8 Ferraris, a Lamborghini, three Mercedes Benz, and two Toyotas, a total of 14 vehicles bought the farm when one Ferrari driver trying to change lanes lost control, bounced off a barrier, and came spinning back into the middle of a luxury car caravan heading for an enthusiasts’ event in Hiroshima.

No one, besides the automobile insurance company executives seen leaping from high windows, was seriously injured in the accident, but a lot of very expensive metal was seriously bent.

Yahoo News

1:11 video

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Hat tip to Bird Dog via Karen L. Myers. It’s kind of scary how closely Bird Dog’s tastes coincide with mine.

This is the Waloomsac River near Bennington, Vermont. Three cars were actually swept away by the flooding. WNYT.

Hat tip to Theo.

The late Alan Clark (1928-1999) boasted an enviable form of automotive distinction by continuing to own for the remainder of his life a white Jaguar XK120 which he had purchased while attending Oxford in 1950.

I never thought I’d hear of a longer case of original ownership of a classic automobile, but Curmudgeonly & Skeptical reports on one which puts Alan Clark’s Jag 120 in the shade.

Mr. Allen Swift (Springfield , MA.) received this 1928 Rolls-Royce Picadilly P1 Roadster from his father, brand new – as a graduation gift in 1928. He drove it up until his death last year…..at the age of 102. He was the oldest living owner of a car [bought] new. ...

He donated it to a Springfield museum after his death. It has 170,000 miles on it, still runs like a Swiss watch, dead silent at any speed and is in perfect cosmetic condition. (82 years) That’s approximately 2000 miles per year.

Count me among the many thousands of Washington area residents who spent Wednesday night stuck in traffic as a snowstorm sowed chaos all around us. Being car-bound in sub-freezing weather for six hours can make a guy think. I counted my blessings. The situation could have been worse, I realized: My fellow commuters and I could have been trying to make it home in electric cars, like the ones President Obama is constantly promoting, most recently in his State of the Union address. ...

This subsidized market niche is just one well-publicized malfunction away from disaster. Perhaps a Volt battery will overheat and burst into flames, as some computer batteries have been known to do. Or maybe a Leaf driver will suffer frostbite while stuck in the next blizzard. Let’s just hope one of his neighbors pulls over to help him out.

Modern efforts by government to promote the use and adoption of inefficient and uneconomic technologies by cash subsidies in pursuit of newer, tidier means of doing things we can do perfectly well and much more cheaply already resemble the obsessive efforts of pre-modern European princes to create gold by funding alchemical experiments. Throwing money in the direction of superstition does not actually create new industries and technologies. It just wastes money.

[S]tart-stop systems that turn off a car when it is idling and reignite the engine when the driver releases the brake will be coming to the United States and Canada in the next five years, The Detroit News reported.

The technology is widespread in Europe and will be embraced in North America as a tool to meet increasingly stringent fuel-economy and emissions requirements, auto experts say.

“Engineers kill for one-tenth of a mile per gallon,” Joe Phillippi of AutoTrends Consulting Inc. said. “In city driving, it would make a huge impact.”

Estimates vary, but the consensus is shutting off the engine at a stop can improve fuel economy as much as 15 percent.

Consumer acceptance could be a challenge.

“It is a strange sensation because the engine suddenly turns off,” said analyst Stephanie Brinley of EMC Strategic Communications in Troy, Mich. “It is quick and seamless, but you can tell it happens.”

Half of the new cars in Europe will have start-stop technology in 2012, and North America will reach that figure in 2016, said Frank Frister, product manager with Bosch North America, one of the companies developing stop-start systems.

There you’ll be stopped at the light, and in front of you will be one of those holier-than-thous who has taken care to equip himself with the latest earth-saving technology.

The light changes, the complex electronic system stutters, and the democrat in the Prius fiddles with his ignition trying to get his engine restarted as seconds tick by and your blood pressure rises.

Next year, if you have somewhere in the neighborhood of $200,000 to spend on your next car, Mercedes will be importing to the United States the spiritual successor to the legendary 1950s 300SL. It will even have gull-wing doors, and just watch what it can do.

2:54 video.

Hat tip to Jan Hartigan via Robert Breedlove.

