The Masticator was started by two Minneapolis-area visionaries as a zine in the summer of 2004. Issue two was never realized, and half of its founding force moved to Brooklyn. Three years later, the electronic version of The Masticator has far eclipsed its single print-bound predecessor. Today, The Masticator posts art reviews, random urban snapshots, gentle political mockery, and other short articles on subjects like cars, fashion, and books.
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Carbon Motors
Although this police car looks like a Chrysler 300, it's not. It's a Carbon Motors Corp. E7, the first ever car built just for police applications. The company, which is based in Indiana, doesn't have the funding or the orders necessary yet for real production (they've got 13,000 orders so far), but they're getting closer.
Carbon points out that while many municipal vehicles -- fire engines, postal trucks, ambulances -- are purpose-built, police cars haven't been.
It's got a number of novel features that the big three don't offer -- and since Ford is ceasing production of the Crown Victoria Police Interceptor soon, the company has a chance.
It's powered by a BMW 3-liter twin-turbo V6 diesel that produces about 250hp and 400 lb-ft of torque. It'll do 0-60 in 6.5 seconds and get better mileage than the Crown Victoria (about 28-30 mpg).
Its suicide doors open wide to make putting people in the back easier. There's no light-bar on the roof -- all flashing lights are integrated into the body of the car. Its size is deceptive in the photos: although it's slightly shorter than the Crown Victoria, it's just as wide and six inches higher. And as the photo below shows, the back seats are easy to clean.
According to the New York Times, while Ford is ending the Crown Victoria's long run, it's still trying to stay in the running for police contracts with a modified all-wheel-drive Ford Taurus SHO (a 365hp turbo V6 that does 0-60 in 5.7 seconds).
Dodge's Charger is already in use as a police cruiser, and Chevy is pitching a rebadged Pontiac G8, an Austrialian-built car that was only sold in the U.S. for two years. They'd be calling it a Caprice this time around, a reference to another old police cruiser favorite. The Caprice has a big 6-liter 355hp V8.
When I noticed a post on the blog A Continuous Lean about Audi rally racing and how the Quattro four-wheel-drives changed the sport in the early 80s, I was reminded of a summer a few years ago when I got to watch a rally race in the Northern Minnesota forests near Bemidji.
The most exciting part was a nighttime section fo the race in dense forest. It would pitch black, and then you'd hear a rumbling. The trees would start to glow, like a UFO landing, and the rumbling would turn into screaming as a rally car reached the crest of a hill near where we were allowed to stand along the narrow dirt trail. All of a sudden, the car would burst over the hill with its rows of high beams blazing. The crowd would gasp and camera flashes would barely capture the action.
I'm still looking for some video online from that year's race, but I did find some great footage from other years in the Ojibwe Forest Rally.
Here's a high-speed rollover from 2009 in which both driver and navigator of this 2001 Dodge walk away unhurt:
And here's some dashboard footage from the same race. This Volkswagen Golf is negotiating some twists in the forest in a night stage.
And finally, here's a great video of an Audi in the Pike's Peak Rally in 1987 (the Audi action starts about 24 seconds in):
I saw this beautiful shortened Volkswagen bus at the Back to the Fifties weekend at the Minnesota State Fair earlier this summer.
In related news, Britain's "best A-Team van replica" is for sale for a mere £30,000. That's about $50,000 right now. It's normally for hire as a special event limo (£400 for the first hour, £50 per hour thereafter; £1 surcharge per mile from Bristol.).
Jeremy Clarkson's review of the new Honda Insight hybrid is that special sort of bad review, one that's a delight to read regardless of any knowledge or interest in the thing reviewed. It hits two separate pleasure centers in my brain: The one that reacts to articulate and creative bad-mouthing and another that lights up at the misfortune of popular people or things.
Jeremy Clarkson is one of the three hosts of the BBC's car show, Top Gear, a show so entertaining and well-produced, that you wonder when American TV is going to knock it off and fuck it up. What's so uniquely British about the show, and why it can never be made so well in the States, is that the hosts are not afraid to say that a car sucks. Whether it's a new Ferrari or a new Ford, they will give very candid and thoughtful reviews.
"Much has been written about the Insight," writes Clarkson in the Times Online. "We’ve been told how much carbon dioxide it produces, how its dashboard encourages frugal driving by glowing green when you’re easy on the throttle and how it is the dawn of all things."
But how is it to drive?
