automatic AC and other stuff. Besides the fact that it was faster and sounded much better it was also cheaper, so the choice was obvious.
I guess that by now you can already see where technically advanced car + no resell value + FIAT´s traditonally shitty building lead those cars: being sold dirty cheap, abused beyond a no return point and then scrapped. The car was crowned the worst deal you could make, turned in a meme and heavily associated with post 9/11 slamophobia. Its the flagship car of calling unreliable shitboxes "bombs".
However, do you know what comes after a relatively fast car that obviously can take a turbo to it becomes so cheap and underated? Of course you make a sleeper build. So people did that, and turns out, these cars are really easy to make a lot more power out of them once you had 15 years to map the problems and learn to work around them. Bit too late, now most of them are begging to die and so the good ones are getting more and more pricey so im never getting one.
Also i feel like your point about them being ugly is both mean and kinda unfair bc cmon, all you need is new wheels and maybe a lower suspension
I feel like this is great evidence of how our views on cars are so inextricably tied to their (and our) contexts that, arguably, we're seldom even talking about cars as much as about the role they played in the contexts in question. Is the fact that these are the same car sold on my shores any more relevant than the argument that, had I been born and raised in prev's family, I would still be me? Especially now that the context, from market to service manual (leave it to Fiat to mistranslate a number), has informed the lives they lead, and in turn their current state.
Hell, even if we boil how good a car is down to how well it does the job it sets out to do and what it asks for in return, and even if we boil that job down to running and those requests to maintenance and repairs, we end up with an upwards line in the care-performance chart. Depending on the shape of it we may call a car from impervious to abuse to impervious to care and anywhere in between, but the most important truth is that the best way to ensure you have a bad car in your hands is to treat it badly.
And not just because you shouldn't think you can just sort by cheapest and buy sight unseen because you're searching for a "good" model (as much as I may culpably have given that impression), but because, if that is true for tools arguably made to do one thing, how can you expect to treat people like that?
How can you think of society as just a matter of spotting the bad people and tossing them away, that building incentive structures -making it easier to do the right thing, making doing the wrong thing less worthwhile, educating on the importance of that choice and its consequences, accompanying them through a change for the better- is just a nice-to-have to tack on if there's time? How can you think that the predominant cause of crime is immutable destiny?
It's a beef I've long held with American culture's mindset - I always make a point to note when I'm looking at one of its blockbusters and, however many plot twists they pile on, there's no corruption or redemption arc to be seen, and everyone was always bad or good all along - and if the latter, not even blowing up a hospital would be scrutinized in the slightest, because anything furthering the good guy's cause is ok.
Why do you think there's such a sea of people seeing no problem with everyone getting access to more barrels than a winery? Because they think the problem isn't everyone having guns, it's bad people being around. If you can have episodes you need to be in a psych ward, if you are in any way corruptible you need to be treated as already criminal, if you have harmful impulses whether you mean to act upon them is irrelevant and you should burn either way - and then all the people left would be good people who should have guns to save the day if the bad ones come!
Truly, this is what happens when a culture drapes itself in the cozy traditions of Christianity and strips away all uncomfortable truths like the idea that we are all born with the potential to cause harm and need mutual assistance to be kept in the right path and fix our inevitable mistakes, until religion just becomes a backpatting assurance that once you do all the rituals your spot in heaven's booked.
Geez, what brought my head to such ugly things?
Anyhow, getting back to the Marea's looks:
Yes -as per 99% of on-roaders- a lower suspension improves it for me
If during the work of whoever was painting those taillight trims black I had been run over by a truck I would have wanted them to finish before coming to help me
I will play my deflection card by pointing out you don't like the Corolla wagon I adore which probably makes a hypocrite of both of us but more importantly of YOU.
Okay I think I also want a front picture to-
Oh well this is a post-facelift example so it's not really what I'm looking for, also this picture was photoshopped for the UK market to have the steering wheel on the right hand side and a British plate and the original version can only be found in 300p...
