This is the Trippy Tippy Hippy Van and it's the latest crazy race car creation by Maryland police officer and mechanic Jeff Bloch AKA Speedycop. To make it, the van was mounted on top of another vehicle, a 1998 VW Rabbit. He and his team spent over 1000 hours, in just five weeks, to get the sideways van ready for the racetrack. Amazingly, it does zero to 60 in eight seconds!

Bloch, known for his unusual vehicle builds, explains how he came up with the idea for the Trippy Tippy Hippy Van:

The idea came to me—as so many other bad ideas do — by simply wondering how to make something totally conventional into something far more creative and entertaining to watch. Our previous builds were based on the same premise. What if a plane could be made into a racecar? We built the Spirit of LeMons, a ’56 Cessna 310, into a totally reliable street/track car that handles incredibly well, despite the mundane ’87 Toyota van base. I chose that particular model van because it uses a mid-engine/RWD setup and torsion bars in the front, which made for a low center of gravity, and left no strut towers protruding from the narrow fuselage. What if we did it again, but with a helicopter? Most helicopters have quite rounded bodies and use narrow skids, so even if a fuselage could somehow be sourced cheaply enough, neither would hide the chassis of even a small vehicle inside.

Cut & Shut is the latest work by illustrator Chris Labrooy, showing whimsical imaginings of icon VW Beetles and other models come to life. Read the rest

I never cease to be amazed at the how well the 4WD Vanagon Synchro works. I'm always shocked at how much they sell for.

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I know what you're probably thinking and, nope, this isn't a concept design for a refrigerator that looks like a Volkswagen Bus. They actually made a VW Bus fridge!

This stylish kitchen icebox is a collaboration between Volkswagen and Gorenje, a Slovenian manufacturer of large home appliances.

Gorenje Retro Special Edition Refrigerator, modelled by the legendary Volkswagen van T1 from the 50's, also termed as the 'Bulli', will undoubtedly revoke a notion of the decade with its pastel blue or Bordeaux red colours and smooth, rounded edges. Besides giving your home a touch of retro, it will win your heart with its practicality and the latest technology, making it an indispensable item of your kitchen setting.

This is what it looks like in "Bordeaux red" (swoon):

(Foodiggity, Yanko Design)

Previously: A Volkswagen microbus tent, for camping or just hanging out Read the rest

The hits keep on coming for Volkswagen, whose crimes have not yet been fully detailed, it seems. The EPA discovered Dieselgate emissions-cheating software in 2015, and then a German team found more in 2016, and now, a year later, the German Transport Ministry is recalling 24,000 Audi A7 and A8s for the same reason. Read the rest

Starting with an off-the-shelf model of a VW microbus, Hernandez Dreamphography creates Inner Trip, a diorama of a weathered VW on a wintry field. Read the rest

The five Volkswagen executives who were criminally charged in the USA for their role in the Dieselgate scandal have been advised not to travel to the USA because they are liable to arrest there: they've also been told that leaving Germany is risky because they might be arrested and extradited to the USA. Read the rest

It's not just regulatory compliance exec Oliver Schmidt -- arrested last week -- who faces personal criminal repercussions for his role in the Dieselgate scandal: five more VW execs have been indicted and face criminal charges, including the former head of VW R&D, the head of engine development, an engine development supervisor, and another regulatory compliance liason. Read the rest

The most remarkable criminal justice story of 2017 is that the FBI has arrested a real corporate criminal, a VW executive who tried to engineer a coverup of the Dieselgate scandal, and that he might go to jail -- it's remarkable because the Obama administration spent eight years resolutely not sending criminal executives to jail, preferring instead to let their corporations buy their way out of criminal sanctions with huge fines, a doctrine pioneered by Obama Attorney General Eric Holder back when he worked for Bill Clinton's administration. But while Clinton rejected this idea, Obama put it into practice. Read the rest

Oliver Schmidt led Volkswagen regulatory compliance office from 2014 to Mar 2015, and it was he who issued statements dismissing the initial West Virginia University reports of cheating in the emissions control systems of the company's cars, lying to US regulators and insisting that the systems were merely buggy, and not deliberately designed to get around emissions testing; after the company admitted to the fraud, he appeared before the British Parliament and insisted that the fraud didn't violate EU law. Read the rest

AirMapp is a great channel of rescued and refurbished VW vans. They found a 1955 panel van abandoned for decades in the mountains. At first they planned to tow it to a shop, but then they decided to take the parts up the mountain. Very satisfying ending. Read the rest

After briefly scrambling every available neuron my brain had to offer, this VW Van shaped tent makes perfect sense.

You wanted to go camping in your VW camper, but it wouldn't start! Instead you take your VW sized tent, authentic to a 1965 T1, and cram on in!

I love camping in my VW Vanagon Westy.

VW Volkswagen T1 Camper Van Adult Camping Tent via Amazon Read the rest

Drivers in London have to pay a daily "congestion charge" intended to encourage the use of public transit and bicycles, but low-emission vehicles are exempt, and so for years, drivers of VW diesels got free rides thanks to the company's fraudulent claims about their cars' pollution. Read the rest

A report in BILD am Sonntag claims that the California Air Resources Board (CARB) has uncovered the secret test that Audis were programmed to perform to determine whether to pollute like crazy or to pretend that they were low-polluting, legally compliant vehicles. Read the rest

The German newspaper Bild am Sonntag says that US investigators have discovered three more hidden cheat apps in a Volkswagen product line: these ones were discovered in 3-liter Audi diesels. Read the rest

An internal Volkswagen corporate PowerPoint presentation from 2006 outlined how to trick emissions tests -- and the result of that plan to cheat environmental protections, governments, and the people who bought and drove those cars is now known as “Dieselgate.”

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Daniel Lange and Felix "tmbinc" Domke bought some of Volkswagen's cheating Engine Control Units on Ebay and extracted and decompiled the software in them to learn exactly how the cheating took place. Read the rest