Buy/Drive/Burn: Basic Japanese Compacts From 2008

Today’s Buy/Drive/Burn trio are the 2008 versions of the same Japanese compacts from last time. Many of you were split on the relative goodness of 1998’s Civic versus Corolla, but agreed Sentra should burn. Do those views change when the cars are from 2008?

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Buy/Drive/Burn: Basic Japanese Compacts From 1998

We continue our 1990s-then-2000s series today, with the Japanese counterpart to the American compacts presented here recently. These Japanese compacts from 1998 represented the last of the Nineties’ Golden Era quality. Civic, Sentra, Corolla, make your pick!

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Junkyard Find: 1990 Geo Prizm With 321,981 Miles

The General established the Geo brand for the 1989 model year, as a way to move low-priced iron designed and/or built by Toyota, Suzuki, and Isuzu (for some reason, Daewoo-built cars didn’t get sheltered under the Geo banner, so the LeMans retained Pontiac badges for its entire 1988-1993 sales run here). Of all the Geos, the Corolla-twin Prizm proved the most durable, and so I still find plenty of Prizms during my junkyard travels. Here’s a ’90 with an exceptionally high final odometer reading, found in a Denver-area yard last month.

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QOTD: Automotive Cooperation Done Right?

In last Wednesday’s QOTD post we covered all the worst examples of automotive collaboration. Commenters racked up the examples, sharing collaboration failures even worse than the Jaguar X-Type selected for textual pillory in the post.

Today we flip it around and discuss the best outcomes of automaker cooperation.

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  • SCE to AUX At least with direct sales, there's one less party to point fingers about pricing.
  • Wjtinfwb Malibu will be the Ford Panther of this decade. We won't miss it until its gone. GM will tell you there's no market for sedans anymore. Honda, Toyota, Nissan, Hyundai, Kia, Mercedes-Benz, BMW, VW, Audi and others will challenge you on that. GM gave up on Malibu as soon as it was introduced in 2017, no development, only de-contenting and relegation to "Fleet" status. I've had a lot of Malibu rentals, they were fine. Not as nice as an Accord or Camry, but preferable to an Altima, Sentra, Sonata or Jetta in my mind. A little development in the powertrain, refinement of the suspension and clean up on the styling would have done wonders. But that's not the GM way. Replace it with something else equally mediocre or worse but charge more because it sits higher. It's a shame GM has been relegated to such a back of the class manufacturer when spectacular cars like the C8 Corvette show what they can do when someone really gives a damn.
  • SCE to AUX This has been a topic for at least four decades.In a world filled with carcinogens, you'd need an enormous study to isolate the effects of seat foam compared to every other exposure we have.Besides, do people really drive around without any fresh air purging the cabin?
  • Rna65689660 This is NOT new information. They’ve known this for decades.
  • Wjtinfwb Had an E38, loved it dearly. I thought nothing could make me love the subsequent "Bangle" 7 series, but this latest version did. Apparently the psychotic drug epidemic plaguing North America has made its way to Munich and filtered into the design studios. This car is just grotesque.