Category: Autos

No BMW never made a convertible 7-series, but that didn’t stop this guy from cutting the roof off his car. Of particular note is the roll bar fashioned out of plain old “water grade” thin steel pipe. Sure, he might be an asshat for forging this frankencar out of a perfectly good sedan (stick-shift 7-series are rare!) but he’s going to be safe!

Well, maybe not. Should be rollover, that 2+ tons of German metal is going to obliterate that pipe onto the guy’s head. But only if we’re lucky.

It’s rare enough to see a one-time “car of the future”, especially when it’s just parked down the street, but I’ve been driving past this Lagonda every day for a couple months now and can’t help but smile.

The first time I saw one was at the LA car show in 1976 or so and I instantly wanted one. OK, so I was eleven years old and it looked a lot like a Hot Wheels car as designed by Derek Meddings. In practice though, the futurism wasn’t quite as reliable as people thought and it eventually just became a big car. Still awesome-looking though.

There’s not much to Soviet-era automobiles. There’s the oddball Trabant from East Germany and a handful of Russian builders, but none of them really built anything that stood out to be something other than “generic sedan in old background photo.” Volgas were fashionable (Yuri Gagarin drove one!), but the company never really designed and built anything outside of basic utilitarian sedans. And c’mon, if James Bond gets to drive a Aston Martin do you really think that a stylish KGB agent would want to drive a box?This “what if” was answered by Russian custom car manufacturer A:Level who took a BMW 850csi and created a new body based on the 1957 Volga. The end result is the Volga V12 Coupe which is the coolest looking car I’ve seen in years. There’s only one and A:Level refuses to make any more, but it’s making the rounds of the European auto show circuit. Car And Driver magazine has the complete rundown.

A couple of weeks ago I had an opportunity to visit both the basement vault of the Petersen Auto Museum and Jay Leno’s private car collection. Lots of rare and significant autos all of them in the zillion dollar range, but what caught my eye were the automotive Q-ships – non-flashy cars that look like something you would see marooned in some distant vacant lot. Only they’re packing some ridiculously high-horsepower engine that can accelerate the scrap heap to orbital escape velocity in a couple of seconds.

This supercharged Thunderbird in the Petersen vault is a good example. The only clue that there’s something extra hiding under the hood is the set of supercharger gauges stuck somewhat inelegantly on the steering wheel.

I like the relative lack of chrome this has compared with your typical late 50s fin-encrusted behemoth, but it is still a vintage Thunderbird that’ll get all kinds of attention from even the occasional car freak. The clear winner though is this 1966 Dodge Coronet Hemi at the Leno collection.

The Dodge is your basic box sedan, but so timeless and clean that I couldn’t help but notice it in a building filled with flash. The California Highway Patrol still speaks reverently of the late 60s Dodge Polara which held the record for the fastest police car ever tested by the CHP for 25 years. About the only thing you can add is Radio Birdman’s “455 SD” and you’re good to go.

Besides, the Chrysler Corporation had the grooviest ads ever.

Oh, and the obligatory “mirror project” photo.

Fluid dynamics as played out on the highways…

Once upon a time, years ago, I was driving through a number of stop/go traffic waves on I-520 at rush hour in Seattle. I decided to try something. On a day when I immediately started hitting the usual “waves” of stopped traffic, I decided to drive slow. Rather than repeatedly rushing ahead with everyone else, only to come to a halt, I decided to try to drive at the average speed of the traffic. I let a huge gap open up ahead of me, and timed things so I was arriving at the next “stop-wave” just as the last red brakelights were turning off ahead of me. It certainly felt weird to have that huge empty space ahead of me, but I knew I was driving no slower than anyone else. Sometimes I hit it just right and never had to touch the brakes at all, but sometimes I was too fast or slow. There were many “waves” that evening, and this gave me many opportunities to improve my skill as I drove along.

I kept this up for maybe half an hour while approaching the city. Finally I happened to glance at my rearview mirror. There was an interesting sight.

It was dusk, the headlights were on, and I was going down a long hill to the bridges. I had a view of miles of highway behind me. In the other lane I could see maybe five of the traffic stop-waves. But in the lane behind me, for miles, TOTALLY UNIFORM DISTRIBUTION. I hadn’t realized it, but by driving at the average speed, my car had been “eating” traffic waves. Everyone ahead of me was caught in the stop/go cycle, while everyone behind me was forced to go at a nice smooth 35MPH or so. My single tiny car had erased miles and miles of stop-and-go traffic. Just one single “lubricant atom” had a profound effect on the turbulent particle flow within the entire “tube.”