Welcome to The Morning Dump, bite-sized stories corralled into a single article for your morning perusal. If your morning coffee’s working a little too well, pull up a throne and have a gander at the best of the rest of yesterday. Apple’s Project Titan Hits A Speed Bump, Again Over the past few years, few endeavors in the automotive world have been as intriguing and elusive as Project Titan, Apple’s long-running and long-troubled attempt at making a car....

First, we’ll check the results from yesterday: Huh. I’m actually a little surprised at that result. It’s my pick as well; I’d rather wrench all day on a good-looking non-running car than try to make something pretty, but I expected it to scare off most folks. I did hear some talk of fixing up the Bronco to flip it, but that isn’t necessary. Just fix it up and drive it, and eventually it’ll flip itself....

This one is a 1985 one, and it made an impressive-for-then 102 hp from its 1600cc four-banger–remember the 80s were still a time when 70 hp was a reasonable amount of power to expect from a small car. This thing actually looked pretty good, too! Check out that very graphical eighties-tastic grille, too, with the progressively thinning lines, like the sunset on the back of one of the shirts the kids in my middle school wore from some surf shop they’d never been to....

This one’s not a fake retro design that I usually do. It’s a REAL vintage concept made during the time when MC Hammer was on the radio and Bill Cosby was still Greatest Dad Ever, so you get that angular look surrounding eighties technology. This was a school project so you know that a.) mechanical considerations took a back seat to idea generation and b.) if you do the math you will see that I’m old as dirt [Editors Note: (softly sobbing at realization of own age) – JT] ....

Toyota has a larger heritage collection, various PR people assured me, so what we’re seeing here is a pretty small sampling. In a way, that makes the curatorial choices even more interesting, as you can see that Toyota is attempting to explain a bit of its history. So let’s see if we can get a sense of how Toyota sees itself via these cars. First up we have this little charmer:...

On the Ford Heritage site there’s a great brochure about the RS200 that details a lot of what makes it special. Developed with the help of three-time Grand Prix champ Jackie Stewart, the RS200 featured a mid-mounted 1.8-liter, 16-valve DOHC Cosworth-derived inline-four with a Garrett AiResearch turbocharger. In “Standard” form that was good for 250 horsepower, but it being a rally car it was designed to be boosted up to 420 horsepower for “competition....

The first dealership service department we reached out to is located in the same area as our reader’s mother – Englewood, New Jersey. Speaking with service staff there confirmed that there were many, many customers who had this exact same problem, with the representative reporting they were “inundated with phone calls,” all from Volvo owners who had effectively bricked cars. One of the details that makes this problem more alarming is that this particular software update is one that happened automatically, without owner authorization; the service department we spoke with explained that as of April 4th Volvo intended to send over-the-air software updates in waves, and these updates seemed to be, at least in part, updates to fix some reported infotainment display-related glitches....

The story begins with a young inventor named Aaron Fechter, who was 19 in 1973, at the height of the Oil Crisis, when the Arab oil-producing countries that made up OPEC established an oil embargo on all the countries that supported Israel in the Yom Kippur war, America included. This caused a huge gasoline shortage and long lines at gas stations and a general panic as Americans realized that, generally, all of their cars got really shitty gas mileage....

Americans have an insatiable lust for camping right now. As we’ve noted before, the RV industry has been posting record production volumes as people take to the open road for vacations. The industry has also noticed the popularity of off-road camper builds, and as a result you can buy all sorts of trailers with lift kits and all-terrain tires. However, as I’ve noticed with my own eyes, these are often just regular campers that merely look rugged....

The Hunton Steam Gathering is a two-day festival of vintage farming equipment, antique cars, motorcycles, as well as a display of falconry [Ed note: I assume that’s where you drive Ford Falcons? – MH]. If you’ve never seen a big bird come down out of the sky at well over 100 mph and swoop down 3 feet off the ground to grab a target then you need to see a falconry display....

