What hath wrought this staggering lighting bolt of journalistic integrity, you may ask? Gathered friends I have an answer. If you’ll indulge a bit of British colloquialism, bloody hell do I have an answer. If it pleases your honor, may I present Exhibit A: The newly released Dodge Hornet. “But Adrian, you’re from the Land of Badge Engineering, Great Britain,” you’re likely shrieking. And it’s true. Throughout the fifties, sixties and seventies as Austin Morris begat BLMC begat British Leyland, and oh god it’s so depressing, they pioneered the art of doing the absolute bare minimum to differentiate various nameplates....

But first, let’s see which scooter you chose on Friday: Yep, I suspected as much. And I agree. But to the commenter who voted for the Honda and invoked The Legend of Billie Jean in doing so, bravo. Fair is, indeed, fair. Now, to new business. You all like station wagons, right? How about broken ones? How about, um, colorful ones? Well, you’re in luck, because that’s what we’ve got today....

From bouclé fabric to rose gold interior trim, this limited-edition Haute Voiture Maybach is certainly funkier than your average six-figure ultra-limo. The floor mats are made of mohair, the infotainment sports a special UX, and the whole thing seems fit for the fantasy garages of the very rich and very famous. Plus, with only 150 Haute Voiture models being made, rarity is virtually guaranteed. Mercedes-Maybach hasn’t actually released a price for the Haute Voiture yet, but the standard S680 starts at $230,050, so we can expect this to be… well, more than that....

What is hydrogen? The basics: Hydrogen is a chemical element, a colorless, odorless, flammable gas that combines chemically with oxygen to form water: the lightest of the known elements. Hydrogen is the most abundant chemical substance in the universe. Most of the hydrogen on our planet exists in molecular forms such as water and organic compounds. There is a lot of debate about hydrogen’s credentials as a ‘green’ fuel. This mainly depends on the way it is made....

The RV market has been sizzling hot lately. In what seems to be somewhat of a culture shift, Americans that may have stayed in resorts are now hitting the road with some sort of camper. Some new ideas appear to be sprouting out of this shift, from new camper van concepts to the return of fabulous fiberglass campers. Now, there’s another entry into the space, and it comes from an unexpected source, a company that builds snowboards....

This is one of those weird unspoken rules of auto design: prominent handles that you grab with your hand and pull are only allowed on doors or occasionally hatches or trunk lids or rear doors: never on the front. This rule was well-enough understood that even a non-car-interested normie like my friend Chris there clocked it, and when he actually finally did look at my car and saw it, it struck him as comical....

Yes, that is a genuine, 1970s Air Jammer toy, the Air Jammer Bug Scrambler one, to be specific. I wrote about these with some awe and fascination a few weeks ago, since it’s one of my all-time favorite cars made with cutting-edge 1970s pneumatic piston tech, and sold in the most goofball ways possible. Our own social media savant, Peter, found this one on eBay and sent it to me....

This week, I’m featuring a number of vehicles that may make you scratch your head. One of them in particular doesn’t seem to make sense, but at least it’s dirt cheap! I’ll warn you right away, some of these may be downright stupid or crappy cars. Some of them are questionably modified. Some of them may be suspiciously cheap. And some, unfortunately, may be a bit too expensive for many enthusiasts....

SCENARIO ONE: The Genie of the Fuse There’s a huge storm out as you’re driving around, with so much lightning flashing in the sky so you feel like a teen pop idol walking down the carpet to the MTV music awards, paparazzi all in your face. Your shitbox sputters and stalls, forcing you to pull onto the shoulder and brave the soaking rain to see what the hell is going on....

It’s a minor change, but one that becomes more baffling the more you think about it. It’s a change in design to the front light units. Here’s the previous version of the LCF’s lights: See those lights? They’re tall, slanted-top corner units, with a square-ish headlight area at the bottom and that trapezoidal indicator up top, separated by that little grooved silver bar. They’re fine for this application, nothing too special, but they seem modern enough and fit the overall look....

