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The cars look virtually identical to the EV Folgore version, which is a good thing, as the classic long-hood-short-rear-deck GT car shape never stopped being wonderful, and the detailing, especially in the lighting design, borrowed from Maserati’s MC20 halo supercar actually works very well. It’s an undeniably pretty car, a clear evolution of the sorts of GT cars Maserati has been building for decades, starting with the Maserati A6 1500 from the late 1940s....

Welcome to The Morning Dump, bite-sized stories corralled into a single article for your morning perusal. If your morning coffee’s working a little too well, pull up a throne and have a gander at the best of the rest of yesterday. RIP Fiesta For nearly half a century, Ford has had a Fiesta in its European lineup (and sometimes in its American one, too). They’ve sold 22 million of the little subcompacts, from the very first Ghia-designed model to the bigger and more modern car....

In case you’re not familiar with the most recent Buick Century sold in America, allow me to refresh your memory. Sold between 1997 and 2005 as a cheaper counterpart to the Regal, the last Century was beloved by old people for its comfort and by people who eventually bought them off old people due to its sturdy nature. Today, you can find them either in pristine shape having only been driven to church on Sunday or, like the one below, piloted haphazardly on a donut spare with rust-addled sills that checked out sometime during the Obama administration....

A few of us at the Autopian have been following the Microlino story for years. Jason first wrote a breakdown about the electric microcar back in 2016. Back then, Micro Mobility Systems, the Swiss company building the Microlino, was just a year into development of its microcar. Founded in 1999, Micro started off by selling a kick scooter. In 2013, Micro launched an electric scooter. The Microlino’s development has been chock-full of delays and twists, including a redesign from a modernized version of the 1953 Iso Isetta to what now looks like a future Isetta....

Before we left our Lebanon, Missouri motel, Otto and I did our tight five prop comedy bit that ended with me receiving mild burns to my earlobe: — David Tracy (@davidntracy) December 28, 2022 We made it to Neosho, Missouri for lunch, which was kindly provided by our fellow motor-vehicle-word-sayer, Caleb Jacobs, truck-man at The Drive. It was fantastic! We even took a constitutional around the town square and enjoyed a bunch of Ozarkian goodness....

Hopefully. Pour yourself some tea because mine is piping. Before we dig in, I oughta introduce myself. I run a growing community for LGBTQ car enthusiasts and went to college a few hours from your esteemed Editor-in-Chief. I taught him how to work on his first XJ Cherokee when we replaced the valve cover gasket in my college townhouse’s parking lot, next to my spray-painted BMW E30 leaking a concerning amount of everything....

This thing makes getting to the bottom of complex issues so much easier. [Full Disclosure: My Volkswagen mechanic and a Volkswagen-owning online friend both recommended this tool for my massive vehicle fleet. Not long after the recommendation, Autel reached out to me and asked me if I wanted to give a scanner a try. I used it on every broken car in my fleet.] So, what is this scanner and why would you want it?...

First, a little background. In case you’re somehow unaware of Tatra, then I might ask what website you were trying to get to that brought you here–was it Autopaint.com? If so, stick around, because this is all fascinating stuff. Tatra is actually one of the oldest automakers in the world, starting in 1850 making wagons and carriages in the Czech town of Kopřivnice. The company moved to motorized cars and trucks by the 1890s, and by the 1920s Tatra was making some very technically interesting vehicles with opposed air-cooled engines and backbone chassis....

Scenario One: The Gnome King You’ve been hearing all sorts of loud, strange noises from your crawlspace, and it’s gotten so bad, especially the sounds that resemble metal being ground into powder and a strange, late-night oontz oontz oontz rhythmic pulsating noise, that you need to do something. You put on your filthiest Dickies coveralls and squirm under your house, only to find a thriving gnome village complete with, right under your bedroom, a well-equipped machine shop and an all-night dance club, filled with scantily-clad gnomes....

What I like about these images is that you can tell the goal was to fill every possible bit of usable volume of space in the car with humans or some sort of hard-sided cargo, and they did just that. Little area behind the spare tire in the front trunk, under the main loading area? It gets a little box. The tiny shelf under the rear window, just behind the main area of the rear luggage well?...

