Drive Your Very Own Batmobile!
Do you know what $150,000 can get you? It can get you your very own Batmobile. One you can actually drive.
No kidding. DC Entertainment has licensed a company to produce functioning life-sized Batmobiles. And not just any Batmobile, but the really cool one: the one from the 1966 teevee series. They build them from a 1970s Lincoln Town Car.
The name of the company is Fiberglass Freaks, and they claim both the interior and the exterior will identical to the original, right down to the now-iconic rocket exhaust flamethrower.
I’ve never been very much of a wheel nut, but if I could afford a real Batmobile, one that will allow me to fry all of the tailgating idiots on the road, then I’m gonna start saving my spare change.
I wonder if that damn lizard will insure it. I also wonder if it comes as a hybrid. You gotta be concerned about the environment, you know.
The batmobile doesn't come as a hybrid, it used atomic batteries!Seriously, wasn't the 60s Batmobile found to not be a legal street machine due to the lack of a top and windshield wipers?
Doubt it. Bumpers and/or headlights might do it — there was special after-market aerodynamic racing front-end sheet metal for the 1958 – 60 Austin-Healey "Bugeye" Sprite (the whole front end lifted up to access the engine), which had headlights, etc.; i remember reading that Bugeyes fitted with it were not street-legal in New York state – headlights too low or too close together or something. (The stock Bugeye bonnet's placement of headlights was only marginally legal in a number of jurisdictions.)It was probably street-legal at the time it was built; certainly Lotus/Caterham 7s are street legal, and the top is a fairly expensive option on most of the line. And the wiper thing is late-Sixties/early Seventies; later model Sprites (and MG Midgets, the Sprite's twin, giving rise to the term "Spridget") and MG-Bs had three wipers, because the windshield glass was so low that two wipers that would fit vertically couldn't sweep the required percentage of the glass. (In real-world use, what they swept was fine, but the spec was in terms of percentage. Mercedes – and possibly others – later designed a system with a single, center-mounted wiper arm that had a cam mechanism that allowed it to sweep virtually the entire glass, including the square corners…)
Based on the radio spots i've been hearing lately, the lizard has been fired.
The gecko is still doing tv spots.
Well, he's been taken off his radio job.The current radio ads are disgusting.Not too surprising, because GEICO is the only auto insurer slimier and more crooked than State Farm.
Hmmm. ComicMix editorial proofreader Adriane Nash has the same opinion — of the company, not their commercials. She's got the pig's "weeeeeeeeeee" as her ring tone for me. Anyway, do you care to elaborate?
One example:In the early days of laser speed guns, GEICO bought a company that made them (or a controlling interest, whichever). They then donated them to police departments, as a public service.Terms of the donation required a minimum number of tickets to be written using them. And only in states where they were allowed to cancel policies or raise rates mid-term, rather than having to wait till the policies expired.Another example:At one time, GEICO would automatically cancel/refuse to renew the policy of anyone who owned a radar detector, despite evidence showing that radar detector owners were less likely to have accidents. (This policy has, i believe, since been banned by most states.)At the same time, someone was routinely blanking out the CB emergency channel (Ch 9?) every day at rush hour over most of Long Island (i believe it was) broadcasting (which is illegal with CB) warnings of police speed enforcement using a (highly illegal) kilowatte linear amp on his CB.When caught, the culprit turned out to be a senior GEICO VP who probably had significant input on the afore-mentioned cancellation policy.
Now why doesn't any of that surprise me?
Perhaps because you've dealt with GEICO?If my mother didn't know the state Insurance Commissioner in SC personally, back in the day, she'd have never collected from State Farm – whose customer was drunk, going the wrong way on a one-way, turning left under what would have been a red light onto another one-way when he hit her; their adjustor told her so, that they knew it would cost her more to sue than it would be worth. However, she had just written and produced an ad campaign – either re-election or Public Service for the commissioner's office.He sent her a blind carbon of the letter he sent State Farm national; it was masterful. He didn't mention knowing my mother and strongly implied that he was acting as he would for any SC housewife and hinted darkly that, perhaps it was time to reconsider State Farm's license to do business in South Carolina…The adjustor was on the phone about two days after she got the BCC…
I thought he was caught in bed with Justin Long.
I'd heard it was Justin Bieber…
I'm tempted to drop Peter Egan a line about this, Mike. No better automotive journalist living, for my money. And I think he'd get a giggle outta this. Technically, this could be considered a kitcar buildup, so it might be street legal as an experimental under most state laws. I just hope Freaks makes it a bit stiffer and stouter than the Barris show versions; frame flex just from being trailered to shows was enough to break them.
Wow. The only straight job I've ever had in my