excessᴍᴀᴄʜɪɴᴀ

Luxury used to be something you could feel without having to explain it. In 2026, luxury is increasingly something you can justify in public while you enjoy it in private. Pickups and full-size SUVs have climbed into price territory once owned by flagship sedans, not because they offer rare technology, but because they offer the most legible status signal left: size, height, and dominance—wrapped in the moral camouflage of “utility.” This isn’t the first era of big American luxury; Cadillacs proved long ago that America will pay for acreage. What’s new is verticality, the social theater of towering hoods and command seating, and the way software and subscriptions now turn “ownership” into an ongoing access fee. Feature parity flattened the old luxury checklist, so the market moved to what can’t be replicated cheaply: space, narrative legitimacy, and post-purchase control.

Continue reading "The Pickup Killed the Luxury Sedan, Then Wore Its Skin"

Ralph Nader’s durable complaint about Detroit was not simply that cars could be dangerous. It was that the industry had a recurring habit of selling theater while treating engineering discipline as negotiable. Unsafe at Any Speed fixed public attention on the Corvair, but the larger accusation was that styling, marketing, and cost-cutting were too often allowed to outrank mechanical honesty. That complaint feels current again. The costume has changed. The gimmick is no longer tailfins or swing axles, but family crossovers and electric trucks sold on supercar launch numbers, as if an astonishing 0 to 60 time were the same thing as a well-engineered performance car.  

Tesla gave the genre its emblematic image when it promoted the Cybertruck by showing it beating a Porsche 911 while towing another 911. The spectacle worked because the modern market already wants to believe that the family hauler has inherited the supercar’s soul. MotorTrend reran the stunt with a Cybertruck Beast and a 911 Carrera T and found that the Porsche still won every quarter-mile run when the truck had the trailer attached. Tesla currently advertises the Cyberbeast at 2.6 seconds to 60 and 320 miles of range, but MotorTrend’s real-world towing test of a dual-motor Cybertruck with a 3,170-pound trailer returned 160 miles. Great internet, thin proof. The launch number is real. The implication that the vehicle has therefore become a coherent performance machine is not.  

Continue reading "The New Supercar Has Juice Box Holders"

America cannot get enough of zombies. From The Last of Us to The Walking Dead, the culture loves a body that keeps moving after the vital signs flatline. It was probably inevitable, then, that the country also kept one of its oldest car companies shambling along long after the metabolism stopped. Chrysler, and to a lesser extent Dodge, still draw a crowd because the old songs were excellent. That is not contempt. It is product archaeology. The clean version of the Big Three ended in January 1980, when Jimmy Carter signed the Chrysler Corporation Loan Guarantee Act. The 2009 bankruptcy rescue only reinforced the same lesson: at Chrysler, failure has long been negotiable. If you care about the rest of the industry, that matters.

Continue reading "It Hasn’t Been the Big Three For Decades"

Cadillac’s 4.2-liter Blackwing V8 was the sort of engine companies build when they want to announce that they still remember who they are. First shown in 2018 in the facelifted CT6 V-Sport, and later sold in production form as the CT6-V and CT6 Platinum 4.2, the hand-built, twin-turbocharged DOHC V8 was a clean-sheet Cadillac engine, not a tarted-up small-block with a better publicist. It was assembled at General Motors’ Performance Build Center in Bowling Green, signed by a single builder, and packaged like a modern European flagship motor, with its turbochargers mounted in the hot-V and its cylinder heads arranged in reverse-flow form. Cadillac was not playing at performance here. It was trying, briefly and against type, to behave like a serious luxury manufacturer.

That mattered because the engine arrived at a moment when Cadillac badly needed a center of gravity. For years the brand had oscillated between heritage theater and half-finished reinvention, forever promising a return to form and then wandering off toward another committee-approved compromise. The Blackwing V8 was different. It was expensive, technically ambitious, and unnecessary in exactly the right way. Nobody builds an all-new, Cadillac-exclusive, dual-overhead-cam, hot-V twin-turbo V8 because it pencils out nicely next to a crossover lease program. You build it because you want a flagship sedan that can stand in the same sentence as an S-Class, an Alpina, or an AMG product without needing an asterisk and a patriotic speech.

