Things are going crazy in Sant’Agata, otherwise known as Lamborghini’s hometown.
The Italian automaker just might be going off its rocker. I’m all for a slick white Gallardo or murdered-out black Murcielago, but some recent designs coming from the Raging Bull are leaving a lot of people with dropped jaws and shaking heads.
Lamborghini has always existed on the edge of what is acceptable for automotive design. Stark angles and heavy creases have defined the brand for the last few generations of cars, but that’s recently been taken to a whole new level.
The results of these changes seem to cross the line of cool and wade into the dangerous waters of the comical.
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Car Industry News, Car Minded, Exotic Cars, Foreign Cars, General Chat
50th anniversary lamborghini, Lamborghini, lamborghini birthday, lamborghini egoista
Inside my car is about the only place left where I can find complete solitude and turn off the outside world if choose. I can either play my Korn albums as loud as I want, listen to NPR if I choose or bask in the glory of silence and a pleasing exhaust note.
As Frank Costanza used to say, it’s my “Serenity now!”
Aside from the outdoor advertising along the roads I travel, when I’m in my car I can be completely free of ads from companies hungry for my money. Soon, though, even the sacred space inside our cars may be fertile ground for new advertising opportunities. One of those could be ads built right into the infotainment systems of new cars.
Want to turn up the air conditioning? Doing so could be brought to you by the good people at Jiffy Lube. Changing a radio station could come courtesy of Allstate.
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Car Audio, Car Industry News, Car Minded, Domestic Cars, General Chat
advertising, General Motors, GM, in-car advertising, infotainment system ads
Could you abandon this?
You missed a car payment.
If you live in the United States, you’ll say some curse words, call the bank, and make arrangements to get back on schedule. Aside from a hit to the credit report, there’s no real harm done. But if you live in the United Arab Emirates, you could go to prison.
There are no bankruptcy laws in the UAE, and not paying a debt is considered a criminal offense. Bottom line, if you take out a loan in the UAE, you either pay, go to prison or flee the country. When the first two options are out of the question and the third becomes reality, whatever possessions you had in the country stay there.
That’s partly the reason behind some high-profile abandoned supercars in the deserts near Dubai. The U.S. has some abandoned cars too, though they tend to mostly be forgotten classics. Keep reading for some pictures that contrast the abandoned cars of the UAE with the ones in the USA.
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Car Lists, Car Minded, Classic & Vintage Cars, Domestic Cars, Exotic Cars, Foreign Cars, General Chat
abandoned cars, abandoned supercars, Dubai abandoned cars, UAE cars
I spent the final night of 1989 at a bowling alley. At 12 years old, my parents wanted to make that New Year’s Eve memorable and took my brothers and I midnight bowling.
I remember feeling a sense of awe that the calendar was about to switch the 1990s. It sounded so futuristic and had the potential to be the decade that would bring on the realization of a future I’d seen in the movies. I half expected to see flying cars in the sky on the ride home in those first hours of the 1990s.
Of course, all the 1990s brought us was email, the Internet and Vanilla Ice. Not a single flying car anywhere in the world.
If only the 12-year-old me from 1990 could have seen what Terrafugia has planned in the second decade of the 21st century!
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Car Industry News, Car Minded, Domestic Cars, General Chat, Hybrid Cars
Cars Coming Soon, flying cars, terrafugia flying car, Terrafugia TF-X, TF-X, vertical takeoff
Is it our cars that make us fat, or how we choose to use them?
A great injustice has been done to our beloved automobiles.
They have become a new candidate in the never-ending quest to figure out what’s to blame for the obesity problem in this country.
It seems the obvious causes are no longer worthy of blame. What about the fact that unhealthy fast food is cheaper than natural organic food? Or our propensity to watch a lot of TV while ingesting mass quantities of nachos and Hot Pockets?
No, the real culprit for our fatness is something far more sinister.
Our cars.
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Car Minded, Car Politics, General Chat
car related weight gain, cars, driving, fat, obesity
My 11-year-old son is years ahead of the times regarding police vehicles.
Since he was about 9, he’s been bewildered by the fact that most police cars are old Fords. He can’t quite grasp that those old Crown Victorias have an ample amount of scoot when needed and are pretty darn capable of getting their work done.
