The Car Thread

[achilles]

https://www.yahoo.com/autos/electric...153000459.html

Care for a Maserati that's electric and has 1200 electric horses? Well, there you go then.

[achilles]

It has been proven by SCIENCE that the Chevy Silverado is the truck you want for all your being caught in a tornado and flipped several time over, then flipped back on the wheels and driven away by the most chill driver on the planet needs. Yes, if recreating that scene from Twister where the Dread Pirate Roberts gets er...pasted in a truck in a tornado, but with the twist of survival, this is the one for you!

[Ravin' Ray]

It has been proven by SCIENCE that the Chevy Silverado is the truck you want for all your being caught in a tornado and flipped several time over, then flipped back on the wheels and driven away by the most chill driver on the planet needs. Yes, if recreating that scene from Twister where the Dread Pirate Roberts gets er...pasted in a truck in a tornado, but with the twist of survival, this is the one for you!

I was gonna post a Twitter reaction to that very same video!

https://twitter.com/JoelWBerry/statu...60002914414592

[achilles]

I was gonna post a Twitter reaction to that very same video!

https://twitter.com/JoelWBerry/statu...60002914414592

An update on that; the driver was a 16 year old boy! I love it! And his reaction, kid said he wasn't really afraid. Chevy needs to hire this kid for a "Tornado strong Silverado" commercial, and start going on about how safe it is....unless it failed the crash ratings, in which case color me embarrassed.

Moving right along though, I don't understand who would buy a Hennesy Venom. The car's big selling point apart from "awesome looking hypercar" is that top speed of 317 MPH, and they were only able to do that on IIRC the space shuttle's landing runway. There wasn't another smooth tarmac surface on earth long enough to do so, and it had to be glass smooth; at those speeds a small rock will cause a catastrophic crash which will turn the driver into a fine red mist in a fireball. Sure you can drive it slower, but there are other much cheaper and more practical cars that look just as good.

Here it is BTW:



It's got around 1800 HP, 1200 torques, and since it's a single clutch paddle shifter, it will be hard to manage in that stop and go traffic when you're using it to shop...presumably for a piece of gum, since nothing larger will fit in the trunk, though the driver and passenger(!) space is said to be very good. So, if you are an NBA player who never goes shopping for much, and doesn't go into cities or towns, or stop at red lights or stop signs, and live next to the space shuttle runway, this is the car for you! Well, and if you have more than $2 million to spend. The only thing is, it probably doesn't get very good mileage, which as we all know is a thing today, so you might have to pay at the pump a bit more than say if you drove a Jetta.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

An update on that; the driver was a 16 year old boy! I love it! And his reaction, kid said he wasn't really afraid. Chevy needs to hire this kid for a "Tornado strong Silverado" commercial, and start going on about how safe it is....unless it failed the crash ratings, in which case color me embarrassed.

Moving right along though, I don't understand who would buy a Hennesy Venom. The car's big selling point apart from "awesome looking hypercar" is that top speed of 317 MPH, and they were only able to do that on IIRC the space shuttle's landing runway. There wasn't another smooth tarmac surface on earth long enough to do so, and it had to be glass smooth; at those speeds a small rock will cause a catastrophic crash which will turn the driver into a fine red mist in a fireball. Sure you can drive it slower, but there are other much cheaper and more practical cars that look just as good.

Here it is BTW:

I could be wrong, but I think that’s faster than a Bugatti Veyron. I doubt if even the German Autobahn is safe enough for the Venom.

[achilles]

I could be wrong, but I think that’s faster than a Bugatti Veyron. I doubt if even the German Autobahn is safe enough for the Venom.

It is not only considerably faster than a Veyron, but it's a bit faster than a tweaked Chiron, the Veyron's faster successor. And you'd have to have a death wish to try and top this thing out on any street or highway around; the slightest ripple in the pavement at speed would prove fatal. This thing is just silly.

