That's not to take away from the accomplishment of Pandamonium Racing's BMW E30; I'll post about their overall win once I'm back to civilization. Now I"m going to pack up the Crown Vic and head south 130 miles. Check in later for more LeMons Arse Freeze roundups!

We've picked out four of the five fav's over at Inhabitat, you'll have to go peak at their list to find out the last, cheeky entry, but we've dropped in the basics on each so click "Next" to learn more. [Inhabitat]

The Solar Black Bear" is an EV project at the University of Maine and plugs into the wall for a complete charge but also uses a rack-mounted solar array to extend its range out to about 100 miles.

VW Bugs and Earth friendliness would seem to go hand-in-hand, but the original bug wasn't exactly catalyzed and clean. This particular example on the other hand is emissions free and runs on a 12V electrical system, it even retains a four speed manual transmission. The best part? It's owned by Manitou High School in Colorado Springs, and is used for driver's ed training.

The stretched H1 limo gets its green cred by operating on a combination of biodiesel, electric power generated by a solarvoltaic array on the roof and a solid waste gassifier. Probably needs to be stretched just to fit all the equipment on board.

The '65 Impala Super Sport is an interesting case of modern engine meets awesome ride. Unbelievably, car was built by MTV's Pimp My Ride and got a Chevy Durmax diesel tuned run on biodiesel and snorting out 800 HP and 1200 lb-ft of torque. It'll go 0-60 in 3.5 seconds and gets double the fuel economy it used to. Unfortunately, they also reworked the interior.

When Ted Kennedy was first elected to the Senate in 1962, it seemed the biggest tragedy in his life was being the Kennedy without prominent cheekbones. Before too many years had passed, however, his brothers John and Robert would be assassinated and he himself would barely survive an airplane accident. These experiences doubtless shattered him and left him with many personal demons, but they were at least matched by the ones he was about to bring upon himself and Mary Jo Kopechne.

On July 18, 1969, Kennedy gave Kopechne, a teacher, secretary and former political campaign specialist, a ride from a party of people who had worked on his brother Robert's presidential campaign. Although it's unclear why, Kennedy drove his Oldsmobile 88 down an unlit dirt road and off a bridge into a nearby tidal channel. Kennedy was able to swim free of the car; Kopechne was not. It was several hours before the overturned car was spotted by local fishermen, who alerted the police, while Kennedy himself only reported his involvement in the accident after Kopechne's body was discovered.

The actual circumstances of the accident and its aftermath are a confusing tangle that will be debated for years and has already been reduced to bumper-sticker commentary, but it undeniably put a stop to Senator Kennedy's Presidential political ambition. To his credit, Kennedy continued to work tirelessly for the causes he believed in, and was considered by many to be one of the most effective members of the Senate at the time of his death. Sadly, for many, his legacy will always be his role in the tragic death of Mary Jo Kopechne and the National Lampoon Volkswagen ad parody he inspired.

Model T

Ford's plan for the Model T was to offer a simple, usable, high-quality automobile that anyone could afford, and the idea caught on, to put it mildly. The T started out as what everybody's mental image of an early automobile has come to be, hand crank, wooden wheels, acetylene lights and all. Ten years after its introduction, it had an electric starter, actual front doors, a roof, and accounted for half the cars in America. Yes, sir, it's the car that made the people who wanted to git up and go actually able to do so-before the T, transportation almost couldn't BE basic.

Photo Credit: Wikipedia

The Jeep

We're talking the true stripped-down models here, the Willys and CJ models that are coveted by off-road types but also worked brilliantly around town. Almost unbreakable, because there was nothing to break. Impossible to be uptight around them, once you got them away from heavy traffic and, you know, the military. And pretty hard to get now, more's the pity. We're embarrassed for choice in one model to feature, but during the Chevette Era right up through the dawn of the Neon, it was possible to get a retired Postal Service Jeep or AM General delivery truck like the one here, switch the steering wheel back to the left side, and drive in relative style and comfort (relative to walking, anyway). There's something magnificent about that.

Photo Credit: Wikipedia

The Ford Falcon

No, not the contemporary Australian version - the one your uncle the insurance salesman had. Or great-uncle, even. You want a Dodge Dart? You're welcome to it, but that's the easy choice. The Falcon was, to put it plainly, just a comfortable car to buy and live with, and more interesting; it came in lots of body styles, including convertible and Ranchero pickup, and was is considered to be one of the great successes of Ford president Robert McNamara, unlike his other project, the Vietnam War. It sold like crazy for a while, but unfortunately, it was shoved to the side by Ford's own more desirable Mustang.