...I guess if toyota.co.uk had those high-res pictures I can at least hope to find something for the pre-facelift model, right?
Wrong! The only evidence they carry of its existence are two baked-in-caption'd WackyWarehouseside pixelfests of exterior and interior, and I don't know if I'm more disappointed by the former...
...or the ladder.
Truly, finding a matching pair of press pictures for this in any kind of resolution is so hard I'm having to resort to French brochure scans... and even those arent' that flattering.
Hey WAIT A SECOND-
SIDE PROTECTION WHAT?!
Move over Renault 5, there's a new king in town.
Anyhow yeah prev do you think we could send enough Mareas into Brasil to hit economics of scale and turn a profit? Or even just break even actually, it would be reward enough to see them enjoyed away from where my eyes are.
Links in blue are posts of mine about the topic in question: if you liked this post, you might like those - or the blog’s Discord server, linked in the pinned post!
We possibly could, i just dont see why would we do that when the best Mareas are already on this side of the atlantic. On the other hand, if we scrapped all of the italian mareas for parts and sent them here, we could probally keep ours in a much better shape.
Oh, parts would be even cheaper to ship - meaning more of a chance of profit to be found in boating them Brasilward! (Surely there's a term for sending them with a larger type of watercraft, but nothing comes to mind.) If nothing else, given Marea means tide, we have the ingredients for a killer business name!
Yeah, I was mostly talking untrained eye. Also I don't think the Corolla and Marea are in the same size class? I looked it up and the Marea Weekend was 4.49m long and the Corolla Wagon only 4.34m, meaning the closest Toyota equivalent was found one size above the Corolla, in the Avensis Wagon's 4.6m.
(oh but the Avensis gets the proper shoot huh >:C)
To make up from the sheer boredom of that sentence, here's this vaguely-gummy-fruit-slices-reminiscent-light-sporting wagon's obligatory Japan-only cooler version, the Caldina (as it was called there) GT-T.
Though looks are emphatically not the highlight here, if you want it to go harder there's the Active Sports version...
...also available in two tone!
But now, for what makes it as cool as it is: you know the fourth generation Supra? If you don't, heyho, that link's in blue so it's for you! Otherwise, you are familiar with its place among the greatest cars in Japanese history - place that, if we're honest with ourselves, is owed entirely to the engine I spent many of those paragraphs desperately trying to convey the legend status of. Cry Fast And Furious all you want, but it was never going to land that role if its engine's absurd capabilities didn't make it the scene's top dog.
So when you see its GT500 spec, you know what to expect under the hood.
But not what you'll get.
Yes, because of its lower weight, when time came for TOM's to make a racecar out of it, the legendary 2JZ's throne was usurped by an engine two thirds of its size. This is the badass level of the 3S-GTE, other contender for greatest engine Toyota ever made - which wrote the annals of motorsport not just in this Supra, but also in its livery brethren, the rally Corolla and Celica from my recent post.
Except the Celica would get to carry that powertrain into the dealership.
Yes - with the many differences between rally spec and an acceptable mass production vehicle, of course, but Toyota put that same engine and all wheel drive system into the production Celica ST205.
And a station wagon.
See what I mean.
This is starting to become a recurring enough theme that I feel like we need a tag for it. Maybe "Japanese automaking consistently keeping its neatest items to themselves"?
That might be a bit long. Maybe we'll use the acronym.
im so sorry... i think fiat has fun cars but im still willing to sacrifice fiat to take out the greater evil (stellantis products) 🥺
EXCUSE ME?!
First off, if we weren't talking about removing their whole contribution from history you could axe Chrysler, which currently makes nothing but the Minivan you yourself have beef with from your encounter of it in Dodge guise.
Second off, since we are, you could axe RAM, and lose nothing you couldn't get from Ford or Chevrolet - well, besides that time they saw a Viper V10 and thought "You know what would be funny?"
Hell, if you really don't think that would sacruffice (that sacrifice would suffice), maybe go for Opel!
