This is the Morning Shift, our one-stop daily roundup of all the auto news that's actually important — all in one place at 9:00 AM. Or, you could spend all day waiting for other sites to parcel it out to you one story at a time. Isn't your time more important?

Being rich can be very difficult. Do you choose to ride around in a limo, drive a super car, or go for something rare and vintage? Now, thanks to Becker Auto Design's $400,000 JetVans, you have a new choice. A custom Mercedes-Benz Sprinter van filled with mobile Bond-villian grade levels of technology and luxury.

Last week at an after-party during the New York Auto Show, a long-time automaker PR professional uttered a maxim of automotive spin I've heard so often it feels like a Tantric mantra: "The cars are the stars." Every time I hear it, I shake my head — because if there's one phrase that sets us apart from every other…

There's two little design easter eggs you might miss on the new SRT Viper if you don't look carefully — maps of two famous racetracks that have been lovingly tattooed like a tramp stamp onto the new 640 HP supercar.

The star of the New York Auto Show is the new Viper. Everyone's talking about it — even more than the new Nissan cab, if you can imagine that. But what's less realized is that there's lots of stuff called "viper" that aren't even cars! Get this — they even named a snake "viper!"

For an auto show in New York, it makes sense that one of the cars everyone's most interested in is a cab. Specifically, the Nissan "Taxi Of Tomorrow" re-revealed yesterday. And while the design is novel (at least from the perspective of the old Crown Vics), almost everything in it is immediately understandable to cab…

It's nice to know that there's still car customizers that will make a new model just because. No focus groups, no careful studies, just the very basic idea that some things would just be cool to do. Like making a 1000 HP car that's not a Veyron. Mostly because it's only $250,000.

I'm not livesketching the 2012 New York show show, but I did want to take a moment to sketch something that struck me as very important. Perhaps unwittingly, the Mitsubishi i-MEV Sport Air concept car really, really reminds me of a modernized Isetta. It even has a huge glass front end that would make a perfect door. If …