Last week, the Changli was doing just great! David was by for a visit, and my kid Otto and David and I drove that little 1.1 horsepower Chinese electron-burner all over town. Zero problems, just good, honest Changli fun. I was in Detroit for a week, and when I got back and wanted to take the old ‘Li out, I was met with a pretty basic problem: It didn’t want to move....
Prior to the 1900s, camping was touted as a way for Americans to escape from the stresses of everyday living. In those days, campers had choices on how to enjoy the great outdoors depending on their preferences and means. The simplest form of camping was backpacking. Others went on horseback or hitched a wagon to horses. The earliest RVs were wagons converted into mobile homes. RVs have come a long way from the covered wagons of the late 1800s....
While at this year’s Detroit Auto Show just recently, I had our own Mercedes Streeter shoot pictures of the front ends of as many cars and SUVs/Trucks as possible, so I could undertake this experiment. To that end, I got 43 car front end pictures to average together, using the magic of math, and I think the results are pretty fascinating. Want to see? Of course you do. So here we go:...
I’ll clarify right off the bat that this article may violate a few fundamental rules we try to live up to here at The Autopian. We have something called the Double E Rule, for example, which means that everything we run should include elements that are both educational and entertaining. It’s a good rule, but I’ll be honest, I’m not sure if I’m going to meet it this time, because all I want to do right now is complain about this fucking car....
So let’s settle up yesterday, and then we’ll take a look at them: No surprise there. That Accord is really nice, and really cheap. And in fact, it looks like the ad is down already. Also no surprise. So, onward. Today we have a couple of Fords built to carry stuff. One is built to carry people, and the other is for, well, pretty much anything else. It’s a bit of an apples and oranges comparison, but once again, they’re what caught my eye today, so we’ll just roll with it....
In case you’re somehow unaware of the tragedy about which I now speak, here’s an example of a car with bumper-mounted indicators: Pretty straightforward, right? All the normal taillight elements are in place, it’s just that some of them have been re-located down to the bottom floor, on the bumper. It’s not immediately clear why such a decision would be made, of course, because there are already parts of the taillights in the more expected location up on the beltline of the car, too....
You all weren’t shy about expressing your distaste for Friday’s projects, that’s for sure. But let’s see how the voting turned out: Yeah, I think that’s the way to go. I see where the builder was trying to go with the fake Bugatti, but it’s just not right. The wood-bodied Beetle is at least an original design, and pretty far along, and I still think the wood is meant to be used as a mold for fiberglass, which would let you re-make body panels as needed....
A few Sunday evenings ago when our offices at The Autopian Tower were empty and the staff was minding their own business at home, our own Matt Hardigee took to our Slack channel with the concept of an ultra-long-hood touring coupe with a massive frunk and essentially nothing behind the two seats. He offered up the below scribble, including his ideas for putting the motor in back and filling the rest of the car with batteries wherever possible....
Welcome back to Comment Of The Day! Every day, we read every single comment posted on our site and pick the one that made us laugh, get informed, or feel warm inside. You don’t have to go into our comments sections and write thousand-word stories about why you love a car so much, but a lot of you do, and that means a lot to us. So we’re highlighting some of the most excellent bits of thought that you’ve formed into words and digitized onto our website....
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. Alfa Romeo To Develop New Model In America Italian automakers haven’t been having a brilliant time in America as of late. Sure, Ferrari and Lamborghini will always have customers, but Maserati isn’t on most luxury consumers’ radar, Alfa Romeo is seeing fairly low sales, and when was the last time you saw a new Fiat?...
Maybe that’s just a myth we tell ourselves. If it is, it’s one that’s been hinted at long before crossovers and SUVs, because, before those were around, we just told ourselves we could do that in anything, bishes. Like this 1978 Plymouth Volare wagon, seen out in the middle of the forest, no obvious roads around. These things were RWD with 3-speed slushboxes on crappy street radials and had all the traction of a hungry dog on a freshly-waxed kitchen floor....
Anyway, back to the booth. As we can see from BMW’s render, it looks like it should accommodate multiple cars, and the giant grilles feature some neat Easter Eggs. Not only is there an M3 Competition emblem on the upper right slat, the right grille appears to feature a giant parking sensor. More importantly, this big-grilled booth makes a statement, and that statement is “y’all can suck it; this is who we are now....
I know it seems improbable; but before you place a slice of ham on your keyboard and slam your laptop closed in disgust, trapping the ham between your screen and keyboard for reasons I can’t even guess at – seriously why did you do that? Look how greasy it made both your screen and keyboard! Sometimes I just don’t get you. Anyway, look at a Rambler American: See what I’m getting at?...
While many people have been indicted in this case, the such a scheme wouldn’t have been so lucrative if it weren’t for DG Auto of New Jersey allegedly stepping up to the plate. See, DG Auto is a specialist recycling business, one that exclusively focuses on catalytic converters and has the resources to de-can converters and separate out the platinum, palladium, and rhodium inside. It even has an app for selling loads of catalytic converters or using toll refining, where DG Auto refines catalytic converters but doesn’t become the owners of said catalytic converters....
As she often does, Kristen Korosec at TechCrunch has the details. It sounds like employees are getting a healthy severance, but the timing of this is extremely curious. This comes while GM-backed Cruise is trying to expand into other cities, though Tesla is reportedly under investigation for self-driving claims. As TechCrunch notes: The answer for why it’s getting tossed aside appears to be Ford, Ford, Ford. Per a Ford press release: Just last month the company revealed an ecosystem of products and services designed to support commercial delivery and robotaxi operations....
Clear win for the Suburban. I agree. It’s cheaper to buy, cheaper to fix, and more useful when it’s done. And yes, I messed up, and it does have a third row of seats. It happens. Today, we’re going to look at a couple of cars that weren’t massively popular to begin with, and most of those that were sold have long since been recycled into toasters or washing machines or soup cans....
Everyone at the office in Richmond Hill, Ontario had a little bit of hope that the Suzuki car line could carry on for at least a short while longer, and this hope ended up bringing a whole host of changes to the Suzuki lineup that America never got. Suzuki Canada even told Global News that they’d sell cars through the 2014 model year. Sadly, the optimism ran out quicker than a Juul pod at a college mixer, and Suzuki called it quits in Canada after the 2013 model year....
On August 20, Tom Lopes boarded a new Cessna 172 G1000 NXi Skyhawk, registration N490NW. Then, at 6:10 AM Pacific Time he departed Merced Regional Airport/Macready Field in Merced, California and flew the little aircraft west. A full 18 hours, five minutes and about 2,190 nautical miles (2,521 miles) later he landed at Daniel K. Inouye International Airport in Honolulu, Hawaii. Lopes delivered the aircraft to its owner, George Hanzawa of George’s Aviation....
I find these vitriolic responses puzzling, so I reached out to Matt himself to ask about his color choice, and give him a chance to defend himself and his car from the Angry Porschemen. I learned so much more than I expected. It’s good. For some backstory, it’s worth mentioning that Matt getting this car hasn’t been an easy process, since this is really the second example of the car that was built, since the original sank into the unforgiving Atlantic when the ship that was carrying it burned and sank back in February:...
Typically “Shitbox Showdown” runs from Monday through Friday, and is penned by our talented contributor Mark Tucker. But I felt compelled to write a bonus Shitbox Showdown as a way to thank you for helping our site reach 1 Million pageviews this month, and also because I can’t stop staring at these two manual Ford SUVs and sharing them with Jason Torchinsky. Jason shares my appreciation for these two vehicles, but I can only send him these two links so many times before even he tires of agreeing with me that these are cool....
