John Lloyd
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Articles by John Lloyd
A 1970 Buick GSX Has No VIN of Its Own. Here's How to Prove the GSX and the Stage 1
Almost everything that makes a 1970 Buick GSX look like a GSX can be bought or reproduced. The black stripes, the rear wing, the hood-mounted tachometer and the Saturn Yellow or Apollo White paint are all within a restorer's reach, and sellers know it. What cannot be reproduced is the factory record, and that is where the value sits. This installment of our originality series takes up the 1970 Buick GSX and the two questions under it: is this a real GSX, and is it a real Stage 1?
Mercedes Crashed Its Own CLA Hybrid Into Its Own Electric CLA’s Door at 56 km/h, With Eight Dummies Aboard
The CLA Shooting Brake hybrid at the moment it hits the driver’s side of the electric CLA. Both cars were travelling at 56 km/h. Photo: Mercedes-Benz Group AG (press image) Mercedes-Benz drove a CLA Shooting Brake hybrid into the driver’s door of an all-electric CLA sedan with both cars doing 56 km/h (35 mph), no braking, and eight crash dummies on board.
Travis Barker Thinks His LS3-Swapped ’59 Impala Makes 495 HP. Chevy Rates the Base LS3 at 430
Representative image: a 1959 Chevrolet Impala convertible set up as a lowrider. Not Travis Barker's car. Photo: Accord14 via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 Jay Leno looked under the hood of Travis Barker’s 1959 Chevrolet Impala convertible and guessed the LS3 in there made “about 300 horsepower, something like that.” Barker’s answer: “I think it’s 495.” The exchange is in the latest episode of Jay Leno’s Garage, posted to the show’s YouTube channel on October 12.
Liam Neeson Is a Mongoose Driving a Super Snake, and on Paper That’s the Best Part of His New Chase Movie
An earlier S550-generation Shelby Mustang Widebody Super Snake. The Mongoose uses the current S650-based car. Photo: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2017_Shelby_Mustang_Widebody_Super_Snake_(44608226584).jpg">Sicnag</a> / CC BY 2.0 A movie called The Mongoose puts its hero behind the wheel of a car called the Super Snake. Whether that’s a wink or a happy accident, it’s the best thing about Liam Neeson’s next action movie on paper.
Thelma Todd Was Found Dead in Her Lincoln in 1935. It Was Ruled an Accident. Hollywood’s Been Squinting at That Ever Since
A 1934 Lincoln from the same era as Todd's Phaeton; her car's whereabouts are unknown. Photo: rsaxvc / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0 On the morning of December 16, 1935, Thelma Todd’s maid went up to the garage above the Pacific Coast Highway and found the actress slumped behind the wheel of her chocolate-brown 1934 Lincoln Phaeton. The ignition was on. Todd was dead. The cause was carbon monoxide poisoning, and it was officially ruled accidental.
Koenigsegg’s Gemera Hit Dubai Autodrome. Is It 1,700 HP or 2,300? Koenigsegg’s Own Website Can’t Decide
Representative image of a Koenigsegg Gemera, not the car in the Dubai video. Photo: Calreyn88 / Wikimedia Commons (CC0). A reel from the spotter account cf.cars1, tagged at Dubai Autodrome, shows a Koenigsegg Gemera on track. The caption reads “Koenigsegg Gemera hot weather testing at Dubai Autodrome today.” Which Gemera, though, is anyone’s guess, and Koenigsegg’s own website isn’t helping. That is the whole post.
On a Ferrari 308 GTB, the vetroresina body is only as valuable as the paperwork that proves it
Every Ferrari 308 GTB built before mid-1977 invites the same question from a serious buyer: is it a Vetroresina? The Scaglietti-built fiberglass cars are the most sought-after of the 308 line, lighter than the steel-bodied cars that followed and, in European dry-sump form, more powerful than the US versions. But a fiberglass body is not a line on a title, and published totals for how many were built run from 712 to 808. That gap is the lesson.
