Welcome to Craigslist Crapshoot, our weekly search for the most bizarre, awesome, and/or terrible vehicles that the online classifieds has to offer.
Kill it with fire, nuke it from orbit, give it to Mikey, he hates everything. There’s lots of ways to put an end to something, but sometimes it’s harder than others. That’s what we wen’t looking for last week: cars and trucks that are likely impossible to kill. We’ll delve into immortality in a sec, but first this week’s quest.
Wo likes turbocharged cars? Show of hands. Pretty much everybody, right? Well, if one turbo is good, then multiple turbos must be even better, just ask Maserati. What we want to find this week are the best deals on cars equipped with multiple turbos. We’ll allow twin-charged cars and trucks too.
As always, we want your finds to go down in infamy and not in the site’s spam filter. Since we’ve changed commenting systems, you may need to update your commenter account. Make sure you have a Disqus account – they’re free and easy to get – and then comment away.
I was listening to a show on NPR last weekend about research into longevity centered on gene manipulation. The started, as scientists are wont to do, with a worm that has a normal life span of about 18 days. By manipulating a single gene in the worm’s DNA they were able to increase its life ten-fold. It wasn’t just a wrinkly old worm sitting around the senior center either, what they accomplished as slowing of the aging process. The same gene engineering was done in other species, including mice, with similar results.
Of course we all know that they just had to look to the types of cars and trucks you all found last week to study the source of seeming immortality. That’s because many of the ads you found were for cars that have a rep for longevity and a couple exhibit that.
Let’s start with the Toyota pickups found by both smalleyxb122 and Keifmo. If you’re familiar with the one-true Top Gear then you’ll know that the ’70s and ’80s editions possess Terminator levels of unstoppability. The Dodge Dart would be a nice garage mate for either of those trucks according to mdharrell owing to its reputation for sturdiness. If only the new Fiat/Alfa-based Dart had the same rep.
As you might expect, Volvo made the list, with a tidy 145 ad offered up by Sjalabais who lamented the changes made to the model just prior to the introduction of the 200 series. Uglified or not, they’re still around in droves.
Of course if you’re looking for a companion car for Methuselah then you needn’t go far from the old Mercedes section of the classifieds, as pointed out by Tomsk, Keifmo again, and our winner, Krautwursten. That winning ad showed a car—a 1988 Mercedes 190D 2.5 that not only comes with a reputation for longevity but the odometer to back that up. There’s 750,000 kilometers on the car’s clock, and it’s seemingly still going strong. There were cars that even MB admitted they over engineered and its one that I would dearly like to own myself. All that means it’s our winner.
Congrats to Krautwyrsten, and thank you all for keeping the dream alive. Now, let’s go get blown multiple times!
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