1982 Buick Grand National Grand National on 2040-cars

Auto blog

Man arrested after teaching his dog to drive a Buick 100 mph

A Washington state man riding shotgun in an old Buick was arrested after fleeing a hit-and-run incident and leading police on a high-speed chase on an Interstate freeway. Meanwhile, the driver, his pet pit bull, got off scot-free. Such was the scene Sunday near Seattle, where police arrested a 51-year-old man from Lakewood, Wash., who told them he was teaching his dog how to drive. The man was apparently steering the car from the passenger seat. Reports say the man, whose name was not released, was driving his 1996 Buick on Interstate 5 when he allegedly struck two vehicles in South Seattle near the Boeing Access Road and then fled north on I-5. The car was spotted on the interstate near the Snohomish River in Everett, and officials told KOMO-TV the vehicle was driving more than 100 miles per hour when they began pursuit. The vehicle left the freeway near the Stanwood exit — 57 miles north of the hit-and-run — and then drove onto the nearby Centennial Trail, a rails-to-trail bike path. The chase finally ended after police were able to deploy spike strips. Police found the man seated in the passenger seat and his dog behind the wheel. The man appeared to have been steering for the canine. The man was arrested on suspicion of DUI, reckless driving and hit-and-run feeling eluding. Weird Car News Buick

Even if GM does close all 5 of those plants, it'll still have too many

DETROIT — General Motors' monumental announcement on Monday that it will close three car assembly plants and two powertrain plants in North America and slash its workforce will only partially close the gap between capacity and demand for the automaker's sedans, according to a Reuters analysis of industry production and capacity data. Sales of traditional passenger cars in North America have been declining for the past six years and are still withering. After GM ends production next year at factories in Michigan, Ohio and Ontario, it will still have four U.S. passenger-car plants — all operating at less than 50 percent of rated capacity, according to figures supplied by LMC Automotive. In comparison, Detroit-based rivals Ford and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles will have one car plant each in North America after 2019. The Detroit Three are facing rapidly dwindling demand for traditional passenger cars from U.S. consumers, many of whom have shifted to crossovers and trucks. Passenger cars accounted for 48 percent of retail light-vehicle sales in the United States in 2014, according to market researchers at J.D. Power and Associates. This year, sedans will account for less than a third of light vehicle sales. That shift in turn has left most North American car plants operating far below their rated capacities, while many SUV and truck plants are running on overtime. The collapse in passenger-car demand is a challenge for nearly all automakers in the United States, including Japan's Toyota and Honda, which have the top-selling models in the compact and midsize car segments. Toyota executives said last month they are evaluating the company's U.S. model lineup. But Toyota also plans to build compact Corolla sedans at a new $1.6 billion factory it is building in Alabama with partner Mazda. The obstacles facing GM in its plans to close more auto factories became apparent on Tuesday as U.S. President Donald Trump threatened to block payment of government electric vehicle subsidies to GM. While it is not certain that Trump unilaterally has the power to do that, he made it clear he intends to use his office to pressure the company to keep open a small car plant in Ohio that GM says will stop building vehicles in March.

Junkyard Gem: 1962 Buick LeSabre 2-Door Sport Coupe

American car shoppers looking for a full-sized hardtop coupe in 1962 couldn't go wrong with the offerings from The General. Chevrolet would sell you a snazzy new Bel Air sport coupe for just $2,561 (about $23,800 today), but those Joneses next door wouldn't have felt properly shamed if you put a new proletariat-grade Chevy in your driveway. No, to really stand tall during the era of Alfred Sloan's Ladder of Success, you had to go higher up on the GM food chain. For the B-platform full-sized cars of 1962, that meant the Pontiac Catalina/Bonneville beat the Chevy, the Oldsmobile 88 was the next step up the ladder, and at the very top was the Buick: the hot-rod Invicta and its swanky LeSabre sibling. To go beyond that, you had to move up to a C-platform Buick Electra or Cadillac. Today's Junkyard Gem is a once-luxurious '62 LeSabre, now much-faded in a northeastern Colorado boneyard. The reason GM shoppers got so bent out of shape about the "Chevymobile" episodes of the late 1970s, in which some GM cars received engines made by "lesser" GM divisions, was that each division had its own family of V8 engines during the 1950s and 1960s and they weren't supposed to be mingled. The '62 LeSabre got a 401-cubic-inch (6.5-liter) Nailhead engine (so called because the valves were unusually small), rated at 265, 280, or 325 (depending on what kind of compression ratio and carburetion you wanted). That's not crazy horses for a big-displacement, two-ton luxury coupe of its era, but the small valves allowed for combustion chambers optimized for one thing: low-rpm torque. This 401 has the two-barrel carburetor, so it made either 412 or 425 pound-feet of torque. That's just a bit less than the mighty Cadillac's engine that year, and definitely sufficient to get this car moving very quickly. You had to pay a fat premium on the Chevrolet, Pontiac, and Oldsmobile B-bodies to get an automatic transmission (a three-speed column-shift manual was base equipment in those cars), but a Turbine-Drive (formerly known as the Dyna-Flow) automatic was standard issue on the 1962 LeSabre. This was an interesting transmission design that traced its origins back to the 1942 M18 Hellcat Tank Destroyer and used torque-converter multiplication to provide a CVT-like experience with no perceptible shifts (the driver could select a separate low gearset manually, so the shifter looks just like the one on the true two-speed Powerglide transmission).