Category: Car and Driver

“Do I love SUVs? Not really. As a designer, an SUV is a marketing accommodation.”

This year, consider purchasing something fresh for the person who literally gave you life and helped you down whatever meandering path that ultimately led you to the questionable decision to read this article. As book columnist for Car and Driver, might I recommend a book?

On the occasion of the publication of her harrowing and beautiful new memoir, I chat with thrice Grammy-nominated singer and composer Neko Case about, what else, her lifelong love of weird cars (and vans.)

Up next in my ongoing series about boutique shops that repair impossible-to-find parts for beloved vintage vehicles is this dispatch from Northern California. Andrew Villaseñor runs Andrew’s Mercedes Service, and rebuilds the self-leveling rear struts for the otherwise indefatigable 1970s-1980s Mercedes W123 Wagons.

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One night, legally blind neurodivergent Milwaukee used car salesman TW Hansen drunkenly decided to purchase a janky 1989 Ford E350 ambulance using his boss’s money. All manner of lunacy–car wrecks, car fires, cars dropped from cranes, cars driven off cliffs, cars towed around town by fenderless vans–ensues. As does one of the most heartwarming documentaries we’ve recently seen.

We wandered the labyrinthine halls of the Makuhari Messe in search of the lurid, the exotic, and the fascinating.

There are few certainties in life. But if you own a 1988 or ’89 Buick Reatta, one thing is assured: It’s dash-mounted touchscreen–one of the first installed in a passenger vehicle–will break.

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Concept cars are generally the evanescent dreams of designers. But, every so often, the bean-counters take a handful of edibles, and some marketing person discovers a emergent psychographic niche of buyers that they believe would be willing to pay a premium for something distinctive, and these fantasy vehicles are turned into something consumers can buy and drive on public roads. Huzzah!

The history of architectural imagery, according to Demeulmeester, is replete with “designers who understood that combining cars with their buildings makes the image more dynamic and strong.”

Witold Rybczynski has owned 15 cars in his life, and all of them make an appearance in “The Driving Machine: A Design History of the Car” (Norton, $29.99). In fact, the book is something of a paean to the famed design and architecture writer’s vehicles, which tended toward the utilitarian.