Our £800 Ssangyong Rodius might be our most hilarious staff car yet. Poor Adrian Clarke is living in hell with the thing while the rest of us love the big diesel people carrier. We’ve taken the Rodius to the Goodwood Festival of Speed, where it got to park next to other automotive legends. Unfortunately, it seems the van isn’t responding well to our readers’ jokes because it retaliated against poor Thomas, giving him carsickness right before rolling up to Heathrow. The jokes aren’t stopping.
Ash78:
“Excuse me, is Heathrow up that way?”
“No, he threw up right there. And there. And a little over there.”
David Tracy wrote about the six cars that he plans on keeping. A lot of you are saying that this is great, while enabling me. Eric Gonzalez:
Ah yes! We’re in David’s “the cars I’m keeping” article season.
Buzz:
I think Mercedes is also trying to reduce her fleet, but I would love it if this article were followed by a “fuck it, I’m buying six more Smart Cars” headline from her.
My 0.02 Cents:
I think she’s saving up for a locomotive, I think she’s got a deep interest in them, because of the great articles she keeps writing.
On the plus side if she does buy a train, she is less likely to forget where she left it. Unlike half her fleet…
Oh, thank heavens I ended the lease on my storage plot. I could have easily fit six Smarts in it! Now, to figure out how to store a locomotive…
Matt wrote about how Nissan is closing its Oppama plant. The NSX Was Only in Development for 4 Years:
It’s going to be hard for me to blame Nissan’s current CEO for any cuts that happen on his watch. I’m not typically one to believe that it’s all the other guy’s fault, but good lord, Ghosn left that company in complete shambles.
TheDrunkenWrench:
I believe he actually left that company in enclosed luggage.
Matt also wrote about how finding information online about some cars has become ridiculously hard. It’s bad enough that search engines are becoming almost useless, but the Internet is becoming a sea of dead links and deleted pages. Urban Runabout:
This is where independent archives come into play.
Some are sales brochures only – not just for the US and Canada, but around the world.
Other archives will include accessory brochures, showrooms sales guides, paint and upholstery guides, price lists and period ads.My favorites are:
Dezo’s Garage
The Old Car Manual Project
Auto Catalog Archive
Auto Brochures.com
Lov2XLR8 – (Headings are in English – but his articles are in Norwegian)Then there are marque-specific archives – such as OudeMercedesBrochures.NL
OnceInAMillenia:
About a year ago, I tried to find the total sales numbers of the Mazda Millenia in the US, but they fell in the same hole of time. I eventually found *some* sales and manufacturing counts from early HTML pages on Mazda’s media site by just randomly changing the URL until a page resolved, but not every year was still there.
Ultimately, I found a complete record in library archives of old Automotive News market research books and I put the numbers on the Millenia’s Wikipedia page for all to find. It was about 169,000 units, for anyone wondering.
Have a great evening, everyone!
(Topshot: Heathrow Airport Limited)
That Heathrow comment was…
“Gold, Jerry GOLD!”
Clearly the answer is to do a camper conversion on it and park it somewhere scenic so you can rent it on AirBnB.
Ziplock bags work too.
From what I can tell, the security of the US train system is pretty low, so how hard would it be to just take one out on the rails and just keep rolling? It sounds like the sort of thing that should be in the constitution, if you’re allowed guns you should be allowed your own locomotive right?
“Now, to figure out how to store a locomotive…”
A good couple decades ago a friend found a lovely circa 1920s trolley car for sale, that is, it was actually free if they could get it off the seller’s property. My friend was really excited since she loves such things & has a farm with some space but after talking with the seller, some moving firms, and RR specialists, she reluctantly gave up on the idea because of how all the logistics involved in moving the trolley car from the seller’s property to my friend’s quite hilly farm and in setting up a place, with gravel, RR ties, and RR tracks just long enough for the trolley car to simply sit on, resulted in estimates well north of $10,000. One can imagine it’d be more nowadays…
(Worth noting that professionals often charge by the number of steps, as in staircases and porch steps, they have to navigate when moving pianos and billiard tables, so all the hills, some of which are quite steep, at my friend’s farm were indeed very much a factor to consider when moving a whole-ass trolley car.)
