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1 month ago | 
hagerty.com | Bryan Gerould |Andrew Ganz
The snapping sound that brittle, old plastic makes is like the automotive interior equivalent of nails on a chalkboard. It’s painful, especially since you know that little chunk of plastic that survived several decades is now probably categorized as “No Longer Available” in every parts catalog you’ll ever find. What to do next is a tricky dilemma for the owner of any older car.
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1 month ago | 
hagerty.com | Bryan Gerould |Andrew Ganz
There’s nothing quite like automotive forbidden fruit. Automakers spend tremendous effort deciding which cars—and which versions of those cars—are earmarked for each market across the globe. Consumers in Japan have long favored plush luxury sedans or quirky, high-personality compacts. Those in Europe like buttoned-down sports cars, often with a practical edge. And the wide-open spaces of Australia are perfect for big off-roaders with huge fuel tanks.
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1 month ago | 
hagerty.com | Bryan Gerould |Andrew Ganz
It almost sounds like one of those “walked into a bar …” jokes. What was engineered by the Japanese, assembled by Italian coachbuilders, powered by a German diesel, and largely sold to rural Spaniards? If you answered, “the Bertone Freeclimber, of course!” then you might be an automotive pub trivia champion.
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1 month ago | 
hagerty.com | Bryan Gerould |Andrew Ganz
We’ve never met a doctor who will actually prescribe “garage therapy” as a way to beat the blues, but any gearhead knows that few things are better than working on your own vehicle. But in order to be a fruitful exercise and not just one that furthers frustration, it helps to ensure proper access to the subject matter at hand. The higher you can put your collector car in the air, the easier it will be to perform service, repair, and restoration work.
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2 months ago | 
hagerty.com | Bryan Gerould |Andrew Ganz
The steep sides of desolate northeastern New Mexico’s Capulin Volcanogive off a prehistoric landscape vibe. Up top sits a picture-perfect crater, a reminder of Capulin’s last eruption about 60,000 years ago. It’s awe-inspiring—an apt metaphor for the oil and coolant eruption under the hood of the boxy, dark green Jeep Cherokee which I limp along U.S. Highway 64 in Capulin’s shadow. My goal: make it to an auto parts store in Raton, New Mexico.
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2 months ago | 
hagerty.com | Bryan Gerould |Andrew Ganz
The average American drives around 13,500 miles annually, though the distance we travel tapers off considerably as we age. In our lifetimes, most of us won’t accumulate 1 million miles, combined, across however many cars we own. That fact may have been lost on Ford in the early 1990s, when the automaker took a rather unusual approach to phase out five-digit odometers in favor of the six-digit layout that is compulsory today.
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2 months ago | 
hagerty.com | Bryan Gerould |Doron Levin
Toyota is entitled to an I-told-you-so. The company and its chairman, Akio Toyoda, have for years bucked the auto industry’s herd-like stampede to electric vehicles. Now, with sales of electric vehicles falling short of industry expectations, automakers are hastily revising their product plans—and Toyota is postingrobust profits.
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Jan 14, 2025 | 
hagerty.com | Bryan Gerould |Peter Valdes-Dapena
My father left Cuba to live in the United States in 1941, and I was born 23 years later. Sixty years after that, I got off an airplane at José Martí International Airport in Havana for the first time in my life. A beautiful red Chrysler convertible picked me up from baggage claim. The long, low car with tall chrome-edged fins had been a Christmas gift from a Havana Chrysler representative to his wife in 1957.
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Jan 9, 2025 | 
hagerty.com | Bryan Gerould |Tim Stevens
Somewhere in the middle of the Arabian desert, the scream of a high-strung Coyote V-8 is echoing off the arid expanse. It’s a familiar 5.0-liter from Ford, but it’s tucked down deep inside a machine unlike anything that has worn a blue oval before. It’s the Raptor T1+, a car purpose-built to enter the 2025 running of the world’s greatest off-road race: The Dakar Rally. Since 1979, the Dakar has tested all manner of two- and four-wheel machines to the brink of their capabilities.
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Dec 2, 2024 | 
hagerty.com | Bryan Gerould |Bob Merlis
Henry Bernard “Toby” Halicki had a thing about cars. That thing was to destroy them in cinematically compelling ways, not quite inventing, but certainly codifying, a form of popular entertainment. Halicki was not a filmmaker by trade or training, but he took it upon himself to produce, direct, finance, distribute, write (using the term loosely), and star in Gone in 60 Seconds, the car crash epic to end all car crash epics that premiered 50 years ago this past summer.
