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This first car-on-screen entertainment I suppose can’t really be considered a movie because while it’s composed of pictures, they’re not really moving pictures. No, this first automotive-focused visual entertainment was a series of magic lantern slides called “Mr.Spurt and His Auto.” I know a lot of you like to have the most updated audio-visual technology and are younger than 150 years old, so you may not be familiar with what a magic lantern is....

Loving buses is a bit like having a curse, because it’s much harder to stuff away a 35-foot monster than it is to store all five of my Smarts combined. And worse, everything is just a bit more expensive when it goes into a vehicle weighing at around 17,000 or more pounds. My lovely enabler wife tells me to wait just a little longer, as we’re hopefully soon moving into a place with lots of space....

The Jeep Wrangler YJ is one of the most polarizing Jeeps of all time, as it was the only “universal-style” Jeep (i.e. CJ or Wrangler) that featured square headlights. For many years, Jeep purists loathed the Jurassic Park Jeep, but in the past decade or so it has seen a resurgence in popularity as nostalgic young adults who grew up watching CGI dinosaurs eat people off toilets reminisced about the YJ in that famous movie series....

Here’s our walkaround video: The new look works in person, I think. The proportions are good, especially the way the wider rear hips feel, and the dramatic rake of the roofline feels sleek and modern, even if we can’t really figure out where the A-pillar ends and the roof begins. One puzzling issue I had with the new look is this: Why, Toyota? For the roughly half of U.S. states that don’t require a front plate, do they really have to have a bumper that looks like someone jammed a brick in there and then painted over it?...

Lots of people don’t get “overlanding.” The hardcore rock-crawling types rightly point out that a typical overlanding vehicle isn’t as capable on nasty terrain as a purpose-built rig. And that if the vehicle you’re planning on sleeping in at night is stuck, what then? [Editor’s Note: I’d rather get stuck in a car I can sleep in. Being stuck at night in a non-overlander is rough. -DT] The general camping scene asks—again, rightly—if it might be cheaper, easier, and just about as good to throw a ground tent in the backseat and spend most of your money on gas and time off from work....

I do need to mention that, contrary to other notices you may have seen on the internet or in flyers around town, this meetup will not offer you the chance to “strike Torch or Tracy with a wood plank, tire iron, sack of doorknobs, or other implement of your choice.” I’m not saying we won’t offer such a service at future meetups, but that is, again, not part of this one....

The enormity of the Nano’s achievement only gets more impressive wen you compare it against other popular, inexpensive cars for the masses and convert their prices to modern dollars. I did this back in 2018 when I wrote up the Nano, so I’m just going to copy-and-paste that here, because I want to make this point yet again: Incredible! I hope somebody takes another stab at an absurdly affordable car one day....

I chose this for today because I saw one and was struck by how the front end looks like it has a smaller car parked in the middle there, if you look at it the right way. See what I mean? The inner headlights and grille connect so it looks like there’s one of those ’70s era Austin Allegros or (if you’re looking at the badge) a Renault 12 parked under the hood of the bigger car....

Before we get to the teardown, you should see how the thing actually works: You have eight rigid, interconnected panels, and they all somehow disappear into what appears to be the rear wall of the truck bed. Where do they all go? How does it work? Here’s the team at Munro to show you: Essentially, what is going on is this: There’s a motor – which they note is like an upsized window regulator motor – that is driving gears at either side of the truck bed....

First, a quick recap of the members of the fleet whose status is relatively unchanged: the Beetle’s carbs are still on my workbench, trapped by my formidable procrastination skills, the Dodge Tioga RV is really more of a guesthouse than anything mobile, and the Changli is still awaiting a fresh set of batteries that I was told would be provided by our wonderful site sponsor, Optima. Of these, the Changli is the most likely to become motile soonest, as it just needs that battery swap....

According to Automotive News, GM is considering a small pickup truck that’s actually down in size from the Maverick and Hyundai Santa Cruz—and it would be all-electric, too. A reporter for the publication saw one such design under consideration this week (at the kind of press event where they show you secret stuff but also cover up your phone cameras, usually) and she confirmed it’s a real thing. Or at least, a thing that exists in studio form while bean counters, engineers and product planners figure out the details....

Things have started out pretty rough for Project Cactus, the $900 kangaroo-hunting ute that I bought from the bush in Australia, and that I’ve had a total of four weeks to fix before the Deni Ute Muster country music festival/ute show/unhinged party. The car that I thought I’d be repairing was in such bad shape that I had no choice but to instead fix the parts car (that’s when you know it’s bad), which lacked basic things like “any interior whatsoever,” a door, a tailgate, a windshield, an engine, a transmission, a driveshaft, and on and on....

The Internet of Cars really loves to perk up whenever they hear twin-turbo anything… until they see what it is and how I did it. [Ed Note: Read our intro on Charles here: “I’m An MIT Enginerd And Battlebots Geek And This Is My Weird Van Collection.” -DT] I approached this mockery of automotive engineering knowing slightly more than nothing about turbocharging and walked away with an abject abomination that looks like serial murder and sounds like a freight train on a takeoff roll at Hartsfield....

Before I even begin this blog, I have to address Project Cactus, because many, many people have been asking about that dilapidated ute I flew all the way to Australia to attempt to fix. A new episode is coming NEXT WEEK, and then the finale will run on Christmas day. I know, that’ll be almost three months from wrench to screen, but we’re doing our best! And it’ll all be worth the wait, I promise!...

I mean, it makes sense, as mechanically these were based on the Falcon, but I never realized they were marketed as such at all. I kinda like it? I miss when car models had “families” where one model would spawn a related wagon and coupé and sedan and in this case, even a van. It generally doesn’t quite work like that now. Also, what the hell is going on in this picture?...

First, let me apologize for messing up the frequency of Parts Bin Puzzle. Between the Open House and getting married, my schedule had been all messed up. But I’m back and on track! Last time, we looked at the Dutton Surf and Dutton Reef, amphibious cars from the mind of UK entrepreneur Tim Dutton-Woolley. Amazingly, you can still buy Dutton’s wild amphibians today, so long as you have the right donor cars to sacrifice....

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. Porsche Gets Tacky As sort of an homage to the 1953 356 America Roadster and the 1993 964 America Roadster, Porsche has decided to take 115 brand new 911 GTS Cabriolets and push the off the cliff of visual taste....

I think for me it’d be a Facel-Vega, a Chrysler V8-powered elegant French beast I once saw street parked in West LA as I was driving by. Who is street parking and driving around a Facel-Vega? It’s like using a golden chariot pulled by winged horses as a septic tank cleaning vehicle. It’s too good for the real world, yet there it was, parked behind some beige Corolla with a mismatched door and by a driveway to a Jack In The Box....

There are three terms often thrown around when talking about how cars handle: Understeer, Oversteer, and Neutral steer. The Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) defines these terms as “The quantity obtained by subtracting the Ackerman steer angle gradient from the ratio of the steering wheel angle gradient to the overall steering ratio” (source: Fundamentals of Vehicle Dynamics, Thomas D. Gillespie). That’s a lot of fancy words about terms that journalists just casually throw around in every Mazda Miata review ever written....

GM has this little promo video, which somehow maintains GM’s long tradition of making decent, normal people annoy the crap out of you when placed into one of their ads: The Blazer EV starts at $44,995 for the base 1LT model with 247 miles of range and goes up to nearly $66,000 for the SS model with 557 horsepower and a 0-60 time of under four seconds. If maximum range is your goal, the RS trim level is for you, with a GM-estimated (so you know, take that with some NaCl because the EPA may get a different result) 320 miles of range....