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Yeah, but do they have a HEMI in it?

I loved my diesel when i owned one, but one thing it severely lacked was bottom end torque. Had to get that motor spinning over a grand before it hit its power curve.
Now steam, 1000+lbs of torque at zero rpm, 0-75 in 5-10 secs (wiki quotes 10, another site, 5, but that might have been Hughes's souped up one) doing 900 rpm at 75. 1500 miles to a tank of water. Drawbacks included that 30 seconds warm up, high periodic maintenance and a price close to $20,000 when a Ford cost $400. Quieter then a Telsa too.
https://www.hemmings.com/magaz...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Manual transmissions used to have advantages over automatic for fuel economy and performance. Those days are over. At this point, manual transmissions are for hipsters, and cars with manual transmissions should really only come with one of these as its entertainment system.

Now they just have the advantage of better reliability and lower total cost of ownership. Who needs these things?

Manual transmissions used to have advantages over automatic for fuel economy and performance. Those days are over. At this point, manual transmissions are for hipsters, and cars with manual transmissions should really only come with one of these as its entertainment system.

I own a 2003 Golf TDI with stick. How much do I have to pay for a "good" automatic? While you can get good ones, a lot of time you have go up in price (or add a Sports Package) to get better heuristics. Though many cars have a "manual override" place on the gear selector.

What, in your opinion, are some sub-$30K cars with non-annoying transmissions? Or are they all "good" (in your opinion) nowadays?

Manual transmissions used to have advantages over automatic for fuel economy and performance. Those days are over. At this point, manual transmissions are for hipsters, and cars with manual transmissions should really only come with one of these as its entertainment system.

You could already get a good used one for $15,000-$30,000... http://www.hemmings.com/classi...

You don't have to worry about mileage because as soon as you drive one you'll understand why DMC went out of business. Also the added derp from all the people saying "OMG BACK TO THE FUTURE CAR" will wear off and you'll want to keep it locked away in your garage.

Trust me as someone who drove the the "Urkel Mobile" (BMW Isetta) for a few weeks.

Except that for a DeLorean, "good" is incredibly relative. The car's engine was an engineering disaster, and if one still runs it's on *very* borrowed time. There are a million kluges in the way they're built...for example, there was a problem where the throttle would stick in cold weather. It turned out that there was an issue with condensation forming, which would then run down into the throttle cable assembly...and freeze. Their solution? Put an l-shaped bracket above the assembly to make the water miss and land somewhere else.

In another example of how at-risk the engines are, an episode of "Comedians Getting Coffee" with Jerry Seinfeld and Patton Oswalt began...began...in a DeLorean. I say "began" because they didn't make it half a mile before the engine suffered a catastrophic failure, resulting in all kinds of fluids running freely and horrible sounds coming from inside. Chest-burster kind of engine failure.

And when you consider that a Mazda Miata genuinely has more horsepower than these cars ever had, the concept of having the look of a DeLorean, the body of a DeLorean, but NOT the original engine they came with...well, that sounds like a pretty good idea to me. I can see why they're giving it a shot, and it doesn't surprise me that the demand has been pretty high so far.

My father had an '85 GT, and it was very cool. My wife now owns it. You can walk up to it, crumple in the door panel with your knee, and it'll pop right back out with no damage at all.

The other feature was their 'mill and drill' setup where all the holes for the body panels were drilled at once in a very accurate jig - that meant that you could easily replace the body panels with factory or aftermarket ones to change the style/color/layout of the body. Since they were not structural, you could do anything, really.

http://www.corbisimages.com/st...

http://www.nytimes.com/1983/02...

http://www.hemmings.com/hmn/st...

http://www.calgaryfieros.com/F...

http://www.fierofocus.com/arti...

Some day there will be a market for a car with no on board computer or electronics.

Here you go: Hemmings: Ford Model T for Sale

I don't know about that -- Seen what model T's are going for these days?

Maybe not exactly ... but for some reason it reminded me of the truck from Highwayman.

From 1964 .. I present GM's Bison

Interesting point, 300m is a slightly awkward value, I wonder if 250m (~820 feet) would be enough separation with today's more accurate autopilots etc.?

It probably would, but it's still easier to work with muliples of 10. That is, after all, the entire idea behind the metric system. It just happens to work well in this application using Imperial.

