2012 Hyundai Veloster

Don’t ever pour a few drinks into me and get me fired up about modern car design, because it’s simply unfair… for me. There are only so many synonyms for the word “suppository,” and trust me, I’ve used them all. That’s why I appreciate it when automakers take a chance in the sheetmetal department. When Nissan decided to denude the Southwest of peyote and come up with the Murano CrossCabriolet and the Juke, frankly, I applauded that someone pushed those cars past the beancounters and the sour-looking management dudes with ill-fitting toupees (there’s probably some overlap there) to hit a retailer near you. I’ve never had an occasion to wear a disguise and try both of them out, but I’ll admit that in my weaker moments the sheer absurdity of the Juke makes me swoon.

Look, anyone could pen an ugly car. I’m convinced that some of the all-time worst styling offenders were simply the product of the management handing the drafting pen to a doe-eyed young designer, with a cranium swollen with wondrous ideas and all high on endorphins for their chance to design a car that people will actually drive in the real world,  and then clubbing said designer over the head and tracing around a piece of toast. This technique led to several Chysler products.

The 2012 Hyundai Veloster is not absurd. Or, at least not in the same class of bonkers as either of those Nissans, but that’s not to say it isn’t as boldly different in other respects. First of all, there’s the asymmetry. Two doors on one side, and one on the other. Obsessive-compulsives may want to avert their eyes, or at least step back and forth through a doorway 35 times before looking closely at this car. In the same vein, grammarians should just ignore the word “coupe” entirely. It’s not worth an aneurism to protest; the world’s moved on, “hella” is rapidly approaching acceptance into the OED, and I have an owl so your argument is invalid.

It only takes a glance to realize the Veloster is different, but how different? Read on to find out.

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Car Stereo: Get Down With Lalo Schifrin

This post isn’t about Steve McQueen at all–not his man-bits, his cars, or his favorite burger condiment. Alright, maybe in a roundabout way, because you can’t separate the man from the film, but let’s take a second and talk about another major player in Bullitt: Lalo Schifrin. Schifrin is never on screen. He doesn’t lose seven hubcaps during a car chase, or order a hit on any stool pidgeon. He does, however, lend the entire movie–virtually every scene, and particularly the epic car chase that put Bullitt on the map for car enthusiasts–its distinctive gravity. But while it’s the Bullitt soundtrack that brought Schifrin to my attention, dive into Schifrin’s catalog of movie scores and you’ll be amazed. Not every one’s a car film, but then again, even THX 1138 included a pair of Lola T70s.

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Matchbox Mania: The Germans Invade England Edition

I was semi-facetiously saying yesterday that all of my diecast cars came from Taiwan, but flipping over this silver Merc led to a surprise – it’s a Corgi, and just like the Queen’s ludicrous little dogs, it was born in that great island nation known for bad food and worse teeth. Not only that, this Englander is German. No, it’s not some elaborate result of a tin Double Cross System, it’s just a Mercedes-Benz 240D, W115 chassis code. Having marathoned across the southern California wastes in a slightly newer 240D, I can say that I have a counter-intuitive admiration for these heavy, underpowered panzers. What’s not pictured in this image is the little plastic-molded tow ball adhered to the back of it, which I’m sure was intended to inform young subjects of Great Britain that a 65-horsepower OM616 diesel was plenty to haul a caravan around. Which clearly is a lesson that stuck, judging by how apoplectic Top Gear gets when the subject turns to them.

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Matchbox Mania: Whiteletter Snakebite (Whitesnake?) Edition

So far, all my Matchbox cars have hailed from Italy (via Taiwan), but today’s contender is a hybrid in the primal automotive sense of the word. It’s a Hot Wheels Classic Cobra, devoid of any mention of the words AC or Shelby for reasons apparent to anyone who’s ever read the words “Carroll Shelby” and “lawsuit” in the same sentence. And despite the fact that it looks like it was once a star on the popular web series “Will it Blend?” this Cobra suffered only at my pudgy little hands, which apparently decided upon destroying all the paint. Let’s hope it wasn’t lead-based, although that would explain a few things.

