Murilee Martin, Contributor
Articles
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Would you believe that we've been doing this series for more than half a year, yet no Fords have been chosen as the weekly Guilty Pleasure?
Sure, we've had a couple of Mercurys, but Henry's name has... -
Guilty Pleasure: Peugeot 604
We've talked about the Renault-derived shouldn't-oughta-want-it Eagle Premier and Chrysler LH in recent episodes of this series, but our last full-blooded French Guilty Pleasure was the Renault Fuego Turbo back in July. Anyway, when you're talking French cars that really just don't make sense, you...
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Guilty Pleasure: Hyundai Scoupe
While the first-gen Excel may be one of the rarest 1980s cars in North America nowadays, we can jump into the next decade and find another Hyundai that's nearly as hard to find: the Scoupe. While Saddam was gearing up for The Mother of All Battles, Hyundai was improving on the Excel--the bar was...
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Guilty Pleasure: Oldsmobile Toronado Trofeo
I've been struggling through an unhealthy obsession with the Mitsubishi Cordia lately, which has cut down on my time for searches for other shouldn't-want-it-but-can't-help-myself vehicles. The only cure for Dementia Cordia is, of course, a genuine example of late-20th-century General Motors...
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Guilty Pleasure: Mitsubishi Cordia
With Mitsubishi's combination of dodgy reliability and puzzling styling, you know the Three Diamonds' back catalog should be good for some seriously guilty automotive pleasures. I admitted to searching for a nice first-gen Diamante a few months back, but the Diamante might be a bit too, you know...
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Guilty Pleasure: First-Gen Chrysler LH Platform
After feeling the urge to find myself a clean Eagle Premier last week, I got to thinking about the Chrysler products that the Premier spawned after Chrysler absorbed all that Renault DNA through its acquisition of AMC. Remember how futuristic the first LH Platform Chryslers looked? OK, now forget...
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The Guilty Pleasure series has honored, if that's the word, one product apiece from AMC and Renault, but things really get interesting when you combine the two companies.
Adding the troublesome PRV...
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Guilty Pleasure: Volkswagen Type 4
Would you believe that I've done 23 Guilty Pleasures posts and haven't included a single Volkswagen? Mostly, this is because the VWs I like tend to be mainstream cool (e.g. Type 34 Karmann Ghia, Phaeton, Thing), but there's one that will make even the most frighteningly obsessed Volkswagen fanatic...
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Guilty Pleasure: Datsun 810
Everybody loves the old Z cars, but what about the Malaise Era Datsun sedan and wagon with an extremely Z-ish engine and chassis? You still see the occasional 1981-84 "810 Maxima" on the street these days, sporting the confusing "Datsun by Nissan" badging of the era, but I'm talking about the...
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Guilty Pleasure: 1986 Hyundai Excel
What makes a normally undesirable car become desirable? In the case of the first Hyundai sold in the United States, it's a combination of historical significance and historical awfulness. Nowadays, Americans see Hyundai as a manufacturer of some very high-quality cars, but it wasn't always so. Far...
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Guilty Pleasure: Plymouth Cricket
While Ford and GM both slapped Detroit badges on various captive imports and overseas-division products, neither came close to matching Chrysler of the early 1970s for sheer weird variety of off-brand imports showing up in American showrooms. During this era, car shoppers could drop into their...
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Guilty Pleasure: Geo Prizm GSi
I've been really fixated on Cadillacs as Guilty Pleasure cars these days, and I considered going with the Cimarron d'Oro--or even an $85 1:43 scale diecast bustle-back Seville toy--for today's GP honoree. However, thoughts of the way that GM managed to pass its bad-management virus to Toyota got me...
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We just honored--if that's the word--a Cadillac with Guilty Pleasure status a few weeks back, but I've been thinking about the fantastic expense racked up by GM by flying the Allanté's...
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Guilty Pleasure: Humber Sceptre
If you're going to get into British cars, you might as well forget about those dime-a-dozen BMC/British Leyland products and dive into the bewildering labyrinth of Rootes Group marques and models... and once you've committed yourself to Rootes Group madness, skip right over the Sunbeams and even...
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Guilty Pleasure: Dodge Mirada
Malaise Era cars make for great Guilty Pleasures entries, in my case because I'm old enough to remember these terrible clankers when they were new and should know better than to want any of them. I just couldn't get enough of the Chrysler J Body when I honored the 1981-83 Imperial, and so I'm back...
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Guilty Pleasure: 1977-79 Caprice "Fish Bowl" Coupe
GM made some strange-looking stuff during the mid-to-late Malaise Era, and the passage of a few decades hasn't really dulled much of the "what the hell were they thinking?" reaction that we still give such fine machines as the "Bustle Back" Seville. I was going to feature the Bustle Back for...
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Guilty Pleasure: 1980-85 Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz
Sorry about the lateness of this installment of Guilty Pleasures; I got dragged off to some madness in Michigan and am only now getting caught up on my worship of cars I shouldn't want but do want. Cadillac made many such vehicles beginning in the late 1960s, when pursuit of market share took...
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Guilty Pleasure: Renault Fuego
When you start talking about AMC cars, you often have no choice but to move right from Kenosha to Boulogne-Billancourt. Yes, when the government bailed out AMC in the early 1980s– that's the French government, of course, since the US government didn't think AMC was too big to fail— AMC...
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Guilty Pleasure: Subaru XT
After a decade of seeing the batshit Impreza WRX on the streets of North America, the idea of a fast, goofy-looking, four-wheel-drive Subaru seems pretty normal to all of us. This was not the case in 1985, when Subaru introduced the (somewhat) fast, goofy-looking, four-wheel-drive XT. "What the...
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Guilty Pleasure: Nissan Pulsar NX Sportbak
Welcome back to Guilty Pleasures, where we long for cars that we shouldn't, yet do, want. Nissan hadn't made an appearance in this series before this week, a situation I'm remedying right now. I considered going with the Datsun 610, 710, or 810, but even a 610 owner wouldn't face many jeers from...
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Guilty Pleasure: ZAZ-968 Zaporozhets
All these Guilty Pleasures cars, but which one am I actively pursuing for my own fleet right now? Yes, the Ukrainian-built, Brezhnev-era ZAZ-968, aka "The Soviet Corvair." I've got some shady connections in the former Soviet Union (i.e., 24 Hours of LeMons racers) who plan to ship a container-load...
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Guilty Pleasure: Mercury LN7
In hindsight, last week's Guilty Pleasure car, the 1970 Mercury Marauder X-100, wasn't quite shameful enough for full GP status; sure, it's big and fat and nothing at all like the Cougars and Cyclones most nostalgia-hounds imagine when they think of cool vintage Mercurys, but only bad people would...
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Guilty Pleasure: 1970 Mercury Marauder X-100
Eight Guilty Pleasures posts and no Ford products? I'll remedy that oversight right now. The folks at Dearborn have made all manner of interesting machinery that, these days, seems to fall through the cracks when it comes to pleasing the fickle hearts of car freaks. For example, the...
Murilee Martin