[achilles]

I happened by a Toyota dealership my folks got a car from back in the day, and was stopped in traffic beside it. I looked over at a Murai, and noticed it had words professionally worked into the paint job. Well and good, and here's the funny bit. The car was covered with a complaint about how horrible the dealership is, how terrible customer service was, how much a lemon that car, (again a Murai), was, and how impossible it is to find hydrogen to fuel it. Parked legally on the street five feet from the dealership! Whoever that is has some serious grudge against them, (BTW, their customer service IS terrible as I recall).

[achilles]

What is the best supervillain car of all time? Is it the Mercedes 600 Grosser, a favorite of dictators and evil types the world over, the Jaguar 420 G, the Kray twins favorite, (and damn, they share my birthday, not the year, but the date, which is disturbing), that Chinese Hongqi L5, which can't even do sixty MPH, but is evil looking in the extreme, or something else?

Of the ones I mentioned, the Grosser, (which as the name suggest is huge), has the most number of deeply evil owners, with all the world's most horrible dictators and Jeremy Clarkson having one or more. It also replaces the electrics for things like power windows and other accessories with hydraulics, which are faster, quieter, and far more expensive than electrics. Only major car AFAIK to do so.

[Kirby101]

The Hannibal 8

[achilles]

The Hannibal 8

Oh, I saw that movie on TV when I was a kid; I loved it! And I was rooting for the bad guy the whole time, Lemmon was that great. Professor Fate was one of my favorite roles of his, amid a career filled with favorite roles. Oh, and the cars were nice too. The movie, (called The Great Race BTW), was great fun in a slapstick way. Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon, Natalie Wood, Peter Falk as Lemmon's henchman, Ross Martin, (The Wild, Wild West), Larry Storch, (F-Troop) were some of the cast, all great. Look for director Blake Edwards' uncredited cameo, and listen to Henry Mancini's score.

Still, that isn't a real car, and that was what I was talking about. So, movie and TV cars aside then, what are other great villain cars?

[achilles]

They're BAAACK! Yes, the car company nobody was asking for is back with a new/old offering, yes, a new DeLorean is back, this time electric. No word on whether it need 1.21 gigawatts power to time travel, but supposedly it has broadly the same look, though there's no word on if they plan on using the striking and ill-advised stainless body. The gull wings appear to be there. No real picture yet, so sorry about that, but there you go, if you always wanted a DeLorean for some reason, there's your car. No word on pricing either, though I suspect it aimed a bit more to the top end of the market.

[achilles]

There's a thing in Los Angeles land whereby groups of armed robbers confront a rich person on the way somewhere, with Rolex or other super premium watches, jewelry and the like, follow them in several cars, and then run them down, (whilst they're on foot), so they can then rob them. They don't typically kill the victims, but getting run down I would imagine hurts and is terrifying especially when it's on purpose.

So the latest one yesterday came as no shock. What did come as a shock were the type of cars the thieves used. An Alpha Romeo Stelvio SUV, and a grey Challenger RT. I mean two more instantly recognizable cars to even people who don't care about cars will recognize at a glance. Who uses that sort of car in a crime?

[MajorHoy]

. . . So the latest one yesterday came as no shock. What did come as a shock were the type of cars the thieves used. An Alpha Romeo Stelvio SUV, and a grey Challenger RT. I mean two more instantly recognizable cars to even people who don't care about cars will recognize at a glance. Who uses that sort of car in a crime?

Maybe so the people themselves won't be recognized because other people will be focusing on the cars?

And I'm assuming the cars were stolen . . .

[achilles]

Maybe so the people themselves won't be recognized because other people will be focusing on the cars?

And I'm assuming the cars were stolen . . .

Yeah, they were likely stolen. And you are right, I have no idea who they were, since I was admiring the Alpha and the Challenger. Smart if they intended that. But....someone who doesn't know what they are would just ignore the Alpha at least.

[achilles]

This is weird. I'm watching the morning news and just saw a Tesla, "unsafe at any speed" commercial by some guy named Dan O'Dowd, who may or may not be running for Congress, I don't know. It was comprised of youtube footage of a Tesla self driving feature not working on the street a lot. It pleads for Congress to stop Tesla or something. Weird.