Photo Credit: Wikipedia

The Volkswagen Beetle

Infinite volumes have been written about this car, but perhaps the single most important Beetle fact is this: It was perhaps as bad as a car can be and still be fun to own. It rusted, it didn't heat or defrost, it was slow, it handled strangely, it was ugly, and it made annoying sounds. But it got to people, somehow, in a way that transcended its novelty value, the way rescued dogs or tiny apartments sometimes do. After all, it was light, it was relatively reliable, and it was different. it If nothing else, it's worth noting that there wasn't really anything else commonly available at the time that offered as much sheer immediacy, and a long road trip in one of these was a small personal epic. Still, the rest of the world got the original Mini, and we got this?

Photo Credit: Wikipedia

The Chevy Nova

In the 1970s, an era when most cars aspired to be rolling living rooms, the cheaper Nova aspired to be a rolling basement rec room, a somewhat overstuffed, purposefully shabby place, usually with lots of browns and yellows, a place where it was perfectly okay to put your feet on the Davenport. No one really wanted one, but plenty of people would up with one and wound up having good times in it, if not with it. It was roomy enough for four people who weren't too choosy, so anyone in there with you was probably a good friend of yours to begin with. Importantly, it could be made faster easily enough, especially the small-block versions, although part of the fun of that was ignoring how slow they were to begin with. The first car a lot of people in Generation X ever worked on voluntarily. Still, though people may not have wanted one, just try finding someone who owned one and doesn't wish they still had it.

Photo Credit: Wikipedia

Ford F-150

Of course, the best-selling vehicle in the world can be had in any trim level you want, but the base-level truck has always been one charismatic automobile. Throw stuff at it, in it, on it, it doesn't care. Get the awesomely durable 300-inch straight six in it, change the oil often, and trundle on through eternity.Hose it off, hose it out, and take it to town, and it still has a certain... well, not class, but a capable dignity you're not going to get in most cars. Plus it's the most common way to get a pleasant and raffish two-seater in a culture that tends to frown on that sort of thing.

Photo Credit: Wikipedia

Honda CRX-HF

The CRX is lovable indeed, but unlike most basic beaters, this one was an obvious treasure off the showroom floor. The liter-and-a-half engine and the five-speed were zippy enough, and fuel economy numbers in the 40s were certainly impressive, but the best part was that it weighed about 70 pounds. Oh, okay, about 1,700, but even in the mid-eighties that was a treat. There are just two seats, but it was a fine little runabout for all that, fairly spacious and Honda-solid. Plus but it rotated on a point right between those two seats, which was fun, and with those EPA numbers this fun was basically free. Sadly, the word is out now and no CRX has sold for basic transportation money since the turn of the century.

Photo Credit: Wikipedia

Ford Festiva

Most people know this car from the SHOgun models with the Yamaha V6 from the Taurus SHO dropped in where the back seats should be. That's fine, but don't overlook the terrier nature of the Mazda-built box, as were all the first-generation Festivas, which are really all the ones worth mentioning. They're zippy enough, roomy enough, and even lighter than a CRX, making them a surprisingly involving drive. Owner anecdotes, always the most interesting of perhaps not the most scientific source of information about older model cars, reveal that the Festiva is tenacious as can be, one of those cars that refuses to give up the ghost completely even after many, many nonessential parts have broken on them. A resounding endorsement, that. Also, the interior fabric over the door panels is so thin that refrigerator magnets can be stuck on, and how do you put a price on that kind of charm?

Photo Credit: Wikipedia

Dodge Neon

In the long run, it wasn't an out-of-the park four-bagger. Build quality wasn't what Chrysler promised, the look didn't age well, and the fluids didn't stay in the engine like they really should have. But when it was introduced, buyers - including a lot of first-time car owners - were delighted to have a reasonably peppy, distinctively styled car from an American automaker. That it handled genuinely well was a nice bonus, for those who noticed. They were everywhere for a while, and unlike a lot of examples of automotive ubiquity, that was generally considered to be okay; a street lightly salted with Neons was a sign that something was going right. It didn't last, of course; bits started falling off, it was notably bad in crash testing (to be fair, just look at the rest of this list!) and a first-generation Neon with a For Sale sign on it may as well have had a warning sign on it, too. But the Neon's success was a sign that happy no-frills success was possible. We wish GM, and anyone else who wants to give it a try, all the best.

