#Editorials

They’ve got two doors, sporty intentions, and names people forgot long ago. Today we cover three oddball offerings from the latter part of the 1980s.

Will you take home the Nissan, the Mitsubishi, or the Subaru?

On the last installment of Buy/Drive/Burn, we chose from three family-friendly luxury wagons from the Malaise year of 1975. Several members of the B&B peanut gallery quickly retorted that all three options were awful, and that only wagons from the 1990s were worth pondering.

Bam. We’re back on wagons, 20 years later. It’s now 1995.

Today’s Buy/Drive/Burn setup comes to us via commenter 87 Morgan, who suggested the trio a while ago. For consideration today: Malaise Era transportation for upper middle-class families. These gigantic wagons served as family haulers before the minivan came along and ripped the sculpted carpet from under their feet.

What will it be — the Chrysler, the Mercury, or the Buick?

We’ve done a couple of ranking challenges before, starting first with the Accord, then the Corvette, and following up a few months later with the Mustang. Today we rank a nameplate which has been in production longer than any of those — in fact, it’s the longest-running in America.

It’s the Suburban.

The Jensen Interceptor brought together American power and British design and craftsmanship in a rare heavyweight sports-luxury liftback.

The company even made a few of them into convertibles, like today’s Rare Ride.

Yesterday, we featured an edition of Buy/Drive/Burn pitting three excellent Japanese sports cars against one another. All three were prime time, heavy hitters in their segment, and all three are remembered fondly for various reasons by the Internet Car People.

But some people thought there was a fly in the ointment — a big one. Hence today’s question.

The Rare Rides series will always have space for unique French cars. It’s featured several Renault vehicles and a couple of Citroëns to date, but only one Peugeot, to my recollection. That one, a 106 GTI, was an import to Canada by an enthusiastic second-hand buyer. Today we feature a second Peugeot: one actually sold by a dealer, brand new, in America.

It’s the hottest 405 sold in the U.S. — the excellently named Mi16.

It was one of those make or break moments. A company teetering on the financial verge which threw a Hail Mary at the right time — and at the right target. The company in question was Chrysler, and the Hail Mary was the K-car platform.

Today we ask you: What was peak K?

As we were rustling up commentary in the last edition of Buy/Drive/Burn, conversation naturally turned to other front-drive sedans available that same year. The discussion sparked the idea for another General Motors same-body showdown, like we saw previously with the luxurious C-body.

Today we’re talking H-body 3800 fun from Oldsmobile, Buick, and Pontiac.

In what’s bound to be one of the most obscure editions of Rare Rides yet, today’s ride is very limited-production in nature. So limited, in fact, that only one was produced. And it’s so limited in its exposure that the Internet can’t seem to decide the year it was actually built.

It’s hard to know where to start with this thing.

Our Picture Time subject today is a Chevrolet Corvette C4 from 1984. Or rather it used to be, before someone got some big ideas in their head — right at the same time their eyes drifted to a pile of spare fiberglass and plastic.

There may have been a photo of a Ferrari F40 lying around as well.

Alright, people, listen up.

I know the world seems more divided than ever these days (although as someone who minored in history, I can assure you this is nothing new). I know that as much as I’d like to keep the craziness of politics away from TTAC, it’s not possible — the automotive industry intersects with politics all the time, and it’s our job to cover those topics and stories. I know arguments on social media are getting nastier.

Ford recently announced the elimination of the traditional car from its North American lineup. Within two or three model years, no four-door Ford will be available with a trunk. No Fusion, no Focus, no Fiesta, no Taurus. The demand-driven logic behind the decision is clear. Cars have declined from 35 percent of Ford sales as recently as 2012, to 23 percent last year.

The company does not report profitability by nameplate, but we can safely assume their declining contribution to net income has been even more dramatic. So Ford’s decision was predictable, if seemingly dispassionate. Less predictably, a relatively healthy automaker is executing a long-term strategic shift. In public. Before the market forced it to.

Herein lies the real story.

Yesterday, your humble author went back to the proverbial old school for a heartfelt piece on why Buick must die. It gave me no pleasure to write it; I can still remember being five years old and waiting with anticipation for my father to bring home his new steel-grey 1977 LeSabre sedan. That was an American-made luxury sedan to compete heads-up with anything the world could offer, which no doubt explains why the Volvo that sat next to it in the garage found its way to the classifieds shortly afterwards.

There is nothing I would rather see than the resurrection of a revitalized Buick taking the fight to Lexus with a top-notch lineup of cars and crossovers that are built and designed — scratch that, I would probably settle for built or designed at this point! — in the United States. That’s why I handed out that tough love to the Tri-shield yesterday.

It would have been nice if Buick PR had responded by sending me some off-the-record advance notice of a new world-class luxury car or truck. I suppose it was naive of me to even think there might be such a thing in the pipeline. Rather, my boss received a list of complaints from Buick’s brand communications manager, Stu Fowle. He believes the article is incorrect on several points. In the interest of promoting further informed discussion about Buick’s current woes, I’ve listed his complaints after the jump, along with my responses.

Last time, in Part I of this DKW wagon’s saga, we covered a condensed history of the Audi marque. From its inception as Horch, through separation, renaming, and merger into the Auto Union fold, Audi wavered along unsteadily. The company even performed a vanishing act between 1940 and 1964.

In the middle of all this history is our Rare Ride, a tidy DKW wagon from 1962. But all is not as it seems.