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Malibu-PCH U-Haul Chase!

I was on my way home yesterday and had stopped at How's Market (Trancas at PCH) when a couple of the employees mentioned that a car chase was heading up PCH. I made it about a mile up the road before the U-Haul truck that was leading the CHP parade passed by. The driver was apprehended a little while later where she was stopped (and tackled and arrested) in Somis. Turns out she was high on something and evading arrest on warrants or something. She went out in a blaze of glory, accompanied by an armada of police vehicles and helicopters. It was a crazy end to a day that included a plane crash in Santa Monica and an early morning wrong-way driver on the Santa Monica Freeway who killed himself in a head-on collision with a police office (who also died in the wreck). What are the odds that all of this stuff falls on the same day? It musta been the Santa Ana winds....

Citroën 2CV on the Santa Monica Freeway

Saw a Citroën 2CV tootling down the Santa Monica Freeway last Saturday afternoon. It was in the #2 lane (the photo was shot from my driver's side mirror) and the driver was zipping along at a whopping 45 mph. I suspect that all 9 horses were working overtime to achieve even that speed, but it was not doing anything to relieve the tension of the cars braking and swerving to get around him. I suppose that not everyone is a fan of classic French economy car design...

1953 (?) Ferrari 166M Berlinetta Pinin Farina (Updated post)

(These photos were originally posted in January of 2009 and I was unable to get close enough to the car to get a good idea of what it really was.I mean, I knew it was a Ferrari, but I kind of went in the wrong direction with my guesstimate of it being a 250. A recent entry in Veloce Today about the Modena Track Days at the Nurburgring included a couple of photos of a Pinin Farina 166M one-off that looks very similar to the car below. The gas cap is in a different location, the taillights are different, the steering wheel is on the other side, but otherwise the body shape is oh-so similar to the car that I saw cruising up PCH).

Sometimes, things just seem to work against getting a good photo. Yesterday was a good example. It was a stunningly beautiful Sunday morning, seemingly everyone from the valley and westside wanted to head to Malibu, and the guys were out on their motorcycles with their radar making sure nothing got too out of hand. I saw this older Ferrari and it looked as if someone had put a tremendous amount of effort into its restoration. The color scheme was a little unusual but the looked (and sounded) great. I caught up with it around Las Flores but there was no way to get a shot of the side or front of the car without causing an accident myself. It appears to be an early Ferrari 250, but it would be interesting to find out if it's an earlier model than that.

BMW Alpina B7

The BMW Alpina B7 offers fantastic specs on all counts, with the Alpina handling package the big selling point. If you were in the market for a $115K car that would hold a family, it's probably a better performance option than anything you'd be able to get from Mercedes Benz at that level (although it's probably worth taking a look at Motor Trend's head-to-head comparison of the B7 and the Mercedes Benz CLK63 Black Series). It's not as blingy as a Bentley or Maserati, but I kind of like the Alpina's stealthy attitude, particularly if you're using it to run up and down PCH on a regular basis and want to blend in with all of the other BMW 7 series cars and not attract the attention of the LA County Sheriff's Department.  

The Really Smart Car

The idea of the new Smart Car is wonderful, but they're ugly and despite the fact that looks are usually deceiving, they look (to me at least) as if they're unstable. But that's just me, and if I'm going to be uncomfortable in a car, I want to be uncomfortable because I'm going fast on a tight suspension rather than because it's really safe and I'm saving fuel. Which brings me to my Australian friend Charlie's 2005 Smart car:

It's light, it's fast, it gets 50+ mpg, it's got great wheels, and it's gone. She sold it recently and bought a brand new Audi TT with the all wheel drive and the 3.2 engine (sound familiar)? The Smart was a blast to ride around in, although a little disconcerting as a passenger because Charlie lives in Sydney and they drive on the wrong side of the road there.

The car was never officially sold in the USA but legal examples do exist. A dealer in San Diego has been offering a 2004 with the Brabus mods for quite some time. The lack of alacrity in its sale could be due to the fact that they're asking $35K for the car, and even with the car's fuel savings it's difficult to rationalize spending that much money for a car that's relatively spartan in its features. If I lived in the city and rarely had to carry anything other than one passenger (its trunk space is anything but ample), the car would make a lot of sense.  

Not particularly stealthy

This is a brilliant piece of reporting.