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Can’t afford to tow your baby Corvette with a full-sized one? Then maybe you could use a pedal-powered Porsche instead.
Via BoingBoing
If you love race cars, then you might just like these fantastic Prada pumps based on the some of the most popular cars of the 50′s and 60′s. It’s a great blend between classic and modern styles.
Link Via Laughing Squid
Speaking of fashionable Halloween rides that only add to a costume, just check out this incredible Flintstones mobile that was actually driven through a drive through.
Helmets, anti-lock brakes, sunscreen -they all seem like they should make us so much safer and healthier, but as it turns out, they can actually put us in more danger, largely because we take our safety for granted once we have these protection measures in place. Read about these and other safety precautions that actually make you less safe in this great Cracked article.
Ordinarily, car thieves aren’t exactly people to look up to, but when one criminal broke into a van in New York and realized it was filled with explosives, he didn’t just run away and hide, he didn’t even wait to call the police. Instead, he took action and drove the van to an isolated waterfront area and then reported the van -along with how he found out about the explosives. In honor of his civic-mindedness, police neglected to even file charges against him.
Read about other criminals with hearts of gold over at Cracked.
There’s a reason cats don’t generally offer roadside assistance. It’s not that they don’t want to help, they’re just not very good at it.
Via Huffington Post
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I think the craziest road I ever drove on was the one lane, ocean-side freeway that hangs over California’s cliffs on the Coast Highway 101. While that got a little intense at parts, it was nothing compared to the terrifying roads seen in this Mental Floss article.
Through the ages, the classiest cars always had fancy hood ornaments. They began as radiator caps and continued even after the caps retreated under the hood. They began to disappear in the 1960s, so now you only see them on fine classic cars -or as art objects by themselves. See a wide variety of all kinds of hood ornaments at Dark Roasted Blend, from familiar logos to one-of-a-kind artworks. The ornament shown here graces a 1931 Packard Eight. Link
(Image source: Second Chance Garage)
It seems like everything you hear on the news is bad, but over on Cracked, you can finally read some good news. While there are seven things listed there, the one that makes me the most excited is the fact that traffic fatalities are the lowest they’ve been since 1949. Go safety!
They might have the advantage of reduced weight, but it does seem like the humans should have had more muscle behind them. Even so, this is an incredibly riveting race between man versus beast.
Link Via Geekosystem
By the hand of Old Red Jalopy, we get to see what some classic movie characters -who happen to be cars- would look like if they were in the new Pixar film Cars 2. This one is, of course, the General Lee from The Dukes of Hazzard. See the other six at NextMovie. Link
Because clowns aren't scary enough already.
What the Internet has taught me: People do strange things, and sometimes these strange things involve a car, and in this instance, sometimes the strange thing done to the car renders said car unrecognizable. Also, people really like tanks. Check out the gallery on CrunchPost for more weird auto-mods, hand-built by people with loads of free time.
A Vancouver ad agency called Dare came up with this creative stunt to unveil the new Honda Civic in Canada. The vague idea is that the Honda Civic is as fun as toy cars, but I’d just like to know what those giant cereal bits are made out of, myself.
People love a race. They began to race cars before any of the kinks in such an undertaking were worked out. Consider the 1903 Paris to Madrid road race:
As a result of the constant, unremitting horror that unfolded on the first day, the race officials just drew a new finish line in Bordeaux.
Given the nascence of car manufacturing, not many people understood yet the inherent danger of traveling that fast in a wood and steel shell filled with explosives. All day, cars crashed into trees, burst into flames, careened into groups of spectators or just straight up disintegrated. Out of all the hundreds of racers that started, more than half crashed out in that first day, at least eight people died including one of the founders of Renault.
But that was just one race. Things got considerably worse in the next, when locals shot at passing vehicles! Read all six stories at Cracked. Link -via Buzzfeed
Sheriff’s deputies in Oklahoma County, Oklahoma noticed damaged wiring in their cruisers for weeks before finding out who the perpetrator is. Spokesman Mark Myer said the culprit is a squirrel who approaches the vehicles by a tree that hangs over the parked cars. Animal control officers have set traps, but so far the suspect has not been captured. Link -via Arbroath
A driverless tractor runs circles in a Walmart parking lot in Richmond Hill, Ontario, smashing cars and anything else in its way for several minutes. -via Cynical-C
EP Industries manufactures pumps, dry-cleaning equipment, firefighting equipment, military equipment, and other types of metal fabrication. But they have a fun side, too. Inventor and company founder Eddie Paul designs and builds mechanical sharks. And he creates custom vehicles to appear in and to promote movies, like the real-world versions of the cars from the Pixar movie Cars. Link
“If you’re looking for a 1960 model, this may well be it.” Those were big words back in 1948, when this short documentary was produced by Popular Mechanics. Which will it be: a three-wheeled golf cart that resembles a flying saucer, an airstream camper on wheels, or a souped-up model T with the dashboard of an airplane? Link -via Nag on the Lake
This Friday’s Museum of Possibilities offers ideas for specialized vehicles that fulfill a range of purposes not usually desired nor requested by the auto-buying public, at least not within a single vehicle. Not to be deterred by the clear lack of demand for such vehicles, I have designed a few. The impulse to add unasked-for capabilities to the ordinary automobile is not easily explained. Even the possibility that these capabilities will not work as I have suggested does not deter me.