Photo Credit: Wikipedia

Copyranter has found this 1969 VW print ad comparing the Volks American product line (which would have been the Beetle, Karmann Ghia, Transporter, Fastback, and Squareback) to the Apollo 11 Lunar Module. Tuesday is the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing, so you can celebrate by buying a Moonlander Captiva, or gnash your teeth over the fact that the supah-cool Lunar Rover wasn't used until later Apollo missions.
[Copyranter]

Yes, yes, we know that the "Umpimp Your Ride" commercials were hilarious, the Beetle-dropped-from-helicopter Corrado ad was a winner, and some folks even mentioned the ad that used that annoying song. We'll get to them on Classic Ad Watch, eventually. Then we heard about this collection of UK-market Volkswagen ads over on MotorTorque and decided it would be best to post it right away. You see, it was so shocking to see that VW's marketers dared to get all eggheady and put a goddamn Dylan Thomas poem in a car ad that we had to share this outrage with y'all! Why, if General Westmoreland hadn't'a kicked Archdude Franz Ferdinand's ass in Grenada, those warm-beer-drinkin' Brits would all be speakin' Afrikaans by now! Anyway, here's the ad, which we're forced to admit is pretty cool… in the same geeked-out-yet-useless way that the Apple Cube was pretty cool. When you're done with that, go watch the other 15 ads.

Last week ended on a Germanic note, with the weird little AWS Shopper getting a nod to the Crack Pipe from 71% of you. Today we're going back to der Vaterland with a summer drop top that will shock you with how few miles are on the clock, as well as by how much the seller is asking because of that.

The VW Beetle, or Type 1, has been around since the beginning of time, and is hypothesized by some biblical scholars to be what Adam and Eve drove when they were banished from the Garden of Eden. As their wardrobes consisted mainly of fig-leaf pasties, the modest performance of the Vee-dub's heater may have made that car a poor choice, however that would have just been the latest in a series of questionable decisions made by the pair.

Despite a storied past, all good things must come to an end, and in 1979 the Beetle was discontinued for the American market. The last year for the air-cooled anachronism brought forth many speculators who tagged and bagged the most desirable convertible models, and then went on to sit on their investment until economic climes, or failure to pay prolonged storage costs, warranted sale.

Such is the case with this PM-yellow Beetle, which has been squirreled away in the Southern California dealership, Zepper Motors, ever since rolling off the boat back during the Carter administration. Never registered, and only moved to make way for expanded inventories and dealership relocations, this drop top has amassed a grand total of 8 miles. Now, Beetles aren't known for being immensely enjoyable to drive, but still, being able to put the top down on a sunny day can make up for a whole host of sins, and you'd think somebody would have thought to take this car out and keep it exercised? That would have kept the seals from shriveling and the fluids from corrupting, but apparently a time-capsule odometer was of greater value.

Gauging from the pictures, the last 30 years have not been too kind to the little Volkswagen because of that neglect. The top, tires and rubber running boards appear to have whiled away the decades by giving up their pliability, and the brightwork has been rendered dull and pitted. The fiberboard and molded plastic dash is in good shape, however - as is the rest of the beige and black interior - meaning you could concentrate on the issues with the exterior and mechanicals, should you chose to make it right.

So there's some good and bad to this incredibly low mileage Beetle, and now it's time for you to decide which side of the apple tree that asking price falls. $35,000 is not chump change, and there's the lingering question whether the low mileage may be to the car's detriment. What do you think, is $35,000 for an 8-mile Beetle a Nice Price? Or is that more Crack than you'll see in the sidewalls of those 30-year old tires?

You decide!

Los Angeles Craigslist, or go here, if the ad disappears.

Help me out with NPOCP. Click here to send a me a tip.

