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View Larger MapLook up and you'll see the splattering above the house on Milner Road. [Google Maps via Geekologie]

Grotere kaart weergeven"Oh hey look, it's such a nice day for a drive in Amersfoort. Just driving along, following a fire truck through these quaint streets. La-la-la-la-la. Oh... little old lady on a bike, watch where you're going. LITTLE OLD LADY! Watch out for the fire truck it's about to hit [TRANSCRIPT TERMINATED. GOOGLE DOES NOT HAVE RECORD OF A FIRE TRUCK HITTING AN OLD LADY. INQUIRY INTO THE INCIDENT WILL RESULT IN "UNFORTUNATE OCCURRENCES"]

Grotere kaart weergeven

Click next to travel through the world of poor drivers.

Where: Roncq, France
What:A Renault meets a pole.
Why It's So Confusing: This French hatchback meets with what we're assuming is a pole before landing on the median. Why does it take nine policemen to deal with what looks like a one-car accident? Conveniently, this occurred near a car dealership so the driver can easily upgrade.

Where: Provo, Utah
What: A Semi-Truck overturned
Why It's So Confusing: This appears to be right in the middle of nowhere. Was there a windstorm? Did someone run this off the road?

Where: Escondido, California
What: This Volvo V70 runs smack dab into this pole.
Why It's So Confusing: The accident itself is fairly normal, but what makes this accident so interesting is that the police staged a good 40+ cones to direct traffic out of a one-car wreck. Bored, guys?

Where: San Antonio, Texas
What: Toyota Tundra in a garage
Why It's So Confusing Perhaps the worst parking job in recent memory, and after all that work to get the portico setup. This is why we can't have nice things.

Where: Loire, France
What: A couple crazy French cars again.
Why It's So Confusing: This looks like the classic t-bone at first glance, until you realize there's no other intersection. But even more interesting is the way these cars crumble. Russian steel much?

Where: Minneapolis, MN
What: Mercedes E-Class Into A Tree
Why It's So Confusing: What would possibly have motivated this Mercedes driver to run into this tree on a cozy side street? Does it have to do with the fact that the car is full of crap?

Where: Austin, Texas
What: Plymouth, Acclaim
Why It's So Confusing: Who knew any of the AA-bodied Mopar's survived? This one probably crashed into the side of the black F-150 with giant rims. Either way, no one walked away from this one happy.

Where: Milwaukee, Wisconsin
What: A Honda Accord Coupe And A Ford Windstar
Why It's So Confusing: What made Milwaukee famous? Why, Accord coupes crashing dead on into family wagons.

Where: Central Shasta, California
What: Jeep Grand Cherokee
Why It's So Confusing: We've looked at this a few different ways and have no idea what this truck hit or why the Google team blurred out some of the ground next to the driver... unless he tossed up his lunch.

Where: Barbera del Valles, Spain
What: A subcompact and a work truck
Why It's So Confusing: It looks like this woman was so excited by the prospect of seeing a Google Street View van she backed up straight into this work truck. Oops.

For more Street View crashes check out Street View Gallery.

We know the Transit Connect has a disproportionately large amount of cargo space for its size, we know it's nimble and can get into even the darkest alleys, we also know it can be had, as is this case, in windowless delivery form, but somehow we don't think this was what Ford had in mind when they designed the little bugger. If you're bored, and not at work, swing around back and check out the bumper, it seems like the cover might have been torn off. [Google Sight Seeing]

Just don't take the little guy and his mom anywhere questionable, which has been known to happen with Streeview from time to time.

And because it was so epic, check out this completely off topic video from SNL that aired last night in observance of Mother's Day. [Google Maps, SNL Digital Short - Thanks, Chase]

You can relive the moment in Street View or via Valleywag's video, embedded here, but you'll have to furnish your own sound effects. I'd like to suggest an Urkelian "Did I do thaaaaat?", if I may. [Reddit via Valleywag]

UPDATE: Some commenters have plausibly suggested that the camera could have just been deliberately lowered and accidentally left on, creating this mind-melting set of image data. This explanation is reasonable, but more to the point it's much less fun.

