Last night - during a late night trip to Pathmark to pick up a 4 pack of Red Bull, a jar of lupini beans, and some oranges - I met a very interesting young lady named Wendy who owns a new 2008 Smart ForTwo.

When I pulled up to the supermarket, I saw the ForTwo and parked next to it so I’d have a chance to check it out. Luckily, on my way out, I saw the owner, a girl about my age loading up the surprisingly spacious rear compartment with groceries. Being interested in both cars and girls, I decided to switch from my grocery shopping mode to my investigative journalist mode. So I approached, introduced myself, and started asking her very important journalistic questions.

Relationship questions are standard procedure for RideLust.com articles. For insurance purposes.

LKQ Inc. (LKQX) is a company that manufactures and sells aftermarket auto parts. They manufacture the parts mostly in Taiwan and sell mainly to auto repair businesses, service shops, and dealerships in the United States and Canada where they have about 300 locations. They’re the dominant aftermarket parts sellers in most of the country, so chances are, when you go to a local repair shop and get a new aftermarket part, it came from LKQ.

When I worked at my family’s auto salvage and repair shop, I dealt with LKQ on a daily basis. We had 8+ acres of salvage cars and a huge warehouse of inexpensive used parts to sell, but it was still often times cheaper to buy new parts from LKQ for resale. They’re an extremely efficient company with a high quality, very low cost product.

In difficult-to-find-an-accompanying-graphic news, Brendan Erhardt, an Australian man, appeared in court yesterday amid charges relating to a traffic infraction involving speeding in his Holden SV6, marijuana, firearms, and - of course - masturbation.

While the manufacturing arm of Bertone – Carrozzeria Bertone – sits in the tangled web of Concordato Preventivo, Stile Bertone is reviving the family name with the North American debut of the Alfa Romeo Bertone B.A.T. 11 concept.

The B.A.T. 11 is a remake of the 1950’s Alfa Romeo Berlinetta Aerodinamica Tecnica [B.A.T.] car, and seems to be just what the doctor ordered for the ailing Bertone family. The partial brainchild of [and funded largely] by dentist Gary Kaberle, the B.A.T. 11 is based on the platform of the Maserati GT and is ultimately intended to be a longer version of Alfa Romeo’s 8C Competizione.

Purchasing the Lamborghini Murciélago LP640 used as the Batmobile in The Dark Night: $376,296.30

Total cost of routine maintenance: $7,034.76

Round-trip airfare for the Murciélago from Quatar to Heathrow to have routine maintenance performed: $39,610.15

Telling environmentalists to suck it: Priceless.

According to an outraged newspaper, a wealthy Middle Eastern man shelled out roughly as much as his country’s deficit to have his Lamborghini Murciélago flown to London and serviced by a licensed dealer.

Parking in London, or any of the world’s great cities, can be a nightmare - there is always one more car than there are spaces.

With space at such a premium, some parking garages, such as the one at the famous department store Harrod’s, have hydraulic ramps installed so that cars can be stacked on top of each other.

You know those grooves cut in the side of some roads to let you know if you’ve strayed too close to the shoulder? Well some designers and engineers at the Hokkaido Industrial Research Institute and the institute in Sapporo in Japan have thought up a way to use that concept to help control speeders. The grooves, when cut at different intervals on the roads surface, will create musical notes as cars drive over them. Those notes can then be strung together to create songs that will only be audible at certain speeds. Driving too fast or too slow would create an unpleasant hum. They’ve dubbed the roads “Melody Roads”.

Just more proof that we’re living in the 1970’s redux. Jack Nicholson showing off his 100% hydrogen powered Chevy, in 1978. And better than that, the hydrogen was produced using solar power. Welcome to the future. The future is now.

Feeling the heat from the large-vehicle market downturn, Nissan is offering to buy out roughly a fifth of its employees at its two Tennessee plants, Decherd and Smyrna. Total, both plants employ about 7,000 workers and are primarily responsible for the production of the Nissan Frontier pick-up truck, Xterra SUV, and Pathfinder SUV.

Obviously a response to the ever-failing SUV market, Nissan’s downsizing is a far cry from similar measures from other manufacturer’s of its ilk.

The last Beetle, currently on display at a museum in Wolfsburg, Germany, rolled off the production line at VW’s plant in Puebla, Mexico, five years ago today. On July 30, 2003, production of Volkswagen’s “classic” Beetle was officially squished [only bug-related pun, promise].

The decision to discontinue the VW classic came after several years of struggling to keep up with shifting trends. Banned in the US since 1977 after its rear-mounted engine failed to meet U.S. Department of Transportation safety standards, the ban delivered a fairly large blow to the Bug. Bouncing back, production and improvements of the Beetle continued and it eventually became a huge hit in Brazil while simultaneously maintaining its popularity in European markets.