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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 
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.
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.
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.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by redsfaithful.
Talk about junk in your trunk (sorry, but I just had to). An Italian man was arrested after a routine police stop ended up with authorities seizing over 1700 animals in his trunk. Included in the bust were 216 parakeets, 300 white mice, 150 hamsters, 30 Japanese squirrels, six chameleons and over 1,000 terrapins, a type of turtle.
It seems he was going to sell the rare critters, but they have instead been given to local zoos.
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.
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.”
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by lannaxe96.
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Nothing says "I’m a geek!" better than a custom-made geeky license plate. Here are 12 awesomely geeky license plates for your viewing pleasure.
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.
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.
What is it about Alameda, California, that attracts vintage (read: sometimes just old) cars? Is it the mild weather … or something else entirely?
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.
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.
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".
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 
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
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.
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
The Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart, Germany has been recognized by the Guinness Book of Records for creating the “strongest artificially generated tornado in the world”. The 34.4 meter high (37.2 yards) vortex has been designed to channel smoke out of the building in the event of a fire.
Head over to Autoblog for images and a video clip.
Link – via Gizmodo UK
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