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The usual kernel of any good shitbox is an ounce of sensibility. Parts availability for old Mopar tat is tremendous, most old Japanese cars will run until the bodies rot off and while every electrical component on an old German car will fail, that won’t faze robust engines like BMW’s M30 inline-six and Volkswagen’s unstoppable two-liter eight-valve four-cylinder engine. Hell, I applied this logic when buying my 3-Series as parts are just so much cheaper than they were for my old Infiniti G35....

Welcome to The Morning Dump, bite-sized stories corralled into a single article for your morning perusal. If you’re morning coffee’s working a little too well, pull up a throne and have a gander at the best of the rest of yesterday. RZ The Roof The problem with launching a concept car with a production name and styling nearly identical to the production car is that when the production version rolls around, it won’t feel like news....

There’s plenty of terrifying automotive Halloween references, but when it comes to cars, the car from The Car might just be the car. The Car was a strange 1977 horror movie about a murderous car that was highly sensitive to being insulted and appeared to drive by itself. In addition to seemingly being able to become offended, the car also appeared to be unable to drive onto hallowed ground, like a cemetery, allowing the people the car was tormenting an opportunity to taunt the machine:...

The World War II Jeep was an engineering triumph when it entered production in the early 1940s; it was small, could drive over any obstacle, tough, easily serviceable, and cheap and easy to build. You’ll never hear me decry that legendary machine, because it truly was revolutionary, setting the foundation for what would later become the most capable four-wheel drive vehicles to ever grace the earth — vehicles like the Toyota Land Cruiser and Land Rover Series I, both of which were developed using the Jeep as the benchmark....

But before you think that Ferrari is absolutely comfortable and secure with their decision to sell SUVs in exchange for money, they do offer a bit of only very faintly defensive justification for why they’re building such a car, referencing some of their history: I think the drivetrain layout is especially interesting. As Ferrari describes it: So, it sounds like the engine is driving axles from both ends: the front ones via the PTO, and the rears through the transmission and driveshaft....

Welcome to weird spec, a recurring series where I go over some of the more mundane oddities of the automotive world. It’s easy to tick off great options on great cars, but those who tick off strange options on normal cars deserve credit too. Throughout automotive history, there aren’t many cars with transverse V8s between the front tires. Outside of a single generation of Ford Taurus SHO and a handful of Volvos, you’re most likely to find this sort of layout in a GM product....

Plus, we’ve got Toto Wolff (maybe) being a jag, Acura bidding farewell to China, and Rolls-Royce saying hello to euros, dollars, and dirhams. Rotary Rotary Rotary Rotary I’m going to share Mazda’s entire press release, titled “Rotary Engine Reborn for the Electric Age,” because it’s not that long: The famous Brussels Motor Show! The new MX-30 model will be unveiled on the Mazda stand at the Brussels Motor Show on January 13th 2023, with a press conference at 10:00 CET....

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. The Production-Spec Mercedes-AMG ONE Is Finally Here Photo credit: Mercedes-AMGIt took forever and a day, but the production model of the Mercedes-AMG ONE hypercar has finally been unveiled. Honestly, I have some thoughts about this plaything for billionaires, and they might be just a little bit cynical....

[Welcome to Huibert Mees’s column, where the former Ford GT/Tesla Model S suspension engineer gets to write whatever he wants on The Autopian. -DT] So what exactly is a bolt? At its most basic, a bolt is a clamp. It is no more than a small version of a C-clamp (or G-clamp for those of you on the other side of the pond). If you want to hold two things together temporarily, you use a C-clamp....

27North is a relatively new player in the RV space. The company is the creation of Pavel “Paul” Bosovik. As 27North’s site says, he has been a lifelong businessman. At 10 years-old, Bosovik sold bookmarks to his classmates for 25 cents each. Later, he would meet and marry Nina, and get into the residential construction industry. The company’s site elaborates: Eventually, Bosovik felt like he needed another change in career, and he took notice that there weren’t many work options in his community....