The dead zone article immediately made me think of the Mandala Effect, where people who believe they had a beautiful Hindu mosaic hanging on their bedroom wall actually just had a dreamcatcher. It’s spooky.
When I saw ‘Mandala Effect’ my brain went immediately to “Haha, what a fool Ash78 is” but the rest of the sentence redeemed you.
Back in the day, when I was a young aircraft electrician in the Army, I was ordering a part for a helicopter when I stumbled across the codes for a diesel electric locomotive. I went ahead and ordered it, just to see what would happen. Someone above me must have caught on because it never did show up at the airport.
I can only imagine the confusion if the rail spur to that airport had suddenly produced a random loco. Today it would probably have an Amazon shipping label on it, and been dropped off in the hanger.
By a REALLY big drone.
“Instructions unclear. Sikorsky SkyCrane enclosed. Hope this works for both jobs.”
Well, outside the hangar, then someone steals it.
Now I’m picturing someone on the flight line trying to stuff a locomotive into the back seat of a battered Altima.
I think the Rodius has raised the bar on the TCO:laughs created scale. I’m guessing The Autopian got more revenue per dollar spent than any other car in the combined fleet.
Hooray! I made the cut in the most Hardigree way possible: Making fun of a CEO named Carlos.
Very good comment
In 1968 (I was 7), we were on holiday in Holt, Norfolk, UK, when a Victor tanker and Canberra bomber collided one night in a thunderstorm over the village. I was reminded of it by news about the crash of a cargo plane and a plane carrying Russian schoolchildren in 2002, and started looking for the RAF crash on the internet. I don’t remember if that was in 2002, or slightly later.
On that night in 1968, I was woken by my mum screaming when she heard the explosion and saw the falling fireball, and then sat in the kitchen with my dad waiting to hear news on the radio of what had caused it. I also have memories of seeing people looking at debris buried in their front lawn, and RAF low-loaders carrying debris through the village.
When I started searching, I couldn’t remember many details of the crash, but there was so much info about plane crashes, some of them much less newsworthy, that I thought it must be somewhere. It wasn’t, and I started doubting my memory so much that I phoned my mum to confirm what I remembered. I felt that we had already reached the era of “If it’s not on the web, it didn’t happen.”
Eventually, I found a quote from a local newspaper, which led me to dates and tail numbers, and to records of RAF planes where they were listed as “out of service” or suchlike. There was no mention of the crash on the home airfileds of the planes, and no memorial to the young crews, which I thought was shameful. The Canberra was a nuclear bomber, so I’m surprised it wasn’t fuel for conspiracy theories.
Now there is more internet info about the crash, and a memorial that I plan to visit to pay my respects one day when I am back in the UK. At the time of searching for it, though, I was shocked at myself at how short a time it had taken to rely on the internet for “reality”.
There are very few records of crashes from those days…. my Uncle was on this Canberra https://asn.flightsafety.org/wikibase/137071
Like the men who died in 1968, your uncle was prepared to put his life on the line for all of us. That was why I found the lack of info, and that there was no memorial, so surprising and really quite upsetting.
The sad thing is he filled in for a colleague who was sick, and it was only an intruder flight. He was the first in our family to escape the mills of Northern England.
Putting the politics of conflict to one side, I don’t see a distinction between the sacrifices of servicemen in wartime and of those who risk their well-being to prepare for the worst. They all deserve the respect of those of us who would prefer to live in their shade.
That is so horrible for your family, but you also have to feel for the colleague he filled in for.
The sad reality is that crashes (especially military crashes) were so common at that time that they just weren’t all that newsworthy. It was a VERY different time.
And in many places, it still is. Not to be glib in the least, but 150 Americans die in a flood, the world stops the presses to cover it. 150 dying in a flood in Bangladesh is called “Tuesday.”
The inherent dollar value of human life is still wildly different depending on nation and culture. It also makes things more newsworthy is there proximity to cameras and/or news offices, too. I call that the Laziness of Media. It’s most obvious in that anything happening in NYC is always elevated 3 notches higher than anywhere else because you have 100 stations competing for coverage.
All completely true. Especially when there are *children* involved.