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Last week, we looked at the 2005 Monaco Diplomat. It was an expensive Class A RV built by a company that sought to create drivable dream homes. We asked you to guess its headlights and taillights. Those of you who guessed Buick Regal/Century for its headlights and 1973-1987 GM truck lenses for the taillights are correct! Our Hans Bishop notes that the amber turn lenses are just those GM truck lenses molded in that color....

Welcome to The Morning Dump, bite-sized stories corralled into a single article for your morning perusal. If your morning coffee’s working a little too well, pull up a throne and have a gander at the best of the rest of yesterday. GM Cranks Up Full-Size Truck Pricing It used to be fairly normal for each new model year of a car to come with a price hike. A little on the top for inflation, bing bong, out the door....

The GT-R is older than the Dodge Challenger. It’s older than Barack Obama’s presidential nomination. It’s older than David Banner’s The Greatest Story Ever Told. These things were prowling the streets while MySpace was alive and well, and Nissan doesn’t seem like it’s planning to end production anytime soon. Despite its archaic nature, the R35 GT-R is such a flex of craftsmanship by a Japanese automaker that it’s basically a Toyota Century for people who know what TX2K is....

Holy crap, right? Just look at it: yes, that’s an unashamedly vertical windshield. Bad for aero, sure, but who gives a shit when most of your driving is at city speeds? This thing is only designed to go 68 mph (fast enough for a road trip) and that flat windshield actually saves a ton of weight and material, which helps make up for the fact that it’s a big middle finger to the wind....

First, a little bit of explanation. Despite riding on the same MLB platform as the Q8, the Q8 e-tron isn’t an electric Q8. It’s actually an updated version of Audi’s e-tron crossover, which isn’t the same as the e-tron GT sedan based on the Porsche Taycan or the Q4 e-tron crossover based on the Volkswagen ID.4. So what does Q8 mean in the context of the Q8 e-tron? Well, nothing and everything at the same time....

Welcome to The Morning Dump, bite-sized stories corralled into a single article for your morning perusal. If your morning coffee’s working a little too well, pull up a throne and have a gander at the best of the rest of yesterday. Holy Crap, The New Honda CR-V Is Expensive Compact crossovers are as popular as ever, and we finally know how much the latest version of a segment pioneer will cost....

Before I talk about that part, let’s just take a quick look at the original Manx, and talk a bit about the man behind it, Bruce Meyers. Bruce died in 2021, and it’s important to remember that he started out as an artist – a sculptor – and that the look of the Manx was a very carefully considered balance of emotion, fun, practicality, and mechanical constraints, filtered through an artist’s eye....

Welcome to The Morning Dump, bite-sized stories corralled into a single article for your morning perusal. If your morning coffee’s working a little too well, pull up a throne and have a gander at the best of the rest of yesterday. Foxconn + VW = Scout? You probably don’t know what Hon Hai Technology Group is, but you’ve used something the company’s built. In fact, the iPhone or iPad you’re reading this on could have been built by the Taiwanese megacompany....

The cars I picked to inspect are ones that I can talk about with some authority (Volkswagen Beetle and Bus) and one our own David Tracy can speak to authoritatively: A Jeep Wrangler JL. Let’s start with that staple of the drugstore die-cast car displays, the Volkswagen Beetle: These show up in a wide variety of colors, and there are a few different models of Beetle — some more cartoony, and some, like this one, a bit more accurate....

I’ve been asking readers to send me sweet cars, buses, and RVs for sale. My inbox has been filling with awesome vehicles, some of which I’m actively researching right now! But yesterday, between the fireworks, taking a motorcycle ride, and going swimming, a reader sent in a car that made my heart skip. It was such a good find that I responded to the email right away. Thank you, Daveed!...

