Karnkluay Krazay

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I suppose having the “fastest Volvo in Thailand” is an important feat but if you’re pulling mid-8 second quarter-mile runs I imagine it would place you as one of the fastest Volvos in the world.

Karnkluay is a highly modified 244 built with the Volvo Club of Thailand. The name “Karnkluay” seems to come from the animated baby elephant “Kharn Kluay”, who wanders away from his mother to become a war elephant for his king. Nice.

What amazes me about this video isn’t the eerie sound coming from the engine bay (is that a turbo spooling?) or the odd headlight covers. No, what’s most disturbing is the crowd of onlookers closely packed around this screaming ride that’s about to pull an 10 second quarter mile run. How old is that kid at :40? Two? Yikes.

Here’s a compilation of Karnkluay’s mid-8 second runs. Note the crew putting all their weight on the rear deck to help with the burnouts. Their clothes must have been coated with rubber after these 3 runs:

Smarter than you

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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.

Volvo stink on his Italian beauty

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When I first skimmed this post documenting a grocery trip in a new Lambourghini Gallardo I thought the author was a pretentious douche. The Tarmac Philosopher, a writer for an auto magazine, takes the V10 monster to his local Whole Foods. When he exits the store he’s horrified to discover the car has attracted a mate:

Some ponce had moved the carts and spitefully parked a filthy, greasy, rusted Volvo 240 station wagon in Fungus Green Metallic right next to my shimmering Lamborghini. Thankfully, after close inspection, not a spot of Volvo stink had blemished the Italian beauty’s skin. I then examined the Volvo, and discovered that its finish had a substantial outer layer of bumper stickers advertising for Greenpeace, PETA, Humane Society, the Earth Liberation Front and few other vegetabalist and ecotage organizations. Not surprisingly, I also received a friendly brochure under the Lambo’s windscreen wiper condemning me forever to Hades for symbolically clubbing baby whales to death by driving an earth-warming beast-car that ran on The Man’s oilish excrement, also known as gasoline. I would have kept interestedly reading, but the whiff of cannabis wafting from the shit-Volvo’s open window started to irritate my nose, so I neatly crumbled up the brochure, and left the parking lot in a billow of CO2 emissions.

Joke was on me, though. The author is only a magazine writer in his own mind. Reality is he’s a kid living in Florida with dreams of big cars and low pay. Good luck, Joe.

Volvo vinner i Längden!

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volvo140_slacks

The strapping young lad above is Sune Larsson from Stockholm, Sweden. According to the 1979 issue of Din Volvobutik:

Sune äger en Volvo 144 av – 72 Ã¥rs modell. Den har gÃ¥tt over 74.000 mil och har gjort Sune till vinnare i vÃ¥r tävling om vilken Volvo 140 som rullat längst.

Anyone care to translate? I assume he drove over 74,000 miles in 7 years? Was that a feat of derring-do in the late 70s? Ten thousand miles a year is an average commute these days. Regardless, that’s one proud Swede.

About: I found a trove of scanned Volvo brochures and miscellany on a server from Sweden a while back and will be trickling the best images out over time. They’re collected under the category “Marketing a Tank“.

More on GPM

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Sunday’s NY Times article “The Last of the Power Rangers” predicts the eventual disappearance of the 500+ horsepower luxury sedan. Now that Obama has unveiled new fuel economy standards of 35.5 MPG by 2016, the extinction seems inevitable.

It got me thinking again about the way we consider fuel economy in MPG vs. GPM. The article states that the thirstiest performance sedan is the 2009 Cadilac CTS-V, coming in at 11 MPG. If you look the cars gallons-per-mile, you see it burns 909 gallons of fuel for 10,000 miles of driving. With this perspective, you can see how truly bad low fuel economy vehicles are, and how the MPG standard hides the truth about how much fuel these cars burn.
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