The J8's will be assembled by Jeep Government and Military Sales, which surprisingly isn't a Chrysler company, instead owned by parent company Jankel which is in the military and tactical vehicles business. The company has headquarters in both Surrey, UK and Duncan, South Carolina and that South Carolina part is important as they're planning to build the military spec beast down there. Currently the J8 is built as a knockdown kit in Toledo and shipped to Eqypt for final assembly and sales to foreign militaries (unless it's sent to AEV who sells them domestically). We weren't given a time line, but were assured it would be in the near future. We'll take the green one with the C-channel bumpers and awesome open-air hard top, the desert tan one with the weapons ring just seems a bit gaudy.

[Detroit Free Press via @Justin_Hyde]

Urban farming in Detroit is not a new idea, indeed it's been gathering strength with the locavore-organic-new-hippy movement. There are little plots dotting the city now. If these people were normal they'd just call it "gardening" but since they need attention they have a catch phrase and websites all about it. That's fine. What's not fine, annoying even, is when people who've obviously never been to Detroit and have no context about it make glib slams against it as a "failed city" and advocate the wholesale demolition of the city to turn it into farmland, which somehow constitutes the "Idea of the Day."

A little known fact about me is that I spent the better part of my youth on a farm in Indiana. The last time I was home I helped my Dad repair the largest tractor in our fleet. Occasionally I'll go home to help with planting, so I have some level of expertise on the subject of farming. The idea of turning vast tracts of urban land into farmland is... how shall I put this, painfully idiotic, and only betrays the ignorance of the Times on the subject.

Let's pretend for a moment the city of Detroit wasn't currently running enormous deficits and had money to buy entire neighborhoods to turn into farmland; alternately they somehow completely abandoned the idea of private property and just took it; continue pretending the residents wouldn't fight the demolition of their neighborhoods; let's just say for the sake of argument the government (which has shown nothing but competence in large scale organization) has the land, complete with all the housing and infrastructure in place.

Farming is a razor-thin margin kind of business. You don't make money by farming tiny plots of land, you need huge, uninterrupted tracts of land to efficiently operate machinery. You also need clean land. I'm sitting here laughing at the idea of pretending to plant in the city, even if it were bulldozed at enormous expense and all of the housing material refuse put into landfills at enormous expense, putting a chisel plough into urban dirt would be a nightmare. Every ten feet you'd have to stop to untangle the equipment from underground electrical, plumbing, sewerage and general what have you. More likely than not you'd just constantly destroy everything. Planting would never work as the delicate planter would be wrecked, not to mention you'd be putting perfectly good seed into often polluted ground. Remember, we're pretending all of the expensive roadways, parking lots, driveways and all manner of concrete has been removed. While we're pointing out how large scale urban farming is ridiculous, might as well mention the pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers that would never be approved for use anywhere within a city.

We could go on about about how this "Idea of the Day" is embarrassing from the farming angle, but almost as sad is the base assumption of Detroit as a "failed city," a "nightmare town" as the Times puts it. Saturday I went to Eastern Market, the city's hundred fifty year old farmer's market and picked up groceries, had breakfast and read the news. Sunday, my girlfriend and I put our bicycles in the car, put the dog on a leash and drove from the nearby suburbs into the city to go riding. We drove up and down the Dequindre Cut, in the past a major rail line running to the water, abandoned during the population and business exodus, formerly the home of gangs and drugs but recently opened as an urban bike and walk path. We drove around downtown for hours, rode along the recently opened river walk which was quite full of people enjoying the last of the sunny warm days of the year. We drove around downtown to check out a new Cuban themed martini and cigar bar, and drove through Hart plaza, where kids were skateboarding and doing bike tricks. The bottom line is this isn't a failed city. It's a city on the way out of the abyss, if just barely. The economic maelstrom the country's in right now isn't helping things, neither are the woes in the US auto industry, but it's not the apocalypse here. Pictures of crumbling buildings and closed factories are sexy, and we're as guilty as the rest in promoting them, but more often than not when your turn the camera around you see a city clawing its way out of the mud.

Is Detroit the nicest city in the world? By no means. The city government is in a continual state of paralysis and corruption, taxes on decent property is painfully high and insurance rates are seriously eye-watering. Crime is certainly still around, but it's below the surface now, nowhere near historic levels. There are certainly many places those unfamiliar with the city should not go. South Detroit is a scary place at night. The neighborhood around City Airport would probably make most softened Americans pee their pants. There are a lot of abandoned and broken-down, burnt-out places. I go to these places because I'm curious. I've lived in the metropolitan area for over a decade, and in that time I've gone from a naive farm boy to a naive auto journalist, but I've watched Detroit get better. Much better. I spend as much time as I can in Detroit not because of a morbid curiosity but because it isn't the varnished over, pretend perfect suburbs. It's honest and interesting.

