4 Cars That Say “Hi, there! I’m an A**hole!”

by Randy Lawrence

One day you are going about your business, living your life and letting others live theirs. You help the elderly, work in your community and give generously to many charities.  You’re well-liked and respected; your friends can’t say enough good things about you.

And then it hits you – all those years of kindness, generosity and and consideration didn’t get you anywhere. The day has come for you to become an asshole. What is the easiest, quickest way to assholdom? Buy a car that screams to the world “Hi, there! I’m an Asshole!” You don’t have to do a thing. Just sit back, turn the key and let your sphinctermobile turn you into the glorious asshole you always want to be.

Here are 5 cars that will guarantee perform your transbungification:

1. Lamborghini Veneno

Nothing screams asshole like a so-called supercar. Not only do supercars announce to the world that you fully intend to break every speed law in existence, at normal speeds their only purpose is announce just how cool you are. The Lamborghini Veneno is all this and so much more. The Veneno (Italian for Veg-O-Matic) was designed by a C-minus driven 14-year-old during a particularly dull biology class. Not so much shaped as sharpened, this automotive freak has more fins, scoops and spoilers than anything from the 1950’s. When Batman tells you to Tone it down! you know you got an asshole winner.

 

2. Cadillac Escalade

Built for the person doesn’t give a damn about anything, especially stupid things like maneuverability, practicality, and economy, this beast does very little well with the exception of  blocking every other driver’s view. Building something as gauche and boorish as the Escalade shows you how far Cadillac has fallen. When rappers, pimps and rapper/pimp wannabees embrace this steamship, you know you are in the fast lane to sphinterville.  An Anal Fun Fact:  Ex-Toronto Mayor Rob Ford drives an Escalade.

 

3. Hummer H3

Built for those who want the sportiness of a Peterbilt without the practicality, the Hummer H3 is the bastard offspring of Greyhound bus and a Frigidaire. Examine this four-wheeler appliance all-day long, you won’t find one pleasant or elegant line. And extra bonus is that despite its size, the interior is surprisingly cramped and poorly laid out. For the up and coming asshole, though, you can’t go wrong with the H3. There is a reason why Hummers are usually found taking up two or three parking spaces… their owners are really big assholes.

 

SPECIAL MENTION: Hummer H1

Way bigger than even the H3, the H1 has all the H3 liabilities with triple the assholosity. It’s track is so wide it makes it unsuitable for most off-road trails. You have to be asshole to have a 16 foot, 4 tonne monstrosity that only seats 4.

 

4. Toyota Prius

The Prius didn’t start out as a car for assholes. Originally released as a more ecologically and economical automotive alternative, the Prius was quickly embraced by the pseudo-ecologically minded and waved in the face lesser mortals as evidence of their superiority. With Bumper stickers that read Breathe Easier, You’re behind a Prius and smug statements like “I’m saving the planet for my children,” Prius owners quickly began to alienate themselves from the rest of the world. What really identified these drivers as assholes was their consistent reference to their Prius ownership as “saving the environment.” Manufactured with the same materials and by the same methods as any other vehicle, the Toyota Prius had the added bonus of special cumbersome batteries made from rare and precious metals strip-mined from the earth and containing toxic chemicals to make them work. You can’t save the planet in a Prius. You still step on the environment, you just do it in Louis Vuitton pumps instead of Kodiak work boots.

 

 

 

 

 

 

This Just In: Cartoons Aren’t Real!

by Randy Lawrence

Actually, this is interesting… the physics behind how Fred Flintstone drives his car… or rather how he brings it to a stop and what should happen to his feet. This article goes beyond the age old argument of Why doesn’t Fred Flintstone just walk instead of pushing a car with his feet? (Because he can’t carry his family and a pet dinosaur on his head – Yabba Dabba Duh!).

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2013/04/22/the-physics-of-fred-flintstones-flaming-feet/

Buick Finally Reaches the Age of Its Owners!

by Randy Lawrence

A quiz. What is the most popular car found in handicap parking spots? The car driving 44 in a 50 zone?  Or the car most likely to be driving on the highway with its turn signal eternally blinking?  Yes, of course, it’s a Buick. Well, just so you know, Buick has earned the right to do all that and more. The GM marque has reached the spritely age of 110. Considering the demise of so many familiar and beloved marques over the last decade and a half (Plymouth, Mercury, Pontiac, Saab, Oldsmobile, et al.) Buick’s survival is truly remarkable. To endure economic fluctuations, energy crises, inept management for  110 years is truly something to celebrate. Now, if they can just attract a younger, more modern  consumer. Don’t get me wrong… they are getting there.  The current crop of buyers is younger, and the automobiles definitely modern (if somewhat bulbous). 

http://www.motorauthority.com/news/1083599_buick-celebrates-110-years-with-11-special-cars

My hero! The Real Iron Man!

