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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. Stellantis Wants You To Subscribe The Detroit News reports that Stellantis wants to get into the game of subscriptions. Not like BMW’s microtransactions, mind you, but new car subscriptions with the option to swap out models....

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. Tesla’s Head Of AI Has Left The Building We saw this coming, right? After a months-long sabbatical, Tesla’s Director of AI Andrej Karpathy has decided to part ways with the Texas-based EV firm....

You can also find the original episode on YouTube, with more to follow. Here are the links to the Apple Podcast version below: We’ve got more listening options than Porsche’s got ways to take your money, so there are also episodes on Spotify, Google Podcasts, or you can use the RSS feed and point your favorite Podcast player at it. Two new episodes should be coming to Apple Podcasts shortly, but in the meantime they’re already on Spotify and other places....

Power for the Lucid Air Sapphire comes from three electric motors, one at the front and two at the back. The twin-motor rear axle is a particularly neat trick because it allows for genuine torque vectoring through corners. The motor acting upon the inside wheel can actually go into regenerative braking while the motor acting upon the outside wheel doles out the power. Altogether, Lucid claims that the three motors are capable of putting out more than 1,200 horsepower and launching the Lucid Air Sapphire from a dead stop to 60 mph in under two seconds....

If you were around for the 1990 FIFA World Cup, you might remember that Italy didn’t win it. This special Panda isn’t a car that celebrates victory, it’s a car that celebrates the World Cup being held in Italy, a sorta strange thing to commemorate with a special edition model. Then again, GM Canada sold several Olympic Edition models when the Vancouver Olympics rolled around in 2010, so Fiat isn’t the only automaker to make a special car celebrating the existence of an international sporting event....

That’s a great bundle of buzzwords, but what does it actually mean? Likely a range of software tweaks, although we’ll wait for official word from Lexus before ruling out any hardware changes. Speaking of software, Lexus is giving LC owners ten full years of telematics, as should be included with any car costing the better part of $100,000. Otherwise, the LC 500’s updates for 2023 simply consist of minor trim tweaks....

An “ugly stick” is exactly what it sounds like: an ugly car with a stickshift. It’s an undesirable. An untouchable. An outcast. Think Chrysler PT Cruiser, Saturn Vue, Dodge Caliber, and of course, Chevrolet HHR. These cars are almost immune to fluctuations in used car values, because even if the Manheim Used Vehicle Value Index jumps by 20 percent, 20 percent of zero is still zero. Yes, these cars are basically worthless, and not for any logical reason, either....

Last year, I wrote about Kollter’s first offering, the ES1 dual sport. That little motorcycle offered a mixed city/highway range of 62 miles, a 72 mph top speed, removable 2.3 kWh batteries, and a 15 HP motor for the low price of $5,990. The cost of that machine has gone up to $6,995 since then, but Kollter is actually selling them. They’ve been reviewed and, as Electrek reports, a Vermont police department put one into service....

Back up a second. Who is Pierre Gonalons? A Paris-based designer and architect, Gonalons specializes in gloriously wild design across a variety of disciplines. For instance, Gonalons’ San Primo sofa feels like a classic mid-century modern piece viewed through a funhouse mirror. I’m a huge proponent of non-automotive designers getting into car design, a massive fan Marc Newson’s Ford 021C, so it shouldn’t be surprising to learn that I’m absolutely thrilled by Gonalons’ involvement here....

The GTI 40th Anniversary Edition doesn’t mark 40 years of GTI production, but it does mark 40 years of GTI sales in America. See, America didn’t get the GTI until 1983 and at first, it wasn’t the same car Europeans got. Instead of a fizzy 110-horsepower 1.8-liter engine, American Rabbit GTIs made do with 90 horsepower, still a bump over standard Rabbit models but not quite the full Monty. Still, it quickly built a reputation as a fun, refined hot hatchback that did everything well....

