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We already know two inches of snow is a lot for Seattle. Now, thanks to a Jalopnik reader, watch a pair of less-than-smart supercar drivers try taking an Audi R8 and a Nissan GT-R out for a drive in the Seattle "snowpocalypse." Because apparently, in Seattle, size doesn't matter. More »
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What makes owners of cars with zero winter prep want to commute in the snow, on a hill, is beyond me. Seattle drivers apparently can't be bothered to... umm... is that someone putting chains on the REAR TIRES of a FWD Toyota Corolla? More »
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The Sperm Bike is a 120-pound, 10-foot bicycle rigged with a sperm-shaped tank of liquid nitrogen and—on business days—vials of human sperm ("pre-babies"). Based on a model used in Copenhagen, Seattle's sperm bike transports its cargo from the Seattle Sperm Bank to fertility clinics. Even though it's motorized, it's still better for the environment than sperm utility vehicles, spermships, and the Spermarine, the sperm-carrying submarines that were so popular in the 1930s. More »
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An argument reportedly over paint job at a Kent, Washington, low rider car show escalated into a shooting Saturday afternoon that left at least 11 people injured, although none in serious condition. Gang activity was suspected. More »
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We see more than our fair share of weird cars around these parts, and one might think that familiarity would jade us. Then you see a Geo Metro stretched like a bad furnace repair and your heart goes aflutter. More »
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McLaren's $250,000 MP4-12C hasn't even begun to be built in volume yet, but it's already had its first wreck, and Seattle residents were rendered sleepless by it. UPDATE! More »
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Three people were seriously burned attempting to restart their van by pouring gas from a bucket into a water bottle directly into the van's carburetor. The van started but soon exploded. The flaming motorists then ran... into a gas station. More »
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Car theft is on the rise in Seattle and police are turning to Twitter to help locate stolen automobiles with their GetYourCarBack account. It's also a great way to bust people for using Twitter while driving. Clever cops. [NY Times] More »
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Go slow, steer into skids, pump your brakes — just a few of the snow driving tips those of us in winter states know too well. Seattle drivers got a pop quiz on them from Mother Nature Monday. They failed. More »
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TomTom's taking traffic congestion to the future, aggregating speed data from its in-car navigation systems to pinpoint precisely which cities have the worst traffic congestion. Here's their scientifically-derived 20 most traffic-clogged cities. The results may surprise some. More »
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This is Down On The Street Bonus Edition, where we check out interesting street-parked cars located in places other than the Island That Rust Forgot. Let's admire a few more DOTSBE cars today, shall we? More »
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From New York to San Bernardino, drivers in America's cities live in their cars. Below we use Google Earth to take an in-depth look at the intersections of the nation's 20 most traffic-congested cities. More »
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Detroit Auto Works of Seattle is still around, though these days they don't seem to focus so much on classic Detroit musclecars as they did back in the 80s… and where's Low Profit Mont nowadays? Imagine an era, just a couple decades past, when 60s Camaros and Chargers still served as transportation! More »
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We were shocked, shocked to learn that the Peugeot 404 Baja racer annihilated the Oval Window Baja Bug in last Friday's Choose Your Eternity poll. It's a new week, however, and we've got new challenges ahead. Let's head on up to Seattle, where the constant rain creates sort of a year-round meat-market singles bar for lonely iron atoms looking to hook up with promiscuous oxygen atoms... and nobody goes home alone! When you've got a vehicle that's been sitting outside in coastal Washington for decade after decade, you figure you ought to be able to get it for a very reasonable price- and you figured right! Zeet has earned a PCH Tipster T-shirt by finding us a couple of tantalizingly cool machines sitting in the sodden Pacific Northwest weeds, so let's drive right in to a colder, damper Project Car Hell! More »
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A '68 Datsun 510 race car is a pretty good handling machine, but when you race in the sleet, rain, and snow of a Pacific Northwest springtime (as VintageRacer does) sometimes your car ends up taking an unscheduled detour off the track. Make the jump for VintageRacer's story. More »
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Diamond T stopped making cars while Taft was still president, becoming a noted truck manufacturer. But what if they had made a spiffy roadster in the 1930s? VintageRacer had his camera at the ready when the time came to answer that question; make the jump to read his description. More »
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After sending us some great action shots from Daytona, VintageRacer headed home to the Pacific Northwest, where he spotted this extremely rare Studebaker Champ pickup. He had to wait for a non-rainy day to shoot it (no small feat in Seattle), but it was worth the wait. Make the jump for more photos and VintageRacer's description. More »
