Enthusiasts Blogging Our Favorite Classifieds
Back in “the day” if you knew about what AMG was and the cool things they produced, you could have a little taste. If you purchased a Mercedes-Benz product and took your new car to AMG West in Beverly Hills, California or AMG of Missouri, you had your choice of the catalogue. Truth be told, most of the products were bolt-ons, although there were some power upgrades in terms camshafts and exhaust systems. Today’s car, a 1986 190E 2.3 up for sale in California, is one of those bolt-on cars.
Sometimes the small details make all the difference. Thanks to Porsche, you can do that as long as you pay them lots of money. Today’s car, a 2021 718 Spyder, pays tribute to the previous Boxster Spyder that flew under the radar to most but that doesn’t mean they aren’t appreciated. Once we open the doors you’ll know what I mean.
Well, the new Mercedes-Benz C-Class is here. The 2022 model year launched the W206 chassis, which is an all-new design inside and out. It carries over the rounded shape on the exterior and inside is a light copy of the current S-Class with it’s heavy use of screens and a waterfall-style layout directly into the center console. All the current cars are powered by a turbocharged 2.0-liter inline-4 with a 48-volt hybrid system, which I’m sure will be easy to diagnose and repair in the year 2029. Three trim levels are available with the “Premium”, “Executive”, and “Pinnacle”, the latter of which tops out at $48,550. However, this being a new car in 2022 and not for sale at a factory dealer, you can guess the price…
Remember the old saying, “The fastest car is always a rental”? While that might be true in a lot of cases, there are cars that are faster: the “Corporate Executive” vehicle. Why? These cars operate with the same philosophy as the rental cars, but are actually fast to begin with, and not Chrysler 200s from the airport rental parking lot with stale donuts under the seats. They are treated with the same disregard for ownership as the rentals, although usually luxury cars with way more power than Ted the CFO at the oil and gas company actually needs. Case in point? This 2013 Porsche Cayenne GTS up for sale in Texas with over 205,000 miles on it. Yes. One owner and 205,000 miles in 10 years. Over 20,000 miles a year on this GTS, which isn’t exactly a beacon of cheap running cars or reliability. I hope the write-off was worth it on this one.
I give Audi a lot of credit for bringing the R8 to market. It took a fair amount of gall for a company best known for mid-range all-wheel drive luxury sedans to up and produce a supercar-beating mid-engine road car capable of being used year-round and every day. It’s a feat nearly without precedent. Of course, I said “nearly”.
That’s because BMW pulled off a similar trick the best part of thirty years before Audi did it. And arguably the development of what would become BMW’s fledgling Motorsports division was even more impressive than what Ingolstadt pulled off. The M1 burst onto the scene at a time of economic austerity, global oil crises and came from a company who not only didn’t have a history of producing such cars, but didn’t have connections to others who did (unlike Audi’s corporate Lamborghini partnership).
Speaking of Lamborghini, because of BMW’s lack of expertise in supercar design it was the Sant’Agata firm that was employed to produce the M1. But because of Lamborghini’s lack of expertise at being…well, a company capable of producing something on a schedule, BMW engineers had to first liberate the early molds from Italy and then find someone who could produce the car. Ultimately, it was a combination of ItalDesign in Turin, Marchesi metal working in Modena to build the frames and Karosserie Baur in Stuttgart that stuck the M1 together. Though it doesn’t exactly sound like a match made in heaven, and indeed the M1 was a relative sales flop, it has nonetheless grown to cult status as one of the most user-friendly supercars of the late 1970s:
