Thanks for this. There are those of us old enough to remember when Thompson, Wolf, Didion were something special to read. I am not surprised he wrote a piece on Barris. Seems like his kind of thing.

With the amount of plumbing this car has, it could have that, an AC system and a victrola for all I know.

http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2010/01/wood-gas-cars.html

Stupid question, but is this thing steam driven? Second thing, could it be fueled with wood chips like the WW II Kubelwagens?

First Gear: The belief that Federal standardization of newly developing technologies will bring about more efficient development is not new and is still as equally wrong as it ever was. It assumes that the one standard that is approved or blessed by the Federal government is the one that will win. For driverless cars,…

Getting tired of a car seldom happens to me, which is why I now own 5. I buy them, and I never really want to get rid of them, and I regret most of the ones I have sold. Of the three cars I sold, the ‘88 VW Jetta GLI was the easiest. It was completely no good. At 5 years and 115,000 miles it had rusted to bejeesus,…

All the hoses on my old cars were eaten up by E10. Massive holes the size of nickels but oval, and when we rebuilt the engine on my ‘72 Mercedes all of the seals were as hard as hockey pucks. Ethanol is a menace in every sense.

I always felt that the arguments made against MTBE were overblown by the corn lobby to get it out of the market. I would like to revisit MTBE with less biased studies, but now that I have suggested it, I will probably be too busy avoiding big corn hit men to pursue the studies myself.

Yeah ... what do you think is happening now? They are putting the fire out, moving it, then monitoring it, and then it reignites even though they think it is safe. You suggested that doesn’t happen with gasoline fires, which is right because they burn through their energy supply in minutes then get scraped up. Here we…

This point was made concerning a battery pack that had been removed to a stable location faaaaaaaaaaaaar away from people of any kind much less a highway, see upper references to Tesla BBQ pit, and the battery could be left to burn itself out in a safe location if there is no way to discharge it. As I said, not an…

Legitimate point, but would a gasoline car have fared any better in an accident where it slammed into a couple of walls and ate itself? I think that they would be just as dead, however you are correct, this fire propagated instantly. So would a gasoline fire. What I am trying to point out is that most electric battery…

Drivers die all the time from gasoline fires after severe accidents, and I am not certain I have heard that this guy survived the impact to die from the fire, but be that as it may.

And plenty of electric car accidents that aren’t self igniting either. The big difference is that the tesla fires we have seen have propagated very slowly giving passengers times to escape harm, which is not always true in a gas fire. This does create a new problem of how to discharge latent energy from a battery to…

That’s because they very quickly burn themselves out. If the electric battery were given time to burn itself out, you have the same safe result.

I’m not much of a Tesla fan, but this is not the biggest problem in the world, it is just something fire companies need to be aware of. These fires spread slowly, and yes a damaged battery can be literally impossible to discharge. Maybe the thing is build concrete firepits and let the buggers burn themselves down. Not…

Why is Grimes “good”? Having never heard of her before I checked out some stuff on youtube. It sounds like Pikachu turned out an album. Although it does make sense that Elon Musk would date Pikachu, electricity and all.

So Elon Musk and this Chick are going to Mars to populate it or something? I am beginning to see why everyone on the Expanse hates Martians.

Dreamed up by William Gibson 25 years ago except that version was computer generated, which is a minimal excuse.

Exactly. The speeds this is filmed at are quite slow. The film Grand Prix was filmed using specially modified Ford GT40s. The speeds were much, much higher. This is sweet, but Grand Prix is a racing film.

I remember taking a taxi ride in Alice Springs in one of these things with a mere 200,000 miles on it. Ran like a top ... much like my mother’s ‘63 or so Falcon. However high mileage is about the only thing those two cars had in common other than a name.