On a 1963 Corvette split-window, the engine pad does the talking. Here's what buyers must verify
Only one model year of Corvette wore a divided rear window, and that fact alone makes the 1963 split-window coupe the most desirable car of the C2 generation. Hagerty's valuation page had its value trend at +7.4 percent as of January 2026. With 10,594 coupes built out of 21,513 Corvettes that year, per SCM's profile of a 1963 coupe , there are enough survivors that a buyer can afford to be picky. The detail worth being picky about is the engine pad.
Pancho Villa Died in a Hail of Bullets in This 1919 Dodge. A Century Later, You Can Still Count the Holes
Photo: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0 The gunmen were already in position, inside a house along a street in Hidalgo del Parral, when Pancho Villa’s black 1919 Dodge Brothers touring car came into view on the morning of July 20, 1923. They opened fire. Villa and several of the men riding with him were killed. The Dodge took dozens of rounds. More than a century later, it still wears them. Half the ‘cursed’ cars we’re covering this month come with a legend and no paperwork.
Matchbox Began in 1953 as a Toy Sized to Fit a Match Box, Now the Brand Is a John Cena Apple TV Movie Premiering October 9
Photo: Riley (NZ Car Freak) via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0 John Cena plays an undercover CIA agent named Sean in “Matchbox The Movie,” which Apple TV will premiere worldwide on Friday, October 9, built on a toy brand that began in England in 1953 with a limit on what a child could carry to school.
Bradenton Police Valentine’s Day Offer: Free Rides for Former Flames With Warrants
When your ex left you on read and kept your hoodie, Bradenton Police Department has the perfect revenge plot. Their Valentine’s Day social‑media post, splashed in pink and decorated with heart‑shaped handcuffs, invites the broken‑hearted to call their non‑emergency line (941‑932‑9300) with the location of a former flame who has an outstanding warrant. The prize? A “Valentine’s Day visit,” a chauffeured ride in a squad car and a shiny pair of bracelets — the law‑enforcement kind.
This unmodified 1993 Supra Turbo shows the Mk IV market now pays for restraint, not perfection
There is a 1993 Toyota Supra Turbo on Cars & Bids today that nobody would call perfect. Its front bumper, hood and quarter panels have been repainted. The front lip is cracked, there are chips in the paint, a seam has let go on the rear seat, and the seller discloses corrosion on underbody components. The odometer shows roughly 60,500 miles. And with a few hours left on the clock, fourteen bids have carried it to $122,359. That figure will draw attention, but it isn't the story.
Porsche Patents a Clutch Pedal and H-Gate for Its PDK, and the Shifter Is the Clever Part
Six-speed shifter in the 911 Carrera S with MT Package. (Image: Porsche Cars North America) Porsche engineers have spent decades making the clutch pedal unnecessary. Now one of them has filed paperwork to bring it back as a controller. German patent application DE 10 2025 109 563 A1, published by the German Patent and Trade Mark Office (DPMA) on September 17, describes a car with a combustion engine, an automatic gearbox, and three pedals in the footwell.
Tucci Hot Rods Is Cutting Up a Ford Maverick to Fit a Twin-Turbo Coyote V8 for SEMA
Photo: Mr.choppers via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0) Somewhere in Marcy, New York, a Ford Maverick is missing a chunk of its transmission tunnel and part of its firewall. That’s not a crash report. That’s progress.
BMW built nine Nürburgring tribute models, and only three of them are actually rare
BMW M GmbH and BMW Motorrad have gone in together on a birthday present for a racetrack. The Edition 100 Jahre Nürburgring runs to nine vehicles — six cars and three motorcycles — all finished in a bespoke colour BMW calls historical Nürburgring Green, and all carrying the outline of the Nordschleife somewhere on or inside them. The split between those two halves matters far more than the paint does.
A Driver in China Mistook a Staircase for a Car Park Entrance. The Stairs Won.