"It’s terrible. Biblically terrible. Possibly the worst new car money can buy. It’s the first car I’ve ever considered crashing into a tree, on purpose, so I didn’t have to drive it any more."
The problems are myriad and systemic, he says, so it isn't easy to isolate them. The "constant variable transmission," or CVT, makes the car seem as if it has a slipping clutch. The engine sounds:
"worse than someone else’s crying baby on an airliner. It’s worse than the sound of your parachute failing to open. Really, to get an idea of how awful it is, you’d have to sit a dog on a ham slicer."
He continues:
"Because the Honda has two motors, one that runs on petrol and one that runs on batteries, it is more expensive to make than a car that has one. But since the whole point of this car is that it could be sold for less than Toyota’s Smugmobile, the engineers have plainly peeled the suspension components to the bone. The result is a ride that beggars belief."
If Clarkson's right about all of this, the celebrations for a new era of hybrid trnasport are premature. It's nearly greenwashing. The technology just isn't quite there yet, and we're probably better off buying diesels, or better yet, converting diesels to bio-diesels. Is it really better to ditch a perfectly good used car for a brand new Prius or Insight? Doubtful. But a whole lot of people who don't like cars much anyway can feel like they're helping.
Listen to this car start up -- it sounds like an airplane. Or maybe it sounds exactly the way a car that looks this way should. It was created in 1955 for Chrysler by the Italian coachbuilder Ghia and designed by Giovanni Savonuzzi. It was designed for a gas turbine engine, but it never had one until Scott Grundfor, who bought it for $125,000 about eight years ago, put one in it.
Four of the famous BMW Art Cars are on exhibit at Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan right now. The cars on display are: Frank Stella's 3.0 CSL (1976), Roy Lichtenstein's 320i (1977), Andy Warhol's M1 (1979), and Robert Rauschenberg's 635 CSi (1986). Conspicuously absent is Alexander Calder's 3.0 CSL, the car that started it all in 1975.
When asked by the New Yorker if these cars were art, Frank Stella told Calvin Tomkins that “It depends on who you ask.” From the New Yorker:
“The design is made by an artist, so it’s art.” He declined to comment on the other art cars. “Let’s just say I liked the earlier ones,” he offered, “because they weren’t about being an art item.” Most of the later cars, beginning with Ernst Fuchs’s, in 1982, were production models, not made for the track. “It’s the racing part that’s interesting,” Stella said. “That car I did was a nice introduction to racing, and a relief from the art world.”
I was interviewing Piloti founder Kevin Beard for an article at work today, and he mentioned a short film from 1976 called “C’etait Un Rendezvous.” I’d never heard of it.
Piloti, which makes shoes for racecar drivers, will play this nine-minute French film on a loop for trade show and department store displays, sometimes on multiple TVs next to a street-dirty racecar.
“You’ve got to look it up,” Beard told me. “The director is Claude Lalouch, who did ‘A Man and a Woman.’ He mounted the camera on the bumper of a big old Benz. It’s real-time -- he starts at the Périphérique in Paris and goes to Montmartre as fast as he possibly can at about 4 in the morning on a Sunday, just at dawn. And he blows like, 30 or 40 stoplights. It’s a cinéma-vérité. It’s nine minutes long; it’s essentially one roll of Panavision film.”
With that kind of endorsement from a guy who makes his living in the racing world, I had to see it.
There are a lot of rumors about the film, but from what I can glean, Lalouch or a hired Formula One racer drove a Mercedes-Benz 450SEL (and probably not a Ferrari, as some websites claim) with a gyro-stabilized camera on the front bumper. The Wikipedia entry claims that you can hear the car shifting into fifth gear, and that calculations by several sources indicate that the car reaches about 140 miles per hour. Some claim though that Lalouch dubbed in sounds from his five-speed Ferrari.
The film has become legendary, with bootlegs apparently being traded for years. More recently, fans have edited it and provided their own music soundtracks. Spirit Level Films has re-released it as a DVD for about £10, but it can be found in various forms on the internet.
The film is below -- having the sound up is essential:
And here is a short documentary on the making of the film:
I don't know where to begin. In Sunday's New York Times and on the homepage at nytimes.com, there was a peculiar article called Saudis Race All Night, Fueled by Boredom. Reporter Robert F. Worth, who seems to be the Times' man in Saudi Arabia, weaves a bizarre story full of illicit nighttime auto racing and its natural companion, forbidden gay love.