The grille is awkward and small, the indicators are set into a strange linear, chrome-bordered recess that feels like part of something else, and the hardware for the bumper doesn’t look like automotive hardware; the bumper looks like it’s made from bathroom grab handle railings, or something. And yet, despite all this, somehow I like that weird, grumpy face. It has real charm behind it, a peculiar sort of fussy, weird charm, like an annoying friend that would do anything if it makes things more fun, even if they won’t shut up or not make weird noises when they chew....

Her whole body language reads “wait, what are you doing here?” though she is still smiling and hopefully is amused by it all. I mean, it is a cool car, after all. Especially with those strange above-the-bumper rubber-block bumper guards there. The very distinct body differences between the Coupé 504 and the Sedan 504 – here, I’ll show you that one now: …made me realize another common example of this, only we never think of it that way: the Volkswagen Beetle and Karmann Ghia....

The last Autopian meetup was a roaring success, with everything from Lamborghinis to TVRs to old trucks to $500 beaters assembling in an unofficial capacity at the Walmart parking lot in Troy, Michigan — just north of Detroit. Your humble website plans to keep things classy by once again hanging out in a Walmart parking lot for a completely unsanctioned gathering of car-nerds. I plan to be there in a 1966 Ford Mustang....

Before we get started, I want to take a moment to thank some people. First, huge thanks to Thomas for holding down the fort for me with such enthusiasm and flair. I really appreciate it. Second, thank you all so much for the outpouring of condolences and support about my dad. It means more than you can possibly know. And finally, because I haven’t had a chance to do so, huge thanks to all our newly-minted supporting members!...

Here’s the tweet: — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 29, 2022 So, Elon is saying that the likely 5,000 to 6,000-pound Cybertruck will be waterproof and buoyant enough to float, “briefly,” making it able to “cross rivers, lakes & even seas that aren’t too choppy,” though good luck to you finding a not-too-choppy sea that you can cross, you know, “briefly.” Brief crossings of seas aren’t generally a thing, though there is a car designed in 1938 that has managed to pull off all of the things Elon listed there:...

In our last entry, reader Alex T found a new car to add to my bucket list. Last month, my wife and I bombed about Los Angeles in a Golf GTI, a practical hatch that keeps the smile factor set way high. That car made me fall deeply in love with the concept of a hot hatch; then Alex T came around and suggested that I could have GTI power with an even longer roof....

source: geekdad In many ways, American Motors was similar to this mystical island. While perhaps better known by later products such as the Gremlin and Pacer, the company was created by mergers of firms that made rather odd, out-of-the-box products such as Hudson, Willys, Kaiser-Jeep, and Nash. All of these were small companies that dared to explore markets that the Big Three had little interest in at the time (and in many cases would prove to be decades ahead of their time), and American Motors kept up this trend until their 1987 demise....

Back in the 1930s, Ford engineers began work on a vehicle to fill a hole. This vehicle would have more features and styling than any existing Ford product, but not quite on the level of a Lincoln. Created in 1938 by Edsel Ford, Mercury’s existence was that of a middle child, filling Ford’s gap for a mid-range premium vehicle. Mercury was a hit right out of the gate. The first Mercury was the 1939 Mercury 8....

The lights on the Countach that I’m referring to specifically — the front sidelight/indicator units and the taillights —are really the only lights that are actually seen on the car, since the headlights themselves are hidden under covers. Let’s start with the taillights first, because they’re more dramatic and maybe a bit more tragic. Let’s look at the rear of the Countach LP500 of 1971, the design concept that served as the basis of what would later become the Lamborghini Countach:...

— Chazzy (@chazzydawgg) March 20, 2022 [Remember this video? It was absolutely everywhere the week before we launched The Autopian. Every site was mostly just holy-crapping the whole thing, gawking at that heavy-ass Tesla swan-diving into the pavement, sending trash cans flying and trashing that poor bastard’s Subaru. But we wanted to know why. What is it about this hill and this car that made for such an astoundingly dramatic jump?...