Affordable Classics
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A Great Beater Sports Car
This First World question is posed to me frequently: Which Mercedes-Benz convertible should I purchase as my daily driver? It’s a tough question. High-quality examples of the Mercedes-Benz R107 are seemingly doubling in value overnight. The R129 Series is doing what it was designed to do, which is spray hydraulic fluid from the top actuators…
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Shedding Its Former Life
Necessity being the mother of invention, and Brits being a nation of inveterate tinkerers, gave us “Men in Sheds” — a breed whose inventor/engineer mentality has won fame for fashioning functional devices out of parts that have no business near each other. Thus, it was natural that redundant cars would become recycled or repurposed during…
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Better — and Uglier — Than the Original
Pity the second-generation Mazda RX-7. The FC, as it’s known to rotary cognoscenti, has always trailed its older brothers in desirability — if not in performance. And while that’s not strictly fair, it has kept prices attractively low on a car that has a lot of enjoyment potential. Mazda brought out the first RX-7 in…
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Britain’s Not-So-Affordable Range Rover
This is supposed to be the “Affordable Classic” strand, but Range Rovers aren’t very affordable — in their home country, at least. They’ve always been expensive to buy and run, but interest in the early cars, especially those with Suffix A (pre-1972) chassis numbers, has been rising steadily over the past decade, perhaps stoked by…
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One Fun Econo-Box
When Honda brought the first Civic subcompact to America in the middle of 1972, the car was not very well received. Honda’s previous cars had been far too small and idiosyncratic for the American buyer, and early Civics had a tendency to rust so badly that the U.S. government forced Honda to recall and repair…
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Spend a Little More — Get a Lot More
If you want to put an all-wheel-drive sports car into your collection, but you don’t want to pay the ticket price for an exotic and you don’t want the boy-racer styling of a sport compact, there aren’t a lot of options. Fortunately, the obvious choice is also a good one. The Audi TT is a…
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Durable, Good-Looking and Cheap
If you have a hankering for an older Multi-Purpose Vehicle (old enough to predate the whole soccer-mom SUV thing), but feel that you missed the boat on first-generation Ford Broncos or 1969–72 Chevy Blazers, I have good news for you. There’s one out there made in large enough quantities that availability is good, parts support…
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Why You Buy an Underlig
“Underlig” is a Swedish word that means curious, odd, peculiar or strange. Any of those terms could fairly be applied to the venerable Saab 96 and its kindred. No matter how you look at it, these little cars are funky. They’re not as odd as the Messerschmitts and Isettas of the world, but they’re strange…
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When Chevrolet Built a Porsche
In the fall of 1964, Chevrolet introduced the second-generation Corvair in direct competition with the Ford Mustang. While the Mustang seemed to take all the air out of the room for a small, sporty American car, independent thinkers in the know realized the two competing products couldn’t be more different. The Mustang was great looking,…
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The Best Buys at Any Price
1972 Iso Grifo Series II Gooding & Company Lot 66, which sold for the “was everyone sleeping?” price of $511,500 Earlier this year, a good friend — and wonderfully overzealous lover of all things Iso — asked me if there was any chance this car could be worth $1 million, which was the owner’s dearest…