Another Car You Can’t Have

Does Clarkson have the world’s best job, or what?

@Dodgerblue: I have asked myself the same question, and the answer is “yes” – my dream job is Jeremy Clarkson’s …

@Dodgerblue: No. Not even close. All these cars are pieces of shit. If he’s into this sort of thing, he should start a show called “Cars That Matter” in which he reviews real cars like the 1972 Buick Electra 225 and drives cross country baiting state troopers. The world’s best job would involving being paid incredible sums for fucking on the beach.

@FlyingChainSaw: Well, yes. But do you know anyone who gets paid for doing that? Clarkson gets paid for this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ik9aEet5Um8.

What? Battering monstrous cars on grinding, bone-rattling cross-country escapades or pestorking al fresco by the sea?

@Dodgerblue: Interesting car but he didn’t push it. Riding around some farm land and going ‘wow. smooth car’ and passing a truck? Who cares? Driving from Milwaukee to Missoula, outrunning local law enforcement, state troopers and air national guard, etc. in a 9 hour, white knuckle chase through horrific no-man’s lands at 300+ mph. That would be TV worth tuning into.

@FlyingChainSaw: ’72 was the beginning of the dark days in Detroit … better a ’62. And you would be lucky indeed to get one of those Renaults.

@blogenfreude: Yes, but the 350s that powered the big Buicks were rocks and the cars were tanks, able to cruise at high speed in living room comfort, the back seats able to hold a half ton of ice and 10-20 cases of beer with room to spare. That’s a car. The Renault looks peppy but you need more than pep for a road party.

@FlyingChainSaw: Late 60s Chevy Impala with a 427. You could get your whole high school class in the back seat, a coupla bales of weed in the trunk, and outrun anything with a siren.

I once won a dinner by identifying this car from a football field away – year, make, and model. Now that would be a good road trip car.

@blogenfreude: Jeez, look at that trunk, you could get the whole harvest in there.

Neighbor across the street had one – more metal in it than 3 Civics. When I was 3, neighbor next door had Porsche 356, rusting bumpers … my mom had to drag me away because I’d always go over to smell it. The gearhead in me is deep, padawan.

@Dodgerblue: That does peg the badness meter. I like the 350 because of its ubiquity and relative reliability. But, yes, a 427 reducing staties to weeping despair as chunks of macadam shatters their windscreen and the Chevy hurls itself into the vanishing point is what the automotive arts is all about.

@blogenfreude: This car exudes the ultrabadness.

@FlyingChainSaw: Somewhere out there there’s a 225 wagon (mid-60s) with my name on it.

@blogenfreude: I still see the occasional 356 on the street. Guys driving them (it’s always a guy) look happy.

@blogenfreude and Dodgerblue: My grandpa had a 1964 356 that he bought in Stuttgart at the factory, drove around Europe for five weeks, and had shipped back to the US. He gave it to my dad in the late ’80s before he died. My dad sold it to someone in LA a couple of years ago. My dad was paranoid about driving it.

@blogenfreude: It is your destiny. Staties everywhere fear that day when you and the 225 wagon unite and begin your work of turning highways to talcum powder.