We've picked out 20 of our favorite VW ads from the Classic Ad Watch series for your enjoyment. From the 1950s through the current decade, from the USA, Germany, South Africa, China, Mexico, and Brazil, these ads cover the highlights of the Volkswagen product line in entertaining fashion

1984 Rabbit	1987 GTI	2005 Caddy	Beetle
1984 GTI	1998 Transporter Syncro	1984 Vanagon	1979 Scirocco
1968 Beetle	1979 Rabbit	1972 Beetle	1981 Vanagon
1970 Karmann Ghia	1958 Beetle	1976 Transporter	1958 Transporter
1955 Beetle	1971 Karmann Ghia	1983 Beetle	1966 Fastback

That method worked wonders on the saleability of this Morris Minor Hell Project, and now we're seeing the cheesecake approach taken to new heights with the most decrepit awesome collection of Hell Projects we've ever seen offered by a single eBay seller. Looking for a '63 Ford Zodiac? Perhaps a '49 Salmson S461 is more your speed, or a '54 Austin A30. Whatever sort of obscure French, German, or British machine you might be seeking, German eBay seller Goldies-Boutique probably has what you need. The model, who may or may not be "Goldie," shows off an assortment of costumes while posing in a all the standard car-parts-calendar-style poses; we especially like the fetching grease smears on her face in the "Verdammt Citroën won't start!" shot. Now, there's always the danger that Max Mosley took one look at this tall, busty German woman posing in front of a '48 Panhard Dyna in a skimpy cop outfit and immediately bought all 23 Hell Projects… but you never know, you know?
[eBay Germany], thanks to Manic King Of Corinthia for the tip!

We'll start off with an octet from Discontinuuity, who has a knack for finding some great machinery down on the streets of the home of Coors: Golden, Colorado. Discontinuuity brought us these eight Golden vehicles plus this dignified Golden Mercedes-Benz Ponton a while back, and now we've got another round for you:

Nova Station Wagon: I've got a couple of good DOTS cars here for you. First up is a 1962 (or maybe '63) Chevrolet Nova station wagon gasser. I talked to the owner, Mike, who also owns a 1946 Austin hot rod and takes both cars out to the local Bandimere Speedway for Wednesday night drag races. The Chevy sports a 327 small block, not the stock I6, and has a killer stance in my opinion. More photos of an IH Scout coming soon.
International Harvester Scout: About a block away from the Chevy was this International Harvester Scout in fairly good condition. All I know is that it's driven by a School of Mines student and that it was probably built between 1965 and 1970.
Subaru Leone: I finally got around to photographing this Subaru today. From what I can tell, it was made between 1975 and 1978 and has every Malaise-tastic tape stripe and chrome option checked off (along with "5 speeds" and "Front Wheel Drive"). It looks like a pretty competent little daily driver though. Now I just need pictures of the much rustier BRAT last spotted at Taco Bell.
Volkwsagen Beetle: I saw the Beetle you posted for DOTS a few days ago with the engine cover propped open, and it reminded me that I needed to photograph this flat-black Beetle. I'm not sure of the year; it's probably from the mid 70s. Whatever the vintage, I think it captures the spirit of a college car pretty well: the Libertarian party bumper stickers, subtle yet somewhat half-assed mods, and the pile of crap where the back seat used to be. You also might note that it's parked on Illinois St, right in front of the MG from the original DOTS Golden post.
Toyota Starlet: I saw this Starlet parked on the street while on my way to a friend's house, and knowing the love that many Jalops have for the little Toyota I had to snap a few pictures. From what Wikipedia tells me this is an 81-84 model, and from what the bumper sticker and rust can tell me this little car has been driven hard through Alaska and Colorado since the Reagan years.
Ford Model A: I hope I'm not sending you too many photos from Golden, but I couldn't pass up this great vintage-styled hot rod I saw in a parking lot today. It's a 1931 Ford Model A (although the owner wasn't sure exactly what year it is, the title is for '31) with a chopped top, a 302 Ford V8, and some sweet pinstriping, all sitting on a '32 Ford frame and bias plys. I love all of the little details like the structural wood and fabric in the roof, flat green paint, dropped axle with hairpins, and the lakes-style pipes. Probably one of the oldest cars I've seen around Golden this year, and definitely one of the coolest.
Ford Thunderbird: I've got a couple more DOTSBE cars here for ya. The first is a beat to hell old Thunderbird I caught being transported on a flatbed, parked in front of this creepy industrial building. Whether its destiny is a full restoration or The Crusher, we can only guess.
Volkswagen Transporter: The second car is a newer VW Bus with a wikkid flame paint job, photographed near where I found the MG previously. The paint and aftermarket exhaust give it cool points in my book; however it also looses a few points because of the PRNDL between the seats. From the stickers on the back window, I infer that the owner (or previous owner) is a Christian, works on power lines, and has been a student at the Colorado School of Mines for the last three years or so.