But whatever. Since it's apparently okay to destroy things that might not be running at full tilt, maybe a little frayed around the edges, perhaps for want of better times, we're assuming it'll be cool to make the argument the NYTimes offices would look great as a PetSmart. [NY Times]

[Wall Street Journal]

I am not much of a mail person, with one exception: I tend to mark my travels around the world with a single postcard sent to my maternal grandmother. Most of them make it to her house in Southeastern Hungary, with the exception of one from New Orleans which I mailed off on the afternoon of September 10, 2001. That one got lost.

After our Woodward Dream Cruise team returned to New York City from Detroit in our garish yellow Camaro, it was time for another postcard. I picked one of those stichable maps which come with a needle and a length of thread for sewing in your itinerary.

It was only after I’d left the store that I discovered the complete absence of Detroit. As you can see on the scanned postcard, this cannot be explained by either typography or layout. And even though the population of Detroit has fallen precariously from its 1950s peak of over 2 million to its current 900,000, the designer of the map has found space for such metropolises as Glasgow, Montana (population: 3,253) or Tonopah, Nevada (population: 2,627).

Do these people hate America or what?

I did what any red-blooded Euro boy with space aplenty in his heart for America would do: I took a Sharpie to the card. Just so my grandmother won’t be misled. It’s rather indecent to do that to a nice old lady.

Not only is Detroit a great place to film a movie like Red Dawn 2 because they'll allow you to blow up downtown buildings without a care in the world, but also because folks in certain parts of the region will futilely shout the name of a certain non-indigenous-to-Michigan furry animal on a fall Saturday without any prodding whatsoever. Usually it's with the word "Go" attached to the front of it — but that can be fixed in post-production, right? Anyway, here's the shot of that Humvee we were talking about above.

We knew selling Hummer to the Chinese would lead to disaster — and us having to fend off the red menace with nothing but a Dodge Ram. There's a slew of other pics of filming in downtown Detroit here.

Anyone else take any shots? If so, drop 'em in the comments below.

The Citroën SM stands on the precipice of Vorsprung, it is from an era when the casual observer could believe in an eternity of progress. Men had repeatedly walked on the Moon, rock music was reaching for lofty heights and there was a passenger airplane, manufactured by an unlikely consortium of state-owned British and French firms, which could travel at twice the speed of sound.

We don’t have such planes now. The Concorde was mankind’s only functioning time machine available for non-military use: you could have lunch in London, digest it aboard and continue your day—with breakfast in New York City.

The Citroën SM was the Concorde’s contemporary, borne of a similar transnational corporate background, but it was the Italians instead of the British who partnered the French this time. The M in SM stands for Maserati, owned by Citroën at the time and responsible for the SM’s engine, but I needn’t tell you all this: google “Citroën SM” and you will find right on the first page a feature article published on this very website which will tell you all about it.

You can go for years and years without seeing an SM and this is not an accident: its relentlessly futuristic engineering was marred by the combined unreliability of its French and Italian heritage. If you were to fantasize about seeing one in the wild, you would probably conjure images of French country roads or Italian mountain passes but surely not Telegraph Road in the Detroit suburb of Bloomfield Hills.

Specifically the restaurant Andiamo, formerly known as the Machus Red Fox, most famous for being the place where Jimmy Hoffa was last seen alive.

Yet that is exactly where Ray Wert, John Krewson and I saw a working SM for the first time in our collective lives. We were on our way back to New York City, returning from the Woodward Dream Cruise, and we stopped for breakfast at Steve's Deli across from the restaurant where Jimmy Hoffa was last seen, waving goodbye to the monster portions and trans fats of Midwestern cuisine.

We were just about to leave our Camaro and enter a local house of wonderful fat when we saw it. A golden SM, getting ready to leave. It was an American-spec SM, easily recognizable by its four fixed headlights in place of the original’s six swiveling ones, which could not slip through U.S. regulations. An actual human was sitting in the driver’s seat. Upon his commands, the vehicle moved under its own power. An artifact of more promising times, when engineering was set to conquer the future in style. Need evidence? Here’s L.J.K. Setright on the SM’s hydropneumatic steering in his book Drive On!:

Just imagine: a year after the Concorde, fastest and most beautiful of Bristols, had taken to the air in defiance of kinetic heating, pressure gradients, trim changes and all the control and other problems associated with sustained flight at 60,000ft and Mach 2, the fuddies and the duddies were shaken with dismay by the very thought of the Citroën SM having fully powered steering with entirely artificial feel. It was simple, really: the basic accumulator pressure powered the steering, but pitted against it was the output of a secondary pump driven by the transmission so that its output was proportional to the road speed of the car. At parking speeds, it offered no resistance; at 110mph there was enough to cancel assitance.

