As the old saying goes ”there’s no substitute for horsepower.”
Check out the following video of the 580 HP Camaro ZL1 at the Nurburgring. The Camaro pulls 172 mph at the 7:35 mark.
Not quite as fast as the Corvette ZR1, but still an excellent run.
January 1st, 2012… Only 310 days until Election day.
I found these great 1950′s posters @ Vintagraph.com
Now, on to the links.
Sentry Journal : The Best of “The Plain Truth” 2011 & my New Year’s resolution
The Eye: A New Year is Upon Us
Gator: You might be a Redneck if……
theCL: theCL Report (December 30, 2011)
CH2.0: Occupod Roundup
GTBTBA: I’m Not a Conservative
Spellchek: Need a job? How about SEIU Home Care? Must be qualified in civil disobedience
Bunker: Reagan’s call to duty
LAS: 2011 Review & 2012 Preview
MTTM: Agenda 21 Explained In Another Way
Moonbattery: Glitter-bombed
RR: What’s Going on With Ann Coulter?
Republican Mom: An interesting application of Google Trends
Wade: Republicans and Ron Paul Supporters Not Immune To Kool-Aid
WWTFT: The Founders on Power
WyBlog: Meet the new year, same as the old year
FCBZ: Violent NY Occupiers on New Year’s Eve
Proof: On New Year’s Resolutions
CP: Happy Reset,,,If We can ?
This is a few days old, but here is an update from Jim @ CoF: Feliz Navidad y Prospera Año Nuevo
This is so cool. Plus, the videography is excellent.
First, they came for our light bulbs. Now they want to ban all cell phone use in cars:
The National Transportation Safety Board said on Tuesday that it had voted to recommend the ban on the use of mobile devices by drivers, citing what it said were the risks of distracted driving.
The recommended ban applies to hands-free devices, a recommendation that goes further than any state law to date. The agency said it is recommending that drivers be allowed to use their phones for emergency purposes.
“No call, no text, no update is worth a human life,” said Deborah A. P. Hersman, chairman of the N.T.S.B., an independent federal agency that is responsible for promoting traffic safety and investigating accidents and their causes. It will be up to the states to decide whether they want to follow the agency’s recommendation.
She said the decision was a hard one because such a ban would be unpopular among some people. But she said its time had come, given what she said were growing distractions in the car and the spread of increasingly powerful mobile devices.
However, a researcher at Wayne State University in Detroit says not so fast.
In the new report, Richard A. Young of Wayne State University School of Medicine in Detroit finds that two influential studies on the subject might have overestimated the risk.
The problem has to do with the studies’ methods, according to Young. Both studies a 1997 study from Canada, and one done in Australia in 2005 were “case-crossover” studies.
The researchers recruited people who had been in a crash, and then used their billing records to compare their cellphone use around the time of the crash with their cell use during the same time period the week before (called a “control window”).
But the issue with that, Young writes in the journal Epidemiology, is that people may not have been driving during that entire control window.
Such “part-time” driving, he says, would necessarily cut the odds of having a crash (and possibly reduce people’s cell use) during the control window and make it seem like cellphone use is a bigger crash risk than it is.
The two studies in question asked people whether they had been driving during the control windows, but they did not account for part-time driving, Young says.
Just like the global warming hoax, researchers overstate data supporting their desired results. Then, government bureaucrats latch on to the flawed research, increasing their reach into every facet of our lives.
Looks like too much fun.
Via AutoBlog:
Fritz Grobe and Stephen Voltz, the two men who helped kick off the fun in the first place, are back, claiming a new record for the longest distance traveled in a car powered by Diet Coke and Mentos: 239 feet.
No, that doesn’t seem very far to us, either, though Mark II of their machine is a marked improvement over Mark I. The Mark II vehicle is more aerodynamic and seems to have less mass than its predecessor, which positioned the rider way out in front over a bicycle-like contraption. That said, we think Grobe and Voltz do even better… especially since they used just half the fuel this time ’round.
Yet another Electric Vehicle ‘manufacturer’ files for bankruptcy without building a single car:
Aspiring electric car company Aptera Motors has announced that it is going out of business.