Somewhere between “this looks like the way in” and “why is the dashboard pointing at the ground,” a driver in Kaili City, in southwest China’s Guizhou province, realized he had made a navigational error. By then the car was already on the stairs.
Today in Automotive History: The Partridge Family Hit the Road in a Mondrian-Painted 1957 Chevy School Bus
The Partridge Family cast in a 1970 ABC publicity photo promoting the series premiere. Photo: ABC Television Network via Wikimedia Commons (public domain) Fifty-six years ago tonight, ABC gave America a family band, a teen idol and a school bus that looked like a modern-art museum had rear-ended a Chevy dealership. On Friday, September 25, 1970, The Partridge Family premiered at 8:30 p.m., right after The Brady Bunch.
Brabus cuts the roof off the G 63 and gives it 900 hp
Mercedes-AMG has never sold a four-door convertible version of the current G 63, so BRABUS built one. The German tuner-turned-coachbuilder pulled the cover off the 900 ROCKET EDITION CABRIO at the Monaco Yacht Show, and it is the first open-top car to wear the ROCKET badge in the company's history. Only 50 will be made. The roof is the hard part, and BRABUS claims more than 500 newly developed pieces went into the two-piece electric soft top.
Is the Alpine A110 a future collector car? Only some of them
On July 2, Alpine's Dieppe factory built the last second-generation A110, an A110 R 70 in Alpine Blue. When MCC covered Alpine's A390 art car at Goodwood Revival , we said the quieter story was the A110 running out. This piece follows up on that. The question is whether the Alpine A110, built in the tens of thousands, never sold in America and powered by a Renault-Nissan four-cylinder, can become a collector car. Our short answer: the A110 won't become collectible because it's rare.
Today in Automotive History: The Munsters Premiered, and TV Got Its Wildest Hot Rod Hearse
A Munster Koach on display at the Huntington Beach Art Center. Photo: Bahooka via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0) Sixty-two years ago tonight, America sat down after dinner and met a family that lived at 1313 Mockingbird Lane. On September 24, 1964, The Munsters premiered on CBS in the Thursday 7:30 p.m. slot, and TV audiences got Fred Gwynne’s lovable Frankenstein of a dad, Yvonne De Carlo’s vampire mom, and Al Lewis as a centuries-old Grandpa with a lab in the basement.
Ford, Jeep, and Toyota are all recalling cars, and Tesla just picked up another federal probe
Four automakers made recall or safety news over the past two days, and one of them — Ford — accounts for more than 226,000 of the affected vehicles by itself. None of these have been covered here yet, so here's a plain-English rundown of what's wrong, who's affected, and what to do about it if one of these is sitting in your driveway.
The 22:38 Coast-To-Coast Cadillac Finally Showed Its Cockpit, And It Explains The Whole Run
Five months after a Cadillac CT4-V Blackwing crossed the bottom of the United States in 22 hours and 38 minutes, the crew behind the run finally pointed a camera at the interior. It is not a caged, stripped, fire-bottled race car. It looks like a small dispatch center that someone crammed into a compact sport sedan and then drove at an average of 104 mph for nearly a full day.
Europe just made every new car watch your eyes. America gets the camera, not the rules.
On 7 July, a threshold passed in Europe with no ribbon, no press conference and no new badge on the tailgate. From that date, every new passenger car and van registered in the European Union has to leave the dealership with a driver monitoring camera pointed at the person behind the wheel. The European Commission confirmed the deadline as the second wave of the bloc's General Safety Regulation took effect.
Volvo crammed an EV-sized battery into the XC60 plug-in hybrid — Brussels did the math first
The number Volvo wants you to notice is 200. That is how far the new XC60 plug-in hybrid can travel on battery alone, in kilometers, on Europe's WLTP cycle. The XC90 manages 160. Both figures are roughly two and a half times what the current cars deliver, and Volvo describes them as "paradigm-shifting." The number that actually explains this car is 3.5. That is the multiple by which Europe's plug-in hybrids overshot their own laboratory CO2 figures once real customers got hold of them.
