Junkyard Boombox Virus Spreads: Meet The Catbox, Featuring Genuine Lucas Electrics!

More than two years have passed since I built the car-battery-powered , and finally some other masochist innovator has decided to experience the headaches joy of a homemade afflicted blessed with genuine Jaguar components: Catbox! And now we'll let Brian describe his accomplishment. As you can see, the bar for...

May 20, 2024

Waste Oil Is Free: Use Car Radiators For Cheap Household Central Heating

You say you're tired of paying the gas company for natural gas to heat your shack while at the same time throwing away perfectly good, energy-laden hydrocarbons every time you change your engine oil? Problem solved! This innovative (though admittedly not particularly emissions-friendly) solution comes to us courtesy of Peter,...

May 20, 2024

Improved Timelapse BumperCam Proves Reliable, Still Getting Good Race Photos

, an ancient Kodak bolted to the rear bumper of a LeMons Volvo, took good photos but its large size made it vulnerable to crash damage. Not so with BumperCam II, survivor of three punishing races! You like to shoot race photos, but those uptight track officials won't let you...

May 20, 2024

Connect An iPod To Your Beater's Theft-Deterring Radio With A Wired FM Modulator

The works pretty well, but let's say your local crackheads aren't desperate enough to bust your windows to steal a factory AM/FM radio, yet they will steal anything nicer? How will you listen to your MP3s? Let's say you park your car in an area frequented by urban entrepreneurs who...

May 20, 2024

Why Didn't Mitsubishi Offer a Mid-Drive Position On The Mirage?

We've been led to believe that the driver's seat on street cars should be one side or the other, but why? Team Mid-Drive Crisis converted their LeMons Mirage to mid-drive, and we can see that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. With a front-wheel drive car that uses a cable-operated shifter,...

May 20, 2024

This Sentra's Oil Blow-By Problem Solved, Cheap!

When your rings go bad and crankcase pressure starts a-buildin' up, you'll get oil a-gushin' out of any escape it can find: dipstick tube, filler cap, wherever. Cars dumping oil on a race track get in trouble. What to do? The members of the didn't come to the 2010 Gator-O-Rama...

May 20, 2024

1980s Chrysler Argues With A Speak & Spell

Through the magic of technology, the 1986 Chrysler New Yorker could to talk to its driver. Similarly, the could school you with a mechanized voice. This is what happens when you put them together. Next up, and a talking get into a slapfight and then spend the afternoon making out....

May 20, 2024

Let's Hear It For Parts Standardization: $19.95 a Pop For New Civic Brake Rotors!

Much as I hate working on the daily driver— where's the fun in that?— the warped rotors on my got to shaking enough to detach my pineal gland. Next stop, Every time I work on the ol' Civic (which isn't often), I'm struck by how much effort Honda put into...

May 20, 2024

1966 Dodge Sportsman Hell Project Begins: Hide The Metric Tools!

With some help from and his trailer, my has now arrived in the garage. Once I started taking stuff apart, I got a vivid reminder of how incredibly uncomplicated Detroit trucks once were. The whole vehicle appears to have about 19 moving parts, and this is the top-of-the-line, passenger-friendly Sportsman...

May 20, 2024

VIDEO: Google's Secret Driverless Cars In Action

Yesterday we told you and even logged over 140,000 miles on U.S. public roads. Today we've got video of a Google autonomous car driving normal California highways with nobody at the wheel. Eerie! Google today revealed a secret project to develop driverless cars, saying its test vehicles had… The first...

May 20, 2024

Are Google's Driverless Cars Legal?

Google's project to design raised several questions about the future of driving. But it also raised a more topical question: Are Google's heavily-modified driverless vehicle prototypes even legal? We found out. Researchers have been working on driverless vehicles since the late 1970s; European governments spent nearly $1 billion in the...

May 20, 2024

This is Google's first self-driving car crash

This photo of what looks like a minor case of Prius-on-Prius vehicular violence may actually be a piece of automotive history: the first accident caused by . Whose name should the cop write down on the ticket? Sent in by a Jalopnik tipster, the photos were snapped earlier this week...

May 20, 2024

Drivers are worse than cancer

American drivers, like cigarettes, are immoral — waiting to kill us like cancer, and should be replaced by cars that drive themselves. So says Netscape co-founder and self-styled techno-futurist Mark Andreessen. with the New York Times, Andreessen was chiming in on when he dropped this inflammatory bit: Yesterday we told...

May 20, 2024

Google wins key patent for driverless car

Google won a U.S. patent for its autonomous-vehicle system, paving the way for us dumb meat pods to be eliminated from the driving process. The applies to how the system switches from person control to machine control using "smart" parking spaces. According to the method laid out in the patent...

May 20, 2024

Robot Google Cars Will Kill You Old Lady — A Florida Political Ad

Now that Mitt Romney has picked his , election season is in full swing. In Florida, scare tactics are underway for the State Senate seat in Florida's 22nd District, and they involve and scared senior citizens. This photo of what looks like a minor case of Prius-on-Prius vehicular violence may...

May 20, 2024