My Autobiography, Part 4: The Present

Last you heard, my 2nd 4Runner had been stolen.

My dad, taking pity on me after having three cars stolen in three years, decided to offer me a bailout of sorts. He sold me his Jeep at a significantly below-market price. That was fall of 2004, and I've managed to hang onto it since then. For extra piece of mind, it's equipped with Lo-Jack's Early Warning System, which calls my cell phone if the car moves without the Lo-Jack keyfob present.

The Jeep has served me well over the years. With a relatively small lift and 33" tires, it's no taller than a stock fullsize pickup and makes a great city car. With 4.10:1 gears and ARB air-locking differentials in the axles and a 4:1 low-range transfer case it's quite the mountain goat. It's such a good match, that The Missus has forbidden me from ever selling it, no matter the justification; she knows that six months later, I'll just either want it back, or would just go buy a replacement Jeep (isn't she great?).

Speaking of The Missus, marriage to my lovely wife in May '05 brought her '00 Dodge Ram in to the fold. Her V6, 2wd, short-cab, short-bed pickup (basically as wide as it was long) never failed her in the 101k miles that she had it. Once you live with a truck, it's hard to give up the utility it offers. Finding a great deal on a drill press, giant suitcase and/or a stoplight at a garage-sale never presents a challenge.

Between the Jeep and the Dodge, we never really had the ability to carry both people and things. That all changed with a semi-spur-of-the-moment response to a Craigslist ad for a 1967 Ford Country Sedan. There will be many more posts to come on The Wagon, but here are the basic facts: 390ci engine, seats for 10, needs lots of little things done, and it always starts (after a couple of tries).

After I finished grad school at USC, it was off to the salt mines. Without giving up too much detail, The Missus and I commute from Glassell Park (just north-east of downtown LA) to Sylmar, and then Valencia. It's 45 miles one-way, which was a lot of miles to be racking up on a 101kmi Dodge pickup. Alas, the truck moved on a more purposeful life with a contractor down in South LA, and was replaced by a 2006 Subaru WRX wagon.

We couldn't be more happy with our purchase. Bought 1-year used with 8k miles in August 2007 for roughly $6k off the price of a new one, its now got creeping up on 60k miles. The blessing/curse of a compact sportwagon is that it's the right car to take for almost every trip. It'll haul four people and their snowboarding gear for a weekend no problem. Less burdened, it'll haul ass through some of southern California's best driving roads. Since we've had it, we have to make excuses to drive the other cars, because the WRXagon can pretty much do it all.

Wrapping up, I've got a mental image of the teacher turning on the lights after a riveting nature film, only to find the class half missing or asleep.

We've made it to the present fleet of cars...but I suppose there is one more thing I could bring up...

Worth Reading: Classic Jalopnik

Chances are if you found your way here, you came by way of now very-big auto blog Jalopnik.com.

In pulling up the El Camino link for my Auto-Biography, Part 3, I knew right where I wanted to go: the El Camino SS was the 50th out of 50 cars in the now-dormant Jalopnik Fantasy Garage.

Somehow that led me to the sign-off post from Jonny Lieberman, who used to write there, which contains a pile of links back to great posts of the early Jalopnik 1.0 days. We're now on Jalopnik 2.0, which has its appeal. But it's no Jalopnik 1.0. Dig around in the archives, there's many a precious nugget to be found.

My personal favorite: Murilee Martin's comment on the Mazda MX-5.

My AutoBiography, Part 2: "Buying the 4Runner"

Just as "jump the shark" and "nuke the fridge" have special meanings in pop culture, to "Buy the 4Runner" has a special meaning for me and my family.

When we last checked in with a younger and stupider me, I had three summers of simplified professional wrenching experience under my belt and was just wrapping up my sophomore year of college at UC San Diego.

With ubiquitous internet access and lots of time between classes, I was spending countless hours on 4x4 forums. Funny thing about spending 100 times as much time online talking about something as actually doing it: You can lose track of what matters.

I'd become convinced that my Jeep, (now upgraded to 35" tires, a 5" coil conversion and dual air lockers) was underbuilt. The axles would snap at the slightest hint of a hill climb and the transfer case was woefully under-spec'ed. I was doomed. What I really needed to do was sell my Wrangler for the high prices that they could bring, then build up a solid-axle Toyota 4Runner from scratch to be the hardcore wheeling machine I really wanted. After all, you could get a great used specimen for like $4,000, and that 22RE motor would run forever.

None of this was true. As long as I didn't make a habit of bumping my way up rocky hillclimbs under full throttle, my drivetrain was been fine. Busy with school, I wasn't doing all that much offroading to begin with. I'm not sure how I thought a 17 year-old 4Runner was going to be a reliability upgrade over a simple Jeep with a 2 year old motor.

Regardless, a grandiose plan was hatched: I'd sell the Jeep for a bunch of cash, and use it to build a 4Runner into exactly what I wanted.

While searching for something to buy, I came across the example you see above. 5.5" All-Pro Offroad lift, 5.29:1 gears, 35" Super Swampers and a winch. Sure, it had 160k miles, but it really only had 50k on a rebuilt engine, so it was fine.