Ducati Let California’s Paperwork Leak a New 2027 Diavel V4 Trim Before It Was Ready To
Ducati hasn’t teased it. There’s no shadow-camo photo, no silhouette countdown page, no cryptic Instagram post. Instead, the newest addition to the Diavel V4 family surfaced the least glamorous way possible: as a single new line item buried in a California emissions filing.
2026 Toyota GR Supra MkV final edition: Is it a future collector car?
Toyota built its last GR Supra in the spring of 2026, closing out a seven-year run of the fifth-generation car with a send-off it calls the MkV Final Edition. Only 1,300 will reach American driveways. That is a small number by modern standards, and small numbers tend to catch a collector's eye.
Today in Automotive History: Two Amphicars Crossed the English Channel to Reach the Frankfurt Motor Show
An Amphicar 770 swimming at a car show. Photo: Valder137, Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0) Sixty-one years ago today, two small convertibles rolled onto the stand at the Frankfurt Motor Show still damp from the English Channel. The day before, four British servicemen had driven those same two cars off the beach at Dover and pointed them straight into the water, aiming for Calais, 21 miles away. One of the two nearly didn’t make it.
Have This With Your Coffee: Your Backfire News Round-Up for September 16
Photo by Lisa Fotios via Pexels Rise and shine — here’s everything that ran on Backfire News today, all in one place before you start scrolling. Hanoi Startup AVES Is Betting on 2027 for Its First Electric Scooters Vietnam has a new electric two-wheeler hopeful, and right now it has more job listings than actual scooters. Here’s what AVES says is coming in 2027.
Pour the Coffee: Your Backfire News Round-Up for September 15 Is Ready
Photo by Connor Scott McManus via Pexels Rise and shine — here’s everything that ran on Backfire News today, all in one place before you start scrolling. Bristol Motor Speedway and the Dollywood Foundation are putting Dolly Parton’s pink butterfly on every car at the Night Race. Read the full story → Toyota’s GR GT and GR GT3 lapped Laguna Seca together. The engineering details explain what buyers should expect. Read the full story → Land Rover’s road-legal Dakar winner is Australia-bound.
Today in Car History: The Quad-Turbo Bugatti That Launched on a Birthday and Died in Four Years
The EB110 Super Sport: 610 PS, four turbochargers and all-wheel drive in a shape that looked like nothing else in 1991. Photo: Alexandre Prevot / CC BY-SA 2.0 Thirty-five years ago today, roughly 2,000 people stood around in Paris and waited for a sheet to come off. Under it sat the Bugatti EB110: a mid-engined V12 with four turbochargers, sixty valves and a carbon fiber tub from an aerospace firm. The badge on the nose belonged to a company that had not built a road car since 1956.
Today in collector car history: The Bugatti EB110 debuted 35 years ago today, and its market now pays for paperwork
On 15 September 1881, Ettore Bugatti was born in Milan. On 15 September 1991 — his 110th birthday, to the day — a consortium led by Italian entrepreneur Romano Artioli presented a car named for the anniversary itself: the Bugatti EB110. It was the most technically ambitious road car in the world, and within four years it had bankrupted the company that built it. Thirty-five years on, the EB110 is a seven-figure blue-chip asset. That rehabilitation is a familiar story.
A split-window Corvette stalled $148,000 below one that sold last week. The spread inside the model is the real signal.
Monday night did not move the average price of anything. What it moved was the distance between the best example of a model and the second-best one — and on the evidence of the last 24 hours, that distance is now the widest number in the market. Two 1963 Corvette split-window coupes crossed the same platform three days apart and finished $148,000 apart.
Have This With Your Coffee: Your Backfire News Round-Up for September 14
Photo by Connor Scott McManus via Pexels Rise and shine — here’s everything that ran on Backfire News yesterday, all in one place before you start scrolling for yourself. Gary Myers died September 10 at 76. Thirty-eight wins at Bowman Gray put him in the record books, but the people he built cars for have a lot more to say about the rest of it.