Continue reading "Cadillac’s Blackwing Could Have Been the Future"

(Extremely Rachel Maddow voice): To understand why, we need to look at the 1957 Eldorado Brougham—and a man named Antoine.

At $340,000, the Celestiq isn’t competing with Tesla or Mercedes. It isn’t even trying to be part of the same conversation. It’s a rebuttal—to a century of decline, to a half-century of compromises.

Continue reading "The $340,000 Celestiq Hatchback is Cadillac’s Only Hope"

What’s automotive kryptonite for enthusiasts? A brown manual diesel wagon, of course. In the U.S., this has been hard to find, but it’s getting harder still to find any combination of those words as every month in 2025 passes. As of August, 2025, the Volvo V60 is gone from U.S. showrooms, and the wagon’s time in the U.S. is officially over. Volvo’s announcement that it would pull all non-SUV models from its 2026 U.S. lineup made this official. These four now make up the entirety of the U.S. market for genuine wagons: the 2026 Mercedes-Benz E53 Hybrid Wagon at $93,350, the 2026 BMW M5 Wagon with a MSRP of $123,900, the 2026 Audi RS6 Avant Performance, $130,700, and the Porsche Taycan GTS Sport Turismo, from a staggering $156,100. These extremely rare, wildly expensive options are all that’s left of car-based wagons without the pretense of off-road cosplay.

Perhaps this is an untimely eulogy, as it could reasonably be said that the wagon’s moment has been gone for some time, but to watch Volvo give up is too much to let pass without words. In places like Maine, Berkeley, and Seattle, where Volvo 240 wagons once outnumbered residents, the Subaru Outback is as close as you will get. The truly staggering statistic about the standard V60’s departure is its price: at $71,250, the 2025 V60 Polestar Engineered (the sport model, vice the Cross Country crossover-esque variant) is more than $20,000 less expensive than the next lowest priced wagon that doesn’t allege off road capability: the Mercedes-Benz E53.

Continue reading "Requiem for the Wagon"

Lexus would say the LC has no predecessor, yet its lineage can be traced to the superlative Lexus SC and Japanese-market Toyota Soarer (Z30) produced from 1992–2000. The SC defined proportion and restraint while the LFA (2010–2012) proved Lexus could marry precision with passion. The LC 500 joined them as a clear continuation of the line: Japan’s grand-touring ideal translated for a new century. Introduced at the 2016 Detroit Auto Show, the LC was less a fresh start so much as the next interpretation of what the Z30 and LFA began.

By the time the LC arrived in 2017, Lexus had gone more than fifteen years without a true grand tourer. The SC430 was a luxury hardtop convertible that abandoned even a hint of athleticism and is thus a deviation that will not be discussed further. The LC was something new, a design-forward flagship luxury GT rather than a direct successor, yet its lineage was unmistakable.

Continue reading "The Best Japanese Grand Tourer Ever Built"

The most beautiful French car of the postwar era is the Citroën DS Décapotable by Henri Chapron. The DS itself, unveiled at the 1955 Paris Motor Show, was already a break with the prevailing logic of car design. Aerodynamic and futuristic, it drew 12,000 orders on its first day. Roland Barthes called it “a change in the mythology of cars,” and decades later an international jury would name it the most beautiful car of all time. That judgment was rendered on the sedan, but the four-door was a concession to use. The idea runs cleaner without it.

In Chapron’s hands the DS resolves. The Décapotable’s handmade doors were lengthened by four inches to balance the profile once the rear doors and B-pillars were gone. The one-piece rear quarter panels, reshaped tail, and lightweight fiberglass boot lid establish a continuous taper from the low, raked windscreen to the trailing edge of the car. Reinforced sills and underbody bracing preserve structural integrity, so the hydropneumatic suspension keeps its level, unruffled ride. The proportions settle into something classical without surrendering the car’s strangeness. Only 1,365 were built between 1960 and 1971, each hand-finished with bespoke trim in fifteen paints, thirteen leather colors, and three carpet hues. With the roof stowed, the car reads as a complete sentence.