The piece starts describing a scene that could have been in any small town in America, in fact, given the rest of the story, I'm surprised Worth didn't open with those very lines: In a scene that could have been in any small town in America... well, let's let Worth tell it:
The young men start gathering around midnight, on a broad strip of highway between the desert and the sea. By 1 a.m. there are hundreds of them, standing in clusters alongside their cars, glancing around uneasily for the police.
Then, with a scream of revving engines, it begins: a yellow Corvette and a red Mitsubishi go head to head, racing down the road at terrifying speeds, just inches apart. Shouts go up from the sidelines, and another pair of racers shoot down the road, and another.
Next, he draws the distinction between the type of racing he's witnessing -- drag racing -- and drifting, which he describes breathlessly as "an extremely dangerous practice in which drivers deliberately spin out and skid sideways at high speeds, sometimes killing themselves and spectators."
Drifting is not exotic. It's a very well established form of racing all over the world. But, to be fair, illegal street drifting is fairly common too.
It isn't a love of cars, or teen hormones that fuels these various forms of racing in Saudi Arabia, writes Worth; it's tufush. "They are, almost literally, bored out of their minds," he marvels.
Tufush is "a colloquial Arabic word for boredom whose meaning is said by some to derive from the gestures made by a drowning man." From here, Worth talks about drifters in a way that made me wonder if he was talking about cars or aimless youths. This next part is inexplicably weird:
Drifting, which tends to attract poorer, more marginal men, has also been an unlikely nexus between homosexuality, crime and jihadism since it emerged 30 years ago. Homoerotic desire is a constant theme in Saudi songs and poems about drifting, and accomplished drifters are said to have their pick of the prettiest boys among the spectators. Drugs sometimes also play a role. But a number of drifters have also become Islamic militants, including Youssef al-Ayyeri, the founder of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, who fought in Afghanistan and was killed by security forces in Saudi Arabia in 2003.
So, combine boredom and homosexuality and you get drifting, which leads to terrorism. Or is it combining boredom and drifting which spirals into homosexuality and eventually jihadism?
Worth gets every piece of car culture wrong, from street racing to describing a 29-year-old Saudi who slicks his hair back and wears jeans and a polo shirt as emulating a "1950s greaser."
Worth admits that most Saudi street racers aren't gay drifting terrorists, but that means he has even less of a story. After all, this is street racing -- it could be happening anywhere in America, Japan, or Europe.
Worth contributed to a video report on Saudi racing that can be seen in the article.
There are a lot of videos out there showing Saudis drifting, and often crashing, set to dance music. In this one, a big BMW gets wrecked:
And here are a series of dramatic crashes:
What's oddest is that nearly all the drifting videos I've seen show Saudis in traditional clothing, while the drag racing footage captured by the Times shows Saudi men dressing in modern Western clothes. The drag racers modify their cars. The drifters seem to use (and really abuse) stock cars.
The other thing that strikes me about all of the videos I've found of Saudi drifting is that the drivers are incredibly reckless and unskilled. This isn't racing at all; it's going really fast and then spinning out, trying to keep the car on the road. This really has little in common with drifting as we know it. It's more like the Saudi version of doing donuts in a parking lot after a fresh snow. Only apparently it's done by gay terrorists.
In the photo above, artist Alexander Calder (1898-1976) stands in front of the BMW 3.0 CSL he painted as a part of the car company's Art Car program in 1975.
Calder was the first artist in the Art Car program; Frank Stella painted a car the next year in 1976, Roy Lichtenstein in 1977, and Andy Warhol painted a car in 1979. There have been 16 Art Cars since 1975.
The program started with Hervé Poulain, a French art auctioner who was also a racing driving. Calder was a friend, and the two worked on the car together. Poulain raced the Calder car in the 24 Hours of Le Mans.
The cars designed by Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg and Frank Stella will be on display at New York City's Grand Central Terminal from March 25 to April 6 this year.
Every once in a while, New Yorkers need to get out of the City. When Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vauz designed Central Park in 1857, part of America's first landscape design contest, the object was to create a public green space for those without the means for summer homes in the country. A refuge in the midst of the bricks and cobblestones. A few years later, the two designed another giant park -- Prospect Park in Brooklyn.
Those of us who have no access to automobiles must be content to walk to the parks when we need to relax and enjoy green traquility.
But what if something else is missing? What if the subway and the walking and the taxis start to get to you? Where does a lover of cars and the sound of barely restricted exhuast systems go?