Would I want to drive a 1990 model sports car while it was in Wash Cycle? Probably not. Would a drum dryer that rotated around the outside of the car muffler actually work? Maybe, but it might be so small as to be nearly useless. And if the car overheated while in traffic or on a long grade, the clothes inside the dryer might bake. That is, unless there was a thermostatically-activated muffler baffle installed.
Remember, the purpose of the Museum of Possibilities is to investigate possibilities, and not to get too hung up on practical matters!
The present drying up of jobs available to low- and middle-income Americans is leading to a drastic and largely unexpected phase change in the way we live and get around. Imagine what would happen if an ever-increasing percentage of the population could no longer afford a roof overhead or basic transportation. Norms for what are now considered “acceptable” lifestyles would be revised downward. Being homeless might be considered somewhat “normal”!
Yet Americans are famous for their ingenuity. They like to believe that “when the going gets tough, the tough get going.” Perhaps a new class of mobile dwellings called motorless homes will evolve. They will be muscle-powered!
For this Friday’s Museum of Possibilities, I’ve decided to spare readers from having to read a lengthy text – occasionally longwinded and self-referential – by offering my concept in comics format. The reader will only need to scan a very few sentences to get the point.
While I may not possess a perfect understanding of all the factors contributing to the ludicrously high cost of auto insurance – jacked up in part because of the nation’s car chassis worship – I am glad to suggest a solution: Automobiles could be pre-wrecked at the factory. Auto manufacturers already have the necessary expertise to design robots capable of pounding, denting, “keying,” and scratching a new automotive finish without compromising functionality or safety. Engineers would be able to design underlying structures so that wiring, airflow and access by mechanics remained intact.
Would I buy a pre-dented car? No, not unless it became the new standard for automotive beauty. Until then, I would let others be early adopters.
Riding around in this adorable melonmobile would make me feel like Cinderella in her pumpkin coach. I hope it’s a seedless variety so pit stops wouldn’t be required.
During the short seven months (August 2, 1990–February 28, 1991) that the Gulf War raged in the Middle East, I was at work on a book, Public Therapy Buses, Information Specialty Bums, Solar Cook-A-Mats and Other Visions of the 21st Century. The book, published by St. Martin’s Press in September 1991, featured my half-serious predictions for the coming decades. At the time, I could not help but notice the popularity of the U.S. military’s Humvee, so it was not much of a stretch to imagine that versions of those rugged, menacing truck-sized vehicles would become a successful consumer item. I predicted the arrival in the not distant future of Mean Cars. I wrote:
Auto stylists, ever sensitive to shifts in the collective mood, detect an angry, defensive attitude in Americans and offer them the road-hugging, angular, “tank” look in mottled, spattered, or camouflage colors. Cars have narrow slots for windows, body armor, bullet-proof glass and teargas guns.
My prediction was substantially accurate. Not only would car models start looking meaner, they would get larger and heavier. The Hummer became an instant commercial success even if the few who bought them, including California’s Governor-to-be Arnold Schwarzenegger, had no need for such a mammoth vehicle for grocery shopping or commuting to work.
The chart shows the steady growth in sales of SUVs after the Gulf War until around 2005, when demand began to sputter. In 1990, what I had failed to imagine was how the future mix of vehicles, which offered a more extreme range in the size and mass of passenger vehicle models, would co-exist on the streets and highways of America. I had not foreseen how the success of the Light Truck vehicle segment (mostly SUVs) would create a dangerous disparity in weight and mass compared with compact cars. And then there was the problem of seeing over these tall vehicles! Lined up at an intersection, a compact car could now be stuck inside a “canyon” of tall cars.
I proposed a variety of ways to enable the small car driver to see over and around SUVs. My first concept was the Rooftop Periscope Sedan, shown in pink. It seems crude and comical to me now. In the inset above, a goldenrod-painted vehicle has an improved design, with a video camera atop a telescoping mast which slides inside a vehicle pillar.
