Great quote from P.J. O’Rourke regarding the difference in working on a muscle car from the 70’s with trying to work on a car today:
A modern car, you flip the hood open, you might as well pry the back off an iPod. What’s in there? I don’t know.
I gotta get his new book, Driving Like Crazy
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | M – Th 11p / 10c | |||
| P.J. O’Rourke | ||||
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In case you missed the Ghost Riding fad from a couple years ago, consider yourself lucky. Based on a video from Mista FAB, Ghost Riding involves every parent’s nightmare of kids jump out of the slowly cruising family truckster and dancing next to and on top of the vehicle, instead of sitting safely buckled into the front seat.
I was originally going to embed this video of two dudes ghost riding a Volvo 940 (?) for this post. Instead I had to go with this classic of a guy standing of the roof of his Ford Ranger as it slowly makes its way up the curb and into a telephone pole.
I’d seen a bunch of Smart cars on a trip to France back in 1997 and thought they were pretty cool. Back then the emphasis was on the collaboration between Swatch design and Mercedes Benz engineering. Now that they’re available in the states, the selling point seems to be gas mileage.
They can cruise at a pretty good clip, but it looks like some drivers on American roadways can’t handle it. There’s a thread on the Smart Car of America forums documenting drivers who become enraged at being passed by the Smurfmobile:
I have had lots of people on the highway speed up as I am about to pass
them. I have had people check their speedo and do a double take.. its a
ton of fun passing them while they think they are going faster than
general traffic. Audi owners are especially peeved and almost insulted
by my passing them for some reason. I guess its all part of the fun of
driving my smarty.…
I get it mostly when sitting at red lights with multiple straight
lanes. The vehicle next to me HAS TO beat me off the line. I’ve seen a
few people so interested in beating me off the line that they almost
get into accidents.
Someone even made a video.
Since your boyfriend’s Hummer isn’t going off-road anyway, why not fit it with wooden wheels?
Via Cars and Motors
I’d wager that there are more Volvo 240 “Art Cars” than any other, with the obvious exception of VW Beetles. But BMW boasts the highest caliber of artists painting on factory fresh vehicles.
Grand Central Terminal recently had a display of the Absolut-Vodka-like series of painted Beemers from the 70’s until now, including the 320i pictured above, painted by my hero, the late Roy Lichtenstein.
You can see all the cars, and check out the huge painting created by Robin Rhode driving a Z4 through paint and over a 100×200 foot canvas.
Via Streetlevel
“I Love Traffic” is a sweet little time waster that lets you play god by controlling traffic lights at an increasingly complex set of of intersections. It’s like a combination of Frogger and Tetris, with streets in multi-lane and multi-directional patterns, cars and trucks of differing sizes driving at different speeds, and a rapidly accumulating stack of traffic that will jam if you’re not quick enough. The best feature, though, is that no matter how many accidents you cause (like the one I did pictured above) you can always try again with the same roads; you’re not dumped at the simple starter levels.
From Armor Games via How We Drive.
Car Lust does a great analysis of the failures of the US auto industry by spotlighting the Family Truckster, the monster wagon driven by Chevy Chase in 1983’s National Lampoon’s Vacation. The author deconstructs the satire in 3 simple points:
He contends that the demise of Clark Griswold is directly related to the purchase of the Truckster. The car is intrinsically evil and he goes so far as to compare it to the precious ring from Lord of the Rings:
Griswold is almost unrecognizable from his pre-movie state–he had descended into a plane of irrationality, immorality, and rationalizing reminiscent of, say, a serious drug user. Again, the One Ring’s slow, deleterious effects on its bearers can serve as an example. While the Truckster’s effects appear to be similar to the Ring’s, the Truckster actually appears to be much more powerful. The Ring took years to twist its bearers, but the Truckster ruined Griswold’s life within a week and left an elderly woman and a dog dead in its wake.
Rather than dropping the wagon into Mt. Doom, however, we now have a loving reproduction that pulls 14.9 second quarter mile times.
Illustrator Christian Pierce created a sweet animation of the process of drawing hot rods on his Nintendo DS. Inspiring.
Since the Simpsons just revamped their opening sequence after 20 years, I figured I’d pull up this 3 year old video out of Europe that reconceives the intro using live action. Marge winds up in a faded red 240, rather than the bulbous wagon from the cartoon.