The Wall Street Journal recently began adding automobile reviews by Dan Neil to its weekend edition. Neil is not only a hard-core enthusiast, he writes like P.J. O’Rourke after six cups of Jamaica Blue Mountain sweetened with Cardhu.

Screaming into a top-down tornado at 130 mph in the Porsche 911 Turbo Cabriolet, I am reminded—as I’m sure most people are—of Thomas Aquinas.

To wit: When is a thing perfect, complete, finished—when does Porsche drop the paint brush and walk away from the canvas? When will one more stroke diminish the whole?

The medieval philosopher, riffing on Aristotle, argued that a thing is perfect when it lacks nothing (the Greek “teleos,” or completeness, approximates the Latin “perfectio”) and that it ultimately attains its purpose.

Well, man, if this car isn’t there I’ll eat my skullcap. Let’s count it out: 500 hp; 0-60 mph in a forebrain-flattening 3.3 seconds; top speed of 194 mph; a nice even 1 g of lateral grip; all-wheel drive. Throw in a great canvas top and 24 miles per gallon fuel efficiency, and an exhaust note that sounds like the Kraken gargling 50-year-old Glenfiddich, and it begins to appear as if the long history of the Porsche 911 has to come to some sort of immense, satisfying conclusion. I mean, even if you regard this thing as merely a bald-spot delivery system for rich dudes, it does that mission so exceeding well. Aren’t we flirting with the best of all possible sports cars here?

Yes, obviously, a car could always be better. The Turbo Cab could cost $19.95, come with 73 virgins, use the owner’s smugness as a propellent. From its lethal-looking dual exhaust pipes, the Turbo Cab might emit only rainbows and unicorns.

Read the whole thing.

Hummers are stupid and wasteful and if they go away because no one wants to buy one, that’ll be just a little sad. It’s always a little sad to lose some stupid. I love people doing stupid things that I’d never do—different stupid things than all the stupid things I do. It reminds me that although all over the world we humans have so much in common, so much love, and need, and desire, and compassion and loneliness, some of us still want to do things that the rest of us think are bug-nutty. Some of us want to drive a Hummer, some of us want to eat sheep’s heart, liver and lungs simmered in an animal’s stomach for three hours, some us want to play poker with professionals and some of us want a Broadway musical based on the music of ABBA. I love people doing things I can’t understand. It’s heartbreaking to me when people stop doing things that I can’t see any reason for them to be doing in the first place. I like people watching curling while eating pork rinds.

But if any part of the Hummer going belly-up are those government rules we’re putting in on miles per gallon, or us taking over of GM, then I’m not just sad, I’m also angry. Lack of freedom can be measured directly by lack of stupid. Freedom means freedom to be stupid. We never need freedom to do the smart thing. You don’t need any freedom to go with majority opinion. There was no freedom required to drive a Prius before the recall. We don’t need freedom to recycle, reuse and reduce. We don’t need freedom to listen to classic rock, classic classical, classic anything or Terry Gross. We exercise our freedom to its fullest when we are at our stupidest. ...

Our government declaring that we need alternative energy sources, and betting our money on who might get a smart idea, is not going to give smart people smart ideas. It’s really easy to see stupid all around us, but I don’t think we want to be too quick to stop it. We need to protect other people’s stupid to save freedom for all of us.

Yeah, Adrien Brody and Carrot Top wasted gallons of gas driving their stupid cars. I can feel smug about my Mini Cooper’s sexy 37/28/32 MPG measurements. But I don’t think we should be too quick to feel happy about the stupid Hummers going away. We’re all making bad choices all the time, and most of mine are way stupider than driving a Hummer. I love my freedom of stupid. I bumped into Adrien one time and had a great talk with him, we got along great. I know Carrot Top well enough to call him “Scott.” I know that they’re both a lot thinner than me. They’re both in a lot better shape. They eat better than me, and they can do a lot more push-ups and sit-ups. They can run farther and faster than me. So, in the near future, with us all being involved in each other’s health care, Adrien and Scott might make up for their wasted gas mileage paying for my high-blood-pressure meds. If we’re all getting together to stop the stupidity of driving a Hummer, will we have to stop the stupidity of eating Krispy Kreme doughnuts and pie? Freedom is freedom to be stupid.