As often reported, the COVID-19 pandemic created a perfect storm for high car prices. Between chip shortages and demand outstripping new car supplies, dealerships and buyers alike have been storming to used cars. Prices on many used cars have, like many other things in this economy, risen dramatically, leading to some frankly wild headlines and even wilder dealership listings. Look no further than our own reports about the state of the used car market....

We’ve been featuring a lot of electric motorcycles lately. A number of them have been motorcycles that you’ll hopefully be able to buy in the future. Others are motorcycles that you probably won’t be able to buy but are still pretty amazing. Today, we have something a little different. Back in 2020, electric motorcycle brand Cake joined forces with Polestar on electric mobility solutions. A year later, the pair announced that they were creating what they call the first-ever “electric mobility bundle....

David Judd Nutting (1930-2020) was an industrial designer, but one with an unusual aptitude for a lot more than just the visual look of things; he was a designer and an engineer, one of those rare people who somehow manage to meld both hemispheres of that typical left brain/right brain divide (even if it’s a myth or whatever). Nutting’s career started when he worked for Brooks Stevens Associates, a company whose name you may be familiar with, as Brooks Stevens is an absolutely legendary automotive designer, styling cars as wildly-varied as the Studebaker Gran Turismo Hawk, the Willys Station Wagon, the Volkswagen Type 4, and — perhaps most significantly — the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile....

Old oleopneumatic Citroens, Soviet motors, neglected Porsches, even high-mileage Buick Reattas are all cool enthusiast cars that share one thing in common – they break. As such, owners of cars like these will eventually break down and need to hoof it to the nearest auto parts or hardware store in search of a bodge. The problem is that walking as the crow flies can be tiresome, and carrying a bunch of car parts on a used Boosted board will make you feel and look like an uncoordinated spy kid....

But don’t worry; I’m not going to let a little thing like a minor head wound slow me down. [Editor’s Note: Mark, did you not already have a tetanus? That was part of the new-hire contributor welcome pack, was it not? Do you know how much danger you put yourself by working here at The Autopian — where articles like this are churned out — sans tetanus? Anyway, I’m glad you’re okay....

I’ll admit that I bought the Valiant on impulse. I’d just driven from LA to New York, and didn’t feel like flying back to Michigan. So I searched for a car, with my criteria revolving around simplicity. When I spotted a 1965 Plymouth Valiant with a stick (on the column) and one of the toughest engines in automotive history, I knew it was the one. What I didn’t know was that the $2,000 four-door sedan would actually live up to — hell, exceed — its bulletproof reputation....

Two years ago a man named Tom Mansfield emailed me a link to a 1958 Willys FC-170 for sale near Seattle, Washington. The thing was rusted to hell, likely hadn’t run in decades, and was thousands of miles from my house. But it was cheap, so I asked Tom to buy it; he did, and even stored it on his property until I could arrive in the spring to spend a month wrenching whilst avoiding trenchfoot....

The project is a joint venture between connected road development company Cavnue and the state of Michigan (shaped like an oven mitt, stuffed up into Canada, David’s home) and the goal is to create a special corridor along Michigan Avenue and I-94 connecting Detroit and Ann Arbor that will allow for automated, self-driving connected vehicles of all kinds – mass transit, cargo, personal, whatever. Here’s how the State of Michigan describes the project: Ford is a major partner in this new venture as well, which does set them a bit apart from other major automakers that are working on automated driving tech like Tesla or GM....

Charging Station Reliability Sucks More Ass Than Expected It seems as if every week some EV-driving friend talks about inoperable public charging stations on social media, prompting questions about how bad public charging networks could actually be. Well, a team of researchers largely affiliated with the University of California Berkeley’s Department of Bioengineering have finally decided to quantify these woes. The study’s small, but still interesting, as it evaluated every public piece of Level 3 CCS EV service equipment (EVSE) in the Bay Area – all 657 systems across 181 charging stations at the time of the study....

Now, I’m not exactly sure what tool or combination of AI tools the owner of this account is using, nor am I sure exactly what sort of post-processing or Photoshopping is going on, either. I’m not sure that especially matters, and the account owner seems reluctant to divulge those details, which I absolutely understand. I don’t really need to know the exact grade of wire used in an Alexander Calder sculpture or mobile to appreciate it, and I think the same goes here....