That was no regular Beetle, and it wasn't air-cooled; in fact, only the windshield is shared with the original Volkswagen Type 1. The Fun Cup Beetle is actually a tube-frame, fiberglass-bodied race car, purpose-built for the Fun Cup race series. The series started in Europe and has since crossed the Atlantic to our shores. Here's some in-car action from the 25 Hours At Spa:



A race-ready Fun Cup Beetle retails for $34,950 and includes a mid-mounted, ethanol-burning 2-liter Golf engine mounted to an Audi transaxle and making 150 horsepower. Seems like a decent deal for a full-on tube chassis racer, though we think more mix-and-match fiberglass bodies should be available. How about Renault 4CV, Nash Rambler wagon, Toyota Corona, and Moskvich 412 versions?
[Fun Cup]

Bud Lindemann from the original automotive television show "Car and Track" describes a compact trailer designed to hitch up to a pivot point secured to the roof of a compact car, a roof mounted fifth wheel if you will. If the car's wheelbase is short enough it can turn circles around the thing as long as the electrics aren't hooked up. There's supposedly room for four adults of two adults and three kid, optimistic if you ask us, but still the idea has merit. With the RV and camping industry falling off a cliff steeper than hybrid prices, we're wondering if it isn't time for this gem to make a comeback. Anyone care to imagine a Fiat 500 cruising the highways and byways with one of these in tow? [Youtube]

Even now, 25 years after Hubert The Hatred Bug went to The Crusher, its corrupting influence over me remains strong. Though somehow I've managed to become a solid-citizen homeowner by my 40s, I've never owned a car that cost more than $1600 (if you're going by initial purchase price), and my current daily driver is a beat-to-shit 17-year-old Honda Civic DX… which is actually one of the nicest cars I've ever owned. I can look at a basket-case hot-rodded Sprite with no electrical system whatsoever in my driveway and not even flinch, because I've been here before! The main difficulty I have with telling this story is the near-total lack of photographs of my first couple dozen cars; I finally shook down my relatives for the few you have here, and even resorted to scanning a shot out of my high school yearbook. That means you're going to get way too many words and not enough pictures here, but that's how it must be.


Yes, Alameda High School, 1984. This photograph really illustrates the difference between the kind of social group you associate with when you drive a hideous beater, versus the kind you get when you drive a nice shiny version of the same car. On the left is my Beetle, decorated with Led Zeppelin-esque graffiti and the words "Dave's Still Smokin'" (a reference to some deceased stoner friend-of-a-friend, presumably still firing up doobage in the afterlife). I'm wearing an ironic Ernie-&-Bert Shirt and peering out through the ragtop opening, while my buddies are all seriously geeked-out rejects, flexing muscles, fat rolls, and/or icky cutoffs, and destined to be the unemployable punk drummers and bitter conspiracy theorists of the future. Meanwhile, my preppie classmates pose by (future wealthy realtor) Nancy's showroom-condition '72 Beetle (which she called "Herbie" and labeled as such when signing my yearbook), in their bound-for-success sweaters; even through the crappy halftoned yearbook printing, you can smell the optimism in their attitudes. It's like they know that Reagan and Bush I are going to grease their path to success over the next decade or so, and they're totally geared up for it. And why wasn't I standing on the right with those folks, as should have been my birthright? Well, it all started with a phone call to Sweden…


In the summer of '83, I managed to get shipped across the ocean to spend a month or so with a family in southern Sweden. I was having a great time, as you might imagine a 17-year-old would, and I even got to indulge in some car-geekery by taking a trip up to the Volvo Museum in Göteborg. After a few weeks, a phone call comes from California: it's my mom, with some garbled story about a "$50 Bug with a Porsche engine" that my friend Scott had found, and did I want him to get it for me? Scott (the shirtless guy flexing on the roof of my car in the yearbook photo) lived with his survivalist blacksmith father in a crumbling East Oakland shop, with a Hell's Angels bar on one side and a junkyard on the other. The allegedly Porsche-engined Beetle was some sort of one-day-only sale deal at the junkyard; Scott figured it was perfect for me, and my mom agreed. A little family history here: my mom learned to drive on a '55 Beetle with a Porsche 356 engine, thanks to her ice-racing father, and always felt that setup was a great combination. I already had a total beater '67 GTO and a $50 1969 Toyota Corona at the time, but what the heck? "Sure, buy it and I'll pay you when I get back," I said.


