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:

Nathaniel 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!

Link

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)

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

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.

Link via Like Cool

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.

Link

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

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!

Link

]]> http://www.neatorama.com/2011/06/10/car-nail-clipper/feed/ 0 http://www.neatorama.com/2011/06/09/see-through-pontiac/ http://www.neatorama.com/2011/06/09/see-through-pontiac/#comments Thu, 09 Jun 2011 11:44:07 +0000 Miss Cellania http://www.neatorama.com/?p=47482

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

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!

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!

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

The car that was built for the 1968 film Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is up for auction at eBay.

Built on a custom ladder frame chassis, many old world forms of car building were employed, and modern technology stepped in to create a vehicle which was both accurate enough to fool veteran and classic car experts, when held under the scrutiny of 70mm cinema cameras, and durable enough to withstand everything from driving in sand, cobbled streets and down staircases. The bonnet is crafted of polished aluminum; the boat deck is hand-crafted of red and white cedar built by boat builders in Buckinghamshire, and the array of brass fittings were obtained from Edwardian cars. Even the alloy dashboard plate is from a British World War I fighter plane! The car weighs approximately 2 tons and measures 17 1/2 feet in length and is powered by a Ford 3 litre V-6 engine mated to an automatic transmission.

Other vehicles were built for the film to be used for special effects, but this particular car was the only one that actually worked. And it only has 44 miles on it. However, bidding has started at a million dollars. Link -via the Presurfer

Is your car’s front passenger seat uncomfortable? Whatever you do, don’t do what this guy did:

A roadside seatbelt check on Wednesday took a back seat to a bizarre and potentially dangerous car modification spotted by Ontario Provincial Police: a recliner chair sitting in as a front passenger seat.

But the officers in Ottawa were not amused by the idea of comfort trumping vehicular safety, noting that the rocking chair wasn’t even bolted to the floor.

Link

I don’t usually ooh-and-aah over cars, but I’ll gladly make an exception for this 1948 Timbs Special by Norman E. Timbs (and restored by Dave Crouse for the 2010 Concours d’Elegance).

Detroit, why don’t you make cars like this? Link | More images at Supercars.net

You can walk many miles in good shoes, but this is taking the concept a little bit too far:

A footwear manufacturer in China has made an electric car out of a giant shoe.

It can carry two people up to 250 miles at speeds of up to 20mph on a single charge of the battery underneath the driver’s seat.

The leather ‘bodywork’ is made in the same way as a normal shoe but on a bigger scale, using the hide of five bulls.

A Kang Shoe company spokesman said it took six months to design and build the car at a cost of around £4,000.

Link – via J-Walk Blog

These Dutch automotive engineers chopped up a Volkswagen Golf and it became the Mini-Golf. Then they added roll bars and it became the Rollgolf! See more videos at mastermilo82′s YouTube channel. Link -via Everlasting Blort

For our fellow Neatoramanauts still digging themselves out of the epic snowstorm in part of the United States, we present: Snowshoes for Cars. From the 1931 issue of Modern Mechanics:

As shown in the photo at the right, these snowshoes consist of box-like steel frames attached firmly to the spokes of the wheels. The frames are then covered with wire netting, canvas, or hide. When the photograph was taken, the inventor was using a wire netting covering on the left wheel and a canvas covering on the right in an effort to determine which was the most efficient. The wire netting snowshoe proved to be most satisfactory.

The width of the snowshoes is ample to prevent the rear wheels from digging through the snow, and ample traction is secured by the broad surfaces. Heavy ski runners are placed on the front wheels, from which the tires are removed in order to secure better bracing. Naturally this contraption does not enable high speeds to be developed, but it proves successful in deep show and is faster than a dog team. Ordinary tire chains on the rear wheels prove useful on hard-packed stretches of ice on city streets.

Link

If you ever need to play Angry Bird while stuck in traffic (seriously, don’t do this), then this little gadget is for you: a carbon fiber iPad mount for your car that puts your beloved iPad within arms reach from the driver seat: Link

Santa Monica Place recently unveiled the nation’s first camera-based "Find Your Car" system. Shoppers who have lost track of their vehicle amid a maze of concrete ramps and angled stripes can simply punch their license plate number into a kiosk touch screen, which then displays a photo of the car and its location.

