I recently visited Charleston, South Carolina, which is a beautiful southern city wherein I actually heard an old woman remark to two boys playing outside: “Aren’t y’all gonna come inside for some supper?” Charleston is also home to possibly the single wealthiest contingent of southerners, virtually all of whom are actually from the north. I won’t get in to demographics here, but basically Charleston became a popular place for northern money in the late 1800s and I think the exact same people are living there today, with the exact same money. If you’ve ever wondered where they sell all...

I haven’t done a “GM Bad Idea” segment in a while. This is not because GM has stopped having bad ideas. On the contrary, I have seen several new Cadillac XTSs on the road, and there’s absolutely no way they were purchased by anyone who didn’t receive an enormous GM incentive. But I’m not here to knock the Cadillac XTS. That can be done in a future column. Instead, I’m going to call out another bad idea from our friends at General Motors: the Oldsmobile Aurora. You may remember the original Aurora. It’s the car that resembles a rather large, windswept sand dune. It also had no...

I once had a W124 500E. This was very impressive, but only to me and about three other people. Everyone else mainly said: Why the hell did you buy this crappy old Mercedes? This is especially true because I sold a 2001 E55 AMG to get it, and I actually paid more for the older, crappier Mercedes. But there was one impressive detail about my W124. In fact, it was an impressive detail of all W124 models, which – by the way – is the chassis code for the E-Class made from 1985 to 1995. And that one impressive detail is the mirrors. You see, all W124 models had two different mirror sizes. ...

To begin: I know I didn’t post much last week. There’s a reason for that: I took a five-day trip to Charleston, one of my favorite cities, and my hotel overlooked a drawbridge. As a result, I simply sat on the balcony and excitedly watched the bridge go up and down. This left little time to post here. Fortunately, I’m going to remedy that today with a new “it exists” piece about one of my favorite subtly cool vehicles: the 1998 Jeep Grand Cherokee 5.9 Limited. This one is so subtle I actually completely forgot about it until I received a suggestion from a reader to write it up. Let’s...

The Land Rover LR3 is a wonderful SUV. It’s also cheap to run, provided you’re comparing it to a fleet of midsized warships, or possibly Denmark. But for all its flaws – and there are many – the LR3 has one interesting bit of minutiae that may slightly brighten your day when you see one on the road: its fender vent. Note that I didn’t say “vents.” That’s because the LR3 has only one fender vent, located on its passenger side. Interestingly, the vent is actually functional: when you’re fording a stream of up to some ungodly amount of inches known only to the person who...

It’s getting harder and harder to distinguish different cars. For example: I’m quite sure the Hyundai Azera, Acura RLX, Toyota Avalon and Lexus ES are all the exact same vehicle, just with different badging. Perhaps the Asian manufacturers have banded together to give GM a taste of its own medicine. There are, however, a few unique touches that set apart today’s crop of new cars. And the very best is Hyundai’s “atomic” tail lights. The atomic tail lights are only included on the Sonata Hybrid, which should probably the subject of its own minutiae column for the insane number of tiny...