A local photographer in the village of Wool in Dorset spotted the Google car mapping the area and decided to capture a few shots of it. The driver of the car was not pleased:

The Google driver then proceeded to shout at the photographer and said: "Don't you take pictures of me, mate." He then asked the photographer to blur his face out of the pictures as Google does in its Street View images.

HA! The photographer managed to get several shots of the vehicle without having to resort to fistcuffs, but we will be sure to keep an eye on the powderkeg that is Google Street View's UK adventure. [Telegraph]

A spate of burglaries in the Buckinghamshire village of Broughton caused residents to spring into action when the Google Street View car puttered towards Broughton with a 360-degree camera on its roof. The villagers formed a human chain to stop it, haranguing the driver about "invasion of privacy" fears, claiming a belief that the images Google planned to put online could be used by burglars.

As police made their way to the stand-off, the Google car yielded to the villagers and for now, Broughton remains off the internet search engine's mapping service.

So while there's yet to be found any connection between a rise in burglaries and the Google Street View service, it didn't stop this small UK village from extreme NIMBY-ism. (Hat tip to engineerd!)

[via Times Online]

An especially awesome development would be to automate this, requiring only a starting and a finishing point. Suddenly, the nightly rituals of Google Mapsing great drives or pleasant strolls would be even more fun.

Video Credit: joelaz/Flickr via Gizmodo

The Google Street View invisa-car looks to be running strong in a pack consisting of the #3 Corvette Racing C6.R, #45 Flying Lizard Porsche GT3 RSR, #8 B-K Motorsports Lola B08/86 Mazda, #9 Patron Highcroft Racing Acura ARX-01b and the #2 Audi R10 TDI. We'll be on the lookout for more on-track excursions now that Google has reached the other side of the whuurld. (Hat tip to everyone who sent this in!) [via GoogleStreetView]

“I took this shot today, looked at it, looked again…and nothing. All I know is that the grille is from a V8 Vantage.”

The Aston Martin lands in my inbox with an embarrassing thud. I have spent hundreds of working days in my life sucking up information about cars. Yet apart from the obviously Aston grille and the lamprey-like lines, the car is a blank page. But why the words, go look for yourself:

“I don’t have a clue,” is what I reply to my friend Máté’s illustrated letter.

My reply is not exactly true. I do have the faintest of clues, not enough to base a reply on, but enough to get started. A pattern is vaguely recognized.

As readers of Malcolm Gladwell’s first second book Blink will recall, after absorbing prodigious amounts of information, the mind is able—in situations related to the nature of said information—to make quick decisions based on apparently very little input. This is how professional tennis players react to a serve too fast to interpret, how racing drivers can run competitive laps on an unfamiliar track and how an excellent friend of mine can look at a brownish spot in the sky a thousand feet away and say it’s a Black Kite. An old female, to be specific.

For some reason best left to future decades of neuroscience, cars styled by the Italian design consultancy Zagato are very easy to pattern-recognize even after limited exposure. And exposure is necessarily limited by the small number of Zagato cars on the road. One of the best known examples is Aston Martin’s DB4 GT Zagato of 1961. I have seen it exactly once, in Italy:

Zagato’s fluid yet butch lines stick to the brain like ground effect cars to the racing line. And while Máté’s Magic Mystery Aston had a whiff of Zagato about it, what it looked most like was a kit car.

Can’t be, he says. “I happened to photograph it on the most expensive street in the world,” and he directs me to the Wikipedia page of The Bishops Avenue in London.

Oh, that. The street you move to when you’ve made it, made it big, and you want the world to know about it. Zoned from a piece of land that used to belong to the Bishop of London, the Avenue has become a favorite spot of the nouveau riche, particularly if those nouveau riches have come from the likes of oil, guns and naked women. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1991, the House of Saud ruling neighboring Saudi Arabia snapped up ten of the Avenue’s 66 mansions. This is a street that used to be called Millionaire’s Mile, but which has lost that title to become Billionaire’s Boulevard. So yes, the Aston is probably real.

