I’ve participated in the Lemons Rally before, and it’s a ridiculously fun and ridiculously tiring trek in an assemblage of some of the worst cars you’ve ever seen. Craigslist garbage that everyone else passed on gets picked up for a song and thrashed into something resembling working condition to go on a lengthy and grueling road trip. Often the cars receive modifications in the tradition of Lemons, and every year someone outdoes everyone who came before. This year that honor has to go to the Hot Tub Lincoln.
What do you get when you cut the roof off of an early-70s big-block Lincoln, fiberglass in the whole interior, fabricate seals for the pedals and steering column, and fill it with 700 gallons of water? Well, the Lincoln itself is said to have weighed around 5300 pounds brand new, and a gallon of water weighs about 8.34 pounds at room temperature, so... I guess you get something close to 11,000 pounds of Lincoln sloshing its way down the road. Seems like a great idea, right?
To add to the insanity of this project, this particular Lemons rally took place in the high elevation of Colorado, and water does one hell of a number on body heat, especially when the wind of, say 60 miles per hour cruising is taken into consideration. The geniuses behind the Hot Tub Lincoln decided the best method to keep temperatures up was to route the engine’s coolant hoses directly into the cabin/hot tub. With enough water, the idea was that the 200-ish degree temperatures of the engine would dissipate enough through the 700 gallons heat exchanger that the car had become.
Needless to say, that didn’t exactly work out, and I’ll leave it to Lemons’ own Eric Rood and Nick Pon to explain just what went wrong.
I’d seen this rolling WTF on social media as the rally was happening, but the true extent of the vehicle’s absurdity wasn’t uncovered until the most recent installment of Lemonsworld. You should watch this, as the next-level car weirdos at Lemons never fail to inspire other car idiots to do sketchy shit in cars. That’s pretty much always a good thing. Maybe.
Can you beat this? I’m thinking the only way to do such a thing would be to build a proper fish-bowl out of an AMC Pacer. Weld everything shut, seal it up tight, enter the car through a hole in the roof, fill it to the brim with water, and drive it in a full scuba suit. I’ll go start drawing up the plans.