Caught somewhere between garage project and production machine, it’s often a budget way for someone to purchase the wheels of their dreams without breaking the bank.
As with all things though, kit cars cover the spectrum from spot-on supplements to torn-down beaters, and everything in between.
To get a glimpse of the available options, check out Motive’s coverage of the kit cars at the Carlisle auto show.
With everything from a Monte Carlo-based NASCAR replica and an almost production car from the Cobra clone masters to tricked out dune buggies and 57 Chevy-ized Camaros, it’s a taste of both the tasteful and the tasteless.
How do you advertise for the first ever production V8 in a BMW M3?
Hire IdeaCity to cut manifolds, shave cylinders, drill lighting holes, and whatever else it takes to fit cameras, lenses and lights inside of the engine so that you can film the inside of the beast as it does its thing.
This spot took two weeks to study and prepare for, and four, 20-hour days to film, but in the end, 420 horsepower has never looked so good. (This single revolution was filmed at 10,000 frames per second without any computer-generated effects.)
Fisker Automotive wants to bring the sexy back to green sport car design.
With Tesla taking a sad and slow turn towards the automotive afterlife, there’s now a gaping hole in the car world for people who want to drive green, but don’t want to drive slow to do so.
Enter: Fisker
The Karma (clever) will be a four-door plug-in hybrid sports sedan, and will start at just $80,000. (I say just because technology like this doesn’t come cheap when you’re trying to debut a whole new type of transportation.)
With initial delivery scheduled for late 2009, and an estimated production run of at least 15,000, there’s definitely some hope of this thing seeing the light of day.
And if it does, what will drivers see?
A sexy exterior wrapped around an even sexier interior powered by a Q DRIVE powertrain. (Q DRIVE is Fisker’s name for their plug-in hybrid technology.) Basically, a small gas engine turns a generator which charges the lithium ion battery pack which then powers the electric motor.
With this configuration, the car can be driven for up to 50 miles per day, as long as the car is then plugged in each night. By following this routine, the car then also only needs one fuel fill-up. Per year.
Will this change the face of green automotive design?
As with the Tesla, only time will tell; though I do hope that this one at least makes it into production, since we’re at going to need baby steps if there’s ever going to be hope of running towards a cleaner type of automobile.
Called the Splinter, and featuring a mid-engined, monocoque design that is to be made almost entirely out of wood laminates, it definitely looks the part, but since this mock up was created as part of a graduation project, the Splinter site is about as close to production as this car is ever going to get.
Click through to the site though, and check out the amazingly detailed details using Splinter Vision.
Pixar has a habit of sneaking in-jokes and self-references into their feature films and shorts.
Whether it’s bringing characters from different Pixar projects together or referencing earlier and/or upcoming productions, Pixar likes to fill their films with Easter Eggs and secrets for you to find.
Some of them are rather hidden, and most take a keen eye, [...]
To celebrate the 100th anniversary of Charles Eames’ birth, the Vitra Design Museum and the Eames Office teamed up to produce a limited edition run of the elephant that Charles and Ray Eames designed in 1945, but never put into production.
The Eames are famous for their chair, the Eames Lounge Chair, which is said to [...]
