Mass Transit Madness: Mazda MX-3
You’re probably thinking that Hatchtopia has transformed itself from all things hatchback to a Mazda MX-3 blog. So sue me. I like the amorphous early 90s blob that featured a minuscule 1.8 liter V6 and awesome 80s skittles colors.
1991 Citroen BX
From the Finnish Bureau Desk at Hooniverse.com comes this cool French hatchback. While a couple of French manufacturers managed to struggle along for a few years in hatchback-unfriendly America, this Citroen has never had a whiff of apple pie or baseball. Shame, too because the tailgate on this ride would have been perfect to use in a pre-game get-together.
Hatches In Motion: Geo Prizm
Toy Tuesday: 1992 Honda Civic
Used to be, the Fifth Generation Honda Civic was as common as Bott’s Dots on an LA freeway. A couple of decades of hard commuting miles, unsympathetic secondary market buyers and rust have reduced their numbers significantly. The ones that remain are likely to be fitted with fart-can exhausts and stick-on vents from Pep Boys – so unless you’re in to that sort of thing, potential Civic shoppers looking for a nice example have been mostly out of luck.
Until now.
The Golden Age of Hatchbacks
If you’re a long-time Hatchtopia reader, you may have been wondering – when are we going to get an explanation of the nebulous Golden Age of Hatchbacks. You may have Googled it, Wikipedia’d it, looked at your local library or landfill – nothing. Today is your lucky day, hatchback historian.
1949 Kaiser Vagabond
When you look at the Hatchtopia archives, you’ll generally see model years beginning with 197- or 198- with a few 199-s mixed in. So to see a hatchback from the 1940s is something very special indeed.
1982 Datsun 200SX
Update (5/4) – The seller has lowered the price to $1250.
Okay, let’s get this out of the way right now – yeah, that’s a lot of rust. Usually the cars featured in the Hawking a Hatch category are in relatively pristine condition – low miles, no body damage, clean interiors. This one is a little different – sure it’s still a rare car nowadays, but this one is featured because of its quarter-million mile odometer reading and the fact that the seller obviously loves this car.
Hatchtastic Car Illustrations: Blueprints
You may recall last week’s post on some of the cool artistic representations of cars that manufacturers produced in the days before Photoshop and computer gimmickry. This week, Hatchtopia visits the more technical side of the drawn automotive form.
Hatchtastic Car Illustrations
If you are in to graphic arts and advertising as I am, you owe yourself a visit to illcar.com. It features a small but growing collection of interesting old artwork from various promotional materials issued by auto manufacturers.
1993 Mazda MX-3
You may remember the last MX-3 featured on these pages – it was a 90s-fantastic magenta color. Today, another MX3, another 90s flashback. No matter what we think of these colors now, at least they were color. Current offerings seem only to consist of black, white, silver, charcoal, black with a small amount of red, dark silver, charcoal with some blue, black and maybe if you’re lucky, red.