Man, Stranded In The Desert, Makes A Motorcycle From His Broken Car

The original story is in French, and the Google translate is very rough. Please forgive us if we don’t get this completely accurate.

While traveling through the desert somewhere in north west Africa in his Citroen 2CV , [Emile] is stopped, and told not to go any further due to some military conflicts in the area. Not wanting to actually listen to this advice, he decides to loop around, through the desert, to circumvent this roadblock.

After a while of treading off the beaten path, [Emile] manages to snap a swing arm on his vehicle, leaving him stranded. He decided that the best course of action was to disassemble his vehicle and construct a motorcycle from the parts. This feat would be impressive on its own, but remember, he’s still in the desert and unprepared. If we’re reading this correctly, he managed to drill holes by bending metal and sawing at it, then unbending it to be flat again.

It takes him twelve days to construct this thing. There are more pictures on the site, you simply have to go look at it. Feel free to translate the labels and post them in the comments.

You got the translation right, but there’s not just a swing arm that’s broken, there’s a frame beam broken too (not sure about the exact term, one of the 2 girder of the chassis). He’s not far away but he has a lot of tools and other hardware that could be stolen if he leaves them unattended.

Check out the link:

http://hackaday.com/2012/05/21/man-stranded-in-the-desert-makes-a-motorcycle-from-his-broken-car/

Liar, Liar! Ricardo Montalban’s Pants are on Fire!

by Randy Lawrence

I can still hear Ricardo Montalban’s suave pitch for the Chrysler Cordoba: Sewft Coreeentheeean layther. I will go to my grave believing every word Ricardo ever said to me as Khan and  Mr. Roarke, as the spokesman for Chrysler I am, how you say, sus-pee-shuse. I wasn’t old enough to drive when Soft Corinthian Leather swaggered into the nation’s lexicon, but I was a rabid car nut and I knew crock when I heard it.

For those of you who don’t remember or weren’t born yet or are just plain stupid… the Chrysler Cordoba… uh, sorry, Cordoba by Chrysler was the Chrysler Corporation’s belated entry in the so-called personal-luxury market. When smog and safety regulations castorated the muscle car in the early 70’s, american auto manufacturers turned to pseudo-luxury for something else to ignite interest in a sea of otherwise blah-blah cars. The 1970’s were all about appearances and the personal luxury car was perfect in an era when luxury was pasted on rather than engineered in. A whole series of  kitschy frou-frou became the touchstone for the personal-luxury car – big chromeygrills, hood ornaments, padded vinyl roofs, opera windows outside…. velour upholstery, shag carpeting and acres of faux-wood trim. Names like Eldorado, Continentals Mark III, IV, and V, Riviera, Toronado, Monte Carlo, Cougar (which turned to personal-luxury prostitution after the withering of the muscle market limited its sales sales as a pony car) Grand Prix, Cutlass, Regal, Elite, Gran Torino, Matador, and the granddaddy of all personal-luxury cars… the Thunderbird, embraced all the geegaws and continued to glue on more.

Of course, when you see an over saturated market like this any smart business person knows what to do – Shout “Me, Too!” and cannonball into the pool. Fortunately, Chrysler made a big splash with the Cordoba (pronounced cor-DOH-ba unlike the real Cordoba, a city in Spain which is pronounced COR-doh-ba), a car so cheesy it should have been made by Kraft. The car was advertised with Ricardo Montalban as its spokesman, because nothing sells sincerity like an American car with a Spanish name and an Argentinian coin emblem hawked by a Mexican. Still, it worked. The hairy-chested white belt/shoes set flocked to the car and soon the Cordoba was on every sales manager’s must have list . The Cordoba became one of the very few bright profit spots on the Chrysler Corporation’s otherwise blood red account books.

But then came the jokes. One particular option on the Cordoba tickled the public’s funny-bone, or rather the way Ricardo presented it to them… Sewft Coreentheean Layther.  Everyone seemed to don a bad accent with stumbling, rolling ‘R’s reciting Sewft Coreentheean layther. It became the synonymous with things sleazy and cheap. That didn’t stop the Corinthian leather option from becoming one of the more successful options on the car. Still, they couldn’t have made much money on the option. Real Corinthian leather is expensive, feels expensive and requires craftsmen to work it properly and all that cost money. That’s why really high end cars must used it, right? Guess what? No other car in the world used Corinthian leather. You might think that means it is a Chrysler exclusive. Well, yeah, I suppose in the way the Whopper is exclusive to Burger King, but it is still a fast food burger.