But what’s the price of that convenience? Can this system be used by Big Brother to snoop on where you are and what you’re doing?

But what if that magic involved an array of 24/7 surveillance cameras and was also available to police and auto repossessers? What if it could be tapped by jilted lovers, or that angry guy you accidentally cut off in traffic? Would the convenience be worth the loss of privacy?

Those are some of the questions civil libertarians and others are asking as technology capable of spying on motorists and pedestrians is converted to widespread commercial use.

Martha Groves of The Los Angeles Times has the story: Link (Photo: Mariah Tauger/LA Times)

It’s always reassuring to buy a used car from someone who you think only went for Sunday drives -but appearances can be deceiving! This German Dutch ad for Volkswagen illustrates that point. -via The Awesomer

Link – Via Edible Crafts

Remember the game SNES game F-Zero? (Oh, how I love F-Zero). Well, it’s back – in spirit anyhow and with weapons – in this new anime called Redline. And boy, it looks AWESOME!

Redline is a new Japanese animated movie brought to us by Takeshi Koike, the director of the Animatrix. Redline took 7 years to make, apparently using 100,000 handmade drawings, it was no minor task and it looks to have paid off… Bigtime. The animation is just spectacular. It was released in Japan on October 9th, with a nationwide subtitled release planned for 2011 in the States, having some small screenings here and there. So we may have a bit of time to wait, but it looks well worth the wait.

The whole thing has the feel of a mix of Speedracer on methamphetamine and Madmax. You can tell this one was made with a beautiful attention to detail as soon as you see some of the explosions. When there is a lot of detail to something like a fiery explosion, then you know there was some juice behind this baby. But truly, words do not do it justice.

Cool-O-Rama has the trailers: Link [embedded YouTube clips]

Look at this awesome Speed Racer Mach 5! It’s authentic down to the last detail, but this is no cartoon, it’s a full-size licensed replica from custom car wizard Mark Towle.

Our Speed Racer Mach 5 has it all, from the rotating front saw blades and push button chrome steering wheel to the custom M5 logo and red leather interior. Our Mach 5 is built for SHOW & GO implementing a California RUST FREE CORVETTE C-4 chassis to provide sports enthusiasts with the proformance, and handling only an American Made Corvette can deliver.

Oh yeah, you can buy it! Link

If you buy me one of these Fiberglass Freaks drivable 1966 Batmobile replicas, I promise to use it for good, not evil! Only 8 cars a year will be manufactured by Mark Racop’s Indiana shop. These accurately detailed replicas come with all the features a crimefighter needs to respond to the bat signal including a Batphone and a working flame thrower out the rear! Get a closer look at these officially licensed Batmobiles and some of the awesome details with lots more pictures at our Spotlight Blog. Link

Update: The very first officially licensed Batmobile is up for sale at eBay now. -Thanks, Mark!

At one time the car bra was a popular automobile accessory. I don’t see so many car owners buying them lately. But in the late 1980s, this cartoon of a matching set of car panties and bra that I drew for Road & Track magazine was topical.

Yet this is not the kind of car drawers I am thinking about today. Rather, I am interested in discussing possibilities for new types of pullout drawers, cabinets, trunks and beds for cars and trucks.

As cars have become an essential component of our 24/7 lifestyles – only in a few places like New York City is it feasible to live without owning or driving a car – it should theoretically be possible to make them more accommodating to our needs, with some of the features we expect in a home or apartment. For instance, our homes have drawers and closets. In the early 1980s I showed what closet cars might look like. Admittedly this was one of my more sexist drawings from a present-day viewpoint; it made more sense 30 years ago than it does now.

Closet Cars would look like roving closets. Clothes could hang nicely, without having to be folded flat on a back seat or hung from a hook, obscuring the driver’s view. The car would provide numerous handy drawers for storing shoes and clothing. Jewelry and valuables would probably be kept at home and not in the top drawer of a Closet Car, however.