The pickup man: Inside the 400-vehicle Redwood County truck & car collection auction
There's a reason so many country songs are written about pickup trucks: for generations they've been more than transportation. They're farm tools, teenage freedom machines, tailgate hangouts, and for a lot of Midwest kids, a rite of passage. That love of trucks is exactly what built one of the largest privately assembled collections in the country, and it's about to head to auction in Redwood Falls, Minnesota.
Have this with your coffee: Your Backfire News round-up for September 13
Rise and shine — here's everything that ran on Backfire News yesterday, all in one place before you start scrolling for yourself. The First Officially Licensed Eleanor Mustang Ever Built Is Now For Sale Trick Rides has quietly listed Serial No. 1 for private sale — the fastback that every officially licensed Eleanor built over the last two decades owes its existence to.
A 1956 Chevrolet Bel Air packing a supercharged 525-HP LSA V8 is heading to Barrett-Jackson's Las Vegas auction with no reserve
Lot 744 at Barrett-Jackson's Las Vegas auction is a 1956 Chevrolet Bel Air Custom Coupe, and if you're picturing a numbers-matching cruiser with a 265 small-block wheezing along at a stoplight, forget it. Someone in this build's history looked at a seventy-year-old body and decided the only thing worth keeping was the sheet metal. Under that green-and-cream two-tone skin sits a supercharged Chevrolet Performance 6.2-liter LSA V8, rated at 525 horsepower straight from the factory crate box.
Paul Newman's Daytona-winning Mustang Cobra was never really a Mustang underneath
Paul Newman had just picked up a Best Actor Oscar nomination for Nobody's Fool when, at 70 years old, he climbed into a Ford Mustang Cobra built around a steel tube-frame chassis that had almost nothing in common with anything sold in a Ford showroom. That car, Roush Racing chassis No. 23, went on to win the GTS-1 class and finish third overall at the 1995 Rolex 24 at Daytona.
Nearly 300 cars are heading to a Colorado field sale, and the 50-cent opening bid is the least interesting number
Three generations of car collecting are about to change hands in a field outside Eaton, Colorado. On September 19, VanDerBrink Auctions will work through close to 300 vehicles pulled from the estate of the late Doug Born, along with the vintage gas station signage and spare sheet metal his family collected right alongside them. A Field Full of Everything From a Model T to a Power Stroke The catalog reads like a century of American motoring compressed into one pasture.
Ford Let You Order a 425-HP 427 in Its Cheapest Car for 1963 — Only Three Are Known to Survive
Ford’s product planners built the 300 for 1963 with one goal: get people into a full-size Ford for as little money as possible. No chrome side trim, no fancy hubcaps, cloth-and-vinyl seats, and a model name that was just a number. Then, almost as an afterthought, Ford let buyers check a box that dropped its meanest engine into that same stripped-down sedan: the 425-horsepower, dual-quad 427.
Every new car was supposed to stop drunk drivers by now. Nobody told the cars.
Somewhere in this country, almost every day, the same scene repeats itself. A driver, allegedly over the legal limit, puts a vehicle into something it was never supposed to hit — a parked car, a mailbox, someone's driveway. Field sobriety tests get declined. The breath test gets refused. Handcuffs go on. Local news covers it for a day, then moves on to the next one. What almost none of those stories mention is that Washington already tried to legislate this exact scenario out of existence.
The Only Camaro Z28 Convertible Chevy Ever Built Was a Company Car for Its Own General Manager
Corporate executives don’t usually get to raid their own factory for a one-off toy. Pete Estes did, and Chevrolet shut down an entire assembly line to make it happen.
GM's new cabin camera software won't spy for the company — it might just get you sued instead
A rear-facing camera tucked into the overhead console. Four more cameras scattered around the sheet metal. And an alarm trigger that turns every one of them into a witness. That's what Chevrolet just wired into the 2027 Traverse, and it's a bigger shift than a routine infotainment update headline suggests.
