Before Disney/Pixar’s Cars came along, there was this Disney short about Susie the little blue coupe. The story follows Susie as she goes from brand new car, to worn out junkyard scrap, to reconditioned sports car. [via]
Audi centenary sculpture by Gerry Judah
July 17, 2009 @ 7:41 pm
Photo by Bruno Postle on Flickr
To celebrate Audi’s 100th anniversary, Gerry Judah created this 32-meter high sculpture (nearly 105 feet) on display at the Goodwood Festival of Speed in West Sussex, England. The sculpture features two Audi vehicles — a recently launched R8 V10 sportscar and a 1937 Auto Union Streamliner — racing into the sky on a silver polished track.
Check out Dezeen to see some more spectacular photos of this sculpture.
Toyota is now the world’s largest automaker
January 21, 2009 @ 5:38 pm
AdAge confirmed it today in an article citing specific sales numbers from General Motors and Toyota. As of today, Toyota is now the official #1 automaker in the world, putting GM in the #2 spot. In 2008, Toyota sold 8.97 million vehicles compared to GM’s 8.36 million. For over 70 years, GM has reined at the top spot in worldwide sales even though their US sales haven’t been hot since at least 2004.
We certainly are living in interesting times. I wonder if GM will ever take the top spot worldwide ever again.
Smart cars shown off on 11th Avenue
November 26, 2008 @ 10:36 am
The 15th World Congress on Intelligent Transport Systems had a convention last week (Nov. 16-20) at the Javits Center in New York City and they literally closed off a section of 11th Avenue to show off some of the technologies being developed to make the roads safer for everybody.
The cars shown in the video “talk” wirelessly with the road, traffic signals, and pedestrians around them and are smart enough to avoid a serious accident and even automatically stop the car if the driver fails to do so. The system makes use of dedicated short-range communications (DSRC) to find other objects around the vehicle, but I cannot help but think about how this sort of technology would affect a city like New York where vehicles purposely come within inches of hitting each other in order to keep moving. I do this sort of thing often and I would hate it if a computer in my car told me that I was going to hit a vehicle when I know I am able to squeeze by without even a scratch.
But of course, the life-saving capabilities of such technology overshadow the annoyance stated above, so for that, I’ll go with this and say that I think it’s pretty neat.
NYPD Museum Show 2008
November 26, 2008 @ 10:12 am
1972 Dodge and 1976 Pontiac (Photo: Greg Reynolds)
I didn’t know this, but for the past 8 years, the NYPD has had something called the NYPD Museum Show (not to be confused with the official New York City Police Museum) that basically shows off their long line of antique and current NYPD vehicles. It’s a car show with only NYPD vehicles. This past summer, the 8th annual NYPD Musuem Show was held on June 21st and 22nd and it looks like it would have been a neat thing to visit if I was around at the time.
Greg Reynolds shot some photos for copcar dot com and his pictures certainly make me feel like I am traveling back in time to when these vehicles were actually on the streets.
I can’t seem to find information on when next year’s NYPD Museum Show is, but I really hope they have one and continue their tradition of driving these vehicles out into the streets. If you want to see more photos of old NYPD vehicles, you can visit Greg Reynolds’ list of car shows and search for ‘NYPD’. He’s covered the event for at least several years so there’s a good amount of photos to go through.
Here’s a video of some of the old cars heading towards the museum.
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