The SM motored away and we went inside to dive into plates of high calorie breakfasts. Outside, under an August sun not yet bearing down with its full power, the SM was spooling up its hyperdrives. This rolling projectile of weird magnificence, this golden and flawed and slippery capsule from the space age, a car ahead of its time both in design and acceptable ratios of high engineering versus reliability, it motored away.

Wert and Krewson had omelettes. I had French toast. It was okay. (Technically, I had salami and eggs at Steve's Deli. — Ed.)

Photo Credit: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images (Concorde) and the author

He certainly is a legitimate arrest," said Detroit police chief Warren Evans of that license-less driver. "But is it worth being out of service for an hour and a half in an area where the priority runs could be significant in that hour and a half?"

ABC News also reports that, "The in-car cameras and computers in most squad cars don't work so officers can't record traffic stops, run license plates and check for warrants." So basically, speeding is now fair game in the city of Detroit. We plan on putting this to the test. [<a href=" http://abcnews.go.com/US/Politics/detroit-police-chief-warren-evans-battles-crime/Story?id=8693850&page=2">ABC News]

That's right, "back." We remember when Time used to have employees here in Metro Detroit. Until about ten years ago, they had a whole editorial and advertising team in the cushy Detroit suburb of Bloomfield Hills. Then, a decade ago, they left, tail between their legs, afraid of sinking auto advertising revenues and lonely for their even-more-cushy Manhattan high-rise.

But do you blame them for leaving a decade ago? Detroit's most certainly a city with its fair share of ups and downs, and anyone honest with themselves will tell you it's been mostly downs for quite a while. The thing is the place got considerably better over the last decade. The rampant crime and gang activity of the 80's and 90's has subsided, the sky-high murder rate has declined to meet the average large city, and the downtown has seen a remarkable rebirth in business entertainment. Were it not for the onerous city income tax we'd probably be considering a move downtown ourselves.

However, for someone just coming back to the city, it's hard to see the improvement, so, like Time Magazine, it's much easier to apply a story line to a situation rather than put things into context. Throw up some pictures of the city's urban prairies, talk about the decline of the big three and things like the Heidelberg Project, urban farming, and the creepy-weird Russell Industrial Complex like they're something new and make that look like what Detroit is about. Detoit's a city where lazy journalism is possible, even easy. Point a camera, take a picture, sensationalize. A sure-fire formula.

It's far more complex than that. Detroit's probably the oddest metro area in the world. On one street you'll find mansion after mansion of immeasurable quality with pristine lawns and professionally maintained English gardens, and on literally the next will be burnt out crack houses and a street littered with discarded tires and garbage. A boulevard lined with high-class boutiques will have another behind it lined with prostitutes. The insanity of the city is why people stay. There's a certain hard-boiled grit to Detroiters you don't find in other places. They know they've been dealt a tough hand but they're not going to let that stop them from playing.

But now Time is moving back into town because it's the vogue and hip thing to do. But we're happy to have 'em here — mostly so we'll finally have another media company that'll hopefully be willing to look deeper than the vacant lots and the houses burned down during the bad old days. In fact, we'd encourage them to look at the entire new neighborhoods minted by the volunteers at Habitat for Humanity, the rejuvenated Eastern Market, the constantly entertaining downtown, the many, many interesting festivals, the vibrant art scene and the always incredible music of Detroit. Heck, we'll even show 'em around. [Time]

It's difficult to judge the attitude of a million people, even if those million people share a common interest in the form of tens of thousands of amazing cars. There was no question everyone was having a blast at Woodward. People were happily falling all over themselves to tell you when they'd bought their cars or where they'd found them, explain what they'd done to them, and tell you stories and lies about them. But although there was no question they were having the time of their lives, there was an undercurrent of pessimism, and perhaps even a little anger. In addition to the usual They-Don't-Build-‘Em-Like-This-Anymore and The-Golden-Age-Of-Cars-Is-Over-Forever harangues you get whenever classic car guys get together, there were a lot of angry jeers directed towards Cash for Clunkers, hybrids, environmentalism, safety measures, and other carpocalyptic trends in the broader society — not to mention a strong undercurrent of Kids-These-Days-Would-Rather-Play-Video-Games.

