Air Conditioning: The Ultimate Cool Car Equipment

Air Conditioning: The Ultimate Cool Car Equipment

Since the early part of the 20th century, the evolution of technology has caused us to constantly re-evaluate the gap between necessity and luxury. Remembering the Motorola ‘brick’ cell phones the few high-flying socialites carried during the 1980s, the majority of the public gladly waited to get home to converse with a friend. Today, as we all seem to talk on...

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Curious Beauty – The Cars of Virgil Exner

Curious Beauty – The Cars of Virgil Exner

“Art produces ugly things which frequently become more beautiful with time. Fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time.” – Jean Cocteau Great automobile design is truly subjective. Its success can depend on everything from the designers tastes and ingenuity, the correct perception of the market, to even the...

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How to Deal with Sandy’s Devastating, Nationwide Effects on Cars

How to Deal with Sandy’s Devastating, Nationwide Effects on Cars

Water enters a parking garage in New York City The devastation of Hurricane Sandy is hard to witness. Lost lives and destroyed property put into perspective what is important in life, but they also force us to deal with the effects and consequences of natural disasters. After we make sure people are safe and the basic infrastructure of our cities is up and...

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Ford Unveils Two Future Automated Driving Technologies

Ford Unveils Two Future Automated Driving Technologies

The Blue Oval brand has been a cornerstone of success over the past several years. Recovering immensely from financial ruins in 2006, Ford Motor Company has effectively nailed the attitudes of the current automobile buyer. A main component of Ford’s recovery is identifying the advantages in high-tech features such as SYNC and the EcoBoost engine. Ford Motor...

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The last Tucker assembled from original parts could sell for $1 million

The last Tucker assembled from original parts could sell for $1 million

When Preston Tucker’s automobile factory closed, it left behind the makings of more than a dozen additional vehicles, some of them rather easy to assemble, some a little more difficult. Now, more than 65 years later, one of the latter will soon make has made its public debut and become quite possibly the last Tucker to ever be built. UPDATE (19.January 2016):...

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BMW Art Cars

BMW Art Cars

I dislike BMW’s. They are cars driven mostly by yuppies and people without the burden of a soul. Most BMW drivers are horrible people, who vote Republican, like to kick puppies, and require a car that is completely devoid of a personality. In fact, the only thing I find interesting about BMW is it’s art car program. They are a great bunch of cars, from some...

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You Like Supercars? Here’s the Bloodhound SSC

You Like Supercars? Here’s the Bloodhound SSC

Bloodhound driver gets parking ticket in London The Brits have always been a little bit crazy, especially about such challenges as land speed records, climbing Mt. Everest, and so forth. Now, after three years in development, they arestarting construction of the Bloodhound SuperSonic Car, to reach 1,000 mph on a dry lake bed in South Africa in 2012-2013. Power...

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1982 AMC Eagle Station Wagon

1982 AMC Eagle Station Wagon

I live in Colorado, where the AMC Eagle sold as well in the 1980s as the Subaru Outback does now, and so I see the all-wheel-drive versions of the American Motors Concord and Spirit everywhere here. This means they show up in Denver-area self-service wrecking yards like clockwork, and I photograph them when they do (and I walk right by most air-cooled Beetles,...

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All Tires Should Self-Inflate

All Tires Should Self-Inflate

Ever since the advent of tire pressure monitoring systems, I’ve thought tires should have the capability of self-inflating. If the car can know when the pressure is low and then alert the driver, it should be able to activate a system to re-inflate while driving, too. That bothers me every time the TPMS light illuminates on my dash, because it means I have to...

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Strange Brew – The Cars of Buch-t

Strange Brew – The Cars of Buch-t

Of course life is bizzare, the more bizzare it gets, the more interesting it is – David Gerrold This week, while perusing through the usual car sites, I came across a Wikipedia Commons page that astounded me. The page was created by a user named Buch-t, and includes hundreds of photographs of cars from museums and events in Germany. The amazing part is that I...

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Prewar Motoring – Driving a 1935 La Salle through D.C. traffic

Prewar Motoring – Driving a 1935 La Salle through D.C. traffic

Randy Denchfield’s 1935 La Salle Convertible Coupe. This past May, while driving up to New York City to visit my family, I made a detour to the Washington D.C. area to photograph this lovely 1935 La Salle Convertible Coupe for my forthcoming Cadillac book. Owned by Cadillac collector Randy Denchfield, it’s one of two ’35 La Salles in his collection, and without...

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An Autobahn in America?

An Autobahn in America?

A number of years ago some discussion took place about going back to a nationwide 55-mph speed limit on American highways. The idea, of course, was to increase the number of miles travelled per gallon of gasoline while decreasing the amount of emissions from the country’s fleet of motorcars. Obviously nothing ever came of that. In contrast, speed limits keep...

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A Craigslist Escort (Replacement)?

A Craigslist Escort (Replacement)?

Jon writes: Hello Bark, It will soon be time to replace my wife’s car: a ’94 Ford Escort wagon. We’re considering spending somewhere between $4,000 and $10,000 on its replacement. We have no kids and, thanks to a little snip-snip, we will continue to have no kids. Fuel economy isn’t a big issue as we both work from home. However, we live in rural Iowa, so...

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