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A lot of guys love their cars, but one man has found true love in his cherry red 1998 Monte Carlo. And by "love," I mean the kissing, romantic kind.
From TLC's TV Series My Strange Addiction:
LinkNathaniel admits he can't go longer than 24 hours without seeing Chase, and that it sometimes brings him to tears to be away from the car. He even has a picture of Chase as his screensaver at work to get him through the day.
But this isn't just a car owner really loving his car -- Nathaniel goes on dates with his car, goes outside to kiss it first thing in the morning and is even intimate with it. He strokes Chase lovingly, gives Chase long bubble baths and even buys Chase birthday gifts.
On March 21, 1920, the Sandusky Register reported on an astonishing invention in which W. W. Macfarlane, traveling in a car (driven by a chauffeur), held a conversation with his wife back at the garage -500 yards down the road! The article is reprinted at Paleofuture. Link
This is the 1957 Aurora. We will never know what the public would have thought about it, as only one prototype was built, and it didn’t work well enough to make it to its own press conference. Now wait, before you argue that the Aurora can’t be the world’s ugliest car, check out the huge collection of ugly cars at Dark Roasted Blend. They are all ugly in their own ways. Link
(Image credit: GATSBY Magazine)
My Monster Family Car Stickers | $9.95
It’s a set of family car stickers shaped like monsters! The My Monster Family Car Sticker set from the NeatoShop features Franken-dad, Mummy mom, Werebrother, Vampsister, Baby from the Black Lagoon, Dogberus and Cyclop Cat, ranging from 4″ tall down to 1.5″ tall. Simply peel and stick the vinyl stickers, and you can remove them with no residue mess. Monsters designed by artist Mike Jacobsen. My Zombie Family car stickers are available, too, at the NeatoShop!
A driver in Sacramento, California, had trouble getting his car started. He heard a funny noise coming from the engine and found a cat tangled in the motor belts.
Firefighters cut through the belts and were able to free the cat, which was severely injured with several deep cuts.
The cat was taken to the Sacramento Cat Hospital in Carmichael, where life-saving surgery was performed.
The cat, nicknamed Blaze, will be put up for adoption when she recovers in a couple of weeks. Link -via Fark
(Image credit: Sacramento Metro Fire Department)
Barrett-Jackson Auctions has a car for sale with some history behind it. There were many ’69 Dodge Chargers used in the TV series The Dukes of Hazzard, but this particular General Lee was the one you saw jump every week in the show’s introduction (55 seconds into this video).
Featured several times in the first episode of CBS hit “The Dukes of Hazzard.” Fondly named “Lee 1″ is the very car used to jump over a Hazzard County police cruiser in the first episode. Carefully restored over a 16 month period to pre-jump condition.
Lee 1 was purchased by a California movie studio in 1978, soon to become “The most famous television car in the world.” Lee 1 was featured several times in the first episode of CBS’ hit television series “The Dukes of Hazzard.” This episode titled “One-Armed Bandits,” aired on January 26, 1979 and was filmed in the Covington, Conyers and Oxford area of Georgia. The show’s opening sequence, featuring Bo and Luke Duke, included the clip of Lee1 jumping over a Hazzard County police cruiser. That jump, for which Lee 1 is most famous, was made by a stunt man on the campus of Oxford College on Saturday 11, 1978. Lee 1′s first and only jump was 16 feet up and over the cruiser, landing 82 feet from the take off ramp. The only cast member that ever drove Lee 1 was John Schneider, who played Bo Duke. After 23 years in a junkyard, in Metro Atlanta, Lee 1 was rescued and professionally, passionately restored to pre-jump condition over a 16 month period. Lee 1 is truly an American Icon.
See plenty more pictures of the car at the auction site. Link -via Fark
Pogo Dave is “not” selling his Candy Cane Car on eBay because he is a contrarian, a “a master of reserve psychology” who does “not” enjoy entertaining people with his car. The 1991 Toyota Camry is covered in red and white reflective tape and has an exercise machine on the roof. Read more about the car, and see pictures and video, at Art Car Central. Link -via Laughing Squid
Now that's 3D! For the upcoming Mario Kart 7 video game, Nintendo teamed up with West Coast Customs to create a real-life, drivable karts:
Two life-sized replicas of the Mario Kart cars driven by Nintendo icons Mario and Luigi, working vehicles that the company debuted at the Los Angeles Auto Show this past week.
That's right: Working. Built by West Coast Customs, the two karts – identical to those gamers will be able to digitally drive come the December 4 launch of Mario Kart 7 for the Nintendo 3DS – are electric vehicles that can actually be driven around. And some lucky gamers will get the chance to do just that, as Nintendo plans to give away both karts as part of a Gamestop PowerUp Rewards promotion during December.
Link | Hit play or go to Link [YouTube]
"Smaller
is better" is a hot automotive trend these days, but if you think
your Mini is small, take a look at these one-molecule "nano-cars"
than run on electron fuel:
The whole thing is a single molecule. Its core is formed by two hubs that have a five-ringed structure at their core. The hubs are connected by a rigid rod formed from carbon atoms, held together by triple bonds. Each hub is flanked by two “wheels,” each consisting of a three-ringed structure. The bulk of the molecule is a carbon backbone, with a small number of nitrogen and sulfur molecules thrown in.