It is time you knew the truth – there is no such thing as Corinthian leather, sewft or otherwise. The leather in Herb Tarlek’s Cordoba is about as Corinthian as his suit is Armani. Corinthian Leather is a term concocted by Chrysler’s advertising agency Bozell, located in the sexy advertising capital of Omaha, Nabraska. And Corinthian Leather is made and sewn by old-world craftsmen in the traditional way in the quaint little village of … Newark, New Jersey. Oh, well. At least your brand new 1975 Cordoba has full leather seats, right? Sorry. the only leather used in the seats was on the seating surfaces. The rest of the seat surfaces were of the highest quality vinyl. Not even the hide of the elusive Nauga, but the same vinyl that would be in your neighbour’s Volaré.

Sigh. I will hold this against Chrysler alone and Ricardo Montalban’s image will remain pure in my heart. At least the cheesy 1970’s are over and car manufacturers are smart enough not to dupe us these days. By the way, has anyone tried out Infiniti’s new $2000 air freshener, the Infiniti “Forest Air” system?

Batteries to power! Turbines to Speed! Family to Poorhouse!

by Randy Lawrence

Oh, so close.

To think I nearly had the car of my dreams. To own one of the cars that moulded my psyche from the little boy fantasies of my childhood to the little boy fantasies of my adulthood. The Batmobile! Up for auction at Barrett-Jackson!

Now was my chance. I missed out on James Bond’s Aston Martin DB5… and Simon Templar’s Volvo P1800… and the Monkeemobile, I was not going to let this one slip through my fingers.

Well, guess what?

It not only slipped through my fingers, but rolled out of my life. I missed it by that much! ‘That much’ being exactly $4,199,573.63, plus taxes, fees and commission or whatever else Barrett-Jackson charges those  over-privileged bastards who toss out millions to buy my cars.

Oh, well. I’ll just add another dollar to the kitty… and wait. The Munster’s Drag-U-La is bound to cross the auction block soon.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2013/01/20/us-batmobile-auction.html

Don’t be Taken… Go Someplace!

by Randy Lawrence

There are plenty of good reasons to drive an older car. You just like old cars. Maybe you’re too poor to buy a new car… you might even be a grumpy, old fart with an aversion to the new cars coming out… or like me – you’re  an elegant and handsome combination of all three.

Old cars… better yet, lets say ‘elder’ cars offer an opportunity to drive something a little different. Something that stands out from the bar-of-soap banality offered today. Efficiency and practicality have become the industry mantra. Cars are now engineered first, designed second. Cars have become appliances. Efficient and practical are not the catch words that ignite the soul or send you lusting after some rolling toaster. Is that what the world is going to become? A populous trained to appreciate things based on their efficiency and usefulness? Soon we will be a society that gazes upon Bellini’s “Madonna and Child” only to exclaim, “Yes, that will do nicely.” An oblivious civilization that debates the flow rate of Duchamp’s ‘Fountain.’

I’m not against new cars. Far from it. New cars are the elder cars of tomorrow. It’s just that we spend a great deal of lives in our cars. They are active expressions of our personalities and say a lot about us. I want a car that speaks above the monotonous drone of a thousand silver-grey Civics. I don’t want to be taken anywhere… I want to go some place. Older cars are fun and entertaining on the way there…  that is what a car is meant to be.

The Great Government-Auto Industry Conspiracy

I have never been one for conspiracy theories. All my paranoias are based in fact. But as the ravages of winter chew their way through my car my mind turns to what I believe could be the most insidious deception since the extended warranty.

So here it is. I have become convinced that the governments of Ontario, municipal and provincial, are in cahoots with the automobile manufacturers to destroy our vehicles. It is a concerted effort to speed up the natural disintegration process. If you think about it all it makes perfect sense and it is cunningly simple, in an enormously convoluted and abstract way.

The process goes something like this: a car company (let’s give it a factious name like General Malevolence) needs to make money, so General Malevolence builds a car and sells it to you. Once the car is bought and paid for, the car company no longer can make a profit on it. To fix this problem, car companies created the 5 year/ 80,000 kilometres (the metric version never quite had the same ring as 5 year 50,000 mile) warranty program. What a great idea! If anything goes wrong during the first 5 years or 80,000 kilometres (50,00 miles) General Malevolence will fix it for free. All you have to do is bring your car in for regular scheduled maintenance. And pay for the privilege.

