It’s a beautiful evening. The sun is inches from the horizon, and in the City of Glass, that means a thousand sunsets reflecting and re-reflecting the yolk-and-gold light into a burnished megalopolis version of Versailles. I am crossing the best bridge in town, a divided boulevard that suddenly elevates the driver into a vista encompassing the entire gold-leafed waterfront, stretching out and out to the long, low freighters twisting idly at anchor in the marble-smooth bay.

Unfortunately, none of the sumptuous visual feast is doing any good because of the car I’m driving. It’s a Lancer Sportback with the base engine and — oh dear.

Oh dearie me indeed.

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Some dear friends of ours have a pair of twin boys that are just entering their latter teens. I have seen them grow from precocious eleven-year-old scamps to lofty, sullen, intimidating goons. Actually, just joking, they’re both about as sullen and intimidating as a basket-full of labrador retriever puppies.

However, they’re allowed to drive now. Eeep! Continue reading →

One of my favorite games (and I know I’m not alone in this) is to pick up a copy of the classic car version of the Buy&Sell and go through the various ads with an imaginary budget, trying to pick out the diamonds in the rough. A low-mileage AMC Gremlin? I don’t think so. A Buick Grand National GNX clone with fresh paint? Don’t mind if I do!

But there’s a problem. Everybody already knows that these cars are classics, or collectibles, or at the bare minimum, just weird enough to consider holding on to. As such, people might not be asking big money for them, but they’re certainly fetching prices high enough to keep the idea of having a collector car in the garage strictly in the imaginary Jay Leno budget zone. However, looking through ICBC’s rules for collector plate status the other day, I realized something: within 5 years, you’ll be able to put collector’s plates on a car as new as 1990. Continue reading →

Consider the goldfish.

As a pet, it’s fairly useless. In fact, the only thing a goldfish has going for it is that when it dies you can flush it down the toilet, which would be impossible with, for instance, a golden retriever. Well, nearly impossibly anyway. I suppose you could always cut it up into flushable-sized pieces. Or use a blender.

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The Mazda3 has been a favourite with Canadians ever since it launched in ’04, but it’s always been one of the pricier small car options. Now Mazda is willing to sell you a piece of its sporty ethos for bargain basement pricing. The question is: how much zoom-zoom do you actually get in the cheapest Mazda you can buy, the Mazda2?

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Honda’s CR-Z is a surprising mix of practicality and sporty styling. It’s a two-seater, but also a capacious hatchback. It’s a hybrid, but you can get it in a manual-transmission. Could this futuristic-looking hatch be the modern version of the classic CRX?

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