Serendipity Book

Nissan: "Driven by Dicks"

Adam Buxton of TV's Adam & Joe has created a (very literal) parody of the recent Nissan 4x4 portfolio Transformer ad.  His blog also features the news that the BBC are giving him a series devoted to airing the other mashups and home movies that he has been creating on his YouTube channel for the last year:

Fiat Cinquecento Tank

What's slower than a Fiat 500? A Fiat 500 that has been converted into an earth mover ...

[Embedded YouTube Video]

Earlier:
Fiat Cinquecento Jolly
Fiat 500 in Pixar's Cars
Fiat Trepiuno Concept Pics
New Fiat 500 Prototype on Tour
New Fiat 500 Spotted Testing
Fiat 500 Voted World's Sexiest Car

Elsewhere:
My Fiat 500 photo group on Flickr
Carscoop gives the full details of the Fiat 500 Launch
An unofficial blog dedicated to the Fiat Cinquecento
Japanese replica Fiat 500
The Dutch Fiat 500 owners club

Some awe-inspiring (but very functional) architecture

More pictures and an in-depth discussion of automated parking (!) here at the New York TImes.

Via the always stimulating Notcot.org

Nissan Qashqai Skateboard ad

Loving this Nissan car-as-skateboard ad ... [Embedded YouTube Video]
Though Carscoop points out that the idea of 4x4 as urban skateboard has a legacy... [Embedded YouTube Video]

The Car's The Star

Carscoop reported this week that the car that featured in the opening credits to the Pink Panther cartoon series is for sale on Ebay with a starting price of £75,000.

Only last month Uncrate reported that the original Ghostbusters car could be yours for around the same price.

But the daddy of them all must surely be the Batmobile. The Sun reports that the Batmobile will be going for auction in London later this month and is expected to go for around £75,000.

Personally, I wish I'd picked up this original Starsky & Hutch Torino for a measly $33,000 at auction in 2005.

The General Lee from Dukes of Hazzard sold for $40,000 at the very same auction.

Also available was this Super Pursuit K.I.T.T. from Knight Rider for $60,000.

Fiat Cinquecento Flickr group going great guns

The Flickr group I created a year or so ago to collect photos of Fiat Cinquecentos from around the world now has a splendid 1,029 contributions and 390 members, nearly doubling in size in just the last 7 months. Thanks everyone.

Picture Credit: The most recent picture contributed by Louise LeBourgeois.

LVMH rumoured to have bought Aston Martin

The luxury goods firm LVMH who are best known for their premium luggage, clothes, champagne and cognac brands look like they may be about to snatch Aston Martin from Ford!

From Jalopnik: "Obviously the thought of Prada buying Jaguar's just plain silly, but according to the German motor weekly Autobild will report tomorrow LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton SA (and we think there's some other luxe brands in there too!) has agreed to acquire Ford Motor Co.'s Aston Martin brand."

From MarketWatch: "The U.S. automaker will retain a 15% stake in the European luxury brand, which is part of Ford's Premium Automotive Group, the report said. The report didn't elaborate on any financial details. Premium Automotive Group spokesman John Gardiner told Dow Jones Newswires the process to sell Aston Martin "is ongoing". LVMH declined to comment."

Repeated by the FT here.

Via: Agenda Inc. who seem to have confused Aston Martin with Jaguar - come on guys! UPDATE: they've changed it now ;-)

Japanese Classic Car Knock-Offs

This dodgy looking Fiat 500 lookalike is produced by a Japanese company called Duesen Bayern (bizarrely the name means something like "Bavarian Jet Car" in German?!).

They've taken the underpinnings of a Nissan Micra and wacked a not particularly faithful replica bodyshell on to it. Via Jalopnik & Carscoop.

And according to Retro To Go, if you hand over a BMW Z3 to Deusen Bayern they'll give you back this warped replica of the classic Mercedes 190 SL...

Makes the Nissan Figaro look mainstream and dull, doesn't it?

Digital fights print in the battle of the embargo

It's been very interesting to see the car blogs and the big name weekly and monthly international car mags fighting it out this last couple of weeks to get scoops on the latest cars.

The relationship between car manufacturers, their PR companies, some of the major U.S. consumer automotive magazines and many of the high profile specialist bloggers has been very tense lately as a succession of car mags broke the embargoes they were given for sharing images of new cars. It seems (from the bloggers perspective - no one else is joining the conversation of course) that the magazines are bending the rules, possibly with the tacit agreement of the manufacturers, in their battle to remain relevant in the face of competition from blogs like Jalopnik, Carscoop and Autoblog.

It all started when Car and Driver broke the embargoes journalists were given by Ford for the Jaguar C-XF (pictured above) and Lincoln MXR concepts by printing them in their February 2007 issue. The pictures hit the street on December 22nd ahead of a Jan 1st embargo.

In protest most of the automotive blogs decided to break the embargo too. However, revealing double-standards, Ford pursued the websites that broke the embargo and insisted that they take down the images whilst Car and Driver remained on sale.

Subsequently it has been reported that another U.S. print publication, Road & Track, has broken an embargo, this time by publishing images of the new 2008 Dodge Viper SR-10 ahead of the Detroit Motor Show. Again the blogs broke rank and published the images (pictured below).

In turn, some of the blogs have called for car manufacturers to abandon the ancient protectionist embargo system and instead just send out material when they want it to be released. This would of course severely disadvantage the print publications who need more time than the blogs to publish.

The old publishing business model is really starting to show some cracks, eh.

(And yes, this post was just a pathetic excuse to show some pictures of cars.)

Cadillac Since 1902

New work on Cadillac from Modernista!

Some controversy about plagiarism on that endline though it seems.