I’m not much of a gamer but if I do occasionally play on a mates system then it is always on some kind of racing game. However Need For Speed just dropped the new Shift 2 trailer and I have to say it is epic! Screw making a game they should make some kind of feature length movie about it!
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I just found an awesome site that is like a huge archive for magazine and comic covers, it has some very cool and old stuff on it but obviously being me I went straight to the search bit and looked for old car magazine covers!
These are just a few that I have found so far
To check some out for yourself just go to Cover Browser but be warned you might spend days lost on there!
A lot of people think the German car scene is a brilliant but overly technical and a bit too clinical and clean for some and the ‘perfect’ cars they make are technically flawless but don’t really have much spirit or emotion in them. VW are majorly included in this and they still have a bit of a ‘cold steel’ vibe to them. It is a bit strange because they have such a huge following and a lot of people live and breath with dubs and the dub lifestyle, especially with the company’s old camper vans which are easily the most iconic vans ever. It started off with split screen campers and then bay windows but now because of the rarity and price of decent older buses a lot of people are using used vans from only a few years ago and the T4 scene is quite large now with many being converted into campers.
VW obviously like the scene they are a part of here and want to show the larger public just how fun they are and they don’t just produce Golf hatchbacks but they are a company that has given a lot of people a lot of joy for many many years. So their latest ad campaigns have been designed to do just that. Using the idea of incorporating hidden cameras, the public and viral videos they have been setting up lots of ‘fun’ situation that change peoples every day life just a lit bit so that it is more enjoyable.
The campaign was called ‘Fast Lane’ and it involved VW setting up situations so that people had a bit more fun on their journeys.
Like a slide instead of the stairs in a Berlin train station.
Or a lift that was turned into a rocket!
But easily my favourite is the Skateboard trolley! I want a go!
So those cheeky French people have all gone on a little protest to complain about the government and their plans to raise the retirement age, big deal you may say, this doesn’t affect me in anyway and I don’t come here to read the news!
Well the fact is these protests have disrupted fuel reserves and lines, so much so that flights from Paris were being grounded due to lack of fuel, Riot police have launched raids on petrol blockades and President Sarkozy has ordered police to clear all fuel access problem because of the major fuel shortages.
This liquid gold that we love so much is a major cause of problems when it disappears and because it is a major part of everyones lives people start to panic when they think they can’t get it any more. This panic buying really does not help and it frustrates me every time a whiff of something going wrong with petrol means everyone suddenly goes and fills up their tank straight away and then when I go to get a bit later on they have either run out or everywhere has pushed up the prices to crazy costs!
STOP IT! In the future if you hear about any strikes that might cause petrol availability problems really think about if you need fuel or not. Get enough to get you to and from work every day if you need it but if you don’t really need it for anything this week don’t go and get a full tank just because you think you might not be able to a day later!
It is a known fact that sooner or later we are going to run out of the precious oil and obviously this being a car blog and everyone reading this loves car this will be a devastating situation for us! I am a big fan of technology really pushing ahead and we are getting some very cool alternatives to the normal petrol car with the Tesla, Audi’s E-Tron concept and even hybrids are getting better with the new Lotus Elite looking pretty awesome but this is still a tiny part of the motoring industry and I feel like we are going to run out of petrol before we actually have a decent alternative.
My thought is that we should have pretty much all modern cars running on a petrol substitute of some kind very quickly so that we never run out of oil completely and it just gets rationed out. That way you could still go to see special historic motorsport events and see the original cars with the proper petrol powered engines still in them but then you would get back to the car park unplug your electric (renewable electricity obviously!) daily driven car and be on your way.
Even though I love the sound and smell of petrol power, I would happily put a different engine in my car that was powered by something else as long as I got the same feelings when driving. What I do think would be a great loss would be petrol powered motorsport, even if they were only held as special events every now and again, it would be better than never.
Anyway sorry for the rant but I thought I would put my views across on the whole Petrol situation since I’ve been thinking about it because of the Paris strikes.
Have some French metal as thanks for putting up with my written diarrhoea!
I’m pretty sure the pretty girl in the passenger seat comes as standard in all classic Citroens…
And of course some awesome 2CV rods
In my car at the moment I have a very limited array of gadgets and by very limited I mean the phone in my pocket and a CD player is all I have in the realm of ‘in-car entertainment’. The CD player isn’t even in my car most of the time as it is currently being swapped between my car and my housemates Golf because we’re too poor to buy one each!