Their cool sporty cars are a rebadged Saturn...
...and a rebadged Lotus.
Okay, to be fair, I think I find the Speedster the prettier version, and the GT's first generation was a charming little thing.
Oh, and the headlights! These are the only pop-ups that I know of that were manually actuated - the movement of the lever beside the shifter is what physically moved the headlights.
And how did it do so? Well, have a look. I promise you're not expecting what's ahead.
So okay, the cool sportscars are cool. But also two. And what else is there? The uncool sporty cars.
Like the Tigra, only car for which "It's this or a bus" can be not just a threat, but also an earnest guess as to where this seat picture was taken!
Or the Calibra, which had the lowest drag coefficient of any mass production car!
As long as you picked the slow version, with the least powerful engine and front wheel drive. However, that there even was a 4x4 Turbo 16v is itself fancy enough to question its uncool status (hell, sometimes that AWD system even worked!). However: how do you think these actually ended up.
I mean, look at the Manta, its arguable predecessor. Am I saying it's not a cool car? Far be it from me!
But the jokes about Manta owners being tasteless chintz-splattering dudebrokes were enough to spawn multiple movies and a Wikipedia page reporting as much.
So when the Calibra dropped in 1990 -and especially when it got cheap, in the early 2000s- who do you think got ahold of it?
Hey, at least none of them got the RAM owner treatment.
...it's right below me, isn't it.
Should've kept my mouth shut.
Links in blue are posts of mine about the topic in question: if you liked this post, you might like those - or the blog’s Discord server, linked in the pinned post!x
if you had to strike one car/maufacturer (except tesla that's a given) off the face of the planet what would it be
are we talking from now on or also retroactively? if we’re talkin just like kill off a company now without losing everything they’ve ever made, i would say maybe mitsubishi. they’re on their last legs anyway, it would be kind of a mercy killing given what they’ve become. the outlander isn’t awful but if it ceased to be it’s a niche with plenty of better options. i do adore their older models though, love the first couple gens of eclipse and i straight up screamed when i saw an imported jdm lancer evo on the road recently
if we’re going retroactive too, as much as i hate to i think i’d say fiat. their cars now are built terribly and they’re driving chrysler and jeep into the ground. i love their older cars and it would suck to potentially lose abarth, but i think basically every car they’ve ever made has a competitor that’s just as good. it would be tragic to lose the original topolino though
if we’re doing just a single car model though? ford edge. absolutely purposeless suv that i had the displeasure of driving recently. i’m sorry to any ford edge drivers who might follow me but i hated that thing and have never understood why anyone other than rental car companies bought it over a ford escape or other competitor smaller suv
Hi! Evil version of you here (I provide opinions/anecdotes instead of answers), and I'm not sure I would agree - sure, Fiat has released such an incredible array of stinkers in the last 40 years that many models were bought up en masse by state entities because no one else would, but holy HELL did they make a whole bunch of great cars before that.
I really can't blame a yankee for not considering pre-90s Fiat that much, but I mean, surely you remember where the 500 brand name came from?
And what about the 600 Multipla? Can you think of a more charming three-row car?
To say nothing of the original Panda, still a hallmark of Italian roads (and mountains in 4x4 form) over four decades past its debut!
And what about the Uno, whose standard version brought my surgeon dad to work and whose turbo version brought work to surgeons!
And of course let's not forget the spiders - 1500, 124, X1/9...
Sure, Fiat has had a lot more downs than ups, they had and still have a tendency to shave every single thing down to the bone (good will included), my dad did slide his Uno off the road because the tires just transitioned to plastic halfway down the tread, the new Panda I drove had a shifter so vague the numbers on the knob were followed by an "ish" and the old one I drove felt like I was mere feet in front of a car-scooping tornado, but Fiat's story has far too many highlights for where the Durango would be going otherwise to offset.
Also, THEY STOPPED MAKING GREY CARS!!!! AND MADE A BIG DEAL ABOUT IT!!!! COME ON!!!!
