Restoration of the first American Honda N600

H/t to Chester!

My i3 with the new X7's grill

pic.twitter.com/5Qh0TcCMd2

— kevin mccauley (@kmccauley) June 19, 2019

Tesla Model 3-amino

I got tired of waiting for @Tesla to release their pickup truck so I made my own.#TRUCKLA pic.twitter.com/jqT97v3L0c

— Simone Giertz (@SimoneGiertz) June 18, 2019

Candylab Fire Chief

I came home yesterday and saw the boy playing with his new purchase, a wooden car?!

I googled the name of the company and it looks like Jalopnik has done a video on it.

Protests in Hong Kong

How much longer will the protestors fight? And will the Hong Kong/PRC government escalate its own response?

Kolyma Highway documentary

H/t to Sanchez. This Russian documentary with English subtitles is half interviews about the gulag system and half travel shots. Well worth watching.

World Leaders Cars (19)

175. Brunei: Rolls-Royce. 2007 car: Same.

176. East Timor: Land Cruiser. 2008 car: Land Cruiser.

177. El Salvador: Land Cruiser. 2008 car: Toyota Sequoia.

178. Grenada: Land Cruiser Prado. 2008 car: Mitsubishi Montero.

179. Kyrgystan: BMW 7-Series. 2008 car: Mercedes S-Class.

180. UAE: Gelandewagen. 2007 car: Maybach.

Tally
Mercedes S-Class: 45
Toyota/Lexus Land Cruiser: 37
BMW 7-Series: 16
Audi A8: 10
Lexus LS: 10
Toyota/Lexus Land Cruiser Prado: 10
Mercedes Gelandewagen: 8

Chevy Suburban/GMC Yukon: 7
BMW X5: 2

Jaguar: 2
Land Rover Discovery: 2
Range Rover: 2

Toyota Sequoia: 2
Audi A6: 1
Aurus Senat: 1
Cadillac: 1
Chevy: 1
Citroen DS7 Crossback: 1
Hongqi: 1
Honda Accord: 1
Hyundai Equus: 1
Hyundai Genesis: 1
Hyundai Santa Fe: 1
Isuzu MU-X: 1
Lancia Thema: 1

Land Rover Freelander: 1
Lincoln Navigator: 1
Lincoln Town Car: 1
Mercedes E-Class (old): 1
Mercedes E-Class convertible: 1
Mercedes GL: 1
Mercedes-Maybach: 1
Mercedes ML/GLE: 1
Proton: 1
Rolls-Royce: 2
Skoda: 1
Toyota 4Runner: 1
Toyota RAV4: 1
VW Touareg: 1
VW Transporter: 1

Fancy cars and wealth inequality

I posed this question on Twitter and got some responses.

Will we liberal car nuts ever reconcile our love for these ultra cars with wealth inequality? https://t.co/Pdw52zLEdF

— Tamerlane's Thoughts (@TamerlaneBlog) June 7, 2019

John Osborn, former NASA engineer, sees fancy cars as art.

Wealth inequality will always exist, and rich people will always own art. I’m glad that the super rich are preserving beautiful objects because merely observing them is better than them not existing. That said, the wealth thing needs to get rebalanced a bit for their own good.

— John Osborn; (@john_osborn) June 7, 2019

Matt Farah, aka The Smoking Tire, sees it as still less expensive than a yacht.

Lastly, just in terms of scale, seeing a warehouse full of crazy collector cars is a visual shock of wealth, but a rough estimate of all the cars in this photo would buy, about, a single 125’ used motor yacht. Our secretary of education has nine yachts.

— Matt Farah (@TheSmokingTire) June 7, 2019

Patrick George, head of Jalopnik, says:

Eat the rich, seize their McLarens. It’s called wealth redistribution. Duh

— Patrick George (@bypatrickgeorge) June 7, 2019

Run the Joules sees union jobs.

Ferrari converts the wealth of capitalists into good paying union jobs. And lies to them about actual production figures.

— Run the Joules (@Twonius) June 7, 2019

Paper sizes around the world

Indy 500 2019 recap: Sunday

Race Day!

I tend to over-research and over-prepare, so I knew of the horrific traffic to the track. The race started after twelve, but we left our hotel 4.5 miles away at 7am. Along the way, in bumper-to-bumper traffic, we did a lot of people watching. A lot of pickups. A lot of people partying already. Shady police escorts that got friends, families, and the well connected out of the traffic and quickly to the venue. It took us two hours to get there.

We had seats at Turn 1. They were perfect.

There was a lot of military stuff. Flyovers by attack jets and helicopters. A speech by a 4-star general. Singing of God Bless the USA, God Bless America, and the national anthem. Soldiers waving around the track from the truck beds of new Chevys. And on, and on, and on.

We got to see five past Indy 500 cars equipped with Cummins Diesel engines.

And Mario Andretti in his 1969 Indy 500 winning car, preceded by a foursome of 1969 Camaro pace cars.

I, of course, wore an Alonso jersey to the race.

This was our view. A guy behind us had been to 48 Indy 500s.

View this post on Instagram

One parting shot.

A post shared by @ tamerlaneblog on May 27, 2019 at 8:54pm PDT

After the race, we went out for steak. I wanted to get a shrimp cocktail appetizer, but Mario Andretti's dinner party ordered all the shrimp and oysters the restaurant had in stock.

These two very different cars were parked outside the restaurant.