Car Throttle

In Part 1 of this article, I covered 5 recent sales failures of the automotive world.  This time we dive into some more odd, idiotic, or just misjudged cars.  Onto the list... 5) Lincoln Blackwood

Luxury Pickup Truck.  That should be a contradictory term.  Pickup trucks are made to haul things, do work, go off-road: these are not luxurious attributes.  A Luxury Pickup Truck is a fairly stupid idea.  Yet, ask Cadillac: people buy stupid.  In their case, Escalade EXT's: an Escalade with a pickup bed.  Considering this is just a Chevrolet Avalanche (admittedly a pretty clever, if ugly, pickup truck) with some Cadillac trim glued on and a larger price tag, they sell quite a lot of them.  Sales were their highest in

This is a continuation of The Brief History of The Muscle Truck. If I've kept your attention this long, hold onto your seat: it's about to get faster. At the same time the big-block Chevy 454SS was being developed, in another division of GM, engineers were cooking up a performance truck with an entirely different recipe, a truck that lives on in legends and myths today: the GMC Syclone.  First, a minor point: yes, Syclone is spelled wrong.  Mercury (remember them?) held the trademark for the Cyclone name, and Ford wasn't about to give it up to their rival.  The Syclone was a remarkable vehicle in many ways, but mostly for it's ability to leave a stoplight like someone had strapped

Technology is awesome.  I mean, you knew that. High technology has long been one of the selling points of the most exotic sports cars and sedans.  Things like night vision, laser guided cruise control, rain sensing wipers - stuff that would have been considered science fiction back in the 60's is reliable reality today.  But what's more awesome than high technology for the upper echelon of society?  High technology for everyone when it trickles down. Ford announced the  engine lineup for the 2011 F-150 quarter-ton pickup truck yesterday.  Now, normally, we don't give much of a rat's posterior about pickups here at CarThrottle - due to the ox-cart suspension, center of gravity comparable to a Zamboni, slow pushrod motors and a shortage of gears, and the

Ford's F-150 SVT Raptor is a remarkably specialized vehicle. Let's face it; the market for a pickup truck designed to careen off sand dunes at 90 miles an hour is pretty limited.  The most off-roading most people do with their trucks is hopping a concrete parking divider at the mall.  Case in point: when's the last time you saw a dirty Range Rover or Mercedes G500? So, a bit more mainstream appeal couldn't really hurt Ford's mountain-leaping monster truck.  And for 2011, the Raptor lineup is being updated to make a little more sense with the introduction of a SuperCrew variant.  Sporting four full-sized doors, the SuperCrew Raptor rides on a 12"(!) longer wheelbase than the normal cab-and-a-half model, meaning you can actually bring your friends with

Generally speaking, I think the SEMA show is pretty much a pile of garbage. I mean, who really wants to pay a lot of money, travel to the middle of the desert, and walk around a warehouse filled with orange blinged-up Lexii with Lambo Doorz?  You can count me out on that one. But one can't ignore that SEMA is getting bigger and bigger by the year, and at this point it's actually a launch-bed for some manufacturer debuts.  So while I combed through pages and pages of useless crap SEMA debuts today, I found something I actually liked. Ford chose SEMA as the place to debut two new version of their F-150 Baja Racer Special, which they call the SVT Raptor.  We've covered Ford's badass desert-runner here

A bit of good performance news for Ford fans!  Maybe the Pony Car wars still have life left in them yet. You would have thought that these programs would be cancelled or at least put on hold like GM's elusive "Zeta" RWD platform program, but Ford is continuing on. They're smart in recognizing that there will always be a market for such products. Ford is using foresight and that is why it is in the better position that it is today in comparison with it's domestic (and indeed foreign!) competition. Ford Mustang mules were spotted in January with a new engine under the hood. No official word from Ford was out to alert anyone of a new engine. But just recently in an interview with Australia's Drive Ford development director Russell Christophers revealed the existence of

The latest product of Ford's Special Vehicles Team is not quite what you'd expect - unlike all other SVT products prior, the SVT Raptor is designed to go obscenely fast off road. It's a limited-production vehicle based off the regular F-150 pickup truck, but inspired by Baja race trucks - the goal is to be able to cross rough terrain as fast as possible. To that end, the F-150 Raptor has been significantly modified over the regular F-150 to be ready for Baja duty.  Overall track width increases by a considerable 7", completely revised suspension (new upper and lower control arms, tie rods, longer half shafts, reinforced steering knuckles), and numerous other changes.  This gives an incredible 13.4" of ground clearance in the rear (11.2" in the