Ditto for most of Eastern Europe, which for decades was fed on Fiat's scraps - I mean, the 126 was still being made in 2000!!! The Lexus IS was hot on the shelves and they were still selling a car you could pull-start! And what about the Riva??? The Russians kept that chassis going FOUR DECADES after we stopped making the 124 it was based on!
Bringing this back to say that the willingness to lose the Marea Weekend and the Fivetech engine betrays the fact that op probally dont know about the Fivetech
Okay so this might be more about Brazil's chronic lack of cool cars than about the Marea in itself, and you as a italian should be basically imune to fiat doing weird stuff to what should be just normal cars, but stay with me.
TL;DR check this RCR-esque review if you speak portuguese or wanna try the captions or just jump to 1:16 and listen to it
First lets give you the context of the brazilian abuse turned meme hatred turned idolization of this midsize wagon-shaped bad idea.
It begins in 1991 when, after 15 years of a ban in car imports, we finally passed a law to allow imports and flooded the market with new cars after being sold the same 8-12 cars in 3 or 4 segments (we didnt have fully new cars between the uno in 84 and the kadett in 89, GM´s flagship Opala was sold between 68 and 92). Most national cars were 70s or 80s projects and now we could buy a mx3 or a civic si.
With that we started to see a big revolution in national cars since the import tax of 35~70% wasnt enough to keep their cars fighting for a share in the market. We started to see things like mpfi and releases with a delay of 6 months to a year instead of 2~6 years of the international releases and the first turbo car mass produced in brazilian soil, the abovecited Uno turbo, wich would later bring the Tempra turbo, and then the Marea Turbo.
Fiat wasnt the only one making turbo cars here by the time the marea released, but they were the only one making midsized wagons (not even them, at first, since they imported them for a while before the factory were ready for the wagons) and they would, as far as i know, be the only ones to join those facts, making inline 5 2.0 wagons either NA or turbo. they eventually made a 2.4 NA since the 2.0 wasnt quirky enough i guess?
However there´s a terrible cost to jump from ohv carburated or maybe SOHC efi to I5 20v, and its the fact that you cant pull up to the neighbourhood´s shop and ask them to fix your car, because the poor guy never saw a DOHC engine, let alone a turbo. So you take it to FIAT, and some years later you learn that they didnt know shit either, bc they made a mistake in the owners manual translate, making you change your oil with 30.000 km instead of the required 5.000km. So you sell it for half what you paid before you need to rebuild the engine, and pray to god the next owner already forgot you when the engine fails. This circle repeats itself again and again, however the marea keeps being sold for 6 years here after Italy decided it was boring and went back to playing with their alfas and lancias.
But as i said, Brazil has a lack of cool cars, so if you wanted a secondhand car well equiped but not worth a downpayment in a house, it was either a Marea or Vectra (car that the europeans dont give a fuck about either but we like a lot too). The Marea had a bigger list of factory itens and optinals such as (much needed) airbags, automatic AC and other stuff. Besides the fact that it was faster and sounded much better it was also cheaper, so the choice was obvious.
I guess that by now you can already see where technically advanced car + no resell value + FIAT´s traditonally shitty building lead those cars: being sold dirty cheap, abused beyond a no return point and then scrapped. The car was crowned the worst deal you could make, turned in a meme and heavily associated with post 9/11 slamophobia. Its the flagship car of calling unreliable shitboxes "bombs".
However, do you know what comes after a relatively fast car that obviously can take a turbo to it becomes so cheap and underated? Of course you make a sleeper build. So people did that, and turns out, these cars are really easy to make a lot more power out of them once you had 15 years to map the problems and learn to work around them. Bit too late, now most of them are begging to die and so the good ones are getting more and more pricey so im never getting one.