My interior consists of a proper rubbishly made speakerbox/rear boot firewall, two recaro seats with blankets, half of a dash and the interchangeable CD player. It’s a bit empty to say the least. However new cars these days seem to come with more gadgets and comfort than my whole house has in it.
Have you been inside some of the newer people carriers and especially the big American SUV’s? They make my house look tiny and cramped! I’m fairly sure most of the seats in them are more comfortable and better made than most peoples sofas and the amount of pull out tables, cup trays and creature comforts make them more like a front room with plenty of nice furniture than a moving vehicle.
Obviously this quest for the ultimate comfort for drivers and passengers extends to in-car entertainment as well. Most well specced cars now come with some kind of built in computer that works as the CD player, sat nav and DVD player but with the success of tablet based computing thanks to the massively trendy iPad it wasn’t going to be long before car companies started offering special iPad ready cars with factory OEM docking stations and plug and play usability.
BMW turned up at the Paris Motor Show with two cars stuffed full of the latest Apple technology showing off what options they will have for the 2011 range. Now obviously you can just get a laptop out and use that instead but everyone loves perfectly integrating devices so I can see this becoming quite a big thing and obviously a massive bonus for Apple if it is all designed to fit and work perfectly with their devices.
Just think how much better long journeys to go on holiday with your parents would have been if you were just sat in the back playing on an iPad! I had to make do with a cassette player, headphones and a whole stack of spare batteries!
Phew I managed to get through the whole post without saying anything about the whole Apple/everything else fighting or the fact it is stupid to make it only work with one brand and not be compatible with everything…
Oh…
It looks like the Electric sports car scene has its first proper big hitter coming into play soon with Porsche announcing its intentions to build an all electric car based on the Boxster. Porsche is still currently doing research and tests on battery systems and electric drive components but President and CEO Michael Macht has said that Porsche will “definitely be offering electric sports cars in the future”. They are taking their time over it because they want the performance and range to be comparable to their existing range before releasing anything.
It is thought that electric Boxster prototypes will be field tested early next year but it will still be a fair while before the new climate change friendly cars get released to the public. Mercedes have also been saying they will be making an electric car so between them and Audi’s E-tron concept it could be very exciting times for electric cars.
At the moment however the only real and accessible electric sporstcar is the brilliant Tesla but sadly I still haven’t ever actually seen one! With climate change being an unstoppable force in making the government crack down on the motorist having alternatives isn’t really a bad thing and I’m sure at some point somebody will make an electric engine that makes fake V8 noises anyway…
As some of you may have noticed I’ve been tinkering with a new layout because my old one wasn’t letting me do some things I wanted to. I haven’t quite finished yet and some more changes may still come so if you arrive here and something’s a bit broken just give it a bit and come back again, I should have it sorted quite quickly.
If you see something thats a bit broken leave me a little comment and I’ll try and sort it. Also drop a comment to tell me if you like the new site or if you think its rubbish 
So as you probably know by now if you read my waffling, I live and breathe cars and slowly they are, or rather bits of them, are making their way into my house to be used as bits of furniture. My housemate is currently building a coffee table out of a Caddy tailgate and we already have a small table made out of a Capri 4 spoke wheel, I also have all manor of random parts around but they aren’t so much furniture and more just stuff that isn’t in the garage… I will have to get some pictures up at some point.
Anyway I’m not the first person to do this, everyone knows about the Top Gear set and of course I have talked about it before with the post “The Finest Sofas Money Can Buy” but now it would seem you can have the ultimate motorists holiday in Stuttgart if you go and stay in the amazing 4 star V8 Hotel.
Now that's a car park!
To put it simply this looks like one of the coolest hotels in the world, actually one of the coolest PLACES in the world! (Ok some of the rooms may be a bit cheesy but I like cheese, its the perfect accompaniment to toast)
Cheesy?
It has 34 rooms with varying styles going from normal to grown up kids playground (what adult wouldn’t want to sleep in a race car bed?) The furniture in all the rooms looks absolutely amazing and brilliantly done and from the costs of some of the pieces in my other blog post probably wasn’t cheap for them to get hold of or make!
One of the more sensible rooms, even non car lovers would agree this is nice!
One of the more extreme rooms! Even has comedy fake legs under the Minor front end
I'm not sure how this is car related but my god it is awesome!
I think they missed a trick in the hallway/entrance though, the V8 engine table is superb but the sofas are a bit normal! They need to be the back of a BMW 2002….
The drive in lobby is good...
1972 Ford Capri RS 2600
Compton
(via Hot Rods Barn fresh A…)
