Stolen ’64 Chevrolet Corvette Returned to Owner After 40 Years

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December 2, 2016 at 2:32 pm by Collin Woodard | Photography by Red Bluff CHP

In 1976, Modesto Fleming’s C2-generation 1964 Chevrolet Corvette was stolen while she was living in Anaheim, California. At the time, the police were unable to track down her car, and she believed the Vette was gone forever. And that was indeed the case until this October, when Fleming got her car back thanks to Dave Madrigal, a California Highway Patrol officer in the northern California town of Red Bluff, and quite a bit of luck.

Earlier this year, the then-owner took the 1964 Chevrolet Corvette Sting Ray to a local car show. As the Red Bluff Daily News from reports, someone at the show with the knowledge to decode vehicle identification numbers pointed out that the car’s VIN didn’t actually belong to a Corvette. As it turned out, the VIN was actually from a 1964 Impala. Using a different identifying number located elsewhere on the car, the officer was able to verify with the National Insurance Crime Bureau that the Corvette had been stolen.

“The number returned to a 1964 Chevy Corvette that was an unrecovered stolen vehicle out of Anaheim Police Department in September of 1976,” Officer Madrigal told the Red Bluff Daily News. “I contacted Anaheim and advised them of the situation. They then located the victim from 1976, who is currently living in Arizona, and told her we had her car.”

Four decades after it was originally swiped, Fleming has her Corvette back. Sadly, the car wasn’t recovered from the thief: The man from whom the car was recovered had owned the car for nearly 20 years, having received it as a gift from his wife in 1987. She had purchased the Corvette from a dealership that is now out of business.

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A version of this story originally appeared on Road & Track.

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Audi Only a Year Out from Its Moonshot, Seeking $30 Million X Prize

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One small step for man, one giant leap for an automaker? After nearly two years of planning, officials from Audi said this week that they intend to put an unmanned rover on the moon by the end of 2017—and that they’ll put it down in the same spot where the last humans explored the lunar surface, back in 1972.

More than a dozen engineers from Audi have collaborated with a German team of scientists on an entry in the Google Lunar X Prize competition to transport a vehicle to the surface of the moon, where it will travel at least a third of a mile and capture images and video.

Audi says its Lunar Quattro prototypes have undergone extensive testing over the past year. Engineers have optimized the vehicle’s all-wheel-drive power distribution, outfitted them with the brand’s e-tron battery technology, and shed 18 pounds from their initial weight of 84 pounds. With development nearing completion, Audi’s partners in the moonshot, Berlin-based group Part Time Scientists, have signed an agreement for a launch with Spaceflight, Inc., in late 2017. No specific date has been set.

In the meantime, Audi will continue to test two Lunar Quattro rovers and take part in simulations of the entire mission in the Middle East in the coming months.

While Audi’s space mission may seem downright pedestrian compared to Elon Musk’s grand plans for colonizing Mars, Audi’s exploration of space has some practical implications for its business. From both the Middle East tests and actual experience on the moon, the brand hopes to learn how some components endure extreme conditions, according to Michael Schöffmann, head of transmission development and development coordinator for Lunar Quattro.

Once it arrives on the moon, the Lunar Quattro’s four cameras will be used both for planning the vehicle’s path on the surface and for taking 3D, 360-degree pictures. If all goes well, the vehicle will snap photos of the vintage rover left on the moon from Apollo 17, the last manned lunar landing mission, in 1972. The group from Part-Time Scientists intends that the landing module will touch down in the Valley of Taurus-Littrow, the same place where Apollo 17 arrived.

Sixteen teams from around the world are competing to win the Lunar X Prize’s $30 million reward. Two other teams have announced launch dates in the 2017 timeframe, and the Audi/Part-Time Scientists team is considered a frontrunner because it has already won two smaller financial prizes that are benchmarks in the run-up toward the grand prize.

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Rolls-Royce Releases First Images of Project Cullinan SUV in Its Real Body

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Rolls-Royce certainly is drawing out the launch of its Project Cullinan SUV. The idea of a high-riding Roller has been tossed around for some time, with Rolls-Royce decrying the notion for years before finally, in early 2015, confirming its intention to build an SUV. Then an image of a funky, bewinged, Phantom-based mule (pictured below) was released to prove development was underway. Now, Rolls-Royce has released the best look yet at Project Cullinan, in the form of two images that show the vehicle in a proper SUV body. To be fair, unlike many hyped and long-awaited projects (cough*Dr. Dre*cough*Detox), Rolls actually is showing signs of progress toward a finished product.

Rolls refers to Project Cullinan as an “all-terrain, high-sided vehicle,” and it will be the first vehicle to feature the lightweight all-aluminum architecture that will underpin all of the brand’s future products. The first spoiler-clad prototype was used to test the new suspension’s manners on a variety of road surfaces—”suspension throw” and “high-bodied stability” were specifically mentioned as metrics. But engineers can only do so much for a platform without the real body and shape. To that end, this new prototype is beginning testing and will head to the Arctic Circle at the end of this month to be subjected to extreme cold-weather trials. It will then be off to the Middle East to get a taste of the weather at the opposite end of the spectrum.

