Overhaulin' Hits The Airwaves
Maybe you've seen the hot babes and very sensitive gentlemen on TLC's Trading Spaces take their stylistic wrecking ball to people's houses and walk away scot-free after carpeting the ceiling in shag. Who knew Astroturf isn't easy to sleep on? Now the same network is conspiring against us with Overhaulin', where they'll get your car away for a week and do everything needed to turn a high-mileage clunker into a sleek, performance-minded machine. Stylist Chip Foose will guide a team of mechanics through the transformation. See www.discovery.com for more on the show, or just wait until early next year to watch the actual bloodletting.
Betsy Most Popular Car Name
Ever wonder what other people call their cars? Well, you and "Tuner Surprise" can sit back and enjoy the results of Precision Tune's contest to pick the best car names. Out of more than 400 people who entered online or in Precision Tune shops, 21 percent of the cars were tagged with human names like Betsy or Bessie or some other name women stopped using in the 1940s. Some 14 percent of people named their cars some clever way after a color. Some of the best names included Holy Roller, a 1998 Mercury Sable owned by an Oklahoma pastor, Blue Flame, a pizza delivery truck in Gulf Breeze, Fla. and Connie Celica, of Herndon, Va. Read more on the funny cars at www.precisiontune.com and prepare to re-suture your sides together.
Endeavor: All the Road Rage
Maybe you've seen SpongeBob SquarePants on TV, soiling the interior of Mitsubishi's new Endeavor crossover wagon with his spooky, preternatural wetness. Well he's not the only one - rest assured you too can get just as damp over the Endeavor as America's most waterlogged superhero. Because, dear reader, here we have the first Mitsu SUV that acts like it has some manners on pavement, with enough turf-trodding skills to extract you from the occasional off-ramp off-road excursion.
The Endeavor is a basic, low-frills wagon with a big V6 heart and front- or all-wheel drive. Now, ten years ago, the notion of front-drive in this class would have seemed as silly as Prada cowboy boots. Then along came the Toyota RAV4 and, well, Prada cowboy boots. No one here at 2NR has been quite the same since on either front.
Maybe the most effective bit of the Endeavor's mechanical package is its stout 215-hp, 3.5-liter V6. With a growl and a smack on your back, it jerks the Endeavor to life. It's a transverse powerplant teamed with a four-speed automatic-short a gear of state of the art, to be sure, but pretty well suited to the V6's hefty torque. Sportronic controls come grafted to the side gate of the shift pattern, in case you want to play Speed Racer and can't get to your Nintendo 64 in time, otherwise this and similar semi-manual toys are just that.
Choose four-wheel drive and you get a transfer case engaged all the time; choose front-wheel drive and you'll immediately be classified as a poser, with the potential upside of saving a few thousand dollars off the Endeavor's $25,000 estimated base price. Either way you get a strut suspension in front and a multi-link rear end and not a live axle to be found. Steering is pretty clean for something with all-weather pretension, and the ride control proves why car platforms make better city wagons than nasty ol' trucks. It's just hard to upset the Endeavor's composure, short of cranking all the steering and power into the same corner at the worst possible moment. Say, during conception.
In and out, the Endeavor's styling is bound to cause a stir in households more used to the sedate trappings of a Ford Explorer. The body's liberally dosed with crests and slits and facets, so much so you'll swear the designers got extra points for them. Inside the center stack is arranged in a Gobot shape, with warning-light eyes and a metallic silver paint-altogether weird in execution but usefully arranged-and the instruments are big and lit blue at night, a classy touch in an otherwise angular, overly-styled affair.
The Endeavor comes in base LS, mid-range ES and the most expensive Limited flavors. None of them comes with a third-row seat, but they all get the same big V6 engine and comfortable five-adult seating. For between $25,000 and $35,000, they've built a fair competitor that out-flashes the vanilla Toyota Highlander, for sure. Also to the entire range of Transformer toys, and several high-priced companions we know.