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. Volkswagen Loudly Ponders A Big Move Desperate times can sometimes call for desperate measures, and Volkswagen’s considering a measure that’s more drastic than most. Bloomberg reports that due to the European gas crisis Volkswagen may shift new vehicle production out of Germany....

Speaking of contributors, let’s shout them out by name, why not, because they deserve it. We got our fellow car-obsessive Thomas Hundal, cranking out the content; there’s Mark Tucker, giving us our daily serving of shitboxes, hot and fresh every morning; we have our incredible design twins, The Secret One and Adrian Clarke; our engineering-mistake confessor Huibert Mees; Rex Bennett, our man inside the Lane; the Navy’s finest pants-shitter, Bobby Mackay; small-town gearhead anthropologist David Wilson; the GOAT himself, Murilee Martin; our China-car savant, Tycho de Feijter; and our fantastic extra topshot artist, Syd....

Here, join me in admiration: Hyundai’s press conference made a point to note that the famous DeLorean DMC-12, best known for the version with an aftermarket Flux Capacitor, has a direct line of decent to the car the N Vision 74 was inspired by, the Hyundai Pony Coupé, designed by Giorgetto Giugiaro’s ItalDesign firm. Essentially, when Hyundai decided they weren’t in the right position to go into production on a Pony-based sports car, ItalDesign held onto their sketches and dusted them off and tweaked them when the DMC-12 project came around....

I’m actually sort of amazed that I’ve never used Turo before. In fact, I can count on one hand how many times I’ve even rented a car, period. U-Hauls? Oh yeah, I’ve lost track of how many old GMC C6500 trucks I’ve driven. But the last rental car that I’ve paid my own money for was a base model Toyota Corolla so I could drive into Johnson Valley to rip across the desert in a Can-Am Maverick....

The E-Ray itself is essentially the current C8, without really significant visual changes, though there does appear to be an E-Ray badge just ahead of the side air intake, and it seems to have the side aero strakes found on the Z07. The logo design for the E-Ray is pretty conventional sports car-type stuff, with the E forming something that could be seen as an electrical plug, with a blue color often used to connote electrical things....

First, if you forgot what the spraying coolant looks like, here’s a nice video: So, this current Soyuz, known as Soyuz MS-22, really can’t be counted on to return cosmonauts/astronauts safely back to home. The replacement Soyuz, MS-23, was already scheduled to launch a new crew to the station in March. Instead, the capsule will launch on February 20 to replace the damaged craft. NASA doesn’t want to call MS-23 a “rescue” Soyuz, but instead prefers the term “replacement Soyuz....

Cast your mind back to the 1970s. Or don’t, because anyone who knows about shaggin’ wagons and claims to remember the decade of cocaine is probably lying. Anyway, American Motors Corporation had a traveling concept car circus back in 1977 called Concept 80. It was a bit like if GM’s Motorama was held in an era of austerity, stagflation and disillusionment. There were a few compact concept cars built for Concept 80, but the best of the bunch was this glorious AM Van....

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. Don’t Forget That People Still Want To Touch Cars There’s been a shift in the auto industry, hastened by the pandemic, to spend less money on auto shows and spend more on bespoke events for journalists....

We’re not like that. So, with that in mind, prepare to choose between these two carefully-crafted Automotive scenarios, generated by the most advanced AI system you can run on a Texas Instruments 99 4/a computer. SCENARIO ONE: The Seats of Eternal Dampness While attempting to change your oil filter one afternoon, you find that the filter is screwed on absurdly tight, and you can’t get a good grip on it at all....

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. Nissan Refreshes The Altima Big Altima Energy just got bigger. Yes, TikTok’s favorite midsize sedan gets an update inside and out for 2023. Powertrains remain completely unchanged, with 2....

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 Is Alpha Motor Corp Real? Few EV startups have captured the imagination of car journalists quite like California-based Alpha Motor with its cool ass trucks and other potential vehicles....

G’day again, Autopians! Today we will be taking a look at Chrysler Australia Limited, or CAL, and some of the models it released in the 1960s and ‘70s. For US readers, I am sure some of these cars will seem like an alt-universe to what you’re used to from Chrysler in that era. And like that era, CAL produced many unusual cars that are still well-loved today and some are landmarks of Australian vehicle production....

I found out that my car is still out there, earning money for Juliana Hatfield’s old friend via this tweet: — Mark Jackson (@jmjackson79) July 15, 2022 I was surprised when I saw this because I had no idea that this picture was still being actively used, but damn, it sure as hell is. Look, it’s even the cover on his Spotify page! That’s especially notable when you take into account that the photo was shot at a time when Kazaa was still a thing....

Also, there used to be a Sonett just like this one that was parked at the Yerkes Primate Research Center when I worked there as a student, as a bioelectronics engineering assistant. One day I’ll tell you about the Simian Ejaculatron and the Yam Incident. One day. Fast forward to a couple years ago I decided to look at them again. Found two that the guy had dragged out of the woods....

Full disclosure, these photos aren’t even remotely close to being professionally scanned. The actual setup is a Canon T6i on a tripod hovering over my coffee table, so forgive the results for being a little bit shit. Still, I felt like it was worth showing you all an auto show from the past, from a time when the future was very much still powered by gasoline. So, let’s put our minds back roughly twenty years and experience the 2003 Detroit Auto Show like it’s the first time....

I will warn you right now, if you are a Ford fan and want to access the vault, it’s going to take you a very long time. It took me over an hour just to download the pictures for this article. And pages load so slow that you sometimes get timed out before loading finishes. It’s frustrating, to say the least. But, FoMoCo is aware of the site’s technical glitches, so hopefully this gets fixed in the future....

I’m sorry, I’ve been informed I’m not allowed to ask that last question. I guess it’ll just remain a mystery and I’ll wake up, sweating, every morning haunted by the thought that those riches will never come and I just shaved my eyebrow for nothing. [Editor’s Note: Please consider doing this! It’ll help us get advertisers, and I’m getting a little tired of eating dog food. Except that Ol’Roy Country Stew!...

While I now realize that the patrons of even a taillight-themed strip club don’t like to hear the ear-splitting sound of two air horns as a crazed little man screams at them, excitedly, about a kind of VW taillight he wasn’t aware of, I think the issue had more to do with my ill-conceived presentation than it did with the subject. I say this because as a hardcore VW Beetle taillight fetishist, there is almost nothing better than the personal discovery of a previously-unknown Beetle taillight varietal....

Keytar music starts to play as they walk into the back parking lot to see the nearly new 1989 Vector W15, freshly seized by the DEA–the fastest amphibious car on land and water ever made–if it existed, which it doesn’t. Lieutanant Castillo: “…it’s out back…(pause)…” Sonny Crockett: “..what?..A new car?” Lieutenant Castillo: ..(silence) Sonny Crockett: “..is it a boat?” Lieutenant Castillo: “….(pause)….it’s both…..” Our own Jason Torchinsky has tirelessly (well, at least a few times) argued about the viability of amphibious play vehicles, and he’s made a number of good points as to why they should exist....

– Forever Young by Alphaville, 1984 No more synthwave. No more chrome word art. No more pixels. No more neon. It’s enough. Enough, enough, enough al-fucking-ready. If I’m subjected to any more of the above, I’m going to plotz. To quote Captain Picard in First Contact, “The line must be drawn HERE. NO FURTHER!” Goddamn Millenials and Zoomers. Stop rehashing Generation X’s pop culture and go and make something new of your own....