I'm Turning Here! (meta)

Meta explanation: a PITTSBURGHLEFT is a left turn at an intersection with no protected turn lane made as soon as the light turns green, without yielding to oncoming traffic. (Do not try this anywhere except Pittsburgh and its environs. And if you are unfamiliar with this maneuver and you happen to be driving in Pittsburgh, just FYI people absolutely do this.) Four symmetric car makes in the grid - KIA, FORD, JEEP, and GMC - are the "oncoming traffic" here, as hinted by their clues, and four other car makes are making left turns in front of them. Toyota, formed from OTIOSE and GATO, is turning in front of KIA, but the black square at the end of KIA is covering the Y. Cadillac (DACE, CALL) is turning in front of FORD with the I covered by the black square. Honda (TOHO, DAHS) is turning in front of JEEP with its N missing. Mazda (DHARMA, DANI) is turning in front of FORD and missing its Z. The missing letters spell the meta answer, YINZ, which is the Pittsburgh equivalent of "y'all." Thanks for solving!

Cool concept and execution! (I gave up and revealed, though.)

Really nice work, Emma! Took a minute to figure out the right execution, but the actual mechanism was so much cleaner than all the other stuff I tried first :)

Nice! I had to give up and I'm from SW PA!

I doubt I would have figured it out properly, but once I solved PITTSBURGHLEFT and saw "'word'" in the prompt, "yinz" was about the most logical guess since "jagoff" has 6.

I was really hoping to get this one, because I live close enough to Pittsburgh to be familiar with the term, but I also gave up and revealed. I was trying to use the entries ILLTRY and TELLTO, and shift the first letter to the left, etc. My husband scared the bejesus out of me last year when he took an unoffered Pittsburgh left in the Philly suburbs, so we now refer to it as a "WaWa Left." Granted, we'd probably still be sitting at that light if he hadn't done it, but the oncoming traffic was not amused.

cool puzzle!! i didn't think to look for 4 missing cars... i kept trying to break up the word of the 4 known cars and have one letter turn left and the rest go straight... very cool mechanism and i learned a new term!

Finally bounced back to this but could not solve. Happy to get the explanation tho - this is a very cool and clever piece of construction. Looking forward to your next offering!