1995 Honda Accord Lx Sedan 4-door 2.2l - 18" Rims W/ Nitto Tires - No Reserve ! on 2040-cars

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Junkyard Gem: 1997 Acura 1.6 EL

Drivers from Mexico or Canada who take their cars across the border into the United States may drive them legally here for one year, after which they must drive back home or go through a registration process that ranges from arduous to impossible, depending on the state. As a result, quite a few Canadian- and Mexican-market cars end up marooned and un-registerable here, and I find some of them during my junkyard travels. Today, we've got a Canada-only Acura that showed up in a Northern California boneyard recently. I'm always looking for junkyard odometers with very high final readings (right now a 631k-mile Volvo 240 holds the record), and at first glance I though I had come across a Civic sedan with nearly 450,000 miles. Then I noticed the metric speedometer and realized that I was looking at a non-US-market car. 448,538 kilometers is 278,709 miles, by the way. A look at the build tag and emissions stickers showed that this car was built and sold in Canada. I'd found a second-generation Acura EL in a Colorado junkyard a few years back, so I knew that I'd just found a first-generation EL. Like its Acura Integra contemporary, the Acura EL was based on the Honda Civic. It replaced the Integra in Canada for 1997 and production continued through 2005. It differed somewhat in appearance from the Civic and had a nicer interior but was mechanically nearly identical to the US-market Civic EX sedan. A version for the Japanese market was built in Canada and exported across the Pacific as the second-generation Honda Domani. The engine is a 1.6-liter SOHC four-banger with VTEC, rated at 127 horsepower and 107 pound-feet. This one appears to be a loaded EL Premium, with the optional four-speed automatic. List price would have been C$22,000, or about $30,676 in 2023 United States dollars (using the exchange rate for June of 1997). The decklid had an EL-only spoiler, so a local Honda expert must have bought it for a Civic sedan. Since this car was old enough to be federally legal under the 25-year rule, it could have been registered legally in some US states… but California's strict emissions regulations would have made the process too difficult to be worth undertaking on a near-300k-mile machine that isn't particularly exotic.

Watch Honda lay waste to world's fastest lawnmower record

Honda has been working on its high-performance Mean Mower for a while now. In a recent attempt to take the top speed title, it didn't make its 130-miles-per-hour top speed target, but it still managed to set a new Guinness World Record has the world's fastest lawnmower at 116.57 mph. While the video certifying the run was uploaded to YouTube on April 1, this is no prank. The Guinness run was made on March 8 at the Idiafa Proving Ground in Tarragona, Spain.
To claim the record, the lawnmower had to run through a 100-meter speed trap, and it had to make two passes in opposite directions within an hour with the average taken between them. Guinness also specifies that to take the title the vehicle must still be able to cut grass and look like a lawnmower. The speed was still plenty to beat the previous record of 96.529-mph set by Bobby Cleveland on a Snapper race mower at the Bonneville Salt Flats in September 2010.
The Mean Mower is based on a Honda HF2620 Lawn Tractor that's been modified by British Touring Car Championship squad Team Dynamics. It has a newly fabricated chassis from 4130 chromoly steel and packs a 1.0-liter engine from a Honda VTR Firestorm motorcycle with a six-speed sequential gearbox. The engine produces 109 horsepower and 71 pound-feet of torque - enough power to reach 60 mph in around four seconds. The suspension and wheels come from an ATV, and the cutter deck has been remade in fiberglass. The grass bag holds the fuel tank, oil cooler and secondary radiator. The engine no longer actually cuts grass. Instead, the blade is driven by two electric motors.

Honda has finally killed the unloved CR-Z hybrid hatch

Last week we told you that the CR-Z would bow out in Japan with a Final Edition, a typical limited-run job with some badging and unique cosmetic elements. Now Honda has announced that the CR-Z is going away in the US, according to Car and Driver. But there won't be any fond farewell for the two-seat hybrid hatch here. It won't return for the 2017 model year. We expected this – a long time ago, frankly. It's not so much that the CR-Z was a bad idea, or that the car itself wasn't fun to drive on some level. It's more about the promise it failed to fulfill. The car's predecessor, the first-generation Insight hybrid, was more fun to drive in spite of having no pretension of sportiness. And although Honda tried to claim a spiritual connection, the CR-Z had very little to do with the pulse-raising CRXs of yore, which in sportier trims were a flat-out riot to drive. Instead, the CR-Z paired lukewarm driving dynamics with some appalling styling and ergonomic choices. It was heavy and not terribly powerful or efficient. Its only real enthusiast calling card was an available manual transmission, something no other hybrid offers, sporty or otherwise. Given that it was unloved by Americans from the start, the most surprising thing about the CR-Z is how long it lingered on the market. Not every car works; that's the nature of things. Whatever was wrong with the CR-Z could have been addressed with the sort of emergency refresh that the last-generation Civic got in response to being widely panned by critics and consumers. Instead, the CR-Z rotted on the vine rather than getting an investment to fulfill its original promise. In the meantime, the highest-zoot supercars and Honda's own Acura NSX have made hybridization cool again. There's no reason a small hatch couldn't benefit from some on-demand electric torque. In many respects, the CR-Z's time is now. It wasn't quite the right thing and arrived at definitely the wrong time. That's a shame, but don't cry over the CR-Z. It's gone to a better place. Related Video: This content is hosted by a third party. To view it, please update your privacy preferences. Manage Settings. News Source: Car and Driver Green Honda Coupe Hatchback Hybrid Performance