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. Germany Rejects EU Combustion Car Ban Just when it looked like the internal combustion era was truly about to end in Europe, in steps Germany to defy the ban....
I picked the Enterprise to start this series because it was part of what can be considered the first real commercialized boom of automobiles, starting in the late 1820s and going into the 1830s. This first real commercial application of the automobile was as bus service in and around London. There was a number of automobiles developed prior to this boom, but they were generally experimental one-off machines that would only have been operated or even ridden in by a pretty small and select group of people....
Air was founded in 2018 as a company called Polarity Mobility. Back then, the Israel-based company immediately got to work on a personal electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft (eVTOL). This space is crowded with competition from Opener, Jetson Aero, SkyDrive, Lift, Next, HoverSurf, and many more. All of these companies bill themselves as the future of transportation and some go as far as to claim that their flavor of eVTOL will make “everyone” a pilot....
Anyway, I wanted to give a periodic “what’s in the shop” update. It will be sporadic, because some of these items are loooong term projects. If something new and exciting comes into the shop, I’ll grab a few pics and write an update. 1938 Tatra T-97 Jeremy is working on readying this rear-engine, air-cooled beauty for museum director Jeff Lane’s 1,000 mile drive in the Hagerty California Mille vintage car rally in a few weeks....
I say all this because we had an article from Mercedes about an airline for pets (I think she was jealous of the animals). This triggered a memory for TOSSABL: I’m now sitting here on my sister-in-law’s couch trying to not laugh too loudly at the though of a pilot flying around in his Cessna, or whatever, with a cabin full of ferrets. Have a great weekend everyone! Remember, we’ll have a Project Cactus finale for Christmas....
Before we start, here are some extremely simple rules. Tequipment accessories are excluded as they’re generally dealer-installed add-ons rather than true factory options. In addition, popping for a higher trim doesn’t factor in to cost of options, and we’re not going to worry about freight charges here, nor count delivery to California or Atlanta. Everything else is fair game though. First up, let’s indulge in Porsche’s paint-to-sample program with Speed Yellow....
As expected. The SHO won in a landslide. That really is a good price on that car. But I’ve been thinking about it, and I can honestly say that I’d choose the Pontiac. Why? I don’t drive fast, so there’s no point in me having a fast car, and dealing with the higher maintenance, more specialized parts, exponentially higher insurance rates, and all the hassle that would go along with a rare high-performance car like that....
Today, not so much. Today’s choices you’d have to be absolutely, utterly, and in all other ways batshit off-the-rails crazy to take on as a project. But if you were able to get either one of them back into respectable condition, you’d be an absolute backyard-mechanic god. So let’s finish up with our sports coupes from yesterday, and then dive in. The Camaro takes it. Hell yeah. That’s my choice too....
The video above is highlighting the discussion about the glovebox, which is worth your time, but I wanted to pull out the conversation about sleeping in vehicles because, it’s true, that people are obsessed with this concept. Back at the old lighting site it was almost a game to see who could spend the most nights sleeping in a van or a car (or make other people do it). I once made Patrick George and Travis Okulski sleep with me in a Sprinter Crew van and it would have been fine if it didn’t drop to 18F overnight....
The first few days after my arrival in Australia from Detroit were a total blur. I was trying to wrench from 9 A.M. to 10 P.M., edit and write articles from 10 P.M. to 3:30 A.M., and then sleep from 3:30 to about 8:30 — all the while trying to shake off jet lag associated with flying 20 hours from a time zone 14 hours back. It didn’t work. My editing and writing were crap, and my wrenching was also crap; I was losing every tool that came into my possession, I was making mistakes left and right (at one point I had to be told how to hold a set of pliers), and there was somehow a zoo involved....
Check this out: First of all, these types of ads are not unique to Texas, though there is a certain specifically Texan-feeling charm about the fast-paced yelling that ensues, the necessity of including a big-looking dude, and the shoutout to a specific exit. While not quite as scream-y, this takes me back to the Lawrence Marshall Chevrolet ads I grew up with: If you’re curious, that’s not Lawrence Marshall but former Oilers defensive tackle Ray Childress....
First, in case you’re sadly unfamiliar with the sort of diagrams I’m talking about here’s a couple of other examples, both from Renault, because for some reason the French automaker always set out to provide the most visual details for the crap that could be hauled around: Most carmakers’ brochures just used flat colored blocks to show the various seating or cargo areas, but not Renault! The company wanted you to know you could haul ornate dressers or variously colored suitcases or birdcages or houseplants or sacks or even miniature horses....
I should also note I’m by no means the only one to raise an eyebrow at this; people on sites like Twitter and Reddit have noted it for years, but it only caught my eye recently. And now I can’t stop thinking about it. Here’s what it says, specifically: With the ability to pull near infinite mass and a towing capability of over 14,000 pounds, Cybertruck can perform in almost any extreme situation with ease....
Personally, I kind of love that Porsche did that. The wheels are, in a purely rational sense, just fine for the job. But, what makes this all so fascinating to me is just how deliriously unacceptable this would be today, which is sort of the theme of this occasional series we’re starting here, called Phoning It In. Phoning It In will be about the amazing ways that carmakers have half-assed any number of things....
First, let’s go back in time to early 1987, a time where yuppie culture is in full swing. Educated dual-income professionals are making a ton of money and they want everyone to know it. They’re skiing in Aspen, they’re trading in Manhattan, their consumption is conspicuous and European luxury car aspirations ridiculous. At the height of this craze, Lincoln was ready to cash in and had one luxury convertible in their crosshairs – the Cadillac Allante....
First things first: Listen to this thing: Okay, now to the review. Actually, just one more: To those of you who have become used to my deep-dive reviews, I’m sorry: This is not one of them. I’m not sure what I was expecting when I arrived at Ford’s press event at Michigan’s fabled Silver Lake Sand Dunes — a legendary proving ground that The Big Three use for off-road testing — but what I got was Ford essentially telling journalists, simply “Hey, we threw a GT500 engine into our Raptor” and then sending us out to destroy dunes for five hours....
I mean, look no further than this line that Jason wrote, which appears absolutely insane when taken out of context. Hell, that paragraph is nutty even with the context of it being an Automotive Would You Rather. Jason’s just like that, and it makes me feel like we should just publish an article that’s just Jason quotes taken out of context. I’m pretty sure if you fed an AI Jason articles and told it to write something based on them, the server hosting the AI will overload and smoke itself out....
This article is really just a thank-you. Tomorrow I’ll write an update on our harrowing roadtrip from Detroit to LA, I may create a how-to Shower Spaghetti guide (I will not), and I’ll post a list of the best articles The Autopian wrote in 2022. Currently I’m in California snowboarding with a new friend of mine, and I won’t lie: the blog-guilt is getting to me bad. So I have ducked into a cabin to write this little thank you post....
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. J.D. Power EV Survey States The Obvious Look, a survey of more than 10,000 people is great for determining public concerns over electric vehicles, but gauging public sentiments of EVs isn’t rocket appliances [Ed note: Apparently this is a reference to a Trailer Park Boy or something?...
Behold its glory: First, a brief history of the fantastically-named Sir Vival. Walter C. Jerome of Worcester, Massachusetts, was one of many folks that were increasingly concerned about rising traffic fatalities. He felt that Detroit automakers seemingly had zero concern for driver’s safety, and set out to design a “revolutionary” safety vehicle, with the goal of protecting the people inside the car from harm as much as possible. He purchased a 1948 Hudson Commodore from Bellingham Motors, which was owned by Donald Moore....