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Matchbox Mania: Tomica Fiat X1/9 Survivor

Yesterday we saw my Fiat-Abarth 131, which by any objective measure is a toy worthy of admiration. The funny thing is, I don’t remember playing with it as a child. But I do remember this orange 1977 Tomica Fiat X1/9. In fact, it was my favorite matchbox car, and that might explain its slightly less beat-up appearance. The doors open, but I suppose that Tomica figured that no one wanted to peer under the engine cover at the horrors lurking within, as the engine cover is fixed in place. It’s one of the more detailed ones I have, with an impressively tiny injection-molded interior and a minuscule “X1/9″ in relief on the decklid. Unlike the real thing, it hasn’t fallen victim to pervasive tin-rot as soon as it was exposed to air … it’s survived 33 years, solid as ever. A survivor!

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Matchbox Mania: Meet My Fiat-Abarth 131

You all might have heard I’ve gotten a job working at a place full of car geeks. Not just car nuts, but geeks, in the most base sense of the word. Basically, it’s fantastic, although I’m busier than a Ritalin-abusing beaver. Anyways, a lot of these car geeks have decorated their workspaces with matchbox cars, and in the grand spirit of fitting in, I’ve dug about in the deepest recesses of my closet and liberated a few specimens of my suddenly quite ancient-seeming childhood. I figured as I get time, I’ll share them with you one by one. Not too much to say about this one other than OMG IT’S A FIAT-ABARTH 131 DECKED OUT IN FULL WRC LIVERY! I had such good taste as a child. Also, it has some sort of rudamentary suspension for semi-realistic minature sofa cusion rallying. I can’t believe I had this one. Anyways, I’ll share more as I get time, and feel free to use this opportunity to post up highlights of your own matchbox collection in the comments.

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Lola Rennt! (When Parked)

You’ve already pondered race cars that are lame, so let us consider something a little different: a down-on-its-luck contender needing some resuscitation. Some projects are not for the faint of heart, and other projects are not for the thin of wallet. But this Lola T332 is perfect for the buyer who’s unsound of mind and flush with ill-gotten gains. Suspend disbelief, willingly or not, and append several dozen hypothetical zeros to the posterior of your most recent bank statement, then don your silk thinking jacket and clip a Cohiba to ponder this: what would you do with such a pile of parts? How would you navigate betwixt the crazed Charybdis of corrosion and the Scylla of overreaching alliteration sacrificed sanity?

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Hoonicast #10: Pardon Our Dust We Were En-Raptured Edition

You’ll have to forgive the delay in getting this latest installment of the Hoonicast up. You see, we all sold our belongings, quit our jobs, and gathered in Chicago to be transported up to meet our maker. I awoke naked except for a t-shirt that said “I Went to the Rapture and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt.” Needless, to say Hoonicast #10 was as topical as it was irreverent.

Our special guest this week is freelancer, Thunderdrome instigator and bona fide bendy-bus owner Ben Wojdyla! Click on through and take a listen, won’t ya, sinner?

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Hooniverse Asks: What Vehicle Most Deserves a Diesel?

Got Diesel?

When’s the last time you looked forward to driving a minivan? Years back, I was gallivanting around Europe breaking hearts, causing diplomatic crises, and generally being irresponsible. When a friend’s parents came to visit, they rented an Opel Zafira turbodiesel (I’ve no idea if it was a 2.0, 2.2, or the 2.2 hi-po) mated to a slick manual transmission. “Oh great,” everybody else thought, “it’s just as cool as a regular minivan, except slower!” I meanwhile finagled the keys and found that it would light up the fronts at will, and proceeded to drift it through every roundabout I could find. From this brief and highly scientific experiment, I decided that turbodiesel makes everything better.

Back in ‘Merica, where Opel exists only on our game consoles, it’s long been a painful truth to the disciples of torque that on this side of the pond if you want a 21st century diesel car you have to fork over your money to ze Germans, mostly in the form of the VW TDi line of oil-burners, or to purchase a truck whose GVW is in the nuclear aircraft carrier class. Everyone else seems to make delicious compression-ignition motors for sale in Otherlandistan, while we’re stuck picking up 640 oz milkshakes from Sonic in our petrol-slurping Wagon Queen Family Trucksters. Thanks, Oldsmobile!

It begs the question though – which non-diesel vehicle sold in the US should ditch the spark plugs and go over to the sooty side?

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WTF Files: Well At Least It’ll Make Wheelies Easier Edition

Jerry deep-sixed his restrictive exhaust for something that flows a tiny bit better. “Backpressure? What backpressure?”

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