It hardly needs repeating that no — the evident immortality of the small-block and the solid rear axle aside — they don't build ‘em like they used to. And this isn't the place to go into how, with more reliability, efficiency, and survivability, this isn't all bad. What's worth discussing is whether any of today's cars are the sort of machines that will patrol Woodward in 30 years, God willing, and some folks just don't see it happening. A look at the showrooms is inconclusive, because while you can get a meat-eating monster of a Camaro or a Mustang, can you really afford it if you're just out of college, the way you could with many of the originals? Looking at it another way, in ten years the young rodders of the future will have the opportunity to buy and mod the cast-off new cars of today. What will they have to choose from? Next year's new Fiesta, maybe, but what else? And make no mistake, customization is key; even the folks behind the Scion offerings recognized that, never mind that their kits were oriented less to performance than making sure the driver was dramatically lit. If you can't make your car absolutely your own, demonstrate some creative ownership instead of just being a car owner, you aren't part of the scene.

And will there be a scene at all? You may have noticed that the Dream Cruise took place on an Ozone Action Day, an air-quality alert thing declared by regional governments; as forty thousand engines idled proudly beneath signs telling us not to fill up our car's tank during daylight hours. Easy to laugh it off, but you had to be prepared to do so coughing and with watery eyes, because the air was soupy with unburnt hydrocarbons and we don't mean the smell of bacon. Sure, gasoline is the next best thing to bacon for a lot of us, but not to everybody, and certainly not to the people who keep going on about how the petroleum is running out while we're trying to have a good time. Which is annoying, because so many of those people are so young, and so many people keep telling them cars are evil.

And in the end, that is the big worry. If we're honest, we care more about car culture than we do about cars; says so up top there. Will car culture survive all this?

We say yes, it will. It will get harder-face it, when gas was cheap and cars were somewhat cheap and they taught driver's ed and auto shop in almost every school, it was easier to be a gearhead, and you could fall into it almost by accident. But kids will always love cars. We're not all that worried about today's kids having nothing to work on, not after the love we saw Pacers and Pintos and Vega wagons getting at Woodward; people are adaptable, especially car people, and they will modify anything. We're not too worried about people giving kids the message that cars are evil, because kids love evil. But we're not worried at all, not the least little bit, about the "kids these days" because of this fact: Throughout history, whenever anyone's disparaged the "kids these days," they've been wrong. They've just been afraid of being out of touch, of the world going on without them, and of change, technological and otherwise. The car guy you hear complaining about Today's Youth at Woodward is feeling the negative part of nostalgia-that realization nothing stays the same-and down deep, he's probably just worried that someday they'll stop making replacement jets for his Holly double-pumper. Car guys don't get much more afraid of change than that.

We saw this one loading up on gas right off Woodward. Nobody was in any particular hurry. Which can probably be explained by the size of the tank, visible up close on the second photo.

Keep a close eye on our Woodward Dream Cruise tag page for coverage all day!

Ailanthus altissima, the tree of heaven, the stink tree, better known around these parts as the ghetto palm. It's a common sight amidst the wreckage of this city. Detroit is certainly no stranger to tough times, after a meteoric ascension as a center of power and prosperity in the first half of the 20th century, including the post-war boom after serving as the "Arsenal of Democracy," it's been mostly downhill since.

Before our latest bout of national economic diarrhea, Detroit was busy pulling itself up by the bootstraps, rebuilding the downtown city center. Employment was rising and even property values were increasing. Then the bottom fell out. The economy went to crap, the assumed corruption of our politicians was confirmed in the most embarrassing way possible and the once-humming factories halted because people stopped buying cars.

This has happened before, and it took the same toll then as today. The factories and skyscrapers, office buildings and industry went silent then too, but many never restarted, and as a result, Mother Nature is slowly reclaiming parts of Detroit.

It's insidious, slow, unnoticed, but over time, the grasses grow tall, weeds fill in the cracks of once pristine and well-worn sidewalks, loading bays flood and become urban wetlands. Ailanthus altissima gains a foothold and spreads like wild fire. Soon, roofs collapse, foundations are compromised, and nature returns that which men built out of raw ambition back to its origins. It's happening today, and nobody seems to notice. Hit next to witness the astonishing power of nature to quickly return man-made structures to whence they came.

Editor's Note: Ben took the photos but hasn't yet had a chance to identify the buildings. Anyone wanting to help in that process, leave IDs matched to photo numbers in the comments below and we'll add them in.

Obviously, this is the spread of the much hated "city garden," a slang term for random overgrowth. Since popular wisdom holds that its impossible for Detroit to be a pleasant place to live, this must be some type of obvious rot where crack heads hide and gang members hang out late at night.