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Welcome to Down On The Street , where we admire old vehicles found parked on the streets of the Island That Rust Forgot: Alameda, California. Here's a little car that's nearly extinct in rust-prone areas. We saw a '77 Accord in this series not long ago, and it was startling how many readers had never seen a first-gen Accord on the street. Now we're going to look at an example of the early 2nd-gen Accord , which was still quite small (2,076 pounds) and was the first Accord to be built in North America. Horsepower was up to 76- yes, those weight and power numbers would be considered laughably small nowadays, though these cars drive just fine- and Honda's rep for reliability was really getting entrenched in the American consciousness by this time. The price back in 1982? $8,449 for the LX, or $1,050 more than the base Accord hatch. Clearly, the cachet of the LX badging wasn't enough to stop some vocab-challenged vandal from keying "ASS" into the hood paint...
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Welcome to Down On The Street , where we admire old vehicles found parked on the streets of the Island That Rust Forgot: Alameda, California. We haven't seen many Hondas in this series, though I'm still hoping to find a very early Civic or- better still- a 600 on the island. The early-80s Civic wagon is a good example of the Japanese cars that shifted American car buyers' opinion from the "cheap, gets good gas mileage" view of the 70s towards the "these things never break" view widely held today. They were once everywhere, but nostalgia doesn't adhere too strongly to a reliable appliance... and so most were crushed as they hit 300,000 or so miles on the clock. 2,033 pounds. That's right, this car barely weighed one ton, and it would haul four passengers and plenty of cargo. With only 69 horsepower, lots of wind noise, and no cupholders, a car with the same specs as the '83 Civic wagon would be laughed out of the showrooms by car buyers today....
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Just finishing a single 24 Hours of LeMons race can mean a one-way trip to The Crusher after the race is over, as was the case with the Team Come From Behind Probe . After all, a couple days of metal-crunching, rod-throwin' action tend to be rough on a sub-$500 car. That's what makes the glorious career of the Eyesore Racing CRX so great; Soichiro's little 2-seater not only finished three races, it placed 7th at the October '07 Altamont race, 7th again at the December '07 Thunderhill event, and took the coveted People's Choice award (along with a respectable 18th-place ranking) at the May '08 Altamont race. However, even a Honda can't live forever, and team member Wrappedinbacon sends us this photo of Eyesore Pimpin's dearly departed race car. Jump to read his description and see the entire Eyesore CRX Greatest Hits gallery. galleryPost('DOTSJEyesorePimp', 3, 'Rise And Fall Of The Eyesore Racing Honda CRX'); I saw the post about the rotting...
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newVideoPlayer("/87_CRX_JDM_476.flv", 506, 423,""); While the American version of the Honda CRX could circle the globe in five seconds flat , late-80s robots were tearing up their prefectures in the Cyber Sports CR-X. Featuring a "1500 Hyper 16 Valve" engine and "Extra Window," the Cyber-Sports CR-X presented a terrifyingly accurate vision of the future. Looks like Jeff Beck cashed in with Honda, since there's at least one other CRX ad using his song.
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newVideoPlayer("/86_CRX_Si_476.flv", 506, 423,""); The mid-80s Kleine GTI was lots of fun, but those willing to sacrifice the back seat and go Japanese instead of German could get an extra 18 horses in a lighter chassis. We're talking about the first-gen CRX Si, and this ad shows that it could circumnavigate the globe in a mere five seconds.
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Some folks are satisfied with making a Honda Civicamino to haul motorcycles and leaving it at that, but others look at a fuel-sipping Honda and see a house! Here's a CRX with a nice hardwood camper shell (complete with with porthole-style windows) built in, which San Francisco-based reader Rob photographed for us. We're guessing the fuel economy took a hit, but it probably still manages to get 30+ MPG. Make the jump to see another photo and read Rob's description. This was found in the Western Addtion, on Lyon I think it was. Looked like they used old bowling lane or basketball court wood flooring for the majority of the constuction. It was covered in a layer of thin fiberglass in an effort to water proof it....??? I took 2 fotos at different times of day. I particularly liked the little wagon doors in the rear with small round windows!
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It seems that Honda sprayed half its early CRXs white, but not many regular Civics got that color, especially not by the late 80s. The rarity of white fourth-gen Civics proved to be the undoing of Thomas Kenney, the Lawn Guyland resident known to police as the "Bad Hatter." Mr. Kenney wore some great hats during his robberies, and he even thought to bandage his fingertips to avoid leaving prints... but DNA traces on a dropped bandage and the rarity of white '89 Civics with no hubcaps unraveled his criminal master plan, and now he'll be stamping out license plates for brand-new Civics for the foreseeable future. [Newsday]
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There's a lot of talk lately about the skyrocketing value of the Geo Metro, what with high gas prices and all, but it seems that folks are forgetting about the astounding fuel economy of the Honda CRX HF. The HF got over 50 MPG highway and was orders of magnitude more fun to drive than the Chevy Sprint/Geo Metro, yet you don't hear much about it these days. I spotted this example, in the white/gray/red color scheme most mid-80s CRXs seem to have, parked just a few doors down from the VW Rabbit Diesel pickup and decided that 22 years and 50 MPG gives this car DOTS status, regardless of how many are still out there. Honda was still branding the CRX with Civic emblems in the mid-80s, but the little two-seater felt like a totally different car. The HF got a mere 58 horses from its 8-valve 1300 (compared to 91 in the hot Si's fuel-injected 1500), but 58 horses is plenty with a 1,713-pound car. I've had a couple of these cars, and they'll keep going forever if you don't...
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Technically, the Peugeot Mi16 beat the Mercedes-Benz 6.9 in last Friday's Choose Your Eternity poll , but we're talking 327 to 317 votes here. When all is said and done, however, France still needs to take on Britain in a PCH Superpower Challenge... but we're postponing that apocalyptic battle for another day, because tipster EdNiedermeyer sent in a mighty Wankelized contender from not-often-seen-in-PCH Japan (earning a half-credit towards a Project Car Hell Tipster T-shirt in the process), and we've found a Rotarian opponent that stacks up pretty well against it. So throw those pistons in the trash and stagger into the sumo ring to face your 800-pound opponent, because it's Rotary Swap Hell Day! We dove into the searing flames of Hayabusa Honda 600 Hell a few months back, but the problem with the Hayabusa is that it has pistons . What a Honda 600 really needs is an engine with no reciprocating mass and an even more deadly potential power-to-weight ratio than the Hayabusa...
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Back when we had our What's the Cutoff Year For Japanese DOTS Cars poll , the image I used as an example was this '87 Honda Civic 4WD wagon. I'd meant to DOTS-ize this car soon afterward, but I kept getting distracted by cars and trucks that seemed so much more, well, interesting . But 3rd-gen four-wheel-drive Civics are rare and weird- hardly anyone bought them new, they turned into red powder in the rusty parts of the world, and California's stringent emissions tests have doomed many 80s Civics (some of which have the most complicated tangle of vacuum hoses ever placed in an engine compartment ) to the cold jaws of The Crusher. So here we go- today the little four-wheelin' Civic gets to shine! And, since we had a DOTS Car of the Week Poll last Friday, let's have one today- after you check out the gallery, make your vote count! 1987 was the first year of Honda's so-called "Real Time" four-wheel-drive system, which engaged automatically. Toyota's...
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So yesterday we pitted a couple of classic Motown wagons against each other in the Choose Your Eternity poll, and the result was so close to a tie as to make no difference (with the Dodge photo-finishing past the Ford). Today we're going to look at a...
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