Back in the late 1990s, before the Fast became Furious, Honda Motor Co. found itself the fortunate beneficiary of a momentous shift in car culture. Almost overnight, Honda Civics and Acura Integras became icons among a group of enthusiasts known as much for their ill-fitting pants as for their slammed […]

By the time Subaru rolled out the 2008 WRX and WRX STI in the U.S. the car had already enjoyed massive success. Debuting in 2000 as a 2002 model, it was arguably the first modern rally-bred car sold here in significant numbers. Turbocharging and all-wheel drive have a way of […]

It’s nice to be first. Ask Jeff Bezos. Or Bill Gates. Or the Netflix guy. And, yes, even Mitsubishi. It didn’t nail it right out of the gate — that came later with the Lancer Evolution (see “Affordable Classic,” July 2021) — but the Eclipse GSX marked a lot of […]

If you want to out-Miata the Miata, there’s really only one option. You’ve got to pull out all the stops for mass reduction and centralization. You’ve got to go lighter and more focused. You’ve got to make a mid-engine sports car. So, some 23 years ago, that’s what Toyota did. […]

Think back to 1999. Four-cylinder sport compacts had overrun SEMA. Car magazines serving this market were 400 pages thick, with new ones being launched left and right. Every other Japanese econobox on the road was lowered and bedazzled with larger wheels and an aftermarket exhaust. No carmaker better understood this […]

Mazda’s FD3S third-generation RX-7 is hot in so many ways. First, it’s in demand. You can count on one hand the number of these cars that have sold for less than $30k on Bring a Trailer since 2020 — with the best reaching  $80k. So, as affordable classics go, the […]

The early 1990s is not a period fondly remembered by either auto-styling aficionados or performance enthusiasts. This was the era of the inglorious 250-horsepower Corvette, when a new Ferrari infamously got outrun by a stock GMC pickup, and Giorgetto Giugiaro was slumming with the likes of Subaru. From this time […]

Honda turned a generation of otherwise pragmatic buyers into driving fans when the Civic-based CRX hit showrooms in 1984. The 2-door, 2-seat hatchback was a smaller, livelier version of Honda’s compact commuter car while still maintaining a healthy dollop of practicality. Today, history most fondly remembers the second-generation CRX, which […]

It wasn’t terribly expensive. It didn’t sound exotic. And with the exception of its oversized rear wing, it was invisible to most. But Mitsubishi’s Lancer Evolution, born from World Rally Championship competition, was unquestionably a driver’s car. We’d even go so far as to call the “Evo” o ne of […]

It’s official: Volkswagen will stop sales of its iconic hatchback, the Golf, in the American market this year. The Golf debuted in the United States as the econobox Rabbit in 1975 and has served as the base model for the higher-performance GTI since 1982. That the GTI and its even […]