Well, it’s a little earlier than I usually call these, but I don’t think this tally is likely to change much. I personally don’t get the love for those AMC Eagle wagons [Editor’s Note: What’s there not to get?! I’m worried about you, Mark. -DT], but I know they do have their fans. (Now the SX/4 hatchback, that I understand.) Between the Eagle and that Mitsubishi van, I think I’d take the latter....

You might be wondering why we’re covering this random commercial vehicle. Well, mostly because it’s cool. Hands up, how many of us played with Tonka trucks as a kid? While an enormous commercial dump truck is another level of impractical, there’s still something cool about a tall, fit-for-purpose commercial vehicle that delights the little bit of childishness inside every vehicle enthusiast. Okay, maybe it’s more than just a little bit of childishness, since we never really grew out of playing with cars....

Well, I suppose I mean that if you can’t get ahold of one of these Jukes that’s painted just like my ’73 Beetle or the gleefully ridiculous Juke-R, with the drivetrain from the GT-R. But still, other than that, this improbable Infiniti-badged Juke has really captured my attention, mostly because of the inherent strangeness of the Juke’s design coupled with the fact that taking any lower-end-of-the-market car and dressing it up as a luxury brand is always appealing to me....

This was first reported by the folks at Car and Driver, and despite how sad it is, the news shouldn’t be surprising. The wagon has struggled for relevance in a market where the crossover is king. Back in 2021, even wagon stalwart Volvo admitted that SUVs are its bread and butter, and while it wasn’t going to completely discontinue wagons, it needed to cut back. Later that year, Volvo reduced its wagon lineup in America by killing off the standard V90 and V60 models....

Really? Come on, you guys. No kid ever spent hours driving a toy beige sedan around the sandbox. (Well, maybe some kids did, but no kids I knew.) But I guess, if you’d rather have Dick Teague’s funny-looking four door instead of a real live fire truck, that’s your choice. I did like the suggestion of turning the fire truck into a mobile taproom. Especially here in Portland, I feel like that would be a big hit....

Yep. Right there with you. That Audi scares me. It looks nice, but I know looks can be deceiving. Besides, I cut my teeth on Mk1/2 watercooled VWs, and I still have a soft spot for them. Rabbit it is. It sounds like the title issue could be resolved with a death certificate and a trip to the DMV anyway. Today, we’ve got a couple of vehicles that weren’t cool at all when they were new....

As we’ve reported back in September, the small commercial van is dying off in America. At one time you could buy a Chevrolet City Express, a Nissan NV200, a Ram ProMaster City, the Mercedes-Benz Metris, and the Ford Transit Connect. These vans offered big commercial van practicality at a smaller size. But, as we pointed out, sales of the small vans are nothing like their bigger siblings, and have been decreasing....

That 1.3-liter is the same “Global Small Engine” four-cylinder engine found in the Jeep Renegade and Alfa Romeo Tonale, with which the vehicle shares a platform. The motor and a six-speed automatic powers the front wheels while the electric motor, which Dodge deceivingly says “can deliver 1,844 lb.-ft. (2,500 Nm) of torque from 0 rpm,” sends the torque to the rears, and works with a 15.5-kWh refrigerant-cooled lithium-ion battery pack to get the vehicle roughly 30 miles down the street in fully electric mode....

What does this mean? I’m not really sure. But I do know that, if you’d asked me a month ago how many folks would be reading our site after 29 days, I wouldn’t have guessed a number anywhere close to seven-digits long. Nobody knew what an “Autopian” was, we had no background in launching sites, and we weren’t partnering with a media company — this has been a jump into the unknown....

Here’s what I got from Frank, which, I would like to point out, was … “dictated and sent in my absence,” which is a pretty baller thing to have at the end of your emails that you can’t even be bothered to type out on your own! You’re a badass, I get it, Frank. Okay, the response: First, “I started to read your article with great interest and then it faded dramatically,” ouch....