Welcome to Must Read, where we single out the best stories from around the automotive universe and beyond. Today we've got reports from Vulture, Mother Jones, Hooniverse and Smart Asset.
Ask a Physicist: Could You Pull Off the Fast 5 Safe Heist in Real Life? – Vulture
Vulture asks what we've all been wondering: could you pull off the heist from Fast 5 where they drag a bigass vault with a pair of Charger SRT8s?
Kelley estimates that the vault is so heavy and moving slowly enough that practically anything it ran into would slow its momentum. At one point, the vault demolishes a bank. “Even if they could get the thing through the building,” he says “it would jerk back on the car to the point where they would lose their momentum. Each time it hit a pole it would jerk back, right? And then they'd have to reaccelerate.”
What The Frunk? –
I actually like the idea of calling it the "frunk," but agree it isn't novel to the Model S.
There are a whole bunch of automotive nicknames that have stuck – three on the tree, broadie knob, dagmars (go look that one up, growwwwl), and the Hofmiester Kink among them. All of those have rightfully earned their place in the automotive lexicon. And although Tesla seems to be on a roll of late, I want to make sure that the Elon Musk-founded company fails on one point, and that’s bringing ubiquity to the term frunk.
I Built This AK-47. It's Legal and Totally Untraceable. – Mother Jones
What's interesting here isn't really whether you think everyone should have guns or no one should have guns, but how much regulation of guns parallels the way in which we regulate cars.
The AK-47, perhaps the world's best-known gun, is so easy to make and so hard to break that the Soviet-designed original has spawned countless variants, updated and modified versions churned out by factories all over the globe. Although US customs laws ban importing the weapons, parts kits—which include most original components of a Kalashnikov variant—are legal. So is reassembling them, as long as no more than 10 foreign-made components are used and they are mounted on a new receiver, the box-shaped central frame that holds the gun's key mechanics. There are no fussy irritations like, say, passing a background check to buy a kit. And because we're assembling the guns for our own "personal use," whatever that may entail, we're not required to stamp in serial numbers. These rifles are totally untraceable, and even under California's stringent assault weapons ban, that's perfectly within the law.
The Economics of The Formula One Grand Prix of Monaco – Mother Jones
If you hadn't noticed, it's Monaco this weekend.
Monaco has been a destination for the super wealthy since the late 19th century. With elegant casinos, lack of capital gains, income and inheritance taxes, and a $400,000 minimum deposit to open a bank account, it is easy to see why. Experts estimate at least one trillion dollars sit untaxed in the tiny nation’s bank accounts.