Crazy Carts are souped-up electric go-karts with rear wheels like the ones on the front of shopping carts. Some goofballs decided to turn a real car into a Crazy Cart by replacing the rear tires with caster wheels. Read the rest
This commentary titled Never Just A Car is a nice montage of iconic cars in films, making it fun to guess the film as each car whizzes by. Read the rest
To date, Volkswagen has bought back about 350,000 diesel vehicles in the wake of the massive environmental fraud they committed around emissions testing. Here's one of 37 VW graveyards. Read the rest
YouTuber TheStradman wanted to unload his 2006 orange Lamborghini Gallardo, so for kicks he took it to CarMax, thinking they probably would not do a free appraisal. They took a surprising amount of time on the challenge and eventually made an offer. Read the rest
According to this infographic citing Axalta Coating Systems, Asians like white cars at about twice the numbers of North Americans and Europeans. North Americans are more fond of red cars than the rest of the world. Read the rest
Jeepneys are the unofficial national vehicle of the Philippines. Originally made from modified surplus US jeeps after World War II by companies like Sarao, they developed into a colorful and stylized form of public transportation. Read the rest
It's a lucky day for KTVU reporter Alex Savidge and camera operator Vaughan Chip. The two were covering a train derailment east of San Francisco when a car was hit and came barreling right toward them. (via KTVU)
There's always some kind of mess in my car. Spilled coffee, greasy hands, fogged-up or bird-pooped-on windows. I usually fumble around for whatever paper napkins I might have stashed away, but then I saw Quickie microfiber towel 24-packs on Amazon for $10. They turned out to be a way better solution. Read the rest
A customer commissioned Glasgow, Scotland vehicle graphics company Clyde Wraps to make a 2014 Volkswagen van look like it had been devoured by rust. The vehicle is actually covered in beautifully designed vinyl stickers of corroded car parts. Read the rest
Of all the CES videos this year, the most surprisingly interesting one demonstrated responsive laser auto headlights. In the concept demo, sensors gauge driving conditions and objects as they come into view, even splitting the beam so it doesn't blast oncoming vehicles with light. Read the rest
Auto detailing can be an art form in the right hands, as air2thethrown shows in this beautiful photo of a field reflected in a car's surface. The regulars at Detailing Bliss would say shooting at such a severe angle is a cheat, but it's a cool effect regardless. Read the rest
Last Friday, a tornado near El Reno, Oklahoma killed scientist Tim Samaras, as well as his son and a colleague. The three were tracking the storm in a vehicle — storm chasing, if you will — as part of their ongoing efforts to deploy probes that could capture high-resolution video from inside a tornado. (Samaras' team was one of many practicing a type of science that can basically be described as Twister in real life.) Chasing storms was an important part of what Samaras did. National Geographic reports that tornadoes only developed in roughly two of every 10 storms Samaras tracked, and the probes were only useful in a fraction of the tornadoes they were deployed in.
Samaras' death is tragic, but he wasn't some untrained yahoo out running around on county roads in a tornado for fun. He was there to do a job; a job that would, eventually, help other people survive. That said, if a situation kills experts, you probably don't want to be that untrained person trying to navigate it on your own.
Which brings us to a key point. After a handful of people who survived the Moore tornado credited their survival to driving away from it, people in Oklahoma City apparently responded to Friday's storms by trying to do the same thing. For some, it worked. But others were killed or injured when traffic on highways in the tornado's path ground to a complete halt, clogged with cars full of people who were (either accidentally or intentionally) trying to flee the storm instead of hide from it. Read the rest
The original Batmobile driven on the 1960s TV series sold for auction on Saturday for $4.6 million. The seller was legendary kustom car king George Barris who had transformed the 1955 Lincoln Futura for television. The buyer was Rick Champagne, owner of an Arizona logistics company. Champagne says he's going to put the car in his living room. Batmobile sells for $4.6 million (CNN) Read the rest
Look closely. Those are seventeen people that artist Emma Hack painted and contorted into the shape of a smashed car. See how she did it below. (thanks, Sean Ness!) Read the rest
This electron microscope photograph, published by the Vienna University of Technology, shows a nano-scale model of a Formula One racing car, created using a 3D printing technique being developed there. The BBC has more on the new technique. Read the rest
Wood burns in a stove as Pascal Prokop drives his totally baller 1990 Volvo 240 station wagon during cold winter weather on a road near the town of Mettmenstetten, some 25 kilometres south of Zurich, on February 9, 2012. Prokob built in the stove by himself and got an operating permit by the Swiss technical inspection authority. As I publish this blog post, it is 15ºF in the town where he lives and drives.
Pros: S'mores while driving are possible. Cons: the stove occupies the spot where one's significant other might be seated. Oh, and, you know: fire?
(REUTERS/Arnd Wiegmann) Read the rest