In the fall of 1983 I experienced a prophetic flash: At some time in the future, automobile chassis design would no longer be constrained by a rule that dictates that a car body be bilaterally symmetrical. Of course, I knew that almost all living creatures are bilaterally symmetrical – with a few exceptions like the flatfish that has two eyes on the same side of its body. But with most fauna and even many flora, the two sides are identical, arranged along an axis in mirror fashion. I wondered if there would come a time when auto designers no longer felt the need to mimic nature but instead could try out new forms. I drew several examples of car models that I foresaw.
Traditionally, automobiles were designed to be symmetrical from left to right side, and asymmetrical front to back. Thinking about this, I realized there were several problems with my vision of asymmetrical cars in the future. First, cars move faster through the air when their exterior body is shaped smoothly. Complex air currents that are caused by an uneven surface tend to slow a vehicle. Second, while consumers like novelty, they are conservative in their attitudes about what they consider beautiful or graceful. The Ford Edsel, for instance, was mocked and shunned by most car buyers because it was viewed as ugly.
But times are changing. For the 2008 model year, Nissan introduced the Cube, one of the first production cars offered for sale in the United States that included an asymmetrical design feature. Darkened glass hid the right rear pillar, which was painted black to further conceal it. This was a car intentionally designed for rebels, Slackers and the younger generations, persons who have a taste for irreverent, post-modern and whimsical design. To many elders, the lack of a D-pillar might seem disturbing, as if the car is off balance.
The Nissan Cube broke a design taboo! Now there is an opportunity for auto designers to mount an all-out effort to design cars that are cheerfully asymmetrical, unusual looking and painted in distinctive, randomly-applied colors on unusually-shaped body panels. I believe that trends have converged to make it possible for my 1983 prediction to come true. These trends include just-in-time manufacturing, computer-aided car body modeling and strong but ultra-light materials. Cars that older generations would regard as horribly misshapen just might become the new standard for vehicular beauty. After all, in some urban areas –Los Angeles comes to mind – motorists long ago concluded that driving a car is an act of madness, a surreal commitment to willingly perform a dangerous act, but an act that for much of the time involves driving at no more that 3 miles an hour during the miss-named “rush” hour. Why shouldn’t cars celebrate each owner’s uniqueness, and offer the possibility that the freeway itself will become a slow-moving, crazy, mardi-gras-style car fashion show?
We know that for most days a typical car is driven for as few as 40 miles, at speeds of less than 25 miles per hour. Where, then, is the need for all those sleek, aerodynamic cars that are designed as if they must move through the air as fast as bullets? Many folks now express an interest in slowing down. Restaurants have appeared that offer Slow Food in a relaxed and peaceful dining atmosphere. There are even restaurants that offer an opportunity to dine in total darkness! Some cities in Europe are advertised as Slow Cities. The new whimsically-designed, asymmetrical automobile would mock the need for speed. The brochure could proudly claim that it failed all wind tunnel tests, that it was literally resistant to speeding! You read it here first: Slow vehicles are the next car trend.
Not much to say, other than, Are you SERIOUS? Clearly this guy is, at least about all things Disney. I spotted this car cruising around Los Angeles and had to take some photos.
Think it’s safe to say this guy is, er, gearing up for Toy Story 3?!
…with a cozy warm sweater.
Link – via Skull Swap
If everyone had to learn how to handle a stick shift, parallel park, and find their way around first, then the new automatic systems would be an assist instead of an excuse to drive without thinking. Let’s take a look at some ways technology does the driving for you.
The roads have already been laid out for us with painted lines, color codes lights and signs with pictures on them, all we need to do is stay in between the aforementioned lines, and try not put our cars into the back seats of other cars. For several decades now, a driver’s only technological distraction was the radio. Getting from point A to point B has never been easier, in theory.
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by Nightcrawlerx.
Photo: Joe Stevens
“Vans and the places where they were” is a project by filmmaker/photographer Joe Stevens that artfully presents… a bunch of vans. Each photo frames the subject identically, yet the vans and the locales are various, shot over the course of 13 years and counting.
Vans and the places where they were documents surviving custom and conversion vans across the West and examines the dialogue which exists between a van’s design aesthetic and that of its surrounding environment. The project began in 1996 and currently consists of hundreds of images shot on 120mm film.
Nothing like a land yacht to ring in the new year. Jalopnik has a whole parade of automotive monstrosities like this one. Which is your favorite?
Link: Jalopnik
Police cars that are sports cars, smart cars, and off road vehicles from all over the world.
While our cars say something about our personality, they are also tools we use to get a job done. One of those jobs is police work, and sometimes the police cars can be just as unique as our own personalities and the jobs they need to do. Here’s a list of over 30 different police cars from around the world, with everything from exotic sports cars, small mini cars, huge SUV’s off road vehicles, luxury sedans, buses and trailers. Chances are if it’s on the road there’s probably a police force using it.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by digimouse.
