Posts from ‘Review Flashback!’
Review Flashback: 2001 Hummer H1
2001 Hummer H1
Created for the U.S. military, the High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle (HMMWV, and more colloquially, Humvee) was engineered as a replacement for the M151 jeep vehicles and other light trucks that were previously the Armed Forces’ primary modes of light-duty transportation.
Review Flashback! 2005 Toyota MR2
2005 Toyota MR2
In many ways, the Toyota MR2 is a lot like the Honda Del Sol. Both cars seem like they should have been hits with young enthusiasts, but neither one ever truly found an audience. But unlike the Del Sol, which lasted for just a single generation of production, the MR2 was redesigned twice before it was withdrawn from the U.S. market.
Review Flashback! 2006 Ford GT
2006 Ford GT
If you were looking for a solid investment back in 2006, you should have bought Ford. Not Ford stock, mind you, which is worth about the same $8.50 today as it was 13 years ago, but the Ford GT.
2011 Tesla Roadster
Introduced in 2012, the Tesla Model S was the first vehicle that Tesla, Inc. designed, manufactured, and sold on its own. Though the electric-car maker didn’t make good on its promises that the Model S would cost around $40,000 and travel 300 miles on a single charge, it did produce a large, stylish, and surprisingly fast luxury sedan that met with overwhelmingly positive reviews from both the press and the public.
2002 Chrysler Prowler
What comes of a car like the Prowler? Despite a long list of credentials–including its striking open-wheel design, the fact that it survived the death of of its original brand, and a spate of cool special-edition colors–the Prowler doesn’t seem to engender the kind of present-day enthusiast interest one might think it should.
2011 Lincoln Town Car
Dealing with legacy product is probably one of the most challenging parts of an automaker product planner’s job. What does a brand do with aging, unhip product that still sells relatively well, but compromises a marque’s image with the younger buyers that marketers so desperately want to attract?
2005 Ford Excursion
There were two good reasons for the demise of the Ford Excursion, and only one really good reason for it to have been built in the first place.
Addressing the former: Gas prices rose alarmingly during the Excursion’s brief tenure in Ford’s product lineup. Also, there was probably a finite market for 7000-pound SUVs, and what demand there was for such a vehicle had been met fairly quickly in the Excursion’s 2000-05 model-year run.
2003 Volkswagen EuroVan
There are limitations to the marketing power of heritage and quirkiness, and it’s possible that no car manufacturer is more aware of this reality than Volkswagen. Case in point: VW recently made known its intentions to drop the retro-themed Beetle from its lineup. Both the soon-to-depart current-generation Beetle (2011-2019) and New Beetle before it (1998-2011) drew heavily on shopper nostalgia. Though they were quite conventional mechanically, these “homage” Beetles obviously borrowed their “throwback” styling inspiration from the legendary original Beetle, which was first produced in 1938.
Review Flashback! 2005 Pontiac Aztek
2005 Pontiac Aztek
I’m not quite prepared to suggest that Pontiac’s Aztek crossover would have sold well if it had been launched as a 2018 model, but I am willing to propose that it might have been better received in today’s marketplace than it was when it debuted back in 2001.
Review Flashback! 1974 Pontiac GTO
1974 Pontiac GTO
Just a thought: What if the 1974 Pontiac GTO was never actually named “GTO?” What if, instead of disappointing GTO loyalists, this extensively upgraded compact Pontiac had instead been called the Ventura GT?