In a letter to supporters, Aptera CEO Paul Wilbur said that the company had obtained conditional approval for a $150 million loan from the Department of Energy, but was unable to raise the matching private investment required to tap into the loan. As a result, it had run out of resources and was forced to shut down.
While government backed (and leftist approved) EV’s are not selling, one of the most storied sports car manufactures, Lotus Cars, is making a push to expand its sales in the United States. Not only are they are staffing up US operations, they are making a push into IndyCar racing in a big way:
Lotus, after dabbling in IndyCar racing this year, returns in a big way in 2012 when it starts providing engines and aerodynamic kits to the teams. The storied British automaker joins General Motors in breaking the monopoly Honda has held on the Izod IndyCar series since 2006.
The automaker, which sponsored Japanese driver Takuma Sato (pictured above) for KV Racing this year, signed the deal with IndyCar just before the deadline for the 2012 season. It was announced Thursday afternoon to great fanfare by IndyCar, which had become something of a spec series in recent years.
“Lotus is a renowned name in racing, with a long association with some of the greatest names of motorsports,” IndyCar boss Randy Bernard said. “We’re honored Lotus has chosen to serve as an engine manufacturer for the first time with us. We are excited about the future of Indy car racing with the addition of Chevrolet and Lotus as well as the continued involvement of our longtime engine supplier Honda.”
This is good news, since I’ve always had a soft spot for British sports cars.
According to people in attendance, both tires on the car’s driver’s side were torn off, and the impact ripped the master cylinder from the firewall. The throttle cable was attached to the cylinder, so when the cylinder fell, the throttle controlling a 1,500-plus-horsepower engine got stuck wide open for more than a minute. Worst of all, the initial impact knocked Peterson unconscious, so he wasn’t able to do anything to intervene.
And the video…
The driver came to after the medics cut him out of the car and is said to be at home and ok.
Via The Globe and Mail:
There’s just one problem. The fantasy that electric cars are right around the corner doesn’t survive even the most cursory reality check. As Dennis DesRosiers, a leading auto consultant, points out, consumers simply won’t pay a $20,000 premium for a vehicle that doesn’t go very far, isn’t very convenient, and runs out of juice as soon as you turn on the air conditioner.
Consider hybrids. After a decade on the market, they’ve captured only 3 per cent of sales. To get to Mr. McGuinty’s 2020 target, green-minded Ontarians would have to buy at least 100,000 electric cars a year every year, starting right now. Total U.S. sales of electric vehicles are about 10,000 a year.
Of course, electric cars aren’t in mass production yet. And the technology is bound to get better and cheaper. Right?
Not so fast, says the University of Manitoba’s Vaclav Smil, who’s among the world’s foremost scholars of energy economics. Electric cars, he says, aren’t microchips, and Moore’s law doesn’t apply. “The myth that the future belongs to electric vehicles is one of the original misconceptions,” he writes in his book Energy Myths and Realities. In an interview, he notes that recent history is filled with energy breakthroughs that turned out be duds. Electric car crazes have come and gone before. Perhaps some people may remember a Canadian company called Ballard, which claimed to have developed a breakthrough fuel-cell technology. Many brainy people swore that Ballard was the future. It wasn’t.
It gets better. If all those electric vehicles are hooked up to our electric grid, with its diminished capacity (due to the adoption of the RES), electricity prices will skyrocket.
The interesting thing is if the issue truly is conservation and being efficient the real teleological winner is direct injection diesel engines. For example look at the 62 mpg Ford Fiesta (that crushes the 51 mpg Prius):
If I were a Ford dealer, I would jump at the chance to park a diesel-powered Fiesta in front of my dealership. I’d light it up with spotlights all night long. No rebates. No zero percent. I’d give every salesperson a pocket-sized job aid with a single sentence on it to counter every conceivable customer objection: “But (insert customer name here) this car gets – 62.5 miles per gallon.” And I’d have my waiting list right out front so customers could sign up.
I guess if the US government started push diesel engines, it would be even more difficult to justify handing millions of our dollars to multinational corporations to construct lithium ion battery factories.
Check out this fantastically well done web video from the guys at Depth of Speed.
I love seeing the old cars racing at Bonneville. It is so cool.