Incredible Acceleration When the C8 Corvette debuted, it was fairly obvious that Chevrolet was planning some sort of electrification. Come on, nobody designs a car with a huge central tunnel without intent to put something in that space. The result? Chevrolet claims that the E-Ray will run from zero-to-60 mph in just 2.5 seconds and blitz the standing quarter mile in 10.5 seconds. That’s a tenth of a second quicker than the Corvette Z06 in both metrics, all without the fancy quad-cam V8....

Car phones, using a combination of radio and normal telephone lines, have been around since the mid ’40s, though back then the equipment was pretty significant and consumed a decent chunk of a car’s trunk. Here’s an old video explaining how it worked, along with a lot of hilariously stilted conversations: This probably deserves more than just a Cold Start, but I couldn’t help talking about it a bit. Anyway, welcome to a new week....

Here’s the facing page: Now no cheating if you already know Dutch; if that’s you, excuse yourself immediately go eat one of those brownies that make you see god’s uncle or whatever. For the rest of us, can that picture and these descriptions give you enough to figure things out? Like, I think the 3. for the windows suggests the windows are plexiglass and maybe “twee kinderen” means something about little kids?...

The criteria used to select these is simple: what old-ish car commercials had the ability to plant a song (or, more commonly, a tiny, miserable fragment of a song) into my head, and there it would stay, until I seriously would consider using something like a hammer to attempt to remove it. And now, the goal is to plant one or more of these into your head, too! You’re welcome!...

General Motors has a history of rolling out rather fantastic concepts that sadly, often never reach production. How many times have we seen a beautiful Cadillac concept over the years just to be saddened to see it never reach production? Remember the Buick Avista? Or the angular Northstar V12-powered Cadillac Cien supercar? Those cars exist only as one-off concept cars and as dreams living rent-free in your head. But the General hasn’t given just supercars and grand tourers the one-off concept treatment....

My friend is named Jeremy, and unlike all of us, Jeremy is a successful, well-adjusted person with a real job and a wife who went to 9th grade prom with me and dogs and a house and no painful obsession with cars. He’s a huge F1 fan, sure, but when it comes to cars he’s very much a normie, in that his needs are rational: safe, reliable, all that. Oh, but he does play a double-bass, so he needs something that can haul around an instrument the size of a corpse....

My biggest worry with Germany’s TÜV inspection is that technicians sometimes don’t know the ins and outs of all the cars they’re dealing with. That may seem like someone venting their frustrations, but it’s not — it’s acknowledged as a major problem by the “Oldtimer” car community here in Germany. Take two of the reasons why my 1994 Chrysler Voyager failed its inspection back in 2020 (see below): The rear brakes were considered too weak and the steering column wasn’t locking properly....

A bit like Y2K, the Y2K22 bug is a date-related issue that affects certain 32-bit pieces of software. Why? Well, in short, the largest signed integer that a 32-bit format can store is 2147483647, or 01111111111111111111111111111111 in binary. These older Honda navigation systems appear to use a YYMMDDhhmm date format, then convert that number to a signed 32-bit integer and store it for calendar use. For example, August 17, 2021 at 12:35 PM would be stored as 2108171235....

This past weekend The Autopian’s three founders, Jason Torchinsky, Beau Boeckmann, and I joined Matt Hardigree and Beau’s team at Pebble Beach’s absurdly extravagant “Car Week.” The Quail show was nuts, featuring every car exec and plenty of celebrities, and the Concours — the main event — was even nuts-er. But between those two celebrations of automobile beauty and opulence was a celebration of jankiness: The Concours d’Lemons. The show featured some truly absurd and rare old junkers like a French MinicComtesse and a Lincoln Continental turned into a horse....

This weekend I will be embarking on only my second Gambler 500 event of the whole year. Admittedly, things have been a bit of a crazy for my partner Sheryl and I. A series of weird events have happened, and stacked on top of wedding planning, it means that we haven’t done much of any off-roading. In fact, the one and only Gambler 500 that we attended resulted in our van trying to burn itself to the ground....