There were a few small problems...
Instead of the $4-5k that I was looking to spend, the guy was asking $9k (but it already had lift/tires/gears that I wanted, so it was really a bargain!).
It had an exhaust leak at the manifold-to-head surface (and easy fix)
The driver's seat was busted.
The transmission was in need of a 2nd gear synchro (but good, used replacements were only a few hundred bucks)
The clutch was warped (but I could get it when I did the transmission)
Lastly, it was in Sacramento but I was in San Diego. No problem, I'd just have my dad check it out for me, as he was in SacTown at the time.

Everything in italics came back to bite me.

I'd like to believe if I'd been there in person, to hear the exhaust leak, to drive it and realize just how gutless 100ish horsepower feels when yoked to 35", 50lb tires, and recognize the generally neglected state this thing was in, that I wouldn't have told my dad to pull the trigger. Alas, I wasn't, and he didn't want to be the bad guy and tell me this was a terrible idea, so I bought it.

The spread between the $12k I sold the Wrangler for and the $8k I paid for the 4Runner disappeared quickly. Straight away I paid for sales tax, 1st insurance premium, a new driver's seat, a (used) replacement transmission and getting the exhaust leak (mostly) fixed.

Winter break of that year really epitomizes my ownership experience.

I had two weeks to swap the transmission and transfer case to the new (used) tranny and dual transfer case setup I had ready to go.

On the way from San Diego to my parents' place in the Bay Area, the front main oil seal went from bad to worse. I added at least 5 quarts of oil over the trip, most of which proceeded to spray down the undercarriage and up the back of the car.

After burning a day fixing the oil seal issue, the drivetrain swap was longer and more difficult than expected. My lovely future wife had come up to join my family on a skiing trip, but instead she had to stay back an extra day and help me bench-press 300lbs worth of drivetrain into place.

On the way back to San Diego, I had the pleasure of learning that my 4Runner had been equipped with a rear-seat heater. It turns out the previous owner hadn't bothered to remove the coolant lines that fed it, and instead put a "U" hose right were my newly installed second transfer case would rub right through it. This was determined over the course of 4 hours and several hot-coolant baths in a parking lot at the base of the Grapevine.

Later that spring, the head gasket blew.

Without the time, money or skill to do a head gasket, I ventured into my own personal Bailout Plan. The Bank of Dad granted me a $3k, 5 year loan to get the better part of the engine rebuilt at an expert shop. I was in debt, but my 4Runner was finally running right.

It was stolen 3 weeks later, never to be seen again.

Insurance paid me more than I could've sold it for, but nowhere near the total I'd paid into it over 10 months of ownership.

For years, I beat myself up over the whole fiasco. Really, the whole thing embarrassed me.

In my family to "Buy the 4Runner" came to mean entering into a financial boondoggle with delusions of coming out ahead of the game, when in reality you're just biting off more than you can chew.

Five years later, I'm still frustrated by the experience. But when I think about everything I learned as a result, I'm not sure I wouldn't wish it upon myself again. I learned a lot about wrenching, but even more about just how much time, money and space it takes to take on a real project. I'm glad I had that learning experience on an $8,000 4Runner than a $30,000 BMW or a $300,000 money pit of a house.

A Future for Pontiac

It appears Pontiac's circling the drain.

They build excitement, all right...

It's certainly GM's prerogative to shut down a poor-selling brand that's largely a clone to Chevy. 20-something years of a brand identity consisting of plastic cladding and crappy fog lights will leave a mark that's hard to wipe off with the occasional decent car. I believe there's hope for the pointy-arrow brand. Let me play Al Sloan for a bit.

GM has a long history of getting it right when they want, particularly when it comes to parts-bin specials. These would be limited production, performance-oriented models largely based on existing platforms. Pontiac's future lies in performance-oriented versions of other mass-market GM products.

Certainly better than the Torrent GXP

The list is long and awesome. There was the Impala SS, a mixture of Corvette engine and cop car drivetrain. For those feeling a bit truckish, we have the Syclone and Typhoon evil twins. In recent times, Chevy's managed to give us the platform-mate HHR SS and Cobalt SS, sporting 260hp of turbocharged Ecotec goodness. Last but not least, there's the GNX, an uber version of the Grand National, itself a seriously juiced up Regal.

As much as it pains me to point them out, the Hummer H2 and H3 fit this mold as well. While Hummer has become the go-to brand for the those wishing to make the wrong statement about themselves, the potential was there. They could've skipped the ridiculous sheet metal and the terrible ad campaigns in favor of more ground clearance, but let's not dwell on it for the time being. The point is, GM has a wide array of powertrains and chassis' that can be altered from the factory for remarkable performance.

Back to Pontiac. With the exception of the G8, the entire Pontiac lineup is badge-engineered from other GM products, so why not add some upgrades in middle of the the copy-past operation?

Specifically, I propose two tiers of every Pontiac: a "base" that's still a notch sportier than the Chevy counterpart, and the GXP (do we really have to stick with GXP?) that's the over-the-top headline getter. The GXPs will be the attention getters and buzz-generators, but the base models will be the volume sellers (as it's always been).

