Blake Z. Rong

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Stories By Blake Z. Rong

  • Culture
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    The Last O.G.

    To get to Roland George’s shop in Brooklyn, you take the A or C trains out to the Shepherd Avenue station, deep into the part of the city where the tourists don’t visit. But all the world passes through New York, and all the legions of Saab devotees up and down the Eastern Seaboard pass through Swedish Auto Service in East New York, the shop that Roland George has run for the past two decades. It is the last establishment in Brooklyn to specialize in Saabs: a rare beacon, for a dying breed.

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  • Ford
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    The 2020 Ford Explorer: A Dinosaur Reinvents Itself

    The Ford Explorer emerged mewling and blinking sometime during the Cretaceous period. The year was 1990. Pterodactyls dominated the skies above great lumbering beasts, their huge wings blotting out the sun. And from its ancestral birthing ponds of the Louisville Assembly Plant the Explorer clung forth to the silted banks, crawling forward in low gear, dragging its heavy truck frame through the sand, its Eddie Bauer plumage resplendent in anticipation of mating rituals.

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  • News
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    This Tiny Vermont Shop Is The Singer Of Classic Range Rovers

    Taylor Congleton grew up on the water, in South Hero, Vermont—an island in the midst of Lake Champlain, tucked quietly away between upstate New York and the Quebec border. Nowadays he raises three majestic hound dogs who occasionally inspect his work. On the weekends he sails a hydrofoil catamaran painted with Flying Tigers livery, a tribute to his World War II veteran grandfather. He has the tasteful trappings of Range Rover life. And within the cramped blue walls of a 1,600 square-foot shop in

    By Blake Z. Rong
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  • News
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    Trans Am Champion Racer Drives Around In A Giant Chicken

    “El Gallo Grande” is an eye-searingly yellow 1973 Oldsmobile Ninety-Eight sedan with the half-crowing head of an enormous rooster sticking out of the roof, a beautiful sweeping rooster tail from the trunk, and a horn that plays chicken sounds to the bemusement of Los Angeles motorists. It is part art car, part advertising platform for various chicken establishments, part potential Lemons car. It is NASCAR’s true Car of Tomorrow. And it is the love of racer Tommy Kendall’s life.

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  • News
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    You Can Now Command Your Hyundai Genesis With A 'Free' Amazon Echo

    You can do all kinds of stuff with your Amazon Echo, like order a pizza, listen to Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, buy a crossbow, a paleo diet cookbook, or that trusty Amazon stalwart, the 55-gallon drum of Passion Natural Water-Based Lubricant. You can even call an Uber driver. But you won’t need to do that as much—not if you drive a Hyundai Genesis G90.

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  • News
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    When Audi's Le Mans Racer Meets A Eurofighter Typhoon

    These days, your average Le Mans prototype race car doesn’t so much resemble a car you can buy as it does a 90-million-Euro single-seater multirole fighter jet with twin turbofan engines, capable of 20,000 afterburner-propelled pounds of thrust, a 65,000-ft service ceiling, and 9 g turns, carrying eight tons of bristling weaponry, including HARM, Brimstone, and Storm Shadow air-to-surface missiles, and all the buttons, gizmos, geegaws, screens, and fail-safe computer redundancies that would give

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  • Wrenching
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    Le Cheapest Classic Car Ever Is A $1,600 Renault Le Car

    Have we got a car for you! A bona-fide classic! The best in Gallic ingenuity and Space-Age thriftiness! A funky little ride that gets great mileage and packs in all the charm! Yes, this beige 1980 Renault Le Car is a classic, and, some may argue, was always a classic. Never say that even the French, foisting this upon us in the Eighties with the help of AMC (aka the House Un-American Motors Committee) aren’t prone to a bit of self-deprecation!

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  • Motorcycles
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    Why This Barrier-Breaking Woman Was Banned From The World's Deadliest Race

    “Some women refuse to be a slave of routine,” said Pathé News in 1962, the year Beryl Swain entered the Isle of Man Tourist Trophy race. “Mrs. Beryl Swain not only works an office job and holds down a home, but has an unlikely hobby—motorcycle racing. And,” says the announcer, with some muted astonishment, “she’s good at it!” As good as she was, she was only allowed to do it once.

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  • News
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    Elio Motors Has Spent More Time Lobbying For Three-Wheel Cars Than Building Actual Cars

    Elio Motors was founded in 2009 for an ambitious effort: bringing 3-wheeled, fully-enclosed trikes capable of achieving 84 miles per gallon to market for just $6,800. The company began taking “refundable reservation agreements” as much as $1,000 in 2013, for a debut on July 2014. Then the third quarter of 2015. Then mid-2016—right around now, actually. You still can’t buy one—but the company has spent years changing the laws in nearly every state in hopes that someday, you might be able to drive

    By Blake Z. Rong
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  • Culture
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    In 1991 A GMC Syclone Could Whoop A Ferrari's Ass

    This ain’t your mother’s car review. Hell no, amigo. This is a bare-knuckled, down-and-goddamn-dirty, grab-you-by-the-throat knockdown drag-fight between the most highfalutin’ European, Eye-talian exotic supercar and a good ol’ boy in a Johnny Cash suit. Hell yeah! This is some booze-time, gun-totin’, South-Will-Rise-Again fun with some real fast rides! Hold on to yer ankles, chicken-shits, it’s Car And Driver’s September 1991 comparison test between the GMC Syclone and the Ferrari 348ts. Goddam

    By Blake Z. Rong
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  • News
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    The Researchers Who Broke Volkswagen's Emissions Scandal Are Still Scrambling For Money

    There is often no glory in muckraking. The researchers at West Virginia University’s Center for Alternative Fuels Engines and Emissions had just $70,000 in grants and research funding when they uncovered one of the greatest emissions scandals of the 21st century: Volkswagen’s diesel emissions cheat, which would go on to cost the world’s second-largest car company $14.7 billion. Almost a year later, the center still operates on a shoestring.

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  • News
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    Toyota's Mythical New Supra May Have A 400-Horsepower Twin-Turbo V6

    There may be a new Toyota Supra! There may always be a new Supra around, in fact, something we’ve been dreaming about ever since the last one rolled off the Motomachi line in 1998, a rumor with as much lasting power as the one of a mid-engined Corvette. Someday these two majestic creatures will arise from our fevered dreams of automotive perfection, and do battle at the shores of Avalon, the legendary floating island of Arthurian legend, though Corona works too.

    By Blake Z. Rong
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  • Buying
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    I Drove Every Aston Martin

    A scream rang from across the canyons. A dull roar, really, dull only because I haven't yet punched it, sitting Right Here in an Aston Martin Vanquish, and I am in a devastating, crippling traffic jam that only the Malibu hills could provide: Ferrari 430, McLaren MP4-12C, Nissan GTR, Maserati GranTurismo convertible, a sibling Vantage Volante, and then the crème de la crème, today's MVP—an early Acura NSX, on stretched tires wrapping BBS wheels, OG NSX BBS, and the lot are blatting and popping

    By Blake Z. Rong
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