Ayrton Senna drives the hopelessly over-engineered Honda/Acura NSX.  How do his feet heel-and-toe like that?

The Messerschmitt KR200, or Kabinenroller (Cabin Scooter), was a ridiculous three-wheeled bubble car. This proves that men will race anything.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mo7L5CYDOO0

Jalopnik has a regular feature – Down on the Street – where they post photos of old cars, usually in Alameda, California, “The Island that Rust Forgot”. Can Stinque compete?  Check this out – corner of 74th and Amsterdam just this morning, in front of my building – a 1974 Ford Mustang II, 45K, and it’s for sale!  Seven grand takes it:

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Built during a period when British Leyland workers were mostly out on strike, they were horrible cars.  Still, that didn’t prevent BL from trying to foist them on an unsuspecting public:

The cars were so awful that Top Gear (my favorite TV show, as you know) has made a cottage industry dropping pianos on them:

And, inevitably, there is a Facebook page where you can become a fan of dropping pianos on helpless Marinas. I am, in fact, a fan.

1970 Subaru Police Car – one of you suburbanites out there should buy it. Pull over your friends and perform warrantless searches!

The presenter of this chart argues that the Internet has fucked up the instincts of American Youth for a good ride. But what catches our fogeyish attention is the base year, where we’re stuffed in the far-right gray column:

It’s a rarely acknowledged transformational shift that’s been going on under the noses of marketers for as long as 15 years: The automobile, once a rite of passage for American youth, is becoming less relevant to a growing number of people under 30.

As we’ve observed before, the Seventies Teens on that chart lived through the 1973 gas crisis, and have no excuse for seeing that the future will be a lot different than the past. (Although the Gulf Oil stop-motion commercials were really cool.) But as far as a “rite of passage”, well, you try living on the edge of town with a bike.

Is Digital Revolution Driving Decline in U.S. Car Culture? [Advertising Age, via Sully]