Thursday, 1 December 2016

Abandoned French Cars Found in a Mine, Could Have Been Hidden during World War II

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December 1, 2016 at 6:24 pm by | Photography by YouTube/Cold Stone/Vincent Michel

French cars abandoned in mine

This Black Friday, the shopping day post-Thanksgiving, the makers behind Cards against Humanity implored cynics and the deviant to donate money to an operation that would dig a hole. There was no purpose to the hole, nor did the investors get anything in return except for occasional updates on the hole’s depth and size. In the spirit of that, er, achievement, we now bring you . . . a bunch of cars in a hole, courtesy of a story out of France that made headlines in the British tabloids. Where is that hole? Belgian PE teacher Vincent Michel, who found this one while hunting for hidden treasures as a self-styled “urban explorer,” won’t say exactly where.

Specifically, the cars aren’t exactly in a hole, but rather an old mine that’s part of a quarry somewhere in central France. Vincent Michel came across the bizarre storage location and its gaggle of 1930s-era automobiles and, naturally, turned his lens on the rusting, deteriorating subjects. His theory on how the cars found their way into the mine focuses on World War II.

The thinking goes that locals squirreled the cars away as France fell to the Germans, in order to spare them from being scrapped or taken outright, only to find after the war that the moist underground conditions had taken their toll. Assuming that is in fact what happened, it’s likely that postwar economic conditions didn’t support the refurbishment of a bunch of rusting, aging vehicles. A darker possibility is that some of the cars’ owners didn’t survive the war or were displaced, never to retrieve their automobiles.



Like most ruin photography, the photos are fascinating to behold—whatever the story behind them. You can see some of the shots in the YouTube video below or on the photographer’s Flickr page.


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Culture! Sport! Confusion? BMW’s 18th Art Car Is Its 19th Art Car

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John Baldessari BMW M6 GTLM Art Car #19.

In the annals of artifice-laden BMW race cars, the Homer E30 may stand alone, but the Bavarian concern itself holds a tradition of commissioning famed artists to gussy up its machines that dates back 41 years, to the mid-1970s, when first Alexander Calder and then Frank Stella painted 3.0 CSL cars for HervĂ© Poulain. Since then, art-world luminaries such as Jeff Koons, Jenny Holzer, and Andy Warhol—who regrettably didn’t live to silkscreen a banana onto Nico Rosberg’s Mercedes—have plied their trade on automobiles from Munich. Now it’s John Baldessari’s turn.

John Baldessari

The 85-year-old Californian painter and conceptual artist once burned a collection of his early work and baked the ashes into cookies, a ferocious statement about loathing one’s past self while in the grip of a heavy jones for baked goods. Or something. That’s the explanation that we relate to, so that’s the explanation we’re going with. Baldessari’s M6 GTLM is being hailed as the 19th BMW Art Car; number 18, by Chinese artist Cao Fei, will be unveiled next summer. We can only presume the reversed chronology carries some artistic significance.

John Baldessari BMW M6 GTLM Art Car #19.

Alternately, we could be wrong. Perhaps it’s merely another example of Germany’s seeming desire to divorce itself from numeric characters with any foothold in reality, as the nation’s automakers have unmoored traditionally displacement-dependent model numbers from their cars’ now downsized powerplants. We can’t wait for that trend to trickle down into engineering. “Herr Professor Doktor-Ingenieur, what are these numbers, in truth? They can be arbitrarily arranged in the name of emotion und dynamism! The auto will still result!” Go ahead, Detlef. Try it and see.

John Baldessari BMW M6 GTLM Art Car #19.

Baldessari’s car made its debut last night at Art Basel in Miami Beach. Appropriate, since its first race will be just up Florida’s Atlantic coast at the 24 Hours of Daytona—or the Rolex 24 at Daytona, if you prefer your watch movements automatic and your naming rights honored. The car itself, to be driven at Daytona by Bill Auberlen, Alexander Sims, Augusto Farfus, and Bruno Spengler, is practically the inverse of Koons’s M3 GT2 from 2010, which wore a complement of hyperdrive-evocative colored light streaks over a black base. Baldessari’s M6 adds some bright spots of color to the white car and carries the word FAST on the driver’s door in black sans-serif type. The opposite door features a picture of the car. We’ll refrain from tired Xzibit jokes.



It’s not the most mind-bending of the Art Car series, nor is it the worst. There’s a bit of playfulness to it, and the stern 6-series certainly can use all the frolic it can get. We’re not sure the new BMW beats Ricky Bobby’s self-sponsored livery, however, or Kurt Busch’s 2012 appropriation thereof. Now and again, the referentiality of mass-market culture gives you a thicker Slim Jim to chew on than highfalutin pronouncements handed down from the art world.

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OMG, It’s the 2018 Toyota Camry’s Taillight

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CamryTeaser

If a vehicle were ever to be defined by a single rear fender view, then the 2018 Toyota Camry is shaping up to be quite the machine. In a single teaser image, Toyota somehow managed to fit an LED taillight, an aggressive fender vent/speed-hole thingie, an “XSE” badge, a rear spoiler, a shiny wheel, and an aggressive C-pillar kink. Oh, and a tire. Looks sporty, right? Toyota USA chief Bob Carter even said that this newest Camry “will send chills up your spine.”

The redesigned 2018 Camry will be officially making its debut at the 2017 Detroit auto show in January. Based on what we know so far, it’ll ride on the TNGA (Toyota New Global Architecture) modular platform that thus far is found under the Prius hybrid and the C-HR crossover, and the car will adopt a slightly wider and lower stance. The traditional three-box sedan shape won’t be drastically altered, however, as Toyota can’t afford to offend those hundreds of thousands of customers that flock to their showrooms each year to pick up the latest version of the Camry.

If any real excitement is in store for the new Camry, it will come in the form of a new TRD-tuned version, which we spied testing this fall. With quad exhaust tips and aggressive-looking wheels and tires, this hotted-up Camry could use a version of Toyota’s 3.5-liter V-6 engine making upwards of 300 horsepower. The standard version likely will make do with four-cylinder engines, including an updated version of the current car’s 2.5-liter naturally aspirated unit and a 2.0-liter turbocharged four-cylinder taken from Lexus models like the NX and IS.

We’ll get full info once the Detroit show rolls around in January, so brace yourself—the Camry’s coming.


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