VinFast's India localisation reset: What it means for the Thoothukudi plant and buyers
VinFast Spent The Week Explaining Its India Plans, And The Explanation Is The Story Automakers do not issue clarifications about factories that are humming along fine. VinFast put out a statement this week confirming that assembly of the VF 6 and VF 7 at its Thoothukudi plant in Tamil Nadu has not been changed or suspended, that the two SUVs will continue to be built there from completely knocked-down kits, and that India remains part of its long-term manufacturing strategy.
Did You Know Michael Jordan Owns a $3.5 Million Hennessey Venom F5?
Did you know Michael Jordan owns a Hennessey Venom F5 worth $3.5 million? It is easy to assume the basketball legend’s most jaw-dropping purchase would be a rare sneaker or a piece of memorabilia, but Jordan’s garage tells a different story, and it includes one of the fastest convertibles ever built. The car in question is a Hennessey Venom F5 Revolution Roadster, an open-top version of Hennessey’s already outrageous hypercar.
Lando Norris keeps driving his Porsche 911 GT3 RS through Monaco instead of a track where it belongs
Lando Norris didn't need to be behind the wheel of a McLaren to get noticed in Monte Carlo this week. Carspotters caught the papaya-liveried Formula 1 driver cruising through Monaco's tight streets in his personal Porsche 911 GT3 RS, the same dark green coupe that's become a recurring fixture around the principality.
Hyundai's American-built global pickup has one big problem: Nobody knows where it's actually being built
Hyundai just told the world it wants to build a real pickup truck in America and ship it to the rest of the planet. Every outlet covering the story named the same probable birthplace: Hyundai Motor Group Metaplant America, the electrified-vehicle complex in Ellabell, Georgia. There's a problem with that assumption, and it came from Hyundai's own CEO.
GM's wireless update failed so badly, dealers now have to fix these 7 SUVs by hand before selling them
General Motors has spent years selling the wireless update as the thing that would make a dealership visit optional. Push a signal, skip the shop, move on with your day. That pitch just ran into its limits on some of GM's most expensive vehicles. Infotainment computers inside seven 2025 SUVs — the Cadillac Escalade, Escalade ESV, and Escalade IQ, the Chevrolet Tahoe and Suburban, and the GMC Yukon and Yukon XL — stalled partway through an update and never caught back up.
China's #1 bestselling car just failed its own safety audit — and that's not even the scary part
Somewhere in a Chinese testing facility, a government inspector measured the wheelbase on a Geely Xingyuan pulled straight off a dealer's lot. The number didn't match what Geely had filed with regulators. Not by much. But by more than the 1 percent margin the rules allow. That's a strange thing to get caught on. The Xingyuan isn't some low-volume curiosity. It was China's best-selling car in 2025, with more than 465,000 units sold, and it topped 800,000 cumulative sales in under two years.
Ford Let a Timing Belt Rot in Motor Oil for a Decade — Now 135,000 Owners Are One Warning Light From a Dead Engine
A driver on a highway outside Wilmington, Delaware wasn’t doing anything unusual. Just merging into traffic. Then an oil pressure warning light blinked on, and before the driver could even process what they were looking at, the engine was finished — not sputtering, not limping toward a shoulder, just gone, making a sound the driver later described to investigators as the engine turning into a tank.
Lewis Hamilton Ditched His Entire Car Collection—Except This Barn-Find Ferrari F40
Image via Scuderia Ferrari HP Ten months ago, Lewis Hamilton stood in front of reporters at the Azerbaijan Grand Prix and told them, more or less, to stop asking about his garage. He’d sold it off — the whole thing. “I don’t have any cars anymore,” he said. “I got rid of all my cars. I’m more into art nowadays.” Then he added a caveat nobody paid much attention to at the time: if he ever bought a car again, it would have to be a Ferrari F40. Turns out that wasn’t hypothetical. He already had one.
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