I think a new category should be added to Wikipedia’s list of automotive superlatives: “Least Powerful Interesting Car.” Before I go into too much detail about what makes this car so marginally cool, let’s run through a brief history lesson.
What began in 1983 with one car from Suzuki ended up evolving into an incredibly complex, multi-faceted web of badge-engineering spanning over three decades.
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Aside from those BMW wheels (huh?) and the fire department wanna be pinstripes this is a pretty interesting car.
Back around the time when Oldsmobile made the ridiculous decision to make a small, front-wheel drive car and call it a Cutlass while continuing to make the same old rear-wheel drive car and also call it a Cutlass, they remembered an old gimmick they had tried before with moderate success: trying to make an automatic transmission fun to use.
Starting in 1983, you could order your Cutlass Supreme with the Hurst/Olds package, which had some pretty decent options, like a better flowing exhaust, 3.73s, and supposedly the 307 had some slight improvements.
The main feature though, were the Hurst “Lightning Rod” shifters. I’ve been watching a couple videos of them in operation and I really can’t see any benefit from using them at all, other than showing them off and pretending you’ve got a Lenco or something. They make for an interesting conversation piece though.
The Hurst/Olds was only made in this body style for two years, 83 and 84, and it’s really easy to spot the difference between the two years. 83s were black with silver rocker panels, and 84s had a reversed paint scheme. 84s also came with the 8.5″ rear end from the Grand National while the 83s got the 7.5. After 84, they started calling the car the 442 again. As far as I can tell, the Lightning Rods were only available in the 83-84 Hurst/Olds car though.
I hope that one day this car gets reunited with its stock wheels (for that matter, any old set of 15’s would be a major improvement) and cleaned up a little bit, but I’m still just happy that someone is keeping it on the road in any capacity.
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Civic wagons are rare enough but the AWD version is even more of a treat. The manual cars actually came with a 6 speed transmission which had a super low gear to the left of first gear. I’m not sure why they didn’t just call the low gear “first gear” and rename the rest of the other gears to follow suit, but whatever, it’s still cool.
The reason for the low gear was because with only 100 lb-ft of torque, the D16A6 motor really didn’t have enough power to really do anything exciting at all (or get you out of a ditch, should you accidentally manage to do something exciting). I’m pretty sure the owner of this car doesn’t have much of a problem getting a little crazy though…
Yeah, someone swapped a K-series motor in there. Aside from all the obvious, well …dirt, it looks like a really clean swap too. I bet the thing is a lot of fun to drive, and it looks like the owner of the car isn’t afraid to take the car out in the desert and have some fun with it. Civic wagons in general sort of strike me as an “I really don’t give a fuck” type vehicle, and this one says it with more sincerity than any other Civic wagon you are ever likely to see, given that about 95 percent of them have been hastily converted to rusted hood, negative cambered-out dork cars.
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While it’s a shame that the 80s and early 90’s were the heyday of under powered front wheel drive cars, the limitations imposed on car designers at the time surely forced them to come up with cars that found other ways to be interesting. The eighth-generation Bonneville SSE is a great example of this. The SSE was the top of the line trim level for the Bonneville. It was essentially a handling/appearance/stereo package since the LN3 3800 was the only motor offered in the Bonneville starting in 1988.
The interior had some really interesting features. On one side of the dash was a driver information center screen that showed an overlay of the car and pointed out problems and maintenance information. On the other side of the dash was a similarly sized display that showed a really neat graphical compass, and the center of the steering wheel had controls for the stereo and a/c, which was a pretty advanced feature for the late 80’s.
Although the car wasn’t exactly fast, I’m sure it had enough power to keep up with most other cars from its time period, and with more style than most cars have today. It’s got just the slightest amount of body cladding to where it looks really sporty, but now with hindsight being 20/20 it’s pretty easy to see that it was the starting point for Pontiac’s plastic addiction that eventually spiraled way out of control in the late 90’s.
It may be just an outdated family sedan decorated like an 80’s sports car but I’d still drive one.
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Don’t mistake my lack of words for laziness. The two shots of this Civic you see here are the embodiment of the adage, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” See all two-thousand words of paranoid nonsense for yourself by clicking and enlarging the images.
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Okay, lets get this out of the way: I’m totally going to forgive those lame-ass tail lights for the sake of one of the baddest German cars to have ever existed. What you see here is 389hp DOHC 6.0L v12 S600 sedan. Aesthetically, Mercedes Benz has yet to best this design as far as I’m concerned. The W140 is the pinnacle of the subtle design language of luxury cars during the 1990s (see also: E36, XF10). Today’s luxury cars being the antithesis of this with very overwrought features and an I-bought-this-with-my-decent-credit-solely-to-impress-you attitude.
The W140 sedan to me is like a modern version of the 409-powered third generation Impala. A stately exterior that hides it’s malicious intentions.
