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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.

Link Via BuzzFeed

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.

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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.

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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

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.

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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!

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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.

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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.

Link via AdFreak

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

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!

(Images 5 through 10 originally appeared in Design Mind magazine)

Visit Steven M. Johnson at his website.

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!

Visit Steven M. Johnson at his website.

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.

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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.

(Image source)

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.

More recently in 2006 I drew a more robust version of this design, with a TrafficView video camera mounted at the tip of a telescoping antenna. The camera’s view angle and sweep can be adjusted by the driver even while the vehicle is in motion. The video signal from the camera would feed to LCD screens on the front visors and on the back of front seat headrests. The effect of vibration on the video signal, as well as the possibility of an undesirable rhythmic whipping of the antenna in high wind or at high speed would need to be studied.

The anger that I have felt trying to see around SUVs, while sitting down low inside my otherwise wonderful 5-speed Honda Prelude, is perhaps the motivation for these cartoonish solutions. Anger is a great motivator for creativity.

This small convertible features an unusual box-shaped center section that telescopes. When raised, the driver and passenger can easily see over small trucks, minivans and SUVs. The combined feeling of wind in one’s hair while enjoying a great view, and sensing a higher, less stable center of gravity would make for an exciting ride.

The TipUp Sedan offers a substantially improved view of the road ahead when it is tipped up. When in Tip Up Mode, gas mileage suffers, however. Also, in that mode, rear seat passengers lose their view of the road ahead.

The Traffic Peep, with a real-time video camera in its nose, potentially has design flaws, but given that I lack my own wind tunnel for performing tests at different speeds and in cross winds, it is hard to know for sure how it would perform in real world situations. Perhaps this helium-filled blimp would swish back and forth at highway speeds, or flutter like a kite, creating a shaky video image.

My favorite solution so far is the ViewCab. It even has an attractive Steampunk look because of the way its old-fashioned-appearing Driver’s Elevator is integrated into the design. It would be necessary to perform safety tests to determine if raising and lowering the Elevator while at highway driving speed was safe. And certainly it can be assumed that gas mileage would suffer when the Elevator was in the up position. But for around town, I would love to drive a ViewCab. And I could look down into other cars, the way SUV and truck drivers do. I would have a feeling of greater control and power when driving my ViewCab.

Visit Steven M. Johnson at his website.

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.

Think it’s safe to say this guy is, er, gearing up for Toy Story 3?!

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.

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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.

Link (via kottke)

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.

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From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by digimouse.

Did you know you can modify an old bumper car into an actual minicar? The results are pretty cool looking, as evidenced by these cars made by Tim Wright.

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Jalopnik asked its readers for suggestions on what vehicles would be best for surviving and traveling in a post-apocalyptic world. Nine existing vehicles and one semi-fictional vehicle made the cut. Pictured is the Dobbertin Surface Orbiter.

Built out of an old milk tanker, the Orbiter was designed to circumnavigate the globe on land and water, which is good for when you’re on the move and forced to deal with the suddenly changing seasons that the nuclear fallout will likely bring. And like all good survival vehicles, it comes complete with a kitchen and porta-potti.

Link -via the Presurfer

Ok we’ve all seen cars lists before but this one has quite a few I’ve never seen before. The three-wheeled Robin, the futuristic Loremo and stout scarab? Weird stuff! Other are quite familiar, like the 1957 Corvette pictured.

During this time cars have had some radical design changes; some for the better and some for the worse. Here are our top pics for the 60 most distinctive and iconic, classic cars, and while you may not like them all – they are memorable.

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From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by digimouse.

Last year, the Jiangsu Head Investment Group and the government of Nanjing, China held a competition for designing a museum for the automobile’s history and achievements.  Italian architect Francesco Gatti and his team won with this entry featuring an interactive element: you drive into the museum.

The architect describes the museum as a “movie sequence in which the principal actor is the car”, a building where two car-related panorama go hand in hand:   on the one hand the architect’s conscious attention to motorway aestheticism and urban scale – the structures and materials remind one of a viaduct – and on the other, his transportation into the museum of the ergonomics of the interior of a car.  The furbishing and details within the edifice are related to and on a scale with its specific functions and it is not difficult for the visitor to imagine that he is in a car on a highway, rather than in a museum.

Link (rendering courtesy of 3GATTI.)

Car design has gotten a lot more uniform and bland over the years, so it’s tough to find any truly outrageously ugly cars of late. Which is a shame as the ugly cars of old had tons of character and added to our shared experience. How many people who grew up pre-90′s don’t have a tale of their first hideously ugly car? Take the VW Thing:

This compact SUV started official production in 1969 and continued civilian sales through 1980. Designed for German soldiers during the war, the first prototype continued to be improved upon, eventually resulting in this Jeep-like car. Probably one of the safest and most reliable vehicles on this list, that doesn’t stop the VW Thing from being one of the ugliest.

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From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by redsfaithful.

It seems he was going to sell the rare critters, but they have instead been given to local zoos.

Link Via Autoblog

WebUrbanist has a great collection of 15 neat school buses turned into artwork. My favorite is the one seen above based on the catbus seen in the anime movie My Neighbor Totoro. This cool art car was one of the many seen at Burning Man 2002.

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Esslam Zahra of Egypt mounted a retractable fifth wheel on the back of his car, set at a right angle to the other four wheels, in order to pivot into tight parking spots.