Yes, three times. Three separate times some designer at GM considered the problem of license plates and didn’t roll their eyes and do the absolute minimum they had to do. Oh, and in this little roundup (which, I’ll admit, focuses mostly on American license plate standards) I’m not including flip-down license plates that hide the fuel filler, because regulations have made those effectively impossible for quite some time now, (I think the 1996 Chevy Impala was the last car to do it?...

Welcome to The Morning… Something. We’re coming up with a name and graphics, eventually. Today we’re gonna start off with Volkswagen and a little bad news buried in some good news. Then we’re going to talk about Honda and ORA Funky Cats. Get It Together VW I like VW. At least, I want to like VW. In spite of everything you have to swallow to like the German carmaker, I’m happier in a world where VW is as good as its promise to be a friendly carmaker making nice cars for good people....

Why do I want to down this? What is wrong with me? Let’s get through the basics: This is a 1992 Bentley Continental R. The post-war history of Bentley isn’t pretty, becoming mostly a brand barely distinguishable from its sister company Rolls-Royce. The first car to change this pattern was the Bentley Continental R, which harkened back to an era when Bentleys were Bentleys and the brand stood on its own....

In my opinion, the history of American Motors is one of the greatest automotive stories of all time. The company was formed by the merger of two struggling automakers, Hudson and Nash. It thrived by building small, economical vehicles, but fumbled the opportunity of the pony car boom. Through the purchase of Jeep from Kaiser Industries, it found success with the growing popularity of SUVs. However, an oil crisis, economic disaster, and the company’s own mistakes drove it into the arms of French automaker Renault for financial support....

On Friday, a lot of you read the first article by Andrea Petersen, a wonderful service advisor in the Pacific Northwest. Her story was a different take that we hear about often. We all know how it feels to let a beloved car go. You’ve gone to school in that car, you got to learn how to wrench with that car; maybe you’ve even taken several family trips. We don’t often hear what it’s like for the service advisors who sometimes see these cars right before they end up at a junkyard in your town....

Welcome to The Morning Dump, bite-sized stories corralled into a single article for your morning perusal. If your morning coffee’s working a little too well, pull up a throne and have a gander at the best of the rest of yesterday. FedEx Puts 150 Electric Vans To Good Use It’s no secret that we buy a lot of crap online, from car parts to home furnishings to Alexisonfire merch. Since all of that crap has to get to us somehow, last-mile delivery is a fairly critical transportation sector to clean up....

Oldsmobile it is. And when you take ‘er in for service, ask for Shep Proudfoot. I hear he does good work. Now, it has probably not escaped your attention that we here at the Autopian are fans of some pretty weird cars. And I think it’s safe to say that none of us are fans of the Federal ban on importing cars that are less than 25 years old. We miss out on a whole lot of cool cars because of that ban, but at least a whole new “graduating class” becomes eligible for import each year....

Thankfully, at least someone at GM envisions just that. On Wednesday, Buick dropped the Wildcat concept, a styling exercise that’s so 2008 in all the best ways. See, back when Lehman Brothers was losing its shirt, Bloghaus was popping off a genre of remixes, with bedroom production and shameless sampling bubbling up from the underground. In a similar fashion, the new Wildcat concept takes a bit of this, a bit of that, merges them with a sharp line or two, and creates a reasonably interesting vision of the future....

Also worth noting here are the headlight covers on this Mercury which are, in an incredible fit of ’70s perverse opulence, upholstered. Yes, those are padded, upholstered headlight covers, complete with a weird little fake coat of arms in the center. The ’70s were some weird-ass times, friends. Was it because those hardworking buyers were at a job all day, then finally get off work, then grabbed the family and raced to a dealership, then asked for that same baby-crap green Merc that matched photo of the one with lighting roundabout 7:43 pm?...

I’ve always loved Type 3s because of their fantastic packaging, which I’m just going to explain via this image: The most incredible part about this car, which belongs to George, who in turn belongs to the San Fernando Smurfs, a local VW group, is that as of 8 pm the night before the car show, this car had no engine installed. But, here the car is, a testament to the power of last-minute scrambling to get something done....