Also i feel like your point about them being ugly is both mean and kinda unfair bc cmon, all you need is new wheels and maybe a lower suspension
I feel like this is great evidence of how our views on cars are so inextricably tied to their (and our) contexts that, arguably, we're seldom even talking about cars as much as about the role they played in the contexts in question. Is the fact that these are the same car sold on my shores any more relevant than the argument that, had I been born and raised in prev's family, I would still be me? Especially now that the context, from market to service manual (leave it to Fiat to mistranslate a number), has informed the lives they lead, and in turn their current state.
Hell, even if we boil how good a car is down to how well it does the job it sets out to do and what it asks for in return, and even if we boil that job down to running and those requests to maintenance and repairs, we end up with an upwards line in the care-performance chart. Depending on the shape of it we may call a car from impervious to abuse to impervious to care and anywhere in between, but the most important truth is that the best way to ensure you have a bad car in your hands is to treat it badly.
And not just because you shouldn't think you can just sort by cheapest and buy sight unseen because you're searching for a "good" model (as much as I may culpably have given that impression), but because, if that is true for tools arguably made to do one thing, how can you expect to treat people like that?
How can you think of society as just a matter of spotting the bad people and tossing them away, that building incentive structures -making it easier to do the right thing, making doing the wrong thing less worthwhile, educating on the importance of that choice and its consequences, accompanying them through a change for the better- is just a nice-to-have to tack on if there's time? How can you think that the predominant cause of crime is immutable destiny?
It's a beef I've long held with American culture's mindset - I always make a point to note when I'm looking at one of its blockbusters and, however many plot twists they pile on, there's no corruption or redemption arc to be seen, and everyone was always bad or good all along - and if the latter, not even blowing up a hospital would be scrutinized in the slightest, because anything furthering the good guy's cause is ok.
Why do you think there's such a sea of people seeing no problem with everyone getting access to more barrels than a winery? Because they think the problem isn't everyone having guns, it's bad people being around. If you can have episodes you need to be in a psych ward, if you are in any way corruptible you need to be treated as already criminal, if you have harmful impulses whether you mean to act upon them is irrelevant and you should burn either way - and then all the people left would be good people who should have guns to save the day if the bad ones come!
Truly, this is what happens when a culture drapes itself in the cozy traditions of Christianity and strips away all uncomfortable truths like the idea that we are all born with the potential to cause harm and need mutual assistance to be kept in the right path and fix our inevitable mistakes, until religion just becomes a backpatting assurance that once you do all the rituals your spot in heaven's booked.
Geez, what brought my head to such ugly things?
Anyhow, getting back to the Marea's looks:
Yes -as per 99% of on-roaders- a lower suspension improves it for me
If during the work of whoever was painting those taillight trims black I had been run over by a truck I would have wanted them to finish before coming to help me
I will play my deflection card by pointing out you don't like the Corolla wagon I adore which probably makes a hypocrite of both of us but more importantly of YOU.
Okay I think I also want a front picture to-
Oh well this is a post-facelift example so it's not really what I'm looking for, also this picture was photoshopped for the UK market to have the steering wheel on the right hand side and a British plate and the original version can only be found in 300p...
...I guess if toyota.co.uk had those high-res pictures I can at least hope to find something for the pre-facelift model, right?
Wrong! The only evidence they carry of its existence are two baked-in-caption'd WackyWarehouseside pixelfests of exterior and interior, and I don't know if I'm more disappointed by the former...
...or the ladder.
Truly, finding a matching pair of press pictures for this in any kind of resolution is so hard I'm having to resort to French brochure scans... and even those arent' that flattering.
Hey WAIT A SECOND-
SIDE PROTECTION WHAT?!
Move over Renault 5, there's a new king in town.
Anyhow yeah prev do you think we could send enough Mareas into Brasil to hit economics of scale and turn a profit? Or even just break even actually, it would be reward enough to see them enjoyed away from where my eyes are.
Links in blue are posts of mine about the topic in question: if you liked this post, you might like those - or the blog’s Discord server, linked in the pinned post!
Or so the figure on my blog says. Well, it says 399 now, but it'll say 400 when this post is up.
And it will be somewhat misleading.
You see, many of my posts are what I call 'branches': I post something one day, and then later on I reblog it tacking on yet more rambling, be it to respond to a comment, to update with new information, or just because I couldn't manage to write it all in one go. If one were to count these branches, they would be roughly half as many.
This also means that browsing through my archive is even more of a pain than normal, since it will show not just the last post of a branch but every one of the potentially dozens of posts before it. This could be addressed by deleting those other posts, but I don't want to, both because it could mess with people following a link to them and because of the other problem that makes my archive useless: me.
Let's not make a mystery of it, people. The archive's post previews, which (usually) show you the start of a post and/or the first image (it wants to show), may have some whiff of a chance to clue you in to what that post is about in other blogs; but anyone who can reliably use that to predict where a post of mine is going could make more digits in stocks bets than I even know exist.
So I decided that with this 400th post I would bring you my Christmas present to you all: an index post, that would treat every branch as a post of its own and list them in reverse chronological order and go over their topics and what have you...
...and then I found out that Tumblr posts have a 100 link limit*. Who else would've.
So unfortunately, I was forced to accept the heartbreaking reality that I would need to resign to a painful decision.
So it is with great grief that I bring you the terrible news: you will have to click a link.
I know. I know. I'm sorry. But it does mean that you will be able to pick how they are sorted and view the posts' key details in a clear, readable layout, that will be quick to keep updated and even tinker with if needed!
It is currently a work in progress because I was too busy to get it done in time**, but the branches and their links are almost all there.
So if, as I hope, you are having a merry Christmas, you now have something to bookmark for when you feel like a read, and if you're not you now have something to take your mind off of it.
Have a good one, love you all!
*And it's not like it tells you why your post can't be published or even saved, btw! You just have to figure it out on your own. So now you can.
**I took welding lessons! So now I'm finally ready for old Japanese cars ownership :)
Or so the figure on my blog says. Well, it says 399 now, but it'll say 400 when this post is up.
And it will be somewhat misleading.
You see, many of my posts are what I call 'branches': I post something one day, and then later on I reblog it tacking on yet more rambling, be it to respond to a comment, to update with new information, or just because I couldn't manage to write it all in one go. If one were to count these branches, they would be roughly half as many.
This also means that browsing through my archive is even more of a pain than normal, since it will show not just the last post of a branch but every one of the potentially dozens of posts before it. This could be addressed by deleting those other posts, but I don't want to, both because it could mess with people following a link to them and because of the other problem that makes my archive useless: me.
Let's not make a mystery of it, people. The archive's post previews, which (usually) show you the start of a post and/or the first image (it wants to show), may have some whiff of a chance to clue you in to what that post is about in other blogs; but anyone who can reliably use that to predict where a post of mine is going could make more digits in stocks bets than I even know exist.
So I decided that with this 400th post I would bring you my Christmas present to you all: an index post, that would treat every branch as a post of its own and list them in reverse chronological order and go over their topics and what have you...
...and then I found out that Tumblr posts have a 100 link limit*. Who else would've.
So unfortunately, I was forced to accept the heartbreaking reality that I would need to resign to a painful decision.
So it is with great grief that I bring you the terrible news: you will have to click a link.
I know. I know. I'm sorry. But it does mean that you will be able to pick how they are sorted and view the posts' key details in a clear, readable layout, that will be quick to keep updated and even tinker with if needed!
It is currently a work in progress because I was too busy to get it done in time**, but the branches and their links are almost all there.
So if, as I hope, you are having a merry Christmas, you now have something to bookmark for when you feel like a read, and if you're not you now have something to take your mind off of it.
Have a good one, love you all!
*And it's not like it tells you why your post can't be published or even saved, btw! You just have to figure it out on your own. So now you can.
**I took welding lessons! So now I'm finally ready for old Japanese cars ownership :)
A meri kurisumasu from Things About Cars In Posts, offered by this itasha Mitsuoka Le-Seyde!