The key to the system is the bond between the wheel and its hub, which is a double bond formed between two carbon atoms. Electrons can cause this double bond to rotate, which places part of the wheel in close proximity to a bulky side-molecule attached to the hub. This bulky piece acts a bit like a ratchet; the wheel requires some vibrational energy to get past it. Once it does, it’s positioned so that another dose of electrons can cause it to rotate again.
By repeating this cycle, the wheel will turn indefinitely in a single direction relative to the rest of the molecule.
Link (Image: Randy Wind and Martin Roelfs)
The LA Times has a three-part series on used car dealers who make a great profit on old cars sold at high interest rates to people who can’t afford them, but have little choice.
In this little-known but fast-growing corner of the auto market, dealers command premium prices for road-worn vehicles and finance the sales at interest rates that can top 30%.
In a kind of financial alchemy, they have found a way to turn clunkers into cash cows and make money off the least creditworthy customers: the millions of Americans who are stuck in low-paying jobs, saddled with debt and unable to qualify for conventional auto loans.
For most of those people, having a car is the only way to stay employed, and they’ll accept almost any terms to get one.
Buy Here Pay Here lots sold nearly 2.4 million cars nationwide last year, up from 1.3 million a decade ago, according to CNW Marketing Research.
The mechanics of the business are laid out in the first part, and there is a link to today’s followup, with the conclusion to be posted on Thursday. Link -via Metafilter
(Image credit: Lorena Iñiguez Elebee)
If you feel bad about your hamster’s efforts to run in the hamster wheel without getting anywhere, you might want to get him a car. It can run in place, on the floor, or on a track, and the wheel is detachable, in case the car is just not his style. Link -via Breakfast Links
Emergency crews responded to a report of a driverless car running amok in Wildwood, New Jersey on Sunday. Wildwood Fire Captain Chris D’Amico eventually stopped the vehicle.
“I’ve never corralled a car before,” D’Amico said.
D’Amico said that he found an opportunity to jump into the passenger-side window while he was standing inside the circle the car was making.
The empty older model Ford Thunderbird took to the road on its own when the driver got out of the car in order to switch seats with his passenger, officials said
The car’s passenger suffered minor injuries when he tried to jump back in the car earlier.
Comments at the story recalled Ford having recalls of vehicles from that era that would slip out of park into reverse gear. Link -via Smart Stop
Self-driving cars haven’t made it to the streets yet, but they may already soon become obsolete. Nissan is working with the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne on a mind-controlled car that reads the driver’s brain activity, eye movement, and environment to run. There is no release date set and, as you can imagine, a whole lot of kinks to work out. -Link
To inaugurate the new partnership between LEGOland and Ford, engineers built a Ford Explorer out of LEGO bricks for the theme park in Florida. It probably took them a long time to put the 380,000 bricks together, but thanks to time=lapse video, you can watch it in about 90 seconds. -via Buzzfeed
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Brian and Cece McCarthy of Pleasanton, California, were vacationing with their son Dylan at Lake Tahoe when thier car was stolen. They woke to suspicious sounds in the night, and saw from the window of their cabin that there was a bear in their car!
After the black bear climbed completely inside the car it apparently couldn’t get out. In its struggle, the bear hit the gear shift and the car rolled away for a wild, albeit short, ride down the McCarthy’s driveway, over several boulders, only stopping when it slammed into a neighbor’s front porch.
“All of the sudden we look out the window again and the car is gone, the bear is down the driveway – we have this steep driveway coming out of our cabin – he’s down the driveway across the street,” said Cece McCarthy.
The car was ripped open on impact, and the bear escaped. The Prius was a total loss, and a sheriff’s deputy wrote the incident down as “a bear burglary.” Link -via Arbroath
Although only in a concept stage, the Flake car by designer DaFeng is–for the lack of a better word–cool–or at least it looks really cool! The plan is to cover a vehicle in carbon-fiber pieces with each one connected by carbon nanotubes that will allow the individual scales to adjust the car by creating drag on whatever side the car needs control or to stand up in order to slow it down. See the complete project including a video of the concept car in action at DaFeng’s blog. Be sure and check out the wheels, called “D-Wheels” which operate like tank tracks.