They came first for the Hummers.

Then they came for the pie.

Alan Clark, 1928-1999, eldest son of the art historian Kenneth, Lord Clark of Saltwood, had a significant political career, rising to the post of Minister of Trade under Margaret Thatcher. He was also a novelist and a historian, and his diaries are ranked high by admirers of that particularly English genre.

Clark was, in his private life, an automotive enthusiast and a life-long collector and seller of automobiles. Clark was once admonished by the Sergeant at Arms of the House of Commons for using the British Parliament’s parking to house some of his stock.

It is nice having private means. Alan Clark was able to purchase a Jaguar XK-120 from City Motors in Oxford in 1950, when he was an undergraduate; and he enjoyed boasting fifty years later of being probably the only person extant still possessing his own teeth and hair and the 120 Jaguar he had purchased new.

I was recently reading Backfire 2001, a posthumous collection of Clark’s automotive articles, and thought I ought to share a couple of gems.

Buyer Beware

The great thing about any engine made by Rolls-Royce is that unless you actually put a hole in the crankcase (quite difficult) they will always keep running—for a bit.

I well recall a fine summer afternoon at Saltwood when we had just induced the engine of a magnificent Phantom II tourer, bought very cheaply, to tick over after thirty years in storage. The great creature stood on the lawn, puffing gently, while dives cooed. Idyllic, really.

Then, one of my sons, idly scratching with a screwdriver at he flaking paint on the cylinder head below the header tank inlet, caused a jet of water to spurt out with great force. Water was distributed generously over the entire engine bay from huge fan blades, rotating at 450 rpm. The coil and distributor began to malfunction and the plug leads shorted. Yet thanks to a mouthful of chewing gim and a tiny squirt of aerosol matt black, the car was sold four days later.

Caveat emptor, old boy. About a year later I saw the car in a showroom, looking magnificent, and offered at exactly ten times what I had sold it for. I doubt the head had been changed and, anyway, would the new owner ever have noticed? Once ‘restoration’ passes a certain point people seldom drive the cars, except for that tiny distance—which chewing gum on a crack will usually cover—from the trailer to the judging line-up at a concours.

Topped!

Do you also find, in July and August, the pedals get very hot? It’s heat transference, of course. But not a very good sign even if, like me, you enjoy driving in bare feet. Not long ago at some posh dinner I sat next to a very beautiful woman who inflicted on me one of the best motoring put downs I have ever suffered…

She told me how in her youth she had loved, best of anything at all, a Bentley 4 1/2 litre. Bought from Jack Bond for £130 during the Suez War forty years ago. It had been ‘cut’ and lowered [suspension-wise—JDZ], and would do the ton [100 mph—JDZ].

Patronizingly, I asked if she had ever mastered changing gear without the clutch…

‘Without the clutch? One summer was so hot that I drove the whole way from Falmouth to Anglesea (a beautiful route of 170 miles across the Welsh Marches) without touching the pedals, and kept my feet cool by hanging them over the side.’

Try it sometime.

WebUrbanist posts photos of 20 spectacular motorcycle concept designs.

Unfortunately, most of these will probably never actually be built for sale, and all of them are apparently not street legal.

(Nysschen) dismissed (the Chevrolet Volt) plug-in hybrid as “a car for idiots,” saying that few consumers will be willing to pay $40,000—the Volt’s estimated base price—for a car that competes against $25,000 sedans and conventional hybrids. Nor, he noted, is the Volt a luxury car whose green-technology costs will be excused because it also delivers prestige or performance.

“No one is going to pay a $15,000 premium for a car that competes with a (Toyota) Corolla,” he said. “So there are not enough idiots who will buy it.”

He did add that plug-in hybrids are good in concept and hold advantages over diesels in stop-and-go driving. But for the moment, de Nysschen noted, electric vehicles (EVs) are more about making a statement.

“They’re for the intellectual elite who want to show what enlightened souls they are,” he said.

It sounds amazing. In Golden, Colorado, the owner of a 1985 Maserati Biturbo actually traded in his exotic Italian grand touring sedan, with an odometer reading of only 18,480 miles, for $3500 from Barack Obama as down payment on a new Subaru.

