Chevy El Camino, Mercury Cougar, Subaru WRX STI: The Dopest Cars I Found For Sale Online

Harley’s street bikes have never appealed all that much to me, but flat trackers are some of the coolest motorcycles you’ll ever see. This street tracker, then, seems like a healthy compromise — it just needs one little change.

Please, please, buy this bike and change out those bars. I know a wide, less rear-swept, dirt-style bar might make for a less comfortable rider triangle, but consider that it would look so much better. Isn’t that worth it?

Is the El Camino the perfect car? I’ll take the Ranchero too, as a fellow ute, though I do think the El Camino looks better. It’s smaller than a pickup, it should drive better, yet you can still haul anything you want around in the back. Including your friends, if they don’t care much for seatbelts.

The loss of utes in the United States after the deaths of the El Camino and Ranchero is a travesty, but we’re lucky these older cars are still out there. They may be a little beat up, sure, but that’s part of the charm.

Speaking of cars where being beat up is part of the charm, how about a thoroughly ragged S14? This kouki has a wide exterior coated in rivets, some rattlecan-looking paint, and absolutely zero details on what’s under the hood.

Well, okay, not zero details. We know that whatever’s in there comes from a car with an automatic transmission, and it passes smog in California. Does that mean it’s a stock KA24? Is it an SR20 out of something with an automatic? There is no earthly way of knowing until you buy the car. It’s like automotive gacha.

Here, we get a certified problem: A car that “was running great then it just broke down,” and the seller can’t diagnose the issue. Wouldn’t it be nice to fix something real? Set your hands on a piece of machinery, diagnose a problem, and get it working again?

Let’s think this through a little. If a car just suddenly stops, and won’t come back to life, do we think it’s power related? Dead alternator caused the battery to run low? There’s only one way to know for sure: Buy the Volvo.

You’ve gotta love the XJ Cherokee. Simple, rugged, beautiful — what more could you ask for in an off-roader? Don’t say “body panels that are all the same color,” that’s gauche.

This Cherokee may not pass smog in its home state of California, but for how many of you is that really an issue? Buy this XJ, haul it out of state, and take it down the trails or up the dunes of your dreams. Do not repaint it.

The Mercedes-Benz 190E is an interesting test for your age. To my parents, it’s the Mercedes people got just to say they had a Mercedes, the cheapest way into the brand. They don’t see the appeal.

My generation, though, sees the smallest Mercedes of the era as the lightest way into this styling — not to mention all the associations from the Evo models and their performance pedigree. To us, the 190E is cool as hell.

Hot take: More cars need to be yellow. I’m not entirely sure how I feel about bronze wheels on top of that, but the yellow alone is worth celebrating — especially on an FJ, where the exterior color continues inside. Did automotive design peak here?

I think it may well have, at least before this particular car was besieged with fake “this vehicle is too big” lights. Stop putting those on your cars, people. That’s not something to brag about, and for most of you it isn’t even true.

Somewhere, deep in my heart, there’s a truth I’ve long avoided: I am meant to be a supermoto rider. I was put on this earth to sit atop a single-cylinder dirt bike on sportbike tires, hopping curbs and pulling wheelies and generally being a menace to society.

I resist this calling because I like not being in jail, but every day I hear its siren song. The sumo life calls to me, it begs me to ride down a full set of stairs in a public park somewhere. This is my Green Goblin mask.

If yellow isn’t your speed, but you still want something in the vaguely off-roady vein of the FJ, how about an orange Land Rover? Sure it’s a $3,800 Land Rover, which is traditionally not a recipe for reliability or continued financial stability, but: Orange.

A luxury car this cheap, without any description of its condition in the ad, would usually be a terrible purchase. It’d be the kind of things that bankrupts you just by looking at it, and requires you sacrifice your firstborn to pay the local Euro specialty shop. However, and I cannot stress this enough: This car is orange.

You really don’t hear much about Victory any more. To some degree that’s to be expected, since the company went under back in 2017, but the name seems to rarely come up even in the context of used bikes. Do people think about Victory any more?

Maybe that’s why this one is so cheap. You’d never see a Harley dresser this new and in this condition for $10,000, and that’s before all the aftermarket parts on this bike: an air cleaner, cams, exhaust, tune, all the kinds of things that Harley loyalists charge extra for on their used bikes.

Does the Cougar look better than the Mustang? I don’t know that it does, but I don’t know that it doesn’t either. Sure, not much is different between teh two, but the front and rear ends make such a difference when compared to that oh-so-distinctive Mustang styling.

Maybe it’s the contrarian in me, but I see some real benefits to the Cougar side of the equation. This Cougar especially, with its 600 wheel horsepower and nine-inch limited-slip diff. Slap some Hoosiers on this and you could have a blast at the strip.

I think we need to steal the “when men were men” language from the fascists and start saying it about trucks. Modern pickups, with their little built-in stairs that are necessary to access the chest-high beds, are no longer trucks — they’re not built to haul nor to do work, they’re not built for purpose. Modern trucks are symbols, caricatures of what trucks once meant, but have actually ceded all functional ground to vans.

This Nissan 720, though, is a truck. Sure, the bed’s short, but are you telling me you wouldn’t be able to find a way to get 4x8 sheets of plywood home in it? Will you stand there and say that an equally short bed, on a pickup two feet taller, would be an improvement? No. This Nissan is from when trucks were trucks.

God, I am a sucker for a desaturated blue. Maybe it’s just the Homestuck in me, the adoration in my youth of Vriska Serket, but gray-blues just hit right. I know, I know, this Volkswagen Bus is a brighter shade than Vriska’s place in the hemospectrum, but you see where I’m going with this.

This bus may need a little bit of love, some minor rust recovery and some more severe interior upholstery, but at the end of that work you could well be left with the best-looking VW ever made. Isn’t that worth it? For the color?

This is such a classic genre of WRX. World Rally Blue, blacked-out headlight housings, carbon hood, front-mount intercooler, Volk TE37s of questionable legitimacy. It’s tough to tell if that spoke-to-rim angle is correct in the images, but know that many of these wheels are fakes.

These STI hatches are just fantastic little cars, provided you care for them properly and don’t allow them to succumb to any of the classic Subaru faults. Run premium gas, slap on a set of equal-length headers, and top up the oil every time you fill the tank.

This C10 saddens me, because it’s a truck that makes me question my ability to drive it. It’s a three-on-the-tree gearbox, and the only time I’ve ever driven a column-mounted manual was the time I accidentally did a burnout in a friend’s lawn with a tractor. I swear I thought it was in neutral when I dropped the clutch, not second gear.

It would be worth learning to shift on the column, though, for a truck this beautiful. You don’t see front ends this layered any more, and it’s honestly a shame for our modern era of styling. This truck isn’t trying to be aggressive, it’s just a great-looking vehicle with practicality to spare.