Welcome to the weekend! Thanks for stopping by for another installment of Car Connections, a game in which I take three words from the Random Word Generator and use my car-obsessed brain to somehow link each of them to automobiles. This week’s words are fee, salon, and theme. How would you associate these words with cars? Tell us in the Comments section below.
2023 BMW M2 (Photo courtesy of the BMW PressClub USA)
Fee: Modern cars offer a lot of subscription-based convenience features but typically, if you get one with heated seats, you don’t have to keep paying for them. A few years ago, BMW rethought that model and made heated seats a subscription feature. This caused people to get hot under the collar (pun absolutely intended), which led BMW to backing away from the idea. My Hyundai Sonata may not be a luxury car, but I’ll never have to pay a monthly fee for its heated seats. That reminds me: My three years of complimentary Bluelink convenience, safety, and car care features is almost up, so I’ll have to decide if I want to start paying for them. Remotely starting my car from my phone and getting the air conditioning pumping sure is nice in the middle of a scorching Phoenix summer …
Click to learn more about this 1987 Chevrolet K10 for sale on ClassicCars.com
Salon: Hair. Those hair dryers attached to salon chairs that look like helmets. Those bring me to hats — and Chevrolet C/K trucks, such as this 1987 K10.
Photo courtesy of Walmart
A few years ago, I learned that there are racks you can put in your truck that keep your cowboy hat out of the way and safe from getting bent or crushed. If I remember correctly, the first one I saw was in a “Square Body” Chevrolet truck. Both the rack and the pickup are so simple yet so functional.
Maserati Biturbo 425 (Photo courtesy of Maserati)
Theme: Theme song. Many of those come to mind, but the one I’ve heard the most is the James Bond theme. If you saw Timothy Dalton’s last outing as 007, the 1989 movie “License to Kill,” you heard a short and unusual version of the song. At the end of the film, Bond is trying to sabotage a convoy of trucks filled with a mixture of gasoline and cocaine to foil the plans of drug lord Franz Sanchez (played by Robert Davi). While Bond is hanging on for dear life under one of the trucks as it speeds through the desert, Sanchez fires at him with a machine gun, the bullets ricocheting and playing a hollow, metallic variation of one snippet of the theme song (you can hear it from 0:41-0:48 in the video below).
Maserati Biturbo 425 (Photo courtesy of Maserati)
So what’s the connection to cars? Sanchez shoots from the rear seat of a Maserati Biturbo 425i, which is powered by a 188-horsepower 2.5-liter twin-turbo V6.