One of the residents of The Bishops Avenue is Hassanal Bolkiah, the Sultan of Brunei, and this is when you can sort of expect a light bulb to go off in the automotive brain—not mine, unfortunately—because you all know what Hassanal Bolkiah does with his tiny fiefdom’s oil riches: buys all the cars in the world and then some. Our very own guide to the cream of his crop will help you along with a gray F40, a Lamborghini LM002 safari wagon and five Dauer Porsches. The latter are street legal Le Mans race cars from the turbolicious Group C of the 1980s which accelerate like ballistic missiles all the way to 250 MPH.

A significant portion of Bolkiah’s fleet was not purchased but built, and alongside the Ferrari sedans and shooting brakes is a set of three Aston Martins from 1997 called the V8 Vantage Special Series I. They are based not on the current V8 Vantage but the bigger car with the same name produced in the 1990s and they look exactly like the DB4 GT Zagato of 1961, only bigger.

Apparently, the Sultan likes his supercars the 60s way. But coachbuilders are not exactly fond of reproducing earlier designs atop modern machinery. And through another flutter of Bolkiah’s bottomless wallet, the Zagato people got to work again on the V8 Vantage, operating this time not as the codex copiers of Mediaval Europe but as coachbuilders. What they came up with was the V8 Vantage Special Series II, a modern, very Zagato, thoroughly menacing Aston: the car Máté photographed.

Wicked performance is suggested by those curves and the Series II doesn’t disappoint: its 5.3-liter twin-supercharged V8 makes 600 HP and can launch the two-ton coupé to sixty in 4.4 seconds. The aerodynamic wall arrives at 205 MPH. Zagato built a total of three cars, two for Bolkiah, one for his brother Jefri.

This is where the story would normally end but just as Máté confirmed his haunch with a link to Supercars.net, Google unveiled Street View for London. I raced for a large screen, hooked it up to my Mac, and spent an hour and a half combing the length and breadth of The Bishops Lane to no avail. I found a lone Ferrari F430 but looking for custom-built Astons has a way of turning production Ferraris into Crown Victorias.

But then what did I expect? What’s the chance for a car built to thunder along motorways to sit in one place, waiting for both the Street View Opel and Máté to amble by? Before giving up entirely, Máté went for a last look. Parked on the driveway, obscured by a lamppost and fecund foliage, he found our car at last:

So on to you now, Street View ornithologists. Descend on London and dig for cars with stories. And yes, I want my photo of the TVR Cerbera Speed 12.

Photo Credit: Máté Petrány (V8 Vantage Special II), Larry Parker (DB4 GT Zagato), 2007 Tony Murray Photography/AFP/Getty Images (Toprak Mansion interior), AstonMartin.com (V8 Vantage Special I)

One fellow caught entering a London sex shop has been removed, the faces of poorly performing footballers on a billboard have been obscured, a man getting sick on the side of the road and many others have been voluntarily replaced with blackness by the Goog.

Company officials are quick to point out anyone may have their image stripped should it be objectionable or compromising, which will inevitably lead to an awfully spotty version of Street View. Expect red-light districts to sadly be eternally plunged into blackness in short order. [BBC]

The quirky Google Street View car must have been making a fast getaway from Mad Max as it found itself stuck still in New South Wales, roughly 200 miles away. It makes you wonder what Google was thinking when they sent a little econocar out to do a man's job. Where's the '79 FJ40 or the Holden Ute? As the saying goes; measure twice, cut once. We look forward to seeing what other fiasco the Street View guys can get themselves into. (Hat Tip To Boggy_Crapper!)

[4wdmonthly via GoogleMaps]

The Mad Max Pursuit Special V8 Interceptor was really a 1973 Ford Falcon XB GT, an exclusive Australian ride, that came equipped with a hearty 351 Cleveland V8. We're wondering if the nerdy, little Google Street View car was jealous or something because this movie gem seems a bit off the beaten path, even for the Land Down Unda. (Hat tip to Salguod!)

[Google Sightseeing via Google Maps]