Car Throttle

I'm back in North Carolina now, where you can swing a dead cat without hitting a Bentley.  On one hand, it sucks.  I like seeing exotics constantly.  On the other, it's nice that exotics remain exotic. I walked around LA the whole time with my camera around my neck for you guys - so I'll continue now with day two and three of car spotting in LA.  Hope you enjoy it! Classic cars, especially older Japanese cars, seem to have a much longer shelf life in California's relatively mild, dry climate.  This 240Z would have a lot more rust bubbles over here in North Carolina.  I could do without the period window louvers, but YMMV. You could do worse for your commute than driving an

Mitsubishi has decided to do something truly radical, something that would make fans of the Mitsubishi Evolution raise their hands in protest, start a revolution, burn buildings or overthrow dictators – they intend to build the next Lancer Evolution XI as a diesel-electric hybrid. News of this startling move was brought about in an interview by Autocar magazine with Mitsubishi Motors company president Osamu Masuko. Imagine that, a Mitsubishi Evolution like the Evolution X pictured above may not emit a single exhaust drone at the traffic lights as the stop-start function has kicked in and when it accelerates, would sound like a Toyota Prius, i.e no sound at all, or like a Volkswagen TDI diesel accelerating or worse still, like a old Mercedes 240d taxi that is still in

Dank: it's a noun, an urban-ism, with a lot of meanings. It can refer to food ("that burrito was dank!"), music ("this house DJ is dank!") or a number of other things.  In the car world, Dank is usually used to describe stanced/hellaflush cars.  So Dank-Fest seems like a proper title for a show devoted to the Stance & Offset crowd.  The show - which was the first - was organized and put together by StancedLyfe, Wilkseboro Crew, and Hoodstatus, and was supported or sponsored by ISO, TeamRPM, NOS Energy, Firestone (locally), GoGirl Entertainment, and SOHO Motorsports. So... what the hell is Stance & Offset?  In mechanical terms, it's a car that's slammed to the ground, cambered out, stretched tires and rolled fenders with the wheels

Here at CarThrottle, we appreciate the lunatic automotive enthusiasts. They're what makes the automotive world continue to turn, always innovating and coming up with new ways to scare the hell out of us.  This will become a regular feature on the weekends here at CarThrottle as I scour the web for people who've done crazy, some might say lunatic-esque, modifications to their cars. Up first: It's just an innocent-looking Mitsubishi Mirage.  Remember the Mirage?  It was the predecessor to the Lancer in this country, Mitsubishi's shot at the Civic and Corolla that came after the Colt in the 80's.  I started thinking about the insane things you could do to a Mirage after spending a little time helping a friend work on his wife's 93 Mirage

The world's filled with boring, mundane, unremarkable automobiles. For every SVO Mustang, there are 10,000 Camry LE's.  For every Alfa Romeo Guilia Super sedan, there are an untold bazillion Honda Fits.  That's just how it is: mainstream sells.  As it turns out, very few people actually want the diesel, all wheel drive, manual-transmission station wagon that internet car enthusiasts say would sell like hotcakes. Sometimes, though, some of the most interesting cars out there are born out of some of the most dishwater-dull transportation appliances.  Here's my top ten - as always, feel free to leave a comment telling me what I left out at the bottom!  On we go. 10) Mitsubishi Galant VR-4 Mitsubishi's Galant sedan is... hold on, let me go to Wikipedia, I can't

We are primarily a performance-oriented website here at CarThrottle. The amount of people interested enough in minivans to go on the web and read about them is pretty small, so performance cars it is.  What does get a little old after a while, though, is the constant one-upmanship of performance manufacturers with each other.  Look at Nissan and Porsche and their fight over Nurburgring lap times, which is about as relevant as comparing car's fuel injector rates as a measure of performance.  Or the whole Camaro vs Mustang V6 power wars - GM re-rated the Camaro's V6 after the Mustang got a new V6 so it would have 7 more horsepower.  Who cares about 7 horsepower?  Couldn't they have spent that money on making it

There's a lot of smack-talking that occurs among the import tuning crowd. "Yo, bro, my B20/VTEC EG hatch could walk all over your H22-swapped EK hatch."  Sadly, these are not the type of discussions that can be settled on the street, because that's illegal. So local drag strips spend a lot of their weekends hosting drag racing for street cars.  This was the case the other weekend - local import speed shop Phantasm Racing hosted their first Street Wars event of the season.  As with any import drag racing event, there were some wickedly fast cars - and also some loud slow junk.  I'll be skipping the loud, slow junk and showing you a mix of pictures and video of the good stuff.

For those enthusiasts with turbos on the brain, this is a question that has bounced around since the early 90's. There's still not a definite answer today - but with the recent coverage of 3000GT VR-4 tuner 3SX Performance, I thought it would be a good CT: Asks for our readers to share their input on this question. The 90's were arguably the resurgence of real performance, after the mediocrity of the 80's and the depressing malaise of the 70's.  Horsepower was no longer taboo, the speed limit was no longer 55, gas was cheap, and financing was easy.  Out of this was born the unique class of Japanese supercars - viciously powerful cars packed with technology, slick styling, turbocharging, and exhilarating performance.  There really

Picking up where Part I left off, we find ourselves in the back of 3SX Performance's service shop. In addition to a handful of lifts in the main service bay, 3SX also has a number of other rooms filled with interesting stuff in the back of their shop - starting with the dyno room.

This is 3SX's photo, because I somehow forgot to take one of the dyno.

3SX's dyno is a SuperFlow AutoDyn 88, which is a four-wheel-drive unit.  This seems like a no-brainer, but the vast majority of dynos at private shops are only 2WD models, as they're cheaper, easier to set up, easier to keep working right, and easier to use.  But when the bulk of your business

One of the things I'm trying to do in an effort to bring more interesting content to you, the reader, is cover more local items. There are plenty of places you can read a rehash of the latest press releases, but here at CarThrottle we strive to bring you coverage and features you won't find anywhere else.  So to get the ball rolling on this, I introduce our new "Shop Tours" series, where I'll be traveling around the eastern seaboard of the US, highlighting the best and brightest of performance and modification shops our country has to offer.  First up is 3SX performance in Concord, North Carolina. If you're familiar with the world of Mitsubishi performance, chances are you've heard of 3SX before.  They are the