Forgotten Cool Cars of the 90s

Some of these things are bargains these days. A lot of these models or packages were dumped in the 00s. Seems like a lot of the auto companies went bland for decade.

Here's one I owned:
A 1993 Ford Taurus SHO w/5spd. I loved the motor, you could shift at 7K Rpm all day long and it had a sweet exhaust tone. Mine was blue just like this one and that a "Special Edition" badge on it. Bought it for $3K in 2000.


I liked the Thunderbird SC too.


GM made a bunch, think they all are in the bone yard though


Stealth/3000GT


Galant VR4


Subaru SVX

I kinda have a thing for 80's/90's GM muscle

I had a 62 Ford Falcon Futura that I wanted to drop a super charged SC drivetrain in or figure out a way to drop the SHO engine in. I thought it would be just enough engine for the car and not your typical SB Ford engine.

Didn't those cars have a Yamaha engine?

Love those!

I nearly bought a used one once - the interior was rough and it had high kms (for the price they were asking).

Yamaha did the developement work on the engine, but I don't know if they actually manufactured it or not. I drove an SHO once when I was thinking about buying one from the local dealer. Went like a SOB but a crappy car to put such a nice engine in.

I still look for these. actually I've made a lot of money selling new old stock parts and still have some. Great truck of the times,

Always really wanted to thrash an Eagle Talon.



I figure, mount a row of KC Dayliters on the front, lift it a little, and start doing budget rally racing with it.

Bendix was doing the development on the brakes on three of those..

Buddy who is slightly older then me. had one to test drive..

I don't know what they did to the production ones. but the one he had ...Could and Would light the tires in ever gear, and at any time.

Rode in a factory Typhoon that had the factory mods done to it when i went to 4l80e school.
four of us in it. Me being the lightest at 160 pounds ... It burned all four tires off on a few launches..
and when it it hooked it made a ZR1 corvette look extremely slow with four people in it.


the Galant VR4 some guys who rent my one house are into those .... they have sub 12 second daily driver grocery getters...

I worked on the pit crew (12 and 24 hour races) for a team that ran a four car SHO team in the Firestone Firehawk series. They had sponsorship from Ford and the guy who created the teanage mutant ninja turtles. Each car was painted in the colors of each one of the four ninja turtles. We had quite a following with the kids.

The cars were not the fastest in class, but they did better on fuel than most of the otheres and were very reliable. They had a pretty good bark out of the race exhaust too.

I worked in the office for the local GMC dealer when the Syclone and Typhoon came out. Found a better job and on the last day of work I went to the sales manager and asked him jokingly if I could take the Syclone on the bank run today. He looked at me, smiled, and threw the very guarded keys to me. The bank run that day seemed to take 2 hours instead of the usual half hour. and double !!!! I pulled up to a stop light and a hopped up El Camino pulled along side. He revved his engine and took off when the light turned green. I let him get half way through the intersection before I punched it. He had no idea what the black blur was that blew past him. Those things were/are very quick/fast!!!!

I always thought these VW Corrados were pretty nice.

Oh man, I wanted a 3000GT VR4 in the worst way. The base models were FWD turds but the VR4 was an AWD beast with nearly 300 HP.

They actually were 300 hp, and were 320 hp in their later years.

I was a Mitsu Tech for 8 years in the '90's. I made a lot of money off of those cars. Very cramped engine compartments, comparatively fragile drivetrains, and other high maintenance needs meant I got a lot of work out of them.

From what I've heard Yamaha Marine developed the Cylinder heads from scratch and built the bottom end based off of a Ford V-6. The manual gearbox is Mazda.

It is a great looking Engine.


Another forgotten Gem of the 90s was the SE-R.

Nissan has kept the SE-R badge or revivied it a while ago but the Original SE-R was a hell of a sport compact for its' day and quite the sleeper. You could squeak out a 0-60 in 6.9 with just a little tuning and they came stock with an LSD in the gearbox pretty much un-heard of in a factory FWD car at the time.


The tuner kids have all but destroyed most of the CRXs and other hot sport compacts of that time, but there still might be a clean one or 2 SE-Rs out there.

Was the car team called "Team Mirage"?

A couple of guys a few years older than me from my home town raced Moto-Cross and one of the Ninja Turtle guys was their sponsor. Larry and Gerry never made it as career MX riders but they rode in the Nationals and even once in Belgium. I remember watching Dowd riding at their practice track when he was just coming up as a top 125cc rider. Team Mirage rode Kawi of course. iirc They sponsored a super bike road racing team too. The Ninja Turtle guys were also from our hometown. I worked in a resort owned by one of them while in High School.

My tuner kid dropped this stock 240 (before fauxtoe) so much that he gets hung up on spare change lying in the road. That's a fun little scoot. Forgiving car to wrench on.

my neighbor's son had one built into a racecar for the FWD class at the dirt track, i think i was the only guy on the block who enjoyed him loading and unloading that thing, with NO exhaust it sounded like 4 sportbikes running at the same time!

Woodstock Motorsports.