Car Throttle

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

Sometimes it's hard to mask your disappointment. It'd been two years since I'd ventured from Raleigh up to College Park, Maryland for CPT (College Park Tuning's) Spring show, and I was damn excited.  The event in 2009 was large enough to fill two gigantic parking lots, and this year the event was to be moved to FedEx field in order to fit the massive amount of cars expected to turn out - easily in the thousands. With the event scheduled to start at noon on Sunday, I packed up and headed to the DC region Friday night - I've got friends and family in the DC region I haven't seen in a while; might as well kill a few birds with the same tank of

Continuing along with the rest of the new stuff at NYIAS this year, welcome to Part 2 of our "best of the rest" coverage, a sort of all-at-once splurt of information to keep you up to date on the latest developments, without boring you to death with new paint colors for the Kia Optima.  Here we go. 2012 Subaru Impreza Sedan/Hatchback Subaru has finally come to their senses with the Impreza.  While it's always been a relatively fun-to-drive car even in non-turbocharged form, it hasn't really experienced great sales in the economy-car market compared to more conventional rivals.  The biggest reason would be the big-car fuel economy in a small, unrefined package.  The current Impreza 2.5i makes a fairly impressive 173bhp from it's single-cam 2.5L horizontally

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

Sometimes I imagine the entire Toyota Corporation is a single, evil person. I want to grab them by the lapel, and shake them violently while screaming "You're the biggest car brand in the world!  You can engineer ANYTHING! When the technology to lay carbon fibre in a cylinder for the A-pillar of your supercar didn't exist, you INVENTED it!  Stop building more boring hybrids, and make a car that car people want and can afford!"  It seems like I'm not the only person that feels that way, because Toyota is trying to convince us it's got the point by teasing us repeatedly with FT-86 Toyobaru this, RWD that, and so far nothing has come of it.

My, what a big diffuser you have.

I will admit some personal bias on this topic. The previous-generation Subaru Forester was, in my estimation, the embodiment of the "do anything" mentality when it came to automobiles.  Especially in 2.5XT (Turbo) trim with a 5-speed, it hit pretty much all the bases.  It was fast (Car & Driver clocked one at 5.3 seconds to sixty, which was considerably faster than a V8 Cayenne S), had huge aftermarket support, it was fun on the road, decent off road, great in bad weather, and combined SUV utility with car-like handling.  It was a characterful, likeable vehicle.  So when Subaru replaced the old-style Forester with a new, bigger, softer one in 2008, I couldn't help but be disappointed. It was taller, heavier, slower, more boring to look

Toyota's efforts to capture the youth market haven't performed as well as they had hoped. The Toyota brand has been bogged down by recalls and reliability issues, but there is a deeper underlying problem. The company has seemingly abandoned the enthusiasts altogether, and with it the youth market. The Toyota FT-86 Concept was introduced in an effort to combat that. Toyota has aimed to attract young enthusiasts by producing an affordable, rear-wheel drive coupe. That definitely is a good way to start doing that. The latest reports have pegged the new model coming under the Scion brand here in America. But what about the Subaru version....the much-discussed "Toyabaru?" It has been confirmed to make an appearance at the Geneva Motor Show. Subaru is one of the only

The list of positive attributes about Subaru's compact Impreza is a long one. Tough build quality, permanent all-wheel-drive, plenty of interior space, the turbocharged WRX and STI models are a hoot, rock-solid stability in any weather, the ability to cover a patchy road at ridiculous speed with ease, etc.  But there are two things the Impreza's never been: efficient or attractive.  Efficiency is an inherent problem with the design: permanent four wheel drive makes it heavier, and higher driveline losses mean more power is used to move the car.  Ugly, though, is fixable.  And you have to admit, even in blistered-fender WRX form, the current Impreza is dog-ugly. Yuck.  At least it's beautiful on the inside.  So when Subaru pulled the cover off the Impreza Concept

There are some cars you buy, expecting a certain degree of mechanical fallibility. In some cars, it's part of the character of owning one.  In others, it's an inherent design issue that's well known and you learn to work around it.  No one really buys an old Alfa Romeo expecting it'll never have wiring issues.  People with a Citroen SM-Maserati didn't purchase it for it's Swiss Watch durability.  Only the truly misinformed expect an old RX-7 to spend more time on the road than making the lawn look pretty. But some vehicles have an absolutely baffling reputation for reliability in the face of considerable evidence.  These are cars that people buy because their reputation leads them to believe they'll enjoy a few years of trouble-free motoring, and

Every 5 years or so, it seems the future is revealed to us. The newest, greatest technology that will save the future of the automobile has come around, it's time is now, and it will undoubtedly be the greatest thing that has ever happened to the car industry.  Sometimes it's right - look at concepts like direct injection, turbocharging, variable valve timing, hybrids, clean diesels, etc - and sometimes it's an epic flop.  While ideas that stick are cool, what I find more interesting are the ideas that come and go, and no one really remembers them.  Here are a few of my favorites. 1) The Wankel Rotary Engine Once upon a time, it was thought that the future of internal combustion engines was a three-sided pregnant