It turned out that the "Porsche engine" was actually a VW Type 3, as used in the Volkswagen Squareback and Fastback; this engine has a crank-driven fan instead of the belt-driven "doghouse" fan setup used on the Beetles and Transporters (even though I didn't get the Porsche engine, I did get a pair of Weber 34s instead of the Bobby Bosch fuel injection originally put on the Type 3, thus making the $50 investment worthwhile right there). How do you make this engine fit in a Beetle? Easy- just hack off most of the rear body behind the back window, to make a sort of a crude parody of a Baja Bug. And that was just the start of the carnage. There wasn't a single bit of wiring left in the car. No instrument panel. No interior. No cover on the huge ragtop sunroof. The brakes didn't work. The pan was mostly rust. Bondo everywhere in adobe-thick layers, including over rust holes. Still, I loved it right away, much more than the Corona and the GTO (which I soon sold for five times what I paid for it). A week or two of trial-and-error electrical work (melting wires are no problem when your car's interior is all sheetmetal), and I had the engine running, much to the dismay of the neighbors (who discovered that a Type 3 with dune-buggy megaphone-style straight pipes sounds like the World's Loudest Chainsaw in action). A few trips to the junkyard and I had brakes (after a fashion) and a driver's seat, and I was ready to start collecting the largest number of fix-it tickets ever issued to any driver in Alameda history.

The first thing I discovered about my new ride was the magic of the Power-To-Weight Ratio. Sure, that engine was probably making something like 60 or 70 horsepower (depending on how much help it was getting from the Webers and straight pipes), which doesn't sound like much until you realize that the 1958 Beetle came from the factory weighing just 1,609 pounds, and mine was completely gutted and missing much of the body. The transaxle was geared for 36 horsepower, and this combination meant that I suddenly had the quickest-accelerating car in town… for about 2 blocks. And it wasn't anything like the smooth torquey rush you got with a big V8; a hard launch with my Beetle was more like being inside a 55-gallon drum strapped to the nose of a Hound Dog missile fired into a burning oil refinery. The word "brutal" was the word most often used by my friends foolish enough to ride in the "passenger seat" (a small plywood stool screwed into the rusty floorboards), and few of them would take more than one ride. The pan would flex and vibrate so badly under acceleration that my eyeballs would jiggle out of focus, and everything got a lot worse better after I installed some VW-to-GM wheel adapter plates that allowed me to install 235/80-15 tires on '56 Olds wheels (complete with Olds hubcaps) in the rear; this "improved" the car's off-the-line grip enough that I could almost get the front wheels to leave the ground (I was able to get enough weight off them that the car would be nearly impossible to control, a real plus for a 17-year-old hoon). It wasn't really possible to drive it on the freeway, since the engine would be screaming near redline above 60 and the ductwork that enabled the Squareback to get cooling air to the fan was nonexistent, meaning the thing would overheat in a matter of minutes. Minor problems, compared to the joy of driving the most notorious car in town!


Then I bought as many junkyard off-road lights as I could find at the local junkyards, rigging them up on the hood and fenders… after that, a PA system from the legendary Quinn's Electronics, which meant I could blast my very favorite song at the time (Frank Zappa's "Stick It Out") for all the world to enjoy… then, of course, a dozen or so random car horns, all this crap controlled from an instrument panel made from street-sign aluminum and studded with dozens of toggle switches and cryptic indicator lights. What I really wanted to do was install a pair of toilets for driver and passenger seats, complete with water tank and pump so that they'd actually flush onto the pavement, but I couldn't figure a way to keep the sloshage from being too maddening, plus there was the shards-o-porcelain crash danger issue. Meanwhile, I was letting anyone who felt like it decorate the car, which went through numerous paint jobs, graffiti-bombings, decal schemes, etc. There was the Led Zep deal you see here, followed by a Dead Kennedys theme, and then it ended up with a Great Gatsby mural on the doors, for reasons that probably made perfect sense at the time. While all this weirdness made me pretty much radioactive in the eyes of all the Cyndi Lauper-esque AHS girls I lusted after at the time, it was still totally worth it. Unfortunately, all the photographs I have come from a single month, prior to the car reaching its true zenith of lameness awesomeness; can you see why I'm such a sucker for the 24 Hours Of Lemons?

