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The listing for this car was dragged across the Autopian Slack channel by none other than David Tracy himself. Look, bad project cars can be fun. Jason’s Yugo is cobbled together with all the care of a drunken frat bro defenestrating a folding chair, yet it’s endearing. It has a plucky, misfit character to it that leans into its own punchline. It’s Mike Wazowski on four wheels, a vehicle that approaches its ribbing with good nature....

You folks and your Subarus. I just don’t get it. But then, I wouldn’t really want that Hyundai either. I guess I have to agree with the “I vote neither” contingent on this one. Anyway, let’s move on, shall we? Today’s choices don’t have much in common besides approximate age range and color. Or lack of color, I suppose. Honestly, I’m OK with these two in beige. I like nice brightly-colored cars, but sometimes it’s nice to fly under the radar....

Keep in mind, in reality (not the alternate reality that we’ll get to in a moment), Checker actually did realize that at some point it would have to finally update its ’50s-era design to something more modern, and experimented with some all-new, more efficient, more modern Checker cab designs in the late 1970s, using a stretched Volkswagen Rabbit and similarly-elongated Chevy Citation as bases. Check also tried designing a new cab from scratch (well, Checker-scratch, which meant liberally borrowing mechanical components from all of the Big Three) called the Galva (middle bottom):...

For the past 18 years, the Autel Intelligent Technology Company has been providing car lovers and technicians with equipment to keep vehicles on the road. The Chinese company started with simple code scanners and over the years has expanded into a portfolio of tools. Some of its high-end equipment is like having a dealership in your pocket, too. I have one and it’s been a wrenching lifesaver. However, Autel has been eying more than just car repair....

Now, before I go on, I know at good portion of you out there will read this and think well, dummy, you’re talking about BMW right now, aren’t you? So it worked! Any publicity is good publicity, right? I get that, and on some level I’m definitely overreacting here, but you know what? I don’t care; the “any press is good press” thing is a bit silly; I mean, if I were to go into a Pep Boys and start peeing all over the trailer light displays, screaming that the Dutch are controlling soil pH via satellites and that it’s making Americans sexually attracted to succulents, that would likely get people talking about me, too, but I don’t think it would really do any good for the Torchinsky Lifesmile Brand....

When I talk about the same model of car that swapped its engine location, I mean cars that are on the same basic platform, not just have the same name, so things like the VW Golf-based Volkswagen New Beetle or the 2011 version of the Beetle do not count, even though they share a name and general look as the original rear-engined Type 1 VW Beetle. Same goes for the modern, front-engined Fiat 500s; like the modern Beetles, they’re an entirely different platform and everything....

Maybe there’s too man pop culture tropes about being in remote fields with cult members standing and staring at you just prior to some strange ceremony that finds you naked and bound with a Chuck E Cheese mask on your head, facing dozens of True Believers with knives. Is that what Rambler was going for here? That’s a lovely lady, but the strange calm intensity of her stare is making me uncomfortable....

The palette she picked has five car-inspired colors: Fire Apple: Based on Hunter S. Thompson’s fire-apple red 1971 Chevy Impala convertible from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas Yellow Beetle: Based on my own 1973 Beetle! VW called the color Texas Yellow, and it’s just a great, bright, friendly, plucky yellow. Angelyne: An unashamed, confident pink, based on LA’s famous, enigmatic Angelyne, a woman famous for being on billboards and driving her pink Corvette around LA, and that’s about it BRG: British Racing Green!...

Fuell is an e-mobility company with AMA Motorcycle Hall of Fame inductee and engineer Erik Buell, Sauber F1 team principal Frédéric Vasseur, and entrepreneur François-Xavier Terny at the helm. The trio have one common goal: take EV tech and apply it to electric bicycles, then to electric motorcycles. The company name takes the founders’ names and smashes them together. You can buy a Fuell Flluid E-Bike right now, but Fuell aspires for more than to be another player in the electric bicycle market....

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. Honda’s Production Outlook Seems Quite Positive Automotive News reports that rather than recession doom and gloom, Honda’s focusing on actually making cars to deliver. It’s a promising announcement that could represent a turning point for an automotive industry embattled with supply chain shortages....