A pickup bed can be viewed as just another kind of drawer that can be designed in different configurations. In the Double Bed Pickup Truck, a redesign of the standard pickup truck is imagined. The height of the car seat is raised and the hood is made into an ancillary box that is actually a pullout pickup bed. Access to the engine bay is still possible when the “hood” is pulled forward. Perhaps readers who are car buffs will point out that such a design would disturb a vehicle’s balance, which in modern vehicles would seriously affect the delicate power apportioning of the power brake system, as well as the airbag settings. The truck would ride differently depending on whether yard clippings or sand filled the front bed.

Though this drawing was created in the early 1990s, I believe there now exist systems similar to this that allow for extension of the pickup bed by some means. Recently, several car manufacturers offered four-door passenger vehicles with a short pickup bed in place of a trunk.

I have studied possible ways of adding drawers and cabinets accessible from the exterior of a passenger vehicle. The main flaw in these drawer ideas, as I see it, arises if a drawer becomes jammed or broken. This is a potential design weakness. A drawer that was not properly shut, and that has swung out when the car turned a corner, could be a problem. Minor accidents, which would be dubbed “drawer-bender” accidents, could permanently jam a drawer, blocking access to its contents. It would be a big concern, for example, if a laptop with files needed for a PowerPoint presentation within a half-hour, or a decaying salmon bought fresh at the fish market, were rendered inaccessible. The services of a Body, Fender and Drawer repair shop would be required immediately.

Yet in spite of weaknesses that I have enumerated, I am not yet ready to give up on the idea of car drawers or cabinets. Utility trucks have exterior cabinet doors for tools and supplies, so why couldn’t a family sedan?

Consider the Picnicar, for example. Rooftop solar panels would help power small, insulated coolers and refrigerators accessible from the side of the vehicle. A handheld remote would unlock the cabinet doors. The elegant convenience of the exterior cabinets would be a selling point for this car. Perhaps there would be problems from wine connoisseur-car thieves who might try to pry open the exterior wine cabinets to see if rare wines are hidden inside. There is plenty to think about here!

Visit Steven M. Johnson at his website.

In Vancouver, the BCAA Traffic Safety Foundation and the safety group Preventable have teamed up and placed an optical illusion of a little girl chasing a ball down the street in an effort to curb reckless driving.

The reasoning behind the display, which costs roughly $15,000, as explained by David Dunn of the BCAA Traffic Safety Foundation:

“We need to expect the unexpected because anything could happen, whether it is a 3D image on the road … or whether it’s a live child or a dog running in front of the car, these are all things that we have to be able to control for in a vehicle”

Link

What do you think? Good idea or bad?

"I said no, no, it must be some engine part – as I could not see any cat. But when I went into town in the afternoon, I was convinced too that I heard something. But every time I stopped the car, I could not hear or see anything.

"I decided to take the vehicle to Farmer Autocare in Perth, but the mechanics couldn’t find it either. They were thinking I was taking the mickey out of them, that I was referring to a catalytic converter or something

"Just when they were about to give up, we all heard the kitten. At that point two of the mechanics stripped out the bottom of the car. That was when we saw a couple of little eyes peeking out from the dark corner, looking very terrified.

Link – via Arbroath

Have you ever wished your car had eyelashes? Now it can! Carlashes attach to your car with tape and won’t damage the paint. It will give your car that totally unnecessary feminine look. Link -via The Daily What

If you’re the sort of guy who slept on a car-shaped bed when you’re a little kid and loved it, perhaps this is the hotel for you: the V8 Hotel, a car-themed hotel in Stuttgard, Germany:

Welcome to the hotel that offers you the night – and the ride – of your life.

The V8 Hotel boasts rooms guaranteed to rev the engine of any car lover – because the beds and rooms are made from their favourite vehicles.

Based in the centre of Stuttgart’s Meilenwerk – a German international hub for car dealers – guests can sleep in everything from a Morris Minor to a Mercedes.

The Daily Mail has more pics: Link | V8 Hotel website (in German)

This old car was bought sight unseen off Craigslist because it was cheap. I think someone many years ago tried to make this resemble another famous car. What do you think?  -via Cynical-C

Hayes Johnson made a Storm Trooper hood ornament for his Buick Park Avenue. Geeks Are Sexy asked and found out how he did it. These might become really popular! Link

(Image credit: Flickr user Agent RayBans)