Articles

Back when I had my ’66 GMC van, I was amazed on how basic and uncomplicated the front suspension was: A simple, solid axle bolted to two longitudinal leaf springs. It’s about the simplest front suspension one can imagine, and isn’t much different than the suspension on a horse-drawn frontier buckboard of 150 years ago…

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Thanks to Jim’s Antti’s Mitsubishi-themed weekend, I was reacquainted with the Cordia, a car I though was quite handsome as a young college student soldier. But I never realized back in the day how odd and obvious the black plastic filler was in the corners of the rear quarter windows. It is a styling technique…

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Bumper and fascia mounted driving lights have been “a thing” since at least as far back as Pontiac’s love affair with them in the 1980s. Nowadays, almost every car model is available with driving lights as an optional extra, but very few include them as standard equipment on their base model. This presents a quandary…

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Side pipes were, at their genesis, an imperfect solution to a vexing problem. In many compact, low-slung vehicles with big engines (in other words, racing cars) there is often nowhere for those big, hot exhaust pipes to go under the floorboards, and thus they must be routed around the side the vehicle by necessity. Thus…

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Vehicles with more or less fewer than four wheels are somewhat rare in the whole scheme of vehiclulardom (well, except for big trucks, I suppose). But vehicles that were modified at some point in the platform’s lifespan to alter the number of wheels are even more rare. The most commonly-known one is probably the Reliant…

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Ford went a little crazy with the sequel naming thing in the 1970s, slapping roman numerals at the end of model names to differentiate the “new and improved” models from the old, outdated original. Or at least, that was the idea. Movies with a roman numeral at the end of the title rarely turn out…

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Television is a great medium for manufacturers to show off production cars through product placement deals. Who can forget the Saint’s Volvo or Jim Rockford’s Firebird? Likewise, prominently featuring fancy exotics (Magnum P.I., Spenser For Hire, Miami Vice, The Mentalist) or wild, customized show cars such as the Batmobile, Monkeemobile, and Mannix Toronado generate enthusiasm…

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For today’s Encyclopedia Hoonatica entry, we want our Hooniversal crew to create a comprehensive list of cars with hidden glass. You see, when manufacturers want to refresh the styling an existing platform, they often wish to reshape part of the greenhouse—most typically, the rear quarter windows. Unfortunately, stamping dies are horribly expensive, so actually changing…

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There are only so many memorable, cool-sounding, or widely known car names, and many have been recycled over the years on different, unrelated models. Many have even been affixed to cars from different manufacturers. But in some cases, a particular car maker has concurrently sold different cars in different markets under the same name. That…

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