Pontiac By Mad Science™ will need to break from the GM mold in a few key areas, however. Firstly, they must embrace manual transmissions. I know they only represent something like a 10% take rate and cost more to certify for CAFE and EPA, but if you're the performance brand, you need to offer three pedals in every model. Secondly, they're going to need to offer real, substantial performance upgrades and avoid appearance-only "sport" packages. Springs, shocks, swaybars and a decently constructed driver's seat will go farther than you could imagine (particularly when accompanied by a manual trans). Stickers, cladding, and enchaced seat fabric are The Devil's Tools.

Lastly, they must take front wheel drive (and even all wheel drive) performance seriously. GM knows how to build kickass RWD monsters, but the ability to build a legitimate WRX, GTI, MINI or Integra/RSX (RIP) competitor will be crucial going forward. $30-50k AMG and M slayers are great, but the $18-25k sport compacts will build your brand. Ask anyone who grew up in the 90s and now makes enough to purchase the car of their choice (hi mom!).

Let's move on to specific examples. Namely, the G5. The Pontiac G5 is a half-ass rebadge of the Cobalt. In my Pontiac, the base G5 would be the 171hp upgraded naturally aspirated Ecotec, with a GXP cloning the Cobalt SS.

Photo Courtesy CobaltSS.net member 1WhiteSSTC, via Wikipedia

However, in my GM, there would be no Cobalt SS, as Chevy is the everyman's brand and Pontiac is the performance brand. Any performance GM car that doesn't have a brand history (e.g., Camaro or Corvette) would be a Pontiac.

Lastly, even the much-ballyhooed Aveo/G3 cousinhood could bear tasty fruit. Take the VW Polo GTI or Fiesta Zetec S as a benchmark. Even low-end subcompacts can be a hoot with lively suspension tuning, 120-150hp and a manual gearbox. The G3 could be the Polo GTI in North America.

Why Not?

However, a niche Pontiac would be unlikely to stand on its own. Putting my Sloan hat back on, I see Chevy existing as a volume selling, complete brand with trucks, cars and performance all rolled into one. The other GM brands, as a group, would constitute a parallel brand, with less emphasis on volume and more emphasis on filling in niches left by Chevy. As such, Pontiac-Buick-GMC (-Saturn?) dealers won't feel left out in the cold.

So, could this work? I wouldn't have taken all this time out of my otherwise busy Friday night to draft this diatribe if I didn't think so.

Spelling for Gearheads on the Internet

Until recent times, it didn't matter if you could spell carburetor, provided you could tune one. I'm sorry, Cletus, but those days are over.

I'm not such a pedantic tool as to correct someone's spelling online, but that doesn't mean it doesn't bother me. Beyond simple annoyance (your/you're), it gets to be a problem when trying to buy stuff online.

While I may know that what you've listed as an "axel" sits under the springs and between the wheels, Craigslist has yet to implement Google's "Did you mean _____?" feature. The means I'm not going to find your "axel", because I'm searching for an axle.

That said, here's a list of commonly misspelled car related words:

• axle
• bearing (not "baring")
• brakes (not "breaks")
• Camaro
• carburetor
• clutch
• convertible
• differential
• Galaxie is the Ford product, galaxy is a bunch of stars
• hydraulic
• manifold
• manual
• torque
• transmission
• viscous (not vicious)
• wrench

That's enough for now. I'm hoping to link back to this post, and or edit the (unfortunately) growing list as time goes on.

Just Buy The Classic

Today's cars are boring. More accurately: "Today's cars are boring" is a quote I hear all too often amongst auto enthusiasts.

The Car of The 21st Century is indeed over-optimized for the purist. What once was handled though screwdrivers and fancy footwork is now contained in the sorcery of silicon. Automotive excellence depends on the kids whose parents provided them with sensible transportation in high school allowing them to focus on their studies, rather than spend Sunday night keeping the moped/Pinto/Chevette running. Opening the hood is like disrobing an alien. The parts are there...but there's no making sense of it.

"It's such a shame," they comment "that you can't get a stripped-down sports car/econobox without all that extra crap. I bet it you could get a Camaro under $20k and 3000lbs if they offered a stripper model". There's usually a debate about active Vs passive safety and a "when I was a kid we crawled all over the bench seat..." thrown in for good measure.

BMW should've made the MINI smaller, all sports cars should come with the option for no options, and what's with all the airbags?

Well, I tell you what: Shut the Hell Up and just buy the classic.


For half the price of most new cars, you can get a beautiful daily-driver grade vehicle from the era you so selectively remember as great. Let me get you started with eBay motors. The cars pictured were harvested from the completed listings section and represent actual prices that these cars sold for.



A funny thing happens if you suggest this. A stream of excuses pours forth, everything from blaming the wife to problems with snow to driveway space/maintenance issues. Never mind that for the difference in price between the classic and a new CamCord/Fusibu, you could afford a second car/bike and pay mechanic's bills for a number of years. Provided we're not talking about a Crosly, anything from the 60s onward still has a usable parts base.



Locating it will detract from your blog commenting time, though.