Based on these two photos of the camo’d vehicle, the vehicle looks to be higher, bigger, and boxier than our initial rendering, and there can be no doubt there’s more of R-R’s trademark grille hiding behind the disguise. It seems as if the SUV will carry forward more of the Phantom’s look versus that of the slightly curvier Ghost, which could mean the next-generation Phantom—due soon after the VII recently ended its legendary run—might look similar to the previous Phantom. The Cullinan SUV is expected to offer both V-12 and hybrid powertrain options, and it is expected to slide into the garages of the global elite in late 2018. (After many more teasers, of course.)

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Over There: Ford Will Expand Autonomous-Car Testing to Europe

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With wide-open highways and multilane suburban streets, U.S. roads are friendly proving grounds for self-driving vehicles. By contrast, the narrow streets of European cities are more challenging territory for autonomous technology. Ford intends to gain autonomous experience in European environments, and the company said it will deploy at least one of its Fusion hybrid research vehicles in Europe early next year.

Engineers from Ford’s research and development facilities in Aachen and Cologne, Germany, and the company’s engineering center in Essex, England, are jointly leading the testing program, according to a company spokesperson. Their focus will be on adapting autonomous technology for European conditions.

“Rules of the road vary from country to country here, traffic signs and road layouts are different, and drivers are likely to share congested roads with cyclists,” said Thomas Lukaszewicz, manager of automated driving for Ford of Europe.

The program will start with a single vehicle in early 2017, but that number is expected to grow. Even with a few more cars, those numbers will still be small in comparison with Ford’s autonomous operations in the United Sates, where the company tripled the size of its fleet from 10 to 30 cars this year and intends to triple it again in 2017 for continued testing in California, Arizona, and Michigan.

Ford is the first American manufacturer to extend its autonomous testing overseas, although it won’t be the first time the company has looked to Europe to test some of its forward-looking technologies. Earlier this year, Ford conducted a pilot project in London that explored how customers could summon on-demand shuttles via an app.

Although company officials haven’t yet said where the European testing will take place, the United Kingdom has adopted regulations that many manufacturers consider friendly for testing purposes, including permitting autonomous vehicles on all roads and investing in infrastructure that connected and autonomous cars may need.

Jaguar Land Rover announced plans in July to test as many as 100 connected and self-driving vehicles in and around Birmingham over the next four years, and Volvo intends to test approximately 100 vehicles throughout Great Britain through a testing program called Drive Me London. Those tests are expected to begin with a smaller number of cars in 2017 and expand in 2018.

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2018 Volkswagen Arteon: What to Expect From VW’s CC Replacement

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Volkswagen’s CC marks the brand’s first crack at a so-called “four-door coupe,” the increasingly ubiquitous more-stylish-than-a-sedan sedan format, and the model is, well, old. Introduced in 2008, the CC is long overdue for replacement. That’s coming next year, along with a name change to Arteon. So far Volkswagen has released only a handful of design sketches depicting the Arteon and promised that we’ll see the car at the 2017 Geneva auto show. But we have exclusive illustrations of what the production model will look like.

In keeping with the CC, the Arteon is lower and appears longer than Volkswagen’s similar-size mainstream Passat sedan. Our illustration, which incorporates elements from VW’s published design sketches, shows the Arteon with an attractive full-width grille that blends into the headlights, subtly aggressive air intakes, and muscular fender bulges front and rear. While the CC was a sedan—complete with a tiny trunk opening thanks to its steeply raked rear window—the Arteon will be a hatchback, which not only allows for a more useful cargo opening but also an even sleeker profile. The roofline flows nearly uninterrupted down past the taillights to the rear bumper, with an elegant ducktail spoiler giving the look some structure. An optional glass roof is surely on the table, and one is included in these illustrations.

The powerful haunches over the rear wheels are purely aesthetic. The Arteon will be front-wheel drive, likely with all-wheel drive as an option, just like the CC. Also like the CC, which was built off the Passat’s bones back when the U.S. version of that sedan was the same as its Europe-market sibling (today’s U.S.-built Passat is unique to our market), the Arteon will be Passat based. The good news is that Volkswagen is bypassing today’s U.S.-market Passat for the upcoming next-generation Euro-market Passat. So the Arteon will use a stretched variant of the same high-quality MQB platform that sits beneath the 10Best-winning Golf lineup, as well as a host of premium Volkswagen Group products the world over.

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A four-cylinder turbocharged gas engine is a shoo-in for the U.S.-market Arteon, as well as VW’s dual-clutch automatic transmission. It is doubtful that VW will offer a stick-shift option as it did with the CC, given the Arteon’s more premium positioning than even that model. (The name Arteon is a combination, we’re told, of the words “art” and “eon,” the latter being VW-ese for its upmarket models.) Pricing should start in the low- to mid-$30,000 space, in similar territory to Toyota’s Avalon, Nissan’s Maxima, and entry-luxury cars such as the Acura TLX.

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