The Maserati is doomed. Its engine’s crankcase will be filled with sodium silicate in a government stimulus program resembling those of the Great Depression in which farmers were paid to shoot pigs or plow under wheat, then the whole car will be crushed into a cube of metal.

In this case, maybe Obama should just save a few quarts of good sodium silicate. That Maserati already wouldn’t run.

Weekly Driver:

A man in Colorado was so frustrated with his car breaking down, he decided to capitalize on the “Cash For Clunkers” program. That’s nothing unusual — except his car was a rare Maserati.

The 1985 Maserati BiTurbo has 18,480 miles on the odometer and its interior is nearly new. Yet the owner said he couldn’t drive the car more than 10 minutes without having to call his mechanic.

The Maserati, like all “Cash for Clunker” trade-ins, will soon be crushed. The man said the engine frequently had problems and he’s been trying to the Maserati for months. By trading it in, the owner got $3,500 of government money, roughly the same as he was trying to sell the car for privately.

CNN 1:40 video

That Colorado owner’s experience was apparently pretty typical. The Maserati Biturbo made Time Magazine’s 50 Worst Cars of All Time:

“Biturbo” is, of course, Italian for “expensive junk.” At least, it is now, after Maserati tried to pass off this bitter heartbreak-on-wheels as a proper grand touring sedan. The Biturbo was the product of a desperate, under-funded company circling the drain of bankruptcy, and it shows. Everything that could leak, burn, snap or rupture did so with the regularity of the Anvil Chorus. The collected service advisories would look like the Gutenberg Bible.

Your tax dollars at work. Nobody would buy this dog, but Barack Obama did, using your money to do it.

Noah Joseph at Autoblog reports on the recovery of a treasure from an Italian Lake 80 years later.

The Bugatti Type 13 – Ettore Bugatti’s first automobile to speak of – was a revolutionary design for its time and went on to claim innumerable race victories and put the fledgling company on the map until the outbreak of the First World War put everything on hold in Europe. When the war was over, Europe began the task of rebuilding itself and racing resumed. ...

In 1921, Bugatti redesigned the engine with one of the first four-valve heads in the industry and fielded a team at the Brescia Grand Prix, where it swept the competition by claiming first, second, third and fourth places. A public looking for something to celebrate was enamored, so Bugatti gave the Type 13 the Brescia nameplate and began selling customer versions.

Four years later, a Swiss dealer placed an order for three Bugatti Brescias, and while the first two were paid up in full, the third customer somehow failed to pay the applicable duties to import the car and it was subsequently abandoned in Lake Maggiore in northern Italy along the Swiss border. There it sank deeper and deeper for decades before being discovered by divers in the 1960’s.

Since then, the Brescia remained a sunken treasure until this past Sunday when a diving crew raised the long-lost Bugatti out of the lake. The car had been sitting on the lake bed for so long that once brought back onto dry land, one of the tires burst with a startling bang. The car will now undergo a full restoration and will be auctioned off to benefit the Damiano Tamagni Foundation, which works to prevent youth violence.

Basler Zeitung (German)

3:10 video

When a BMW Z4 hits a deer at 140 mph (225.3 kph), this is what happens.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Pointy-headed busybodies of the environmentalist, new urbanist, utopian communitarian ilk blamed the victim. They claimed the car had forced us to live in widely scattered settlements in the great wasteland of big-box stores and the Olive Garden. If we would all just get on our Schwinns or hop a trolley, they said, America could become an archipelago of cozy gulags on the Portland, Ore., model with everyone nestled together in the most sustainably carbon-neutral, diverse and ecologically unimpactful way,

But cars didn’t shape our existence; cars let us escape with our lives. We’re way the heck out here in Valley Bottom Heights and Trout Antler Estates because we were at war with the cities. We fought rotten public schools, idiot municipal bureaucracies, corrupt political machines, rampant criminality and the pointy-headed busybodies. Cars gave us our dragoons and hussars, lent us speed and mobility, let us scout the terrain and probe the enemy’s lines. And thanks to our cars, when we lost the cities we weren’t forced to surrender, we were able to retreat.