The Internet. Whenever I hear the sweet throaty rumbles of these vintage Ferraris, I smile to myself contentedly:
Australian Cars, Trucks, and ... Something In Between
These are some of the odd vehicles our man in Australia has spotted. Frequent readers know I am a huge fan of cars with pick-up beds, factory or modified.
(See some of my favorites here, and the infamous "El Benzo," a vintage Mercedes Benz lovingly redesigned with a pick-up bed here.)
Cars That Were Cars That Are Now Pick-ups And Probably Should Have Stayed Cars
The Chevy El Camino and its less-known Ford counterpart (and predecessor), the Ranchero, are not well regarded in the minds of the American public. They are seen by many as the auto equivalent of the mullet hairstyle, a sort of ‘business up front, party in the back,’ and not in a good way.
After all, if you really wanted to haul stuff, you’d by a real pick-up truck, right? The idea of seeing an El Camino loaded with lumber and equipment is laughable, and so is the notion of a guy taking a woman out for a night on town in one of them. Maybe the car-truck combo is best left for the permanent bachelor, the sleazy man about town whose work doesn’t require cargo space.
I’m being so hard on these pick-up bed cars because I can’t justify my love for them. Nearly every automaker has had one in production at one time or another. The Subaru Brat, the Dodge Rampage -- Volkswagen even made a pick-up bed Rabbit. For those desirous of a pick-up bed in a car that didn’t come that way off the showroom floor, it was custom time.
Here, in the first part of what I hope will become on ongoing series, is a brief survey of one marque and its pick-up bed possibilities. In this installment, the French automaker, Citroën.
1. Don't think that the pick-up bed car concept is over. It ain't even done with in France. This glorious 2007 six-wheel-drive prototype Cruise Crosser is made on the C-Crosser SUV platform. The last axle is powered by an electric motor in back, not the turbo diesel under the hood.
2.The Citroën Xantia pick-up conversion, alas, may only be available as a scale model.
3. Here, a DS 23 Safari, previously a station wagon, was turned into a pick-up by the owner after some roof damage.
4. The DS makes a good pick-up. Here are some jubilant Parisians in a DS sedan conversion.
Its license plate reads: "EL BENZO" -- an obvious homage to the Chevy El Camino. What's so striking about this car, after you recover from the fact that you're looking at a vintage Mercedes Benz that has been turned into a pick-up truck, is that it was done so well.
The concept to build a car like this had been born during the 2004 M-100 Group Meet in St. Louis, while talking to Paul Bracq, designer of the Mercedes Benz Grand 600.
The seed germinated in the liking of a Chevy El Camino, 1969, SS 396 big block V-8 with high lift cams, racing exhaust headers, 440 transmission, and posi-traction rear.
The sick beauty of these pick-up bed Benzes, then, is that the man who designed them is the one of the men who designed the original Mercedes Benz that the Benzomino and El Benzo is based on, the 600. Paul Bracq went on to work for BMW in the 1970s.
I found this sequence showing a Porsche 356A crashing at a race on the famous Nürburgring racetrack in Germany in 1981. It reminded me of my little crash in a '74 Mini Cooper last fall: Everyone walked away. Photos from Willhoit Auto Restoration, a Long Beach, California-based Porsche 356 specialist.
As movie buffs, racing fans, and those who've read J.G. Ballard's Crash know, James Dean died in 1955 when he crashed his Porsche, a 550 Spyder which was "kustomized" by George Barris, the famous car customizer responsible for the batmobile. Dean was driving with his mechanic, Rolf Wuetherich, along a California highway when 23-year-old Donald Turnupseed, driving a 1950 Ford Tudor, crossed into Dean's lane, hitting the Porsche head on.
Legend has it, Dean's last words were: "That guy's got to stop... He'll see us." The mechanic was thrown from the car, and survived.
It was recently proven that Dean wasn't actually speeding as was thought at the time, and that Dean (and not his mechanic) was driving, thought the latter is still disputed by some.
Less than a week before the crash, Alec Guinness, who you may know as Ben (Obi Wan) Kenobi, told Dean the car looked dangerous, and that he'd probably die within a week. Which he did. Jedi powers have always been mysterious.
In David Cronenberg's 1996 film version of J.G. Ballard's 1973 novel, Crash, some auto accident fetishists recreate Dean's crash. The photo below is of the real thing.
It's about time, isn't it? The Scottish Rite division of the ancient international Masonic conspiracy has entered the 21st century: they've sponsored a car for NASCAR. Slate's Seth Stevenson reports.