Links in blue are posts of mine about the topic in question: if you liked this post, you might like those - or the blog’s Discord server, linked in the pinned post!
So, funny story - when I clicked the notification for this ask, it loaded into the regular post interface.
Though as you can see replies weren't available, the reblog button was, and clicking it loaded into the reblog editor exactly as though the ask had already been answered.
Sick!, I thought. I can answer this from @what-is-this-car, the blog I made specifically for this kind of posts!
However, when it came to actually posting the thing, Tumblr came to its senses.
Whether it was another blog or this one, posting it would just error out. I even tried answering the ask and then trying again, to see if maybe it would go through after the post it was trying to reblog actually existed, but no dice.
So I'm just going to lazily copypaste the post I had written in the WITC format. It's not like this has to be a big special post anyway.
Dear @lathgaertha, this car is a 1999-2003 Corbin Sparrow, later sold as the 2005-2012 Myers Motors NmG.
The Sparrow was discussed by @trombone-minivan aka @brick-enthusiast and @things-about-cars-in-posts aka @tumblehcendrum aka me.
For reference, the Castrol livery seen on this Corolla is arguably Toyota's most iconic, adorning many of Toyota's finest motorsport moments from the TOM'S Supra to the legendary rally Celica...
(though admittedly the most legendary thing about it was the secret device that undid the turbo's mandatory restriction when the engine was running and hid itself when removed for inspection and as you can tell from the fact that I'm telling you about it got the car banned for cheating, but yk)
...and Toyota themselves seem to agree, judging by the framing of this shoot of an GT86 sextet celebrating their most iconic liveries...
...and the rally concept of their new-year-new-letter GR86.
However, when time came to rally my beloved, in swooped Movistar asking if they could kindly be allowed to fuck it up.
And unfortunately this is the only livery you can find on model cars, because it's the one with which the Corolla racked up its results - best among them a Constructor's WRC title in '99 and a second place in the Driver's Championship in '98.
Actually, actually. About that second place.
The World Rally Championship is comprised of a bunch of rallies, each of which is comprised of a bunch of stages, and when the final stage of the season comes around, the championship can long have been decided.
This is emphatically not the case in 1998, which is notable in its own right.
And yet there goes Tommi Mäkinen, the championship leader. As in away. Back home.
Well, what else is there to do? He's been out of contention for twenty stages by now, so all he could do is watch Carlos Sainz (not the F1 driver, that's Carlos Sainz Jr., see if you can work out the relation) take the last stage safe and still earn fourth place in the rally, netting him enough points to gain the championship lead.
As Sainz is driving his stage, the current championship leader isn't there. Mäkinen's taxi is waiting for him outside the hotel lobby. He's saying it's fine, really, since all hope was lost many stages ago. He pauses when his phone rings. It's his brother.
A rally's standings are based on the sum of all stage times, and not the sum of stage placements.
Which doesn't sound like a detail that matters.
Except, three hundred fucking meters from the end of the stage, Sainz's Corolla conks out in flames.
Without a time in every stage, there's no total time. You can't be in the rankings. You get no championship points. And without any championship points, the two point lead of Tommi Mäkinen remains.
And in a moment that almost seems to want you to believe it was staged, he finds it out over the phone during an interview about his loss.
Oh, and if you're feeling bad for Toyota and Sainz, please be my guest. But also, remember Mäkinen had retired because, I shit you not, a British car from a historic event they ran before the rally blew its engine up in a corner and he, being the first to drive the stage as the championship leader, drove the corner unaware of the oil spillage, smacked the car into a concrete block, and lost a wheel...
...and kept driving, and finished the stage...
...and set off to reach the repair station, and ultimately got pulled over.
And you may be wondering how that cop didn't know that that was a rally car getting to the assistance station and not a car driving on open public roads. And well uhh. I'm not sure how to break it to you but uhhh. Yeah uh
Links in blue are posts of mine about the topic in question: if you liked this post, you might like those - or the blog’s Discord server, linked in the pinned post!