Then I realized that, while the car was pretty quick, there was more power to be had in that engine. I made a deal with a Baja Bug-owning classmate for a set of used pistons/cylinders to get displacement up from 1600cc to 1835cc, and sent off for some Brazilian dual-port cylinder heads and the ubiquitous Bosch 009 distributor. While I had the engine apart, I painted all the various pieces of sheetmetal different bright colors and painted the menacing cooling fan (which was most effective at keeping tailgaters at bay) a screaming Day-Glo yellow. I was never able to get the registration straight on the thing (the junkyard guys who sold the car didn't have any paperwork on it and gave it the VIN off another Beetle they were about to crush), which meant that I spent a great deal of time standing in line at the DMV and explaining the situation to disapproving cops. Oh, it was great fun, and I somehow avoided a horrible, fiery death driving the thing.

Then it was time to head off to college, 430 miles to the south, and there was no way Hubert The Hatred Bug was going to survive the I-5 journey. I sold the engine, planning to build up another, even hairier one, and parked the car in the Martin family back yard. Unfortunately, my long-suffering parents grew tired of looking at Hubert out the kitchen window, refused to believe my promises that I'd be back to claim it someday, and finally pushed the engine- and license-plate-less Beetle out into the street to be towed to The Crusher by the APD.

So, that's why the 20R-powered Austin-Healey makes perfect sense as my personal Hell Project; it's the same sort of funky, stripped-down/overpowered rig that I've been yearning for since The Crusher ate my '58!

The 105S was made from 1956 through 1959, and this one proves that a left-hand-drive version was built. Kip shot this car, plus the Beetle in Gulf Oil colors, in downtown San Francisco. And that wraps up our DOTS-O-Rama Sunday!

A pretty common urban legend about the GAU-8/A Avenger is that the recoil force matches the thrust of the A-10's General Electric TF34-GE-100 turbofan engines causing the plane to slow down, stall and subsequently crash if the gun were fired for a prolonged period of time. It's even been claimed that the plane would begin to fly backwards, but that's silly since we all know that only UFOs can do that...duh! The actual recoil force of the GAU-8/A Avenger is 10,000 pounds-force, equivalent to 45 kN, which is much less than the maximum 82.6 kN combined thrust of the TF34-GE-100 turbofan engines. Consider this myth busted.

[via wiki commons]

The image quality isn't so good; in fact, identifying the cars is much like trying to extract useful information from the Zapruder Film (which was shot using similar hardware). The ASA 24 film means there are some dark parts, and my film-to-video conversion technique (camcorder + projector) doesn't help matters. There's definitely a Corvair, a 356, and a Beetle, and what appears to be a Renault Caravelle. Maybe a Sprite as well? Mostly you just get atmosphere from this; the sense that it's really freakin' cold, with maybe a mournful whistling of grim Scandinavian-style wind through the skeletal trees, punctuated by the roar of engines at rod-throwing revs and the occasional crunch of sheetmetal on snowbanks. You might check out this Land-O-Lakes SCCA history of racing in Minnesota when you're done here.

Where else do you get daily-driven Peugeot 404s parked on the same block as mirror-world Mopars, just around the corner from a Renault-branded, Pininfarina-styled, Kaiser-engined Rambler Rogue? Evestay was way, way, waaay down south and shot these fine machines for us. Fiats galore, a Falcon, a Maverick, even a Unimog! Here's what Evestay has to say:

I'm not positive that it's a Cambridge. Is it an Oxford? Dunno.
The Jeep pickup might be cheating. I suspect that it hasn't moved in some time.
I *love* the rope hood fastener on the CX.
Enjoy

What we do know is the campaign puts cleverly designed blood-shot googly eye hubcaps on the fleet of VW Beetles piloted around large events, reminding imbibers to stay away from the steering wheel. But since the language on the side is English, it must be the Englsh speakers at German events causing all the trouble. Darn those Anglophiles! [Copyranter]