Almost every time he sees a police car, he says the same thing:
“Dad, why don’t police drive faster cars? If they all got Veyrons, no one would ever outrun them.”
Budgets seem to be another concept he has yet to grasp.
If he lived in Dubai, though, things would be quite different.
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Car Industry News, Car Minded, Exotic Cars, Foreign Cars, General Chat
Aston Martin One-77, Dubai Police, dubai police department, police cars, police supercars, supercars
Admit it—you’d want one
Peer pressure isn’t just for middle schoolers. Apparently, the pressure to follow the path of others never really goes away, and the inability say ”no” can lead to some questionable outcomes. All it takes is a decision from one trendsetter, and pretty soon everyone else is trying to do the same thing.
Today I’m thinking about Porsche as the trendsetter with the Cayenne SUV. Yes, it’s a superior and well-respected vehicle now, but when it was announced there were plenty of people who thought Porsche had gone off the deep end.
Nope. Instead, it spawned a new category of luxury road-going performance SUVs. And now Jaguar wants in.
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Car Industry News, Car Minded, Foreign Cars, General Chat, Trucks & SUVs
Ian Callum, Jaguar Q-Type, Jaguar SUV, Land Rover
I remember the first time I drove a car, I was 13, and I spent hours stalling my dad’s 1984 Toyota Pickup. Over and over we drove around in that circle, my dad refusing to give up on me until I could finally master the art of the manual transmission.
Many of us probably have a similar story (okay, most were probably more gifted and were able to learn how to work the clutch in a matter of minutes, not hours), one of trying and failing until that glorious moment when you get enough (but not too much) gas to the engine and take off for that first time in first gear. It’s a story of pain and struggle, but at the same time it intensely bonded you to the person who taught you an essential life skill, and it ended with sheer joy at the point when you finally mastered the stick shift. Sadly, this experience may not be a common one for much longer.
A right of passage for many a teenager, learning how to drive stick is gradually becoming less and less common, as more and more automakers choose to discontinue production of vehicles with manual transmissions. Just this week, we received the heart-wrenching news that Porsche would no longer produce the 911 Turbo with a manual gearbox. This follows in the footsteps of Ferrari and McLaren, who dropped manual transmissions altogether in recent years, along with Mercedes-Benz and Lamborghini, who have already nixed the necessity on their superstars, the SLS AMG and Aventador. If European makers of supercars can no longer produce fun-to-drive cars with stick shifts, who will?
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Car Industry News, Car Lists, Car Minded, Car Shopping, General Chat
Speeding is bad. Don’t do it.
That said, I know we all have been guilty of pushing the speedometer’s needle a few ticks above the posted legal limit. Most of us have even been caught and felt the adrenaline rush that comes with seeing the flashing red and blue in the rear-view mirror.
Sometimes people panic and try to talk the officer out of writing a ticket. In the few times I’ve been pulled over, I just cooperate, admit guilt, and take whatever the friendly officer decides to dish out. That strategy has worked out pretty well, as I have gotten only one ticket in my life for speeding.
The topic of speeding came up in conversation with a cop friend the other night, and he shared some funny, and common, excuses he heard during his time as a traffic cop. Learn from these, friends, and never utter the words you’re about to read.
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Car Lists, Car Minded, Car Safety, General Chat
avoid speeding ticket, excuses for speeding, speeding, speeding ticket
When photos of coming new cars are “leaked” on the Internet, there’s a good chance the manufacturer was somehow responsible. Nothing triggers blog coverage and media attention in the car industry more than photos of a yet-to-be-released new car.
Make that car the flagship sedan of a best-selling luxury brand in the United States, and odds are, the leak isn’t a mistake, but a well-orchestrated publicity grab. That’s pure conjecture, of course, but it’s what I’d do if I was in charge of marketing at a car company.
What you see above is the “leaked” image of the officially still-veiled 2014 Mercedes-Benz S-Class.
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Car Industry News, Car Minded, Cars Coming Soon, Foreign Cars, General Chat
2014 mercedes-benz s-class, Cars Coming Soon, leaked s-class
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