Now General Malevolence continues to make money on your car after selling it to you. Now General Malevolence knows it can’t keep this up forever. The longer it offers to fix anything that goes wrong on your car, the greater the chance that it will have to fix something that goes wrong on your car. So General Malevolence cunningly ends the warranty program just when your car reaches the age when its components are pretty worn out and will need replacing. That is the first step of this conspiracy — General Malevolence has designed the components of your car to last the length of your warranty. Sure the odd part will break early, but for the most part the majority of the components on your car will last 5 years or whatever is the length of your warranty.

Now you would think that General Malevolence, having made a respectable profit from you and not wanting to spend any money on you, would just cut you loose. This is where the next part of the conspiracy comes to light. Every winter throughout the length of your warranty program (just every winter, actually. This is an all encompassing conspiracy theory, and not just about you. Get over it) the government has been peppering our roads with excessive amounts of salt in an effort to speed up the disintegration for your vehicle.

Why? Under threat from General Malevolence, natch. It would be unethical and, more importantly, too expensive for General Malevolence to go to your house and damage your car in person. So they subcontract that task to the governments. How? By threatening to move their manufacturing facilities elsewhere. You’ll notice that the threat to pack up and leave happens every time a new government comes to power. When a new government comes, General Malevolence gives a fiscal shiver and announces that it doesn’t like the current economic climate and working people are just to greedy and maybe things would be better elsewhere. After all they’ve had so many invitations and that Mexico is such a nice country. Maybe things would be better there.

Hearing this, the government, like some horny teenager, panics and tells General Malevolence that they’ll do whatever General Malevolence wants. Just don’t leave! General Malevolence sighs and says, oh I don’t know maybe if you could somehow get people to buy more new cars that would make me stay. And get rid of all those cars I already sold to those people. I don’t want them to go out and buy a good used car at a reasonable price. That does me no good – oh, and give us some money, that would be nice, too.

And so the government salts the roads to speed up the corrosion, establishes a safety inspection program to make sure their nefarious activities are effective. Every time a car is taken in for a safety inspection the government ascertains how well the destruction process is functioning. Is the car safe and sound, and able to provide more years of reliable service to its owner? Then, more salt is needed. Are cars disintegrating too fast and people are getting suspicious? Cut back to a more subtle and nefarious level of evil.

And to just drive the nail in the automotive coffin (automotive coffin? Does that work?) the government actively promotes a retire your car scheme to make sure nobody can get their grubby little DIY hands on these awful, awful vehicles ever again.

That’s it. The end result of all this is the early death of many useful cars, less affordable transportation for those of a lower income, a loss of a source of useful used parts for automobile collectors. But be careful with this information. There are many sinister officials out there who wouldn’t like this information to get out. Evil people in black (woman can be just as evil and should be paid accordingly) who wouldn’t give a second thought about making certain troublesome individuals to just disapp . . . .

 

I am the Automudgeon!

Why are you here?

I mean, why are you reading this blog… not why are you on this earth? The grand purpose of your existence is your own problem. But if you came here expecting to join in some sycophantic prattle about the latest Lamborghini or Ferrari or whatever the current adolescent wet dream is… for get it!

Don’t bother me with statistics about auto racing. although I am open to anyone who is putting together a petition to change the name of NASCAR. National Association of Stock Car Racing? Really? Stock cars? What f&#@ing dealership lot did they drive those stock cars off of?

Nor is this the place for baby boomers to talk about how much money they threw at their pasts in order to relive a time through some motorized bucket they coveted as a teenager. It doesn’t matter if you did imitate the factory overspray or perfectly copied on long dead line inspector’s grease marks. It isn’t factory. What you have is a 1:1 scale model of a something a factory may or may not have produced. So it can cover 1320 feet in under 13 seconds at over 100 mph and under 8 mpg. There is no way it’s worth more than a Duesenberg. This baby boomer greed is ruining the collector car market normal people, just like it ruined the economy.

I’m here to talk about the real world of cars. Cars that we own, have owned, will own and realistically hope to own. Cars that we fix ourselves, have fixed or tried to fix. Cars that squeak, rattle and groan. Cars that leak, smell and rust. And to bitch and moan, praise and love then as we drive them every day.

If you agree… or understand a bit… or begrudginglywill allow me to live — welcome. Just remember one thing: I am the Automudgeon… and this is my world. Er… make that two things.