Continue reading "Have You Ever Seen Anything as Lovely as a Citroën DS Décapotable?"

It’s often implied the Supra was developed first. In truth, the Lexus SC and Z30 Toyota Soarer preceded it by nearly two years, and they were so well realized that Toyota’s sports-car team later lifted their subframes, suspension, and driveline for the Mark IV Supra. The SC400 in particular became an unlikely equalizer, chosen by people with eight- to eleven-figure bank balances who could have chosen the BMW 850i or Mercedes 600SEC at twice or three times the price, respectively. From a brand that had arrived only two years prior, wealthy Americans bought the stunning Japanese coupe they likely never realized had been designed in California. Figures as divergent as the Notorious B.I.G. (who preferred the passenger seat), Wayne Newton, and Bill Gates owned them. The Lexus SC earned praise from both the automotive press and the celebrity circuit alike as a quietly devastating world-beater.

Japanese sports coupes from the 1990s are commanding prices in 2025 that would have sounded absurd a decade ago. The Nissan 300ZX Twin Turbo now averages around $30,000, the Mazda RX-7 FD climbs past $50,000, and even a base Mark IV Supra fetches about $65,000, with clean Turbos pushing well into six figures. Mid-range cars such as the Mitsubishi 3000GT VR-4 and its Dodge Stealth R/T twin still change hands in the $20,000 to $40,000 bracket, while the base 300ZX, the 3000GT SL, and the Dodge Stealth base model remain in the teens. Talk of a bubble follows every auction, and in Japan that word is loaded because the 1990s asset bubble burst rewrote the nation’s economy and disrupted its society.

Continue reading "America’s Lexus: The California-Born Lexus SC is the Hidden Bargain in Japanese Sport Coupes"

Welcome to the place where logic breaks down, not with a bang but with $500 bottles of brake fluid (Rolls SZ) and the vague smell of an overheated AMEX Centurion. The below cars are not “bad cars” in the normal sense; they’re proof that the right combination of hubris, panic, and corporate disarray can move mountains, or at least a few tons of Connolly leather and steel. This is the Absurdity Index, where deeply strange automotive decisions in the luxury segment finally get their due.

Continue reading "The Absurdity Index"

By the late 1980s, Mercedes-Benz seemed untouchable. The W126 S-Class had set the standard for presence, durability, and sales. Stuttgart was not supposed to be surprised. Then BMW launched the E32.

BMW’s new 7 Series arrived in 1986. In 1987 came the 750iL, Germany’s first postwar V12 sedan, and the insult landed cleanly. Mercedes was not just caught flat-footed by Munich’s nerve, but by how much ground BMW covered in one move.

Continue reading "Mercedes W140: The Last Heirloom Luxury Car"

A recent article by Hagerty titled “The Tech Driving Today’s Vehicles Could Turn Them into Tomorrow’s Junk” landed without resistance because the premise is already visible in the cars themselves. Modern vehicles are no longer machines with software layered on top. They are software systems with hardware attached. When the software ages out, the car ages out with it. The smartphone comparison is not rhetorical. It is literal. A device can be physically intact and functionally dead at the same time.

Continue reading "GM’s Rebuke of CarPlay Will Not End Well"

BMW had built its name on sports sedans. Then it launched the 750i and 750iL, and the luxury hierarchy broke. Mercedes delayed the next S-Class and spent years engineering a reply. Rolls-Royce and Bentley stayed with old formulas into the late 1990s, which reads less like confidence than exposure. Jaguar did not keep up. Aston Martin’s Lagonda was already a technological cul-de-sac. Cadillac and Lincoln had long since exited the conversation. The 1987 750iL did not refine the flagship. It reset it. Nearly 4 decades later, the template still holds.

Continue reading "The BMW 750iL Changed Everything"