But our poor cars paid the price. They were flashing swords beaten into dull plowshares. Cars became appliances. Or worse. Nobody’s ticked off at the dryer or the dishwasher, much less the fridge. We recognize these as labor-saving devices. The car, on the other hand, seems to create labor. We hold the car responsible for all the dreary errands to which it needs to be steered. Hell, a golf cart’s more fun. You can ride around in a golf cart with a six-pack, safe from breathalyzers, chasing Canada geese on the fairways and taking swings at gophers with a mashie.

We’ve lost our love for cars and forgotten our debt to them and meanwhile the pointy-headed busybodies have been exacting their revenge. We escaped the poke of their noses once, when we lived downtown, but we won’t be able to peel out so fast the next time. In the name of safety, emissions control and fuel economy, the simple mechanical elegance of the automobile has been rendered ponderous, cumbersome and incomprehensible. One might as well pry the back off an iPod as pop the hood on a contemporary motor vehicle. An aging shade-tree mechanic like myself stares aghast and sits back down in the shade. Or would if the car weren’t squawking at me like a rehearsal for divorce. You left the key in. You left the door open. You left the lights on. You left your dirty socks in the middle of the bedroom floor.

I don’t believe the pointy-heads give a damn about climate change or gas mileage, much less about whether I survive a head-on with one of their tax-sucking mass-transit projects. All they want to is to make me hate my car. How proud and handsome would Bucephalas look, or Traveler or Rachel Alexandra, with seat and shoulder belts, air bags, 5-mph bumpers and a maze of pollution-control equipment under the tail?

And there’s the end of the American automobile industry. When it comes to dull, practical, ugly things that bore and annoy me, Japanese things cost less and the cup holders are more conveniently located.

The American automobile is—that is, was—never a product of Japanese-style industrialism. America’s steel, coal, beer, beaver pelts and PCs may have come from our business plutocracy, but American cars have been manufactured mostly by romantic fools. David Buick, Ransom E. Olds, Louis Chevrolet, Robert and Louis Hupp of the Hupmobile, the Dodge brothers, the Studebaker brothers, the Packard brothers, the Duesenberg brothers, Charles W. Nash, E. L. Cord, John North Willys, Preston Tucker and William H. Murphy, whose Cadillac cars were designed by the young Henry Ford, all went broke making cars. The man who founded General Motors in 1908, William Crapo (really) Durant, went broke twice. Henry Ford, of course, did not go broke, nor was he a romantic, but judging by his opinions he certainly was a fool.

America’s romantic foolishness with cars is finished, however, or nearly so. In the far boondocks a few good old boys haven’t got the memo and still tear up the back roads. Doubtless the Obama administration’s Department of Transportation is even now calculating a way to tap federal stimulus funds for mandatory OnStar installations to locate and subdue these reprobates.

You should be living collectively in small apartments, where you can smell your neighbors’ cooking and hear him slam his door and flush his john. You ought to be riding to work in public transportation train cars, packed in cheek by jowl with the whole range and variety of humanity, rubbing up against them, inhaling their breath and body odors.

Exurban life represents a rejection of the entire urban life style, of trendy restaurants, of currently hot music clubs, of the clash of interest groups in urban politics, of both fashion and Bohemianism in favor of family and of shopping in favor of Nature.

As George Will observes, liberals think government ought to be doing something to force you to choose differently.

For many generations—before automobiles were common, but trolleys ran to the edges of towns—Americans by the scores of millions have been happily trading distance for space, living farther from their jobs in order to enjoy ample backyards and other aspects of low-density living. And long before climate change became another excuse for disparaging America’s “automobile culture,” many liberal intellectuals were bothered by the automobile. It subverted their agenda of expanding government—meaning their—supervision of other people’s lives. Drivers moving around where and when they please? Without government supervision? Depriving themselves and others of communitarian moments on mass transit? No good could come of this.

Although proponents of the “war against sprawl” think of it as newfangled, it actually is quaintly retro. In the 1950s, when liberalism took a turn toward esthetic politics, its thinkers began looking askance at middle-class America. To the herd of independent thinkers who deplored it in chorus, suburbanization was emblematic of the banality of bourgeoisie life. Then, 45 years ago this week, a Democratic president who had been in office exactly six months heeded the liberal intellectual’s cri de coeur.