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Oops! It’s a first -an accident caused by a Google driverless Prius. It apparently drove into another Prius near Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California. Updates say that the wreck involved three Priuses and two Honda Accords! The question is: who gets the ticket? Link -via The Daily What
Yabba dabba do! You can get your very own Fred Flintstone replica automobile for the rock-bottom price of 2,200 Euros. Yes, it’s a automobile, with a motor, so you don’t have to power it with your two feet. It does have rollers instead of wheels, a cloth top, a wooden bench seat, and environmentally-friendly natural air conditioning. It’s not clear whether this vehicle has an odometer, but the Paris owner says it has traveled 80,000 kilometers. Link -via J-Walk Blog
Bake cookies in a car? You betcha! In Amarillo, the temperatures have soared to over 100 degrees, and about 200 degrees in a closed car. Brittany Nunn of the Amarillo Globe-News baked chocolate chip cookies in her car. They took quite a while to bake, but the car smelled wonderful afterward. Link -via reddit
Don't know your Optitron from your Openometer? You'd be excused if you haven't been keeping up with the latest doodads in your car. Thankfully, Jim Gorzelany of Forbes' Automotive Intelligentsia is here to help:
To help car shoppers cut through the clutter we’ve compiled a list of 10 contemporary new-car features carrying oddball names that could well have been taken from a 1930’s edition of Popular Science. They range from MINI’s sci-fi sounding “Openometer,” to Mercedes-Benz’s nature defying “Magic Sky Control” and BMW’s provocative “Gentleman Function.” See if you can guess what each of them actually do before reading the descriptions.
By the way, that's the Optitron above. No, it's not a Transformer robot, rather it's the 3D-looking backlit instrument panel gauges in Lexus cars.
At my office, we think it’s hilarious to fill people’s cubes with balloons (and then our facilities people get upset). At Legoland, they think it’s hilarious to replace your car with one made of little plastic bricks. They win. It took 201,076 Legos (that’s 2,934 pounds’ worth) to build this Volvo replica.
Link via The Daily What
Car Nail Clipper – $4.95
Do you know a car lover who could use a little help keeping up with his personal hygiene habits? Get him the Car Nail Clipper from the NeatoShop. This retro looking beauty even comes with a handy keychain. It is perfect for on the go nail care.
Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more fabulous Bath & Body items!
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General Motors built two or possibly three transparent automobiles to display at the New York World’s Fair of 1939-1940. The Pontiac Deluxe seven-window touring sedan (B-body) from that project is going up for sale. In between, it’s been on tour all over the country, displayed at the Smithsonian, and owned by a private citizen. Get more details on this car at Hemmings Blog. Link -via Evil Mad Linkblog
Comments Off I hear there’s an extra joke in the music if you understand Portuguese. -via The Daily What
This photograph of a liquor store was taken in Minneapolis in 1939, and recently posted to Shorpy. Interesting, but… what is that futuristic thing sticking up out of the car parked in front?
The first comment on the picture identified the car as a new 1939 Mercury, and the second commenter asked about the flashy antenna. It didn’t take long for someone to find another car with the same gadget, and another to find an advertisement for the exact radio and antenna. This kind of collaboration and information sharing is one of the things that makes the internet so addicting. Link -Thanks, Marilyn Terrell!
The first 500-mile race at Indianapolis Motor Speedway took place on May 30, 1911. That very first race was a story for the ages. Forty cars started, but only a dozen finished.
People were excited by the amount of money at stake (the winner’s share would be $10,000, an impressive sum in an era when Cobb, baseball’s highest-paid player, made $10,000 a season) and the danger. (In the downtown saloons you could bet on how many drivers, who wore cloth or leather helmets and had no seat belts or roll bars, might be killed.) But with every mile the story line had become more and more scrambled and the spectators more and more subdued. Those charged with describing the “excitement” to an eager audience of millions were feeling the first damp signs of panic. Like every other lengthy automobile contest these experts on baseball and boxing had ever witnessed, this one was damnably confusing. The auto racing tracks of the day simply did not have the technology to keep track of split times and running order once cars began passing one another and going into and out of the pits.
Between crashes and the extreme length of the race, there was a time when no one was keeping up with how many laps each car raced. One hundred years later, people still argue about who actually won the first Indy 500. Link
When gasoline was rationed or nonexistent during World War II, many cars were converted to run on firewood. The trend is making a comeback of sorts as gas prices rise higher and higher. See some of these cars and find out how it’s done at Low-Tech Magazine. Link -via the Presurfer
Redditor enginesoftime saw this vanity plate on a Tesla Roadster and snapped a picture. But the fact that it has a numeral added, plus Nikola is spelled with a “c” made me wonder how many other vanity plates on Tesla cars refer to the original Nikola Tesla. This roundup of Tesla vanity plates has clever ones, but they mainly refer to fuel efficiency. The funniest one went viral about a year ago. The geekiest Tesla license plate would be one that just says “NIKOLA,” don’t you think? It has to exist out there somewhere! Link
Stormtrooper Talking Dashboard Driver – $9.95
Don’t let bad drivers get you down. Get the Stormtrooper Talking Dashboard Driver from the NeatoShop. He will tell all those people to, “Move along.”
The Stormtrooper Talking Dashboard Driver also makes a perfect desk accessory.
Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more Star Wars fun!
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I think that the electric vehicle (EV) will remain a novelty and sort of a green status symbol, for the most part, thanks to the limited driving range. I do think that eventually battery tech will improve to the point where the EV will go much longer distances. Right now, the best chance of making the EV more appealing is a way to quickly and cheaply swap batteries for a fresh pack. This is exactly what is happening in China with a company called Better Place that will install 2,300 battery swap stations in China by 2015. Hot swap EV batteries FTW! link