I hung up the zoom call with my producer and felt my soul crush as it hit me that the Deniliquin Ute Muster was just a week away. I still hadn’t heard Project Cactus run, much less drive under its own power, and I understood that getting a vehicle running and driving was just the starting point for a series of lengthy troubleshooting jobs needed to create a roadworthy chariot....

While deliberations continue, today’s dispatch brings us news about what really happened to BYD in America, more complications in this country surrounding the Chinese auto industry, and more headaches for Ford over its disastrous dual-clutch transmission from a decade earlier. Grab the keys to the BYD Han EV you (probably) don’t own and let’s hit the road! IRA Hits BYD A year ago, it seemed like nascent Chinese automaker titan BYD—the world’s biggest maker of “electric vehicles” ahead of Tesla if you also count plug-in hybrids—was pretty well-positioned to take on the difficult but crucial U....

I mulled this as I was rearranging my black turtle neck sweater drawer (it’s the one underneath my watch collection drawer). You see, you can of course still get those adorable Kei cabover pick ups in Japan and on much of the Asian subcontinent. It’s a perfect way to have maximum utility in a compact size. If you had a death wish you could even import an old one into the USA....

I get the question all the time, and for years I’ve always answered: “I just choose whatever I feel like driving.” And that’s true. When I consciously pick which vehicle I’m going to drive, I usually snag the keys to my Jeep J10 or my old Mustang. If I haven’t driven one of my other cars for a while, I’ll fire it up and cruise just to enjoy that novelty....

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. Karma Automotive Sues DeLorean Over Alleged Trade Secret Violations Just when you thought the saga of the new EVs with DeLorean badges couldn’t get weirder, the project gets embroiled in new drama....

The Max-Out looks like the future of the past. It’s a concept sports car seemingly styled by Pepsiman, then accented in the same colors as an old Taco Bell. It feels like it’s built for a future where Half Life 3, 4, and 5 were launched to critical acclaim, which makes it that much more astonishing that it’s been built at all. There’s more wedge to the Max-Out’s front end than on a Reliant Scimitar SS1, and Tron-like illuminated mesh elements show up everywhere from the surface under the elongated windscreen to the hubcaps....

From what I can tell, almost nobody seems to like the 500L, at least not openly, and that never sat right with me. I know it’s not a great car, sure, I’m not completely delusional. But it’s also not a bad car, especially when you consider its whole reasons for existing, and I think it even manages to have a good bit of unexpected character, too, and some surprises. It’s just not as miserable as everyone seems to think, and I’m not even sure what the hell people are thinking it was supposed to be, anyway, and maybe everyone should just shut their big yaps already and drive off in their fucking CR-Vs or Outlanders or whatever other forgettable bullshit they thought was so much better, even when they could have picked up an unwanted 500L for a bag of pimples and and and okay, take it easy, Jayjay....

So let’s get yesterday’s results out of the way, and we’ll take a look: Brave souls, I think. But that Benz does warrant a look, just to see if it really is legit. Besides, the Datsun already sold, so it’s out of the running. Now, I’m sure I’m not alone in having a list of reasonably-priced cars that I’ve always wanted to own, but haven’t (yet) had the chance. And I’m sure mine isn’t the only list that changes with my mood....

Seeing this, and making this mental association reminded me of how, when I was a kid, my mom would tell me that she didn’t like the various Baja Beetles I used to eagerly point out on the road as we drove, because she thought they looked too “intestinal” from the rear. I’m pretty sure she was referring to the headers that were usually visible on these. I’m not sure I really knew what she was going on about then, because I just thought they were cool, period, but I think I see it now....

The museum’s library (named for our longtime volunteer librarian, Robin Holab-Abelman) has about 116 feet of custom oak shelving housing well over 1,500 books on subjects ranging from Abarth and Aero to Zagato and Zündapp. As one might expect from us, non-American marque titles fill about half the shelves, with American titles, biographies, racing, and encyclopedias filling the rest. When Google and Wikipedia don’t provide what you want, or if they give conflicting information, I find it’s always a good idea to check against other sources, especially marque experts whenever possible....