Autos

It hurts to see something like this. From all reports, Fieros Forever was a work of love by a man named Tim Evans, and his specialty shop worked on, preserved, and displayed Pontiac’s sporty little mid-engined runabout. The shop, located in Midland, Michigan, was struck by floodwaters that were released when the Edenville Dam failed during immense rainfall this month. The floodwaters then crested the Sanford Dam, upstream on the Tittabawassee River from Midland, where Fieros Forever is located. As you can see, the result is heartbreaking. Of course, these are cars, which can—given time and money—be repaired. The human cost of the flooding will be harder to fix than a handful of Pontiacs. But what happened to this Fiero shop is just a slice of the unfolding tragedy in the Tittabawasse...

You might remember that a while back, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety crashed a few modern cars into their vintage counterparts to show, in part, how far crash safety had progressed. But what stuck in our minds wasn’t how intact the passenger cells of the modern cars remained, but rather how mangled the old cars were. We’re thinking in particular of the ’59 Bel Air slamming into a 2009 Malibu, and the Nissan Tsuru (an early 1990s Sentra sold in Mexico until 2017) crashing into a modern Sentra. Yowzers. How about two 1970s-vintage cars crashing into each other? And make one of them full-sized in the 1970s sense of the term—aircraft carriers, basically—and the other the relevant company’s compact. We’re talking about the Ford Pinto, Chevrolet Vega, an...