Fuse the sublime Sumi-e art of Feudal Japan with the sublime tire shredding art of contemporary Japan and you get Drift Sumi-e, quite possibly the most Japanese driving game for iPhone ever. Unlike other driving games that put you behind the wheel, Sumi-e drift lets you draw your racing line through each beautifully drawn drift course, then watch the action unfold. You can take snapshots to document your drifts and send them to your friends. The app looks fun and is a steal at only $.99.
Turning your passion into a career is something that very few people on this earth get to do. Whether you enjoy medicine, automobiles or accounting it simply doesn’t matter. Artists have always amazed and intrigued me. They see things differently than you or I and through their own vision of creativity, get to show the rest of the world their vision through whatever medium they choose. We’re all on this website because we love automobiles and they fulfill a part of us that would otherwise be left empty.
This next list is not a listing of who’s who in the art world. It is more so a list of artists who present us with their amazing visions of what the automobile is to them. Now take a look at some very cool visuals and make sure you pay their sites a visit because this is only the tip of their creative icebergs.
In Sweden, a virgin with a 1973 Lincoln Continental and a cool $1 million spent about 5 years crafting a full scale replica of the Batmobile. Now, perhaps we’ve been spoiled by years of high-resolution studio photographs of some of the most beautifully engineered cars in the business, but to our discerning eyes the Swedish Batmobile looks a little, uh, shop class. It took the guy 20,000 hours to build though, so despite our penchant for going for the jugular we’re going to stymie the snarky criticism before it starts and simply give credit where credit’s due. Nice job, Sven.
Ay dios mio! You need to speak in another language to express the severe mental distress inflicted by this shockingly unsexy horrorshow known as the Bond Minicar. We were playing around on craigslist when we stumbed across this ad for a Bond in San Francisco. Where to begin? How about that exterior … it looks like someone wanted to build a replica of Ace and Gary’s phallic Duocar, but all they had laying around was an old wheelchair and a bunch of plywood.
New educational software from Honda called “Honda Safety Navi” is being sold and is essentially a PC-based automobile driving simulator. Despite screenshots that border on anime-style graphics, Honda’s first attempt at selling software is not as silly as it may look.
Complex adaptive systems are all those special cases when you put a bunch of simple elements together and they interact and adapt and learn and work as a whole. Social insects, the free market, evolution, all the single cells in your brain that create a single consciousness; they’re all complex adaptive systems. Scientists are starting to realize the importance of these systems, and how understanding them can give us insights into all sorts of seemingly unrelated things.
It can help us understand human phenomenon like traffic congestion and the stock market, all sorts of social issues, biological issues, everything really. It has practical applications too. Scientists can use genetic algorithms to help find solutions to complex problems. Basically like evolving a solution. And that’s just what this guy did, he put together a simple flash program with an evolving car. Check out the program and a description here:
Akira has always been popular with anime freaks and film buffs, but recently there’s some renewed interest because the 2 part live-action version has been announced. Supposedly the new version will be less of remake of the film, and more of an interpretation of Katsuhiro Otomo’s graphic novel series. Each film will be based on three of the six volumes of the original novel.
Warner Brothers paid seven-figures for the rights to the movie, so there should be an adequate budget fitting for the scale of a film like Akira. The studio’s describing the film as “Blade Runner meets City of God”, which sounds pretty freaking outstanding. Hopefully it won’t disappoint.
BTW, check out cartoonist Harry Partridge’s hilarious spoof of the mistakes an American Akira might make:
The new Cooper and Cooper S Convertables will make their official debut at the Detroit Auto Show in January. MINI says they’ve made “incremental” improvements, and apparently they’re too small to see. The one very visible change is the price, at $24,550, the new Cooper Convertable is $2,600 more than the 2009 model. The Cooper S was bumped up $2,050 to $27,450.
So, very few changes to the car, but major changes to the price. It makes sense though, the market wants this car right now, and they sold like hotcakes at the previous price; supply and demand, up goes the new price. Check out the pictures and the press release for all the other details.
At RideLust, we’re all big fans of cartoons. So we decided to have some fun and put together this list of the most incredible cartoon cars of all time. The reason we use the term “incredible” here is that some of the items on this list wouldn’t be classified as “great” or “amazing” – some of them are incredible for other reasons (i.e. they are obnoxious, or major FAILs compared to the show they were featured in).
With that brief introduction, let’s raise a toast to the great memories of cartoon past…
Cartoon: Super Friends
Although Batman’s Batmobile went through more design changes then Michael Jackson (yeah, I went there) the most impressive of all the (animated) Batmobiles was the winged, wheeled avenger seen in the Super Friends cartoon. Like all the Batmobile models before it, the Super Friends Batmobile came heavily equipped with several on-board computers and a military-grade weapons artillery rivaled in coolness only by the machine-gun equipped Jeep in the The Rat Patrol.
