davintosh

It would be so fun to have one of these converted into a motor home. But with it selling for $4,320,000 at auction with Barrett Jackson, I doubt it’ll happen with the Thorntons anytime soon!

Here’s a link to a Car & Driver article about a one-off hand-built beauty of a car based on a BMW 850CSi, built buy the Russian firm A:Level.

I find this thing really interesting for a couple of reasons; first, because the guy who commissioned it wanted it to look like an old-style Gaz Volga, which was the sub-par commodity vehicle of the 1960’s USSR. It was the car driven by the few Russians who could afford to drive. So apparently, the guy who designed it had a special place in his heart for those vehicles.

Secondly, I find this interesting because the car’s body is hand built, using little more than hammers & anvils to shape the parts. It’s a far cry from mass production, but it seems to me that the skills required to do this sort of work are pretty uncommon these days. The C&D article says it took 17 months to build the car; two weeks to shape a fender, and a month for a door skin. I find it a bit hard to relate to a job that takes that long to see results, but fascinating that someone can actually take a flat piece of steel and shape it into what we see in this car.

The Bruce Weiner Microcar Museum in Madison, Georgia, has got to be the mac-daddy of micro cars. Some of these things are so cool, like this 1960 Isetta.

I’d love to have one of these things, or better yet, I’d love to build one. Or something like it.

The microcar concept is pretty simple; getting people from point A to point B in a city shouldn’t require two tons of machinery that gets 10-20 mpg. Motorcycles would be a good alternative, mileage-wise, but that wouldn’t work around here in the winter. So what about taking one of those crazy 4-wheelers that zip around on the street, tear it apart & put it back together so that it doesn’t ride like a motorcycle and has some protection from the elements?

Something to think about.

ESPAR HEATER SYSTEMS builds gasoline and diesel fired heaters for water cooled vehicles.

It sounds like a great deal; teamed up with a timer, you can set it up to warm things up for you on cold mornings without having to run the motor. It uses only a fraction of the fuel an idling engine would, not to mention that a warm engine uses less fuel in cold weather.

Looks like the price is around $1000, so regardless of how nice it is it would be a long ROI.

But just think of how nice it would be to have the Suzuki nice & warm every time I got into it.

Sigh.

Speaking of Jalopnik, I think it’s only appropriate that I mention that site here after bringing up the post on the Dodge Shelbys. It’s another Gawker Media site that looks at all things automotive. The writers seem to have the same likes & dislikes as me, and do a great job of throwing in good humor.

I just ran across this on Jalopnik; the Shelby Dodge pages. This brings back fond memories of the eighties, when Dodge hired Carroll Shelby to spiff up it’s otherwise dreary compact cars.

I once owned a 1980 Dodge Charger, which was little more than a two-door Omni with some body cladding, a fake hood scoop, fat Goodyear Eagle tires, and an overhead cam 2.2L four under the hood. But dang was it fun to drive!

After driving that car, the Shelby versions of the Omni’s were always drool material for me. Sigh.