In 1970, Emma Ely bought a brand new Chevy Camaro SS 350. 38 years later, she’s racked up a total of 1,104,000 miles on the well worn V8.
Assuming a purchase price of $3,500, that means Emma has paid about 3/10 of a cent per mile for the car! To put that in perspective, if you pay $30,000 for a car and then drive it for 100,000 miles, you’ll have paid 30 cents per mile, or 100 times as much as Emma!
What’s even more amazing is that the engine, transmission, and rear end are all original, and have never required a major overhaul.
According to Emma, she gets the oil changed every 3,000 miles (that’s 368 oil changes during the life of the car) and attributes the car’s longevity to her careful attention to any maintenance issues.
Remember the Splinter, the all wood supercar that looked like nothing more than a clever design mock up?
Apparently it’s quite a bit more than that, as Joe Harmon Design has begun fabrication, and the body is already starting to take shape.
The car’s frame and driveline are based on a central rigid tube section with the suspension and other necessary parts from a C4 Corvette mounted to it. However, as much as possible will be kept in wood form for authenticity’s sake.
The engine is a Northstar V8 run backwards, with the exhaust and intake sides switched around. Intakes sit underneath the cylinder banks, and two roots style superchargers feed air in through individual intercoolers
The wooden component fabrication process includes building a mold/frame, and then laminating layers of veneer into the desired shape.
Check out the site for more details, including live webcam shots and a building blog.
The Titan Exhaust Air Jack in an interesting idea in that it uses your car’s own exhaust gases to inflate a bag that then acts as a jack, lifting one side of your vehicle off the ground so that you can work on it.
The Titan Exhaust Air Jack is designed to lift your vehicle is seconds by its own exhaust gas. The one-way back valve can keep the jack inflated for up to 45 minutes and will deflate in only 5 seconds. The Titan Exhaust Air Jack is inflated via hose which connects to the vehicle’s exhaust and can be used to lift cars, trucks, trailers and boat trailers in unstable areas of mud, sand & snow.
It was originally designed for off-road use, so it’s plenty versatile, and there are no negative side effects from using the air jack on your car, so you don’t need to worry about what it’s doing to the engine.
How do you advertise for the first ever production V8 in a BMW M3?
Hire IdeaCity to cut manifolds, shave cylinders, drill lighting holes, and whatever else it takes to fit cameras, lenses and lights inside of the engine so that you can film the inside of the beast as it does its thing.
This spot took two weeks to study and prepare for, and four, 20-hour days to film, but in the end, 420 horsepower has never looked so good. (This single revolution was filmed at 10,000 frames per second without any computer-generated effects.)
Sure, they did it in 3 Fast 3 Furious, but no one actually puts a new engine into old muscle; do they?
Well apparently they do, because the ’72 Pontiac LeMans that you see here is powered by none other than a 1991 Toyota Supra 7M-GTE 3.0 Litre 24V Turbo motor.
Apparently the car was basically a total loss when it was purchased at auction, so it’s not like they chopped up some pristine iron to make this creation, but I’m still not sure if I can wrap my head around how they decided that this was their best bet for power.
I guess if the go pedal works though, it doesn’t exactly matter what it’s connected to.
Ever wish you had a car for the track and a car for the city?
Well then, BRABUS has got you covered with a matching McLaren SLR and ULTIMATE 112.
The Mercedes-Benz McLaren SLR Roadster gets a full body and trim kit, as well as a custom BRABUS interior and engine upgrades to bring the power level to a respectable 650 HP. (0-62 in 3.6 seconds; Top speed of 211 mph.)
The ULTIMATE 112 (aka the “tender”), which starts out life as a Smart Fortwo, gets matching paint and interior, as well as a boost to 112 HP.
Now if they just made something to tow these with…
When you’re the Chief Editor of Hotrod Magazine, it’s not like you can just drive around in a Dodge Stratus.
However, the Nelson Racing “F-Bomb” 1973 Chevy Camaro that David Freiburger drives around might just take the opposite to the extreme.
Featuring a twin turbo, 406 cubic inch V8, it’s got 1540 HP and 1527 lb.ft. of torque on tap so that any time speed is an option, the go pedal is sure to provide plenty of it.
Besides the monster engine though, the car has also been caged and minitubbed for safety, and was stripped down to the bare metal before being powder coated with a fighter plane motif that I can’t get enough of.
How do you make the world’s most expensive Hot Wheels car?
Easy: Cast it in 18-karat white gold, and cover it with 2,700 jewels weighing nearly 23 carats.
This “toy” was created by Jason the Jeweler, and celebrates Hot Wheels’ 40th anniversary, as well as the production of their 4 billionth car. Blue diamonds take the place of paint, white and black diamonds take the place of the engine, red rubies take the place of the tail lights, and black diamonds create the “red line” tires. Even the custom case has 40 additional white diamonds in it, with one for each year in the “legacy of Hot Wheels”.
Though $140k for a car with zero horsepower is probably a bit much, the proceeds go to a good cause, so I’m sure someone is going to be a happy Hot Wheels owner soon enough.
Clemens F. Leonhardt is working on a wild project. By taking two cylinders form an old radial airplane engine, fusing them to a custom crank and then adding them to a custom frame, he has created a 410 cubic inch V-Twin monster that makes 350 horsepower and is called the GUNBUS.
It’s hard to tell from the pic, but everything on this bike is twice the normal size to compensate for the extremely large engine pieces and parts, so I can only imagine what it’s like to ride.
The Titan Exhaust Air Jack in an interesting idea in that it uses your car’s own exhaust gases to inflate a bag that then acts as a jack, lifting one side of your vehicle off the ground so that you can work on it.
