Which One Should Have Been An Autopian Project Car? Pontiac T1000 vs REO Speed Wagon vs Ford T-Bucket

We’ve reached the end of a short week, and I’ve been subjecting you to some pretty ridiculous choices. But you’ve all been good sports about it, and now I’m giving you a chance to decide which one of our three finalists deserves a spot in the Autopian’s admittedly weird fleet – and who you’d like to see fix it up.

We looked at two fiberglass-bodied kit cars yesterday, and neither one made any of you particularly happy. One was grossly underpowered even if you replaced its batteries and got it running, the other was grossly overpriced for what you got, and they were both just kinda gross. The fake Ford beat the “electric banana” by nearly two-to-one, and most of you who did vote for the Invader wanted to convert it back to gas power.

Me, I’d take the T-bucket. I think I’d have more fun with it. It’s a good platform to experiment on, since it’s not really a classic and nobody really cares about it. A manual transmission swap wouldn’t be out of the question, and that fiberglass body would end up six layers thick in paint after trying out different looks. I’d rather have a four-seat touring body than the two-seat roadster, so there’s room for Betty, Veronica, and Jughead, but this would do.

If you’ve been around a while, you may have noticed that the writers here have some bizarre taste in cars, and make some questionable purchases. My now-sold MG, which only managed just over a thousand miles under its own power in my nine years of ownership, was actually one of the saner choices. We’ve had derelict mail Jeeps that had no business being on the road, tiny kei cars that were more Bondo than metal, moldy Grandma-mobiles pulled out of backyards and forced back to life against their will, and glorified golf carts purchased from China. And that’s not even counting the cursed taxicab or the butt-ugly SUV-ish thing across the Atlantic. This week, I’ve tried to come up with even worse ideas than those, and I’m not entirely sure I succeeded.

But what I’d like to know from you all is: Which one of these cars should have been a project of ours? And which one of us do you think should have been chosen to undertake it? We’ll go over the choices again, and then you can vote for a car and assign it to someone in the comments.

1982 Pontiac T1000 with a sketchy engine swap

GM’s T platform is the sort of car you don’t see anymore: built to a price, made from simple components, and only just good enough to hold together until the warranty expires. The fact that any survive at all says more about the owner’s care than the car’s build quality. Even if you find a “good” Chevette or T1000, it will still be crude and underpowered. The crude part is hard to do anything about, but you can definitely up the power – and the most sure-fire way to do that is with an engine swap.

Unfortunately, I think the builder of this one chose poorly. It has a 4.3 liter V6 out of a 2003 Chevy pickup, backed by a much older TH350 automatic. It uses the stock ECU to control the engine, but not the transmission, because it’s far too old for electronic controls. The whole thing seems half-assed and cobbled together from whatever was lying around, instead of carefully planned-out. If it were me, I’d yank that V6 out and look for something smaller and lighter, a twin-cam four-cylinder of some sort, along with a manual gearbox (this car was originally a manual). Plan it right, and it would still be much faster than stock, but drive and handle a whole lot better. And you would be able to close the hood.

1948 REO Speed Wagon 1.5 ton flatbed

Old trucks, like old houses, seem to have an ability to age gracefully. This truck must have been really handsome when it was new, but now that it’s pushing eighty years old, it could be seen as a pile of junk. Instead, it looks dignified, an elder statesman of the open road, enjoying a well-earned retirement. You could restore it, and make it gleam again, but cars are only original once, and you can’t create a new shiny version of it without destroying what it is now. And that is not an idea that should be taken lightly.

So if you decide to leave the exterior alone, you still have to do something about the mechanicals. Your first inclination might be to do an engine swap on this one too, or maybe drop that beautiful original sheetmetal onto a modern truck chassis, but I wouldn’t be too hasty to do that either. These old flathead sixes are simple machines, with low compression (probably around 6:1, if I had to guess) and a wide tolerance for tuning. Since it turns over freely, there’s a good chance it’s in good enough shape to run. In other words, as soon as you are able, I think you’d find this engine willing.

2017 Ford T-bucket kit car

Hot rods are polarizing; kit car hot rods even more so. They are definitely vehicles of a bygone era; you don’t find too many young people who would be interested in this car. But I think dismissing it as a “boomer ride” is a bit short-sighted too. There are so many things you could do with this car. It will never be eligible for events like The Race Of Gentlemen, or other events that demand originality, but there’s no reason it can’t look like one of those cars. Or break out the orange metalflake paint, and build it as a tribute to ’60s show rods. Get some steel wheels, paint them red, slap on some wide whitewalls, and do the rat-rod thing. Or even, if you must, go crazy with the billet aluminum and color-matched everything, Boyd Coddington-style. (Ugh.)

The point is, a vehicle style with this much history behind it can’t simply be dismissed as a cast-off relic of one generation. Hate it if you want, but don’t disrespect it. And feel free to ditch the Chevy small-block and three-speed automatic; there are far more interesting power sources for a hot rod. And that’s coming from a Chevy small-block fan.

So, your mission is to choose which one you think would make a good project vehicle for a writer here. Vote for your favorite in the poll, and then let me know in the comments whose driveway you’re dumping it in.