Admittedly they aren’t movies, but we’ve been enjoying the car-related episodes of the National Geographic TV series Ultimate Factories. The first one we saw featured the Lamborghini factory in Italy — although the narrator stressed the precision of the car assembly, intoning over and over how the various steps were timed and completed in exacting increments, the amount of hand-work and manual labor was stunning. Especially compared to the subsequent episode on assembling Cameros — hardly a human in sight, only robots. Somewhere in the middle was the next episode on the Porsche factory.
You can see many of the shows online or snippets on the National Geographic website.

Can a classic car can be greener than a Prius? And a 1966 Porsche that is “finicky and expensive to fix, and spews carbon like a coal-fired power plant” at that…. Joe Eaton says: Like many Americans, I love to get out and drive. But in and around major cities, “driving” usually means idling in traffic while trapped in cars as utilitarian and uninspiring as washing machines. It’s soul-sucking and dirty. It’s also expensive. According to AAA, if I were to commute 20,000 miles in a Toyota Camry, I would burn through $9,100 a year in fuel and ownership costs that include insurance, maintenance, and depreciation. If a dash gauge measured money per mile, the needle would be pegged at 45.5 cents. And, according to Department of Transportation statistics, that much commuting would release more than 15,000 pounds of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. A Prius cuts that almost in half—a green boost for sure, but nothing compared with pairing public transportation with weekend joy rides in a classic car. Read the entire article here.

At the track driving events we attend, the topic of drag and aerodynamics — how effective is that wing on the back of the car — often comes up. Our car is street legal, so there’s only so much lowering we can do. We do have a fairly modest wing and a splitter on the front to try to keep air from under the car and forcing it up.
So I enjoyed finding Mike Turner’s DIY Aero Civic project, where he’s used common-place materials from the local hardware store to lower his ‘92 Honda Civic’s drag coefficient and improve its gas mileage. That’s the result in the top picture. He’s based his design on German experiments with low coefficient of drag automobiles in the 1930’s (that’s one of the German cars, a 1939 Maybach Stromlinienkarosserie, in the second photo).

We live a few blocks from one of those auto rows — a string of car dealerships including Pontiac, Saturn and Hummer. My husband goes by them on his daily walk, and he came home the other day and told me one of the dealers had moved, leaving an empty storefront with 2 interesting-looking cars inside. They sort of looked like Corvettes but weren’t. Yesterday I walked over with him to check them out…
The back said “SV” and “9 Campetizione,” so we took a picture and headed home to look it up in Google. This blog says it’s a “a re-skinned C6 Corvette with a touch of Italian flair” and it’s set to debut here in San Francisco this weekend, then have an unveiling at the Concorso Italiano in Monterey in mid-August.
It’s not often you get to see a car before it’s been debuted — even if it is behind a dirty store front window! More pictures and info here. And click on our “spy photo” above to see a bigger version.

While the story was bland, we had fun picking up on the car trivia and references in the animated movie Cars. It was weird to imagine a world with no other lifeform but automobiles — not just a lack of humans but no squirrels or deer to hit on the road — especially when one of the cars had a bumper sticker that reads “I brake for Jackalopes.” While I liked all the old & vintage car characters, it does seem odd that there were no SUVs or hybrids among them. I liked that the exhaust noise from Sally the Porsche seemed authentic, and that the hills around the town of Radiator Springs resembled hoods ornaments of old cars. After writing this post, I looked for more trivia about the movie — there’s a lot here!

Toyota has a new micro-car for Japan and Europe called the iQ. As part of their ad campaign, they hired an agency based in Belgium to design a new font that “demonstrates the small car’s agility.” The agency decided to let the car design the font itself. Using two typographers, a motion capture programmer, and a racing driver, they filmed the car driving around in a warehouse and the movements were translated digitally into each corresponding letter…

(From here)

Since the last movie I picked (The World’s Fastest Indian) was a big success, I decided to try another underdog motorsports movie: Heart Like a Wheel. It’s about Shirley Muldowney, the drag racer who became the only female top fuel champion in National Hot Rod Association history. She comes across as quite tenacious and driven — in an article about Muldowney I found, “one observer suggested that the 1983 Hollywood movie that was made about her life, Heart Like a Wheel, should have been titled Heart Like a Bulldog.” The film is quite a period piece — feels like the 1970s — and made me want to find out more about Muldowney… and this interview from Hot Rod magazine did the trick.

At my house, our cars include both Porsches and Volkswagens. So it was amusing to find this hybrid on Ebay. According to the listing, it’s a “1966 porsche body kit vw bug….it runs and drives nice, feels like a go cart! this car draws mega attention going down the road or at shows, people love it….ive driven it several 50 mile trips with no issues. its getting around 27 mpg too! the car may look like it will hit the ground,it has a 3 inch rubber guard so you have good clearance anywhere with it. looking at it coming down the road it looks like its about a inch off the ground. ”

On our first date, my husband gave me several choices for activities we could do, and I opted for a drive in his 1957 chopped and lowered bug. I picked the route — some favorite roads that I bike on, with a stop at the beach. We started in Redwood City, California, drove west on Woodside Road, left on Pescadero Creek Rd (which winds through the redwoods), right on Stage to Hwy 1 (we stopped at San Gregorio State Beach), then north along 1 to Hwy 92, right on Skyline (Hwy 84) back to Woodside Rd. Click on the map below to get directions. (A good place to stop for lunch is Duarte’s on Stage Rd.) If you have a favorite drive, let me know in the comments.

I have a few mini wind-up car toys, but nothing like the tin toys being shown at the Japan Society in NYC this summer. Coupling traditional metalworking skills with imported machinery, Japanese tin toys established a worldwide reputation after World War II for their quality and detailed workmanship. The exhibit showcases 70 examples of faithful mini models of Cadillacs, Buicks, Chryslers, Pontiacs, Chevrolets, Studebakers, and Fords. You can see pictures of some of the cars here and read some trivia about the heyday of Japanese tin toys here.

General Motors Cadillac 62 Four-Door Sedan, 1950; with friction motor. 9 1/2 x 3 7/8 x 3 1/8 in. (24 x 10 x 8 cm). Suzuki Gangu, about 1953–54. Yoku Tanaka Collection. Photo: Tadaaki Nakagawa.