It's a bit academic, since we're pretty clearly stuck with what we've got, and it (usually) works. :) Changing over would be a nightmare. I still wonder how Sweden managed to switch from driving on the left to driving on the right overnight without complete chaos. Okay, maybe it wasn't totally smooth.

Here's an engineer who realized at an early age that discovery comes with some risk,
        http://www.bentleypublishers.com/milliken [bentleypublishers.com]

He died last year at 101, http://blog.hemmings.com/index.php/2012/08/27/william-f-milliken-1911-2012/ [hemmings.com]

In "Equations of Motion: Adventure, Risk and Innovation", Milliken vividly recounts his experiences pushing airplanes and race cars beyond their limits. His exciting life provides singular, real-world insight into the challenge and joy of engineering and the history of vehicle dynamics as he created it in the air and on the track."

"Many readers of Racecar Engineering will either have a copy or have read Bill and Doug Millikens' Race Car Vehicle Dynamics. In the middle of this seminal work is a chapter titled Historical Note On Vehicle Dynamics Development, which gives a brief insight into the post-war period when all that had been learnt in aeronautics, stimulated by the urgency of war, began to be transferred to automotive engineering. Bill Milliken led this work, creating a Vehicle Dynamics Department out of the Flight Research Department at the Cornell Aeronautical laboratory (CAL).

This new book is the story of Bill"s life, from his earliest days building ever more daring vehicles: his design, build, flight and crash of the M-l aircraft; his desire to discover the science behind stability and control; his pioneering work in flight testing in the aviation industry pre-war and the formation of Flight Research Department at CAL where research into variable stability was started.

The transition to vehicle dynamics research was born out of Bill"s love of racing, notably at Watkins Glen and Pike"s Peak, with preparation and development carried out at CAL. To formalise what was going on, the Vehicle Dynamics Department was formed and Bill was fortunate to meet with Maurice Olley of GM which led to a multi-year relationship that funded the work to put vehicle dynamics onto a scientific basis.

It is a book full of science, adventure, philosophy and humour, copiously illustrated with rare photographs, that will intrigue a broad range of those interested in both aircraft and vehicle engineering."
Review of Equations of Motion from Racecar Engineering - November 2006

I seriously doubt you could have bought a luxury car for $4500 back then.

1981 Chrysler Imperial for $18688:
http://www.hemmings.com/hcc/stories/2008/07/01/hmn_feature22.html

1980 Ford Pinto for around $4500:
http://auto.howstuffworks.com/1971-1980-ford-pinto14.htm

You'd have to go back to the 60's to get a luxury car in the $5000 range:

http://www.automobilemag.com/features/collectible_classic/0812_1960_cadillac_series_62_convertible/viewall.html

It's sheet metal, not machined from stock, so that machine shop would have to produce dies for the job.
Do-able, but it would be several hundred dollars worth of work at least for the shell, then more money to duplicate the lens. Looks like a generic add-on light of the era.

Posting the thing in Hemmings Motor News along with contacting appropriate firms for help would make much more sense.

Anyone who restores old cars should be thoroughly familiar with Hemmings, which has been around for decades:

http://www.hemmings.com/

A weird point, for one somehow those U-2S pilots have been fine without this since the 50ies, for another they even inhale special mixtures starting an hour before the take-off (Wikipedia sez). Anyway I must had been the only one not aware of this craziness with those muscle cars in the military, nice article I found here http://www.hemmings.com/mus/stories/2005/07/01/hmn_feature20.html

The tail fins kinda remind me of a '57 Chevy. I noticed thespecs on the transition mentioned a 100hp engine. Will that engine drive both the prop and the wheels? If so, my mom's neon would leave this thing in the dust.

In all, I see this as a largely impractical vehicle. I would have a good laugh if I saw a car with wings folded vertically going down the highway.

which is why people still drive Studebakers, old Ferraris and old Porsche's I suppose

People care about even stranger things than that. Just yesterday, I saw a group of Edsel fans driving their cars in the Doodah Parade. When I thought that was goofy enough, the people standing next to me pulled out their pictures from a trip to a Corvair fan get together (The Great Western Fan Belt Toss & Swap Meet). ISTR that there are even Trabant fan clubs, of all things. Name a piece of obsolete technology, and there's a good chance that some people will be fanatically devoted to it.