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As if it's hard enough to get a good deal when buying a new truck, imagine if you're mentally ill. Then imagine that you let on that you're not well and have tons of money in cash at home. What happens next is the sales team at Douchebag Brothers Autos first goes to your house and steals about $70,000, then takes $30,000 for the truck and then, when you're committed to a mental hospital, takes the truck and puts it in their name. At least, that's what Paul Rimbley is convicted of doing. More »
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Norm Johnson, a former placekicker for the Seattle Seahawks, is a hero for something other than nailing the game winning field goal as the clock expires. The kicker-turned-real estate agent was driving his son to school when he noticed the Pontiac Grand Am lying upside-down in a ditch full of freezing water and the woman trapped and screaming in the backseat. It was fortunate for the woman he arrived because, like all great kickers (and many good real estate agents), he's got ice water running through his veins. More »
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Because it's sometimes unnerving to get pulled over by a real unmarked patrol car, some police and safety advocates are calling for fleet services to do a better job of making ex-patrol cars more civilian-ized. While there are good reasons for wanting a used cop car (you might be on a "Mission from God"), there are also a couple of less-than-noble motives. Former King County Sheriff Pat Jones has been pushing the state lege to make the change, but so far the law hasn't passed. More »
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If you're driving around with hundreds of thousands of dollars in a briefcase you might want to come up with an excuse before you get on the freeway. A 35-year-old British Columbia man was stopped by Washington State Troopers in Seattle and was unable to explain where the money came from. We're going to go out on a limb and say it has to do with the non-British Columbia. Since no one claimed the money, 90% of it goes to a drug enforcement fund and the rest goes to the state's general fund. See, the War on Drugs is working! [News Tribune More »
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Flexcar/Zipcar users around Washington State are going to see the price of their car sharing rise this week as a nearly 10% car rental tax is going to be applied to their services. The rental car companies were displeased with the exemption for car sharing since they consider their services comparable, and the state's tax collectors agreed. There's an interesting balance at work here. On one hand, car sharing services (like rental car companies) utilize public roads and benefit from many public entities and should therefore pay taxes. On the other hand, the company does pay taxes on its income, gas, payroll, et cetera and helps the city lower its congestion by allowing numerous people to use one car. In the end, what happens will be a matter of who is willing to fight harder for/against the exemption. [Marketplace] More »
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A Seattle man is in jail, a Petco employee is in a cast but Mr. Peepers the duck is going to be okay. The man, Kenneth Quinlan, dropped his girlfriend off at Petco and decided to kill time by lifting an iPod speaker system from an adjacent store. A guard intervened and Quinlan, who apparently needed the speakers badly, beat him up and ran out of the store to his car. Just then, his girlfriend, Mr. Peepers in hand, approached the car. The car hit the girlfriend and Mr. Peepers went flying. Seeing the endangered duck, an exceptionally committed Petco employee rescued Mr. Peepers from the path of the car but was run over. The employee is going to be fine, but Quinlan hit another car on the road and is now in police custody. Though, in his defense, he'd apparently just gotten a methadone dose at the clinic. So, no harm no fowl.– Matt Hardigree More »
]]> http://jalopnik.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=253332&view=rss&microfeed=true Why would someone ever want to take away the Stiffler-esque vanity plate of this young lad from the Seattle area? And seriously, who would ever marry a guy who had this license plate? – Ray Wert More »
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If a full-boat GPS system is overkill for you, the harried commuter, TrafficGauge might just be solution. The service, which uses a basically buttonless device that only displays freeways, is just rolling out in the Bay Area after being deployed in Seattle and LA. While it displays the roads that are running wild, running free; the byways that are backed up, and conditions in between, we think the main problem with the device is the lack of major non-freeway arteries, which in places like LA and the Bay, anyway, are becoming more and more viable as the fruits of Eisenhower's dream fall victim to vehicular arteriosclerosis. [Thanks to CTE for the tip.] More »
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Cheech and Chong taught us all about stealing gas in their 1980 sequel "Next Movie," in which they siphon gas into a trash can (full of garbage), then dump it all over the car and themselves as they try to fill the tank. Afterwards, they light a smoke and the car goes up in flames (though they're miraculously unkilled). Of course, compared to C&C's legendary "getting across the street" scene, one Washington State man's plot to steal more than a million gallons of gas from a distribution center on Harbor Island is completely unfunny. That's probably why it worked. For a while. More »
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We're a sucker for a good car crash story, as long as nobody gets seriously hurt, and this one in Seattle was quite a doozy, as doozies of this type go. A woman left her elderly father in her '80s-vintage Chevy station wagon on the second floor of a parking garage and supposedly stuck the car in park. What happened next isn't entirely clear, but it resulted in the wagon smashing into a parked, unoccupied PT Cruiser and sending both vehicles plummeting through a steel-and-concrete barricade, over the edge of the parking garage and onto the sidewalk below. Amazingly enough, the 88 year-old man survived the ordeal with only minor injuries. More »
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