Via The Presurfer

Ever since the dawn of civilization, humans have had the need for speed. Indeed, raceways have been in existence for just about as long as we have cars, and although you may have
never found yourself in the middle of a Formula 1 competition, I’m sure
you’ve experienced the  taste of racing in some form or another.

Perhaps our interests in speeding things are the result of an early childhood training. Take, for instance, Disney’s Autopia:

In 1955, Autopia was an example of the multilane limited-access highways which were still being developed. Before the park initially opened, the cars were tested without their rubberized bumpers. This is course resulted in some major collisions, although that was the fun part of the initial test drive. The cars at Autopia were eventually fashioned with rubber bumpers, and a guard rail was put in place to discourage reckless driving. What’s the fun in that!

Over the years, Autopia was updated using the very latest is fashionable vehicles including a 1967 Corvette
Stingray, a Volkswagen Bug, “Dusty, an off-road style car; Sparky, a sports car; and Suzy. Each was designed to be tied into the Chevron line of animated ‘Chevron Cars‘, and 4 versions of the Autopia cars were sold as toys during the 2000 summer season at Chevron stations nationwide.”

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From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by lannaxe96.

Spotting silly vanity license plates is always a fun activity, especially double-innuendo or borderline-obscene ones. But some of the best still come from those who show their geek pride on their bumpers.

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From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Geeksaresexy.

The story behind this saga of the mysterious old car collection is long, twisted and still uncertain. Some time ago someone anonymously posted pictures of dozens or more classic cars covered in dust and apparently hidden away in a barn.

As the story made its rounds of the internet speculation grew. The most credible-seeming story comes from someone who claims to have tracked down the owner – a retired businessman who kept the best cars from his car-sale days for himself.

While it would be nice to imagine that someone simply found this amazing stash of cars it is clear that such a thing does not simply assemble itself – so this story appears to make the most sense. But, to this day, no one really knows for sure.

Since I put up these pictures here at the beginning of February 2007, the story of the Portugese barn full of classic and not-so-classic cars seems to have taken on a life of its own. The interwebs have been abuzz with theories and somebody has even gone to the trouble of making up a story about it. Classic car lovers, treasure hunters and auction houses have all somehow contacted intuh.net in an effort to find out more. In order to stem the flow of e-mails and even telephone calls: here’s all I know.

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Jalopnik has a neat feature called Down on the Street, which features snapshots of cars parked on the street. The Alameda series has more than 400 vintage cars and trucks:

Why does such a small city have so many old cars parked on the street?

Good question, and one to which I have no authoritative answer. I have some theories, which are:

[...]

* The Island That Time Forgot: Alameda is a weird place, and I mean that in the best possible way. It’s essentially a David Lynch movie set in a sunny California climate, among Victorian and Craftsman architecture and a small-town mentality that belies its urban grid street pattern and very high population density. The island is full of old people who never cross a bridge, whose original-owner classics never drive faster than 25 and are used only for short trips to Ole’s Waffles or Lee Auto Supply. It’s also full of young people who start to feel that an old car just, you know, make the most sense. You never know what this town will do to you; Jim Morrison arrived on the island as a wholesome Navy kid, and by the time he departed for LA he’d become a dopefiend weirdo poet.

Link – via jalopnik

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Buhandi.

I’ve seen some odd musical acts in my time and while The Car Music Project certainly isn’t the strangest, it’s certainly one of the most innovative.

Founded in 1991 by composer Bill Milbrodt, The Car Music Project makes music by transforming old car parts into musical instruments.

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From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by whitespace.

Google Maps out of control?  See more funny and peculiar photos of vehicle accidents on Dark Roasted Blend’s 5th installment of "Accidents Big and Small".

Link – via b3ta

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Marilyn Terrell.

ISO Quality Planning, a company specializing in helping insurance companies identify risk, has compiled a list of the most heavily ticketed vehicles on the road, and lead feet everywhere can check it out.

The group analyzed traffic data on 1.7 million drivers and established the probability of a driver of a given line of vehicles being ticketed. The Hummer and Scion tC dominated the list, receiving 463% and 460% over the average, respectively. On the opposite end of the spectrum, the Jaguar XJ sedan and the Chevrolet Suburban attracted a mere 11% and 16% of expected tickets. Given that both the Hummer and the Jaguar are high-cost vehicles, it flips the idea that a huge price tag automatically means more police attention.

Link - via lifehacker

From the Upcoming Queue, submitted by JKirchartz.

Austrian artist Erwin Wurm is a chubby chaser. Well, not so much a chubby chaser as a chubby maker.

And when we say "chubby," we mean "fleshy, volumnous sculptures."

Link - via geekologie

From the Upcoming Queue, submitted by JKirchartz.

Ever wondered what it would be like to travel in a jet-powered porta-potty? Me neither. Seeing someone else doing it still is interesting though. It’s every ten year old boy’s dream come true -a whole collection of jet and rocket powered vehicles, including fire trucks, recliners, tractors and more. Plenty of speed record holders here kiddos, so click the link and have fun exploring the speedy side of life.

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Photographer ch.knuckles’ shot these cool and weird custom cars in a parking lot near Tokyo. You can view the photographs in his Flickr photoset.

Link – Bouncing Red Ball via Pink Tentacle

Head over to Autoblog for images and a video clip.

Link – via Gizmodo UK