On May 22, 1964, President Lyndon Johnson, speaking at the University of Michigan, announced plans to transform America by leading it “upward to the Great Society.” Exhorting the Class of 1964 to “indignation,” he said America was in danger of being “buried under unbridled growth.” The implication was clear: Government must put a bridle—and a saddle and snaffle—on Americans, the better to, LBJ said, “enrich and elevate” their lives above “soulless wealth” and to serve “the desire for beauty and the hunger for community.”

Once upon a time, government was supposed to defend the shores, deliver the mail and let people get on with their lives. Today’s far-seeing and fastidious government, not content with designing the cars Americans drive to their homes and the lightbulbs they use in their homes (do you know that, come 2014, the incandescent lightbulb will be illegal?), wants to say where their homes can be.

Get ready, America, for a return to the 1970s era of federally-mandated nationwide 55 mph speed limits, emission-strangled automobile engines, and speedometers topping out at 85.

Barack Obama has appointed America’s Safety-Nazi-in-Chief Charles A. Hurley, current head of Mothers Against Drunk Driving to preside over the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).

Well, you’re living in the Nanny State now, boys and girls. Hurley is a long time advocate of drastically more extensive federal supervision of your naughty driving.

He is on the record as supporting a .04% Blood Alcohol Content limit, meaning you are guilty of DUI if you sip one glass of Chardonnay at dinner, and he favors vastly expanded pullover alcohol checks to enforce it, along with breathalyzer-ignition interlocks.

Expect to see the federally mandatory 55 mph speed limit again, expanded liability opportunities for trial lawyers, and a nationwide regime of stoplight and speed check cameras everywhere.

Repeat after me: “I love Big Brother!”
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Hat tip to Walter Olson.

4:32 video

Hat tip to Henry Bernatonis.

Dr. Harold Carr, an orthopedic surgeon in England, was a recluse in his later years, according to relatives. He never married or had children. So when the doctor died in 2007 at the age of 89, few knew what to expect inside his dusty garage. The last thing Dr. Carr’s relatives expected to find was one of the rarest cars in the world, a 1937 Bugatti 57S Atalante, which The Associated Press said was one of 17 in existence.

London Times:

The Bugatti, a black two-seater, was delivered to Earl Howe, the first president of the British Racing Drivers’ Club and a winner of the 24 Hour Le Mans race, soon after it was completed on May 5, 1937. He kept the car for eight years, adding personal touches including a luggage rack, after which it changed hands a couple of times before Dr Carr bought it from Lord Ridley, a member of the Northumberland gentry, in 1955.

He drove the car for a few years but by the early 1960s it was parked in his garage, where it remained until after his death. It has exceptional originality, retaining original chassis, engine and drivetrain. Even the odometer reading gives a mileage of only 26,284, despite the vehicle being almost 72 years old.

Dr Carr’s nephew said: “It was one of the original supercars. When it was built it could reach 130mph when most cars could only do 50.”

Wikipedia:

The Type 57S/SC is one of the best-known Bugatti cars. The “S” stood for “surbaissé” (“lowered”), though most felt it stood for “sport”. It included a v-shaped dip at the bottom of the radiator and mesh grilles on either side of the engine compartment.

Lowering the car was a major undertaking. The rear axle now passed through the rear frame rather than riding under it, and a dry-sump lubrication system was required to fit the engine under the new low hood. The 57S had a nearly-independent suspension in front, though Ettore despised that notion.

Just 40 “surbaissé” cars were built.

The Atalante was a two door coupe body style similar to and built after the Atlantic, built on both the Type 57 and 57S, but with a single piece windscreen and no fin. Only 17 Atalante cars were made, four of which reside in the Cité de l’Automobile Museum in Mulhouse, France (formerly known as the Musee Nationale de L’Automobile de Mulhouse). The name Atalante was derived from a heroine of Greek mythology, Atalanta.

It is expected to bring 3 million pounds ($4.3 million).

Bonham’s description

Starting this year, thanks to the Solons of Sacramento, residents of America’s open-air asylum will find all new cars bearing prominently displayed, in the manner of Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne, a visible badge of their alleged sinfulness.

