My Quiet Life

Check out this video showing the hand-assembly of the two rotors of Mazda’s new Renesis rotary engine.. Pretty incredible:

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Matt has a picture of his new Mazda3 up. He’s also looking to sell a nice turbo Miata, if you’re in the seattle area (or even if you’re not!).

I was screwing around with flickr last night, and I went on a bit of an upload rampage to my account. Mostly older pictures. I don’t have a paid account, so there’s not much I can do. I considered impulse-buying a paid account, but seeing as how I haven’t taken a new picture that wasn’t from my phonecam which I don’t even use anymore in years, well .. probably not a wise investment. But check out the pictures of my old BMW. *sniff*

Autoblog has pictures of the new Z4 M coupe.. I have to say I like it, compared to the roadster, anyway.. The hardtop adds some much-needed curves. Not the prettiest car ever, but it has a certain something.

Check out this video of a BMW M6 racing a Honda CBR1000rr and a Suzuki GXR-1000 .. and winning .. at 205mph. Pretty cool, and yet grossly irresponsible and retarded:

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Check out this video to see why American muscle cars are nice and all, but they shouldn’t try to hang with the big boys on the tight curves.

And no, I have no idea what’s up with the lispy fake-British-accent narrator.

Autoblog has some hints on the direction that Chrysler is going with their new Challenger. I will be very interested to see if it winds up looking anything like that artist’s rendition (I doubt it. It’s not round and bubbley and stupid enough.)

UPDATE: Okay, this is one of the downsides of reading my RSS feeds in oldest-to-newest order. Jalopnik sez scratch the Chrysler Challenger concept. Oh well. Maybe tomorrow.

GM and Ford sales dropped by one fourth this month. One fourth!

Hey, at least you can get a good deal on a hummer.

Cupholders in a Lotus? Now I’ve seen everything — or at least read about it on the internet.

Wow, Chrysler is recalling 100,000 1995 Jeep Cherokees due to a problem that occurs due to a rather impressive array of problems:

The domino effect on this one is lengthy, but basically condensed water from the air conditioner could drip down into the case that holds the transmission fluid. If the transmission fluid becomes contaminated it could lead to shaking in the transmission. If not corrected, the transmission will begin running at hotter temperatures and possibly boil the water in the transmission fluid, thus ejecting some of the fluid. If that fluid hit a hot part of the exhaust system it could ignite a fire.

The engineer responsible for the problem, Rube Goldberg, III claimed full responsibility for the problem which “wasn’t supposed to happen this way — the ejected transmission fluid was supposed to hit a mouse trap, which would flip over, launching a little toy soldier into a tin cup, the weight of which would depress a lever, releasing a small aluminum ball into the basket target, which would shift gears.”