This morning I found myself flipping through Facebook Marketplace looking for a cheap Volkswagen Phaeton W12 to add to my fleet. When that failed, I turned towards motorcycles, thinking I’d find something diesel or maybe engine-swapped. Failing on both ideas, I decided to get lost staring at something that I can’t afford. That’s when I landed at “Gasoline Culture” website Silodrome and found this masterpiece: What you’re looking at is the Yamaha Moko Powa D10, and it’s one of the rarest motorcycle concepts you’ll ever find....

In case you somehow forgot about the Tatra 603, I happen to have a little video handy here where I discuss some of the car’s secrets: That was edifying, right? The Tatra 603-based passenger van was known as the 603 MB, and a “low-floor” delivery vehicle was known as the 603 NP, which resembled a small, cab-over flatbed more than anything. Both of these were developed between 1961 and 1962, by a Bratislava auto shop that was known as Orava before being incorporated into the Tatra organization and renamed the evocative name “Plant 5....

Dragons or no dragons, people are still people, and as such we have places to be, business to do, trips to take, errands to run, booties on which to call, junkyards to scour. For all of these things we need our cars, and no stupid overgrown lizard with fiery halitosis is going to stop us. So, we need to be logical about the Dragon Problem, and really break it down and see how to solve it....

First, let’s look at the tweet that started all this: — Clare Eliza (@clare_eliza) January 29, 2023 So, Clare there owns a BMW i4, and lives in the UK, seemingly on a steep hill. Clare captioned this with “sentences that would make your nan’s head explode,” and I think we can include most rational people who live in our current reality along with Clare’s nan there, because the idea that a computer can’t update its software because it’s on a hill makes no logical sense, at least based on most people’s experiences with computers and hills....

As you all probably know by now, I love writing about ridiculous transportation projects. Learning and writing about colossal planes, crazy powerful trains, custom motorcycles, and novel RV concepts brings me a lot of joy. I even love weird boats. The MTT Turbine Motorcycle combines aviation and motorcycles into something that resulted in Australian Motorcycle News writing “It’s bloody mad and extremely scary. I’ll tell you what it feels like: it feels like bungee-jumping, except with the bungee pulling you forwards and not upwards....

Salute, Alfa! Yeah, I think that would be my choice too, if I had to choose one. But it would be fun to fix up the Rover strictly for the reactions it would get at the Portland All-British Field Meet. I don’t think I’ve ever seen one there. You know what else I haven’t seen, at least in a very long time? A third-generation Honda Civic hatchback, or a Mazda 323 sedan....

I’ve known Myron for years because he’s probably the most unique car collector in the world. He doesn’t have everything, but everything he has is fascinating. From an Autech Zagato Stelvio AZ1 to a Citroën CX to some random Greek models, his cars are all of the I-better-stop-and-look-at-it variety. Also, as you’ll see in the video above of the podcast below, he’s a delight. I don’t know Mark Brinker, but he’s got a wonderful collection from all over the world, including some cool Japanese stuff like a Datsun Sports 2000, a Nissan March R, and a Nissan Cherry X-1R....

Before we dig into this a bit, let’s just take a moment to look at the two main characters here: the Falcon and the Corvair. Both were entries in the relatively new compact car segment, but the two cars really couldn’t have been more different. The Falcon was an extremely conventional car design, essentially a scaled-down Ford Galaxie. It used an inline-six making about 95 horsepower driving the rear wheels, a unibody with coil spring suspension up front and old-school leaf springs on a live axle in back....

Really, I stopped because I knew my coworker Jason would have a lot to say about the vehicle’s lighting situation. The rear taillight, in particular, is truly special, as Jason makes clear in his analysis below. As for what I have to say about this machine? Well, naturally I slid underneath to look at the hardware. Now that we know what we’re looking at, let’s check out what’s going on underneath....

It was under these dangerously balmy conditions late this fall that I received a text from a longtime colleague and friend who is presently in the tow business named Todd: “Blue Jeep; runs. They’re getting rid of it today or tomorrow if you’re interested, my dude. Cheap.” You see, The Port City of Wilmington is home to my alma mater, The University of North Carolina at Wilmington, and since ’47, has been known as a college town....