Marc Sheppard, at American Thinker, explains:

These so-called “Global Warming Scores” range from 1 to 10, with 1 representing a vehicle selfishly emitting an excess of 520 “CO2 - equivalent Grams per mile” and 10 given to those altruistically checking in at under 200.

Okay, so CO2 grams emitted per mile would appear a tangible, albeit excruciatingly inconsequentially silly, measure. But just what is a “CO2 – equivalent?”

Well, so as not to burden its citizenry with potentially enlightening science, the Governator’s State has conveniently lumped all “Greenhouse gases (ghg) emitted from vehicles includ[ing] carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (NO2), and hydroflurocarbons (HFCs) from air conditioner refrigerant” together into one “CO2 equivalent Value.” Pretty slick move—while CO2 is the least significant of all so-called “Greenhouse Gases,” its unique status as chief byproduct of industrial progress makes it by far the most valuable to regulation-hungry eco-maniacs.

But given all its artifice, “CO2 Equivalent Score” lacks the magical connection sought by the legislation’s makers. So, having successfully misrepresented an amalgam of gases as one, the next challenge was to label arbitrary output ranges of that arbitrary blend as a vehicle’s “Global Warming Score.” ...

Section 1 of the new Bill explains the convoluted reasoning behind this mind-boggling leap, opening with these deceiving declarations of scientific certitude:

(a) The use of fossil fuels in motor vehicles is one of the primary human sources of global warming gases that trap heat in the Earth’s atmosphere, leading to a warming effect on the planet.

(b) Increasing concentrations of global warming gases in the atmosphere are likely to accelerate the rate of climate change in California. (c) Scientific research indicates that the impact of global warming on our environment will be profound. Global warming will significantly impact the state’s air quality, water resources, forests, agricultural regions, coastal regions, and the health of the state’s residents.

Considering that all three points are at the very least unproven and recently all but disproved alarmist propaganda, this new mandated metric is neither any less comical nor any more relevant than would be a Dragon Repellant Score.

Popular Mechanics celebrates the 100 Anniversary of the world’s first cheap, reliable automobile, Henry Ford’s Model T, the Volkswagen Beetle of my grandfather’s day.

Old Cars Weekly:

A classic Ferrari stolen from a warehouse in Spain 15 years ago surfaced recently in Connecticut.

The man who had it apparently did not know the car was stolen, state police said. He bought the car in 2000 for $550,000 and added it to his collection of exotic cars, state police said.

According to local news sources, the man in possession of the stolen car could not be reached for comment.

In spite of the seemingly hefty price tag of $550,000 paid by the enthusiast, on the open market, the car would have fetched more than four-times that amount, according to current Ferrari pricing.

The car was seized late last week after troopers with the motor vehicle and auto theft task forces obtained a search warrant for property of the man in possession of the car.

The 1957/58 Ferrari 250 GT Cabriolet Series 1 Pinin Farina was one of only 40 built.

According to authorities, the car was among four Ferraris stolen from a warehouse in Marbella, Spain, in 1993. It was sold in Spain, Portugal and Italy before arriving in the U.S. in 1994.

The car is owned by Dr. Andreas Gerber of Switzerland, who purchased the vehicle in 1989. State police said their investigation showed that the car was smuggled into the United States through New Jersey in 1994 and was registered with a phony vehicle identification number. It then changed hands several times before ending up in Connecticut.

The Connecticut man in possession of the “hot” Ferrari, apparently unaware that the car was reported stolen, drove the Ferrari and entered it in car shows, such as the 2005 Greenwich Concours D’Elegance, where it won the award for “most outstanding Ferrari,” presented by Ferrari North America.

1956 Renault Dauphine

The most ineffective bit of French engineering since the Maginot Line, the Renault Dauphine was originally to be named the Corvette, tres ironie. It was, in fact, a rickety, paper-thin scandal of a car that, if you stood beside it, you could actually hear rusting. Its most salient feature was its slowness, a rate of acceleration you could measure with a calendar. It took the drivers at Road and Track 32 seconds to reach 60 mph, which would put the Dauphine at a severe disadvantage in any drag race involving farm equipment. The fact that the ultra-cheap, super-sketchy Dauphine sold over 2 million copies around the world is an index of how desperately people wanted cars. Any cars.

Perfectly true. I knew someone who had one. Flooring it down a steep hill for a long time would barely get it up to 60. Riding in it was like occupying a rickety old house in a windstorm. It made an endless variety of demoralizing noises, some suggesting the imminent break-down of a vital component of the drive train, others merely alerting you to the continual flexing of the frame and body. You were always under impression that pieces were soon going to start falling off.

No streets were closed, for Lelouch was unable to obtain a permit.

8:39 video

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Hat tip to Karen L. Myers

The Wall Street Journal Weekend edition, in Honey, I Wrecked the Porsche, discusses the really painful kind of car crashes, those involving $250,000+ exotic cars.

According to the California Highway Patrol, the total number of accidents involving Aston Martins, Bentleys, Ferraris, Lamborghinis, Lotuses and Maseratis rose to 141 last year, an 81% increase from 2002, while overall crashes declined statewide during that period. Porsche, BMW and Mercedes-Benz, which sell a wider range of models, saw a 22% increase during that time frame.

These accidents are happening so regularly that a Web site called WreckedExotics.com—which contains photos of dream cars reduced to smoking heaps—added as many as 700 new examples to its gallery last year and says it attracts about 650,000 visitors a month. Founder Gregg Fidan explains the attraction this way: “It’s like seeing a supermodel fall off the runway.”

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Martin Gegenfurter has a web site devoted to arguing< that a href="http://www.lambounfall.de/indexe.html"> it wasn’t his fault.

Lamborghini Murcielago, after

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Now, don’t you feel much better about not owning one?

Cars are no more straight or gay than cellphones, office chairs or weed whackers. But in recent years that truism has not stopped a perception among some motorists that certain cars can, in the right context, be statements about a driver’s sexual orientation.

Ramone Johnson is a gay journalist and former Saturn engineer who compiles an annual “Top 10 Gay Cars” list for About.com, which is owned by The New York Times Company. Mr. Johnson said that “traditionally we are used to being defined by others.” Driving a stylish car can be a way of “taking control back” and saying “this is who I am,” he said.

Mr. Johnson maintains that “soft lines” and a “vibrant personality” — say like those on a Volkswagen New Beetle — are typical attributes of a gay man’s car, and fashion-forward red gauges and other styling cues, for example, make the Pontiac G6 more of a gay car than its sibling, the Grand Am, because the features express a taste for freedom and fun.

Neither automobile manufacturers nor dealers compile statistics on the sexual orientation of buyers.

Frank Markus, who is gay and the technical director for Motor Trend magazine, said auto companies tend to associate gay consumers with higher disposable incomes since fewer have children (one reason many are free to opt for less practical cars, like two-seaters or convertibles, as well). Tellingly, when the American Family Association, a conservative Christian group, pressured the Ford Motor Company to pull advertising from gay publications like The Advocate in 2005, the ads were for Land Rover and Jaguar, two high-end brands owned by Ford.

Subaru has been the most prominent company to embrace the gay market. As long ago as 2000, the automaker created advertising campaigns around Martina Navratilova, the gay tennis star, and also used a sales slogan that was a subtle gay-rights message: “It’s not a choice. It’s the way we’re built.” Little wonder that many lesbians refer to their Outbacks as “Lesbarus.”

Read the whole thing.

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Hat tip to David C. Larkin.

The earliest American report seems to have been January 30 at The Manic Mechanic:

So, this man in Portugal buys a farm (as opposed to ‘buying the farm’, as it were). Apparently the property owner died and the farm was put up for sale. Pretty satisfied of his purchase he wanders about the property sizing up what might need attention. An old, unused barn that will probably need cleaning out was part of the deal. Upon making his way inside the barn he finds that, indeed, the place needs more than a little cleaning…

The story was originally linked from this Dutch site, which has since removed the link. The Dutch site led to a Norwegian Mazda owners site (Google-cached version) leading to the conclusion that the lucky buyer was Norwegian.

It is still unconfirmed, and an urban legend/hoax of some kind is suspected, but the story is he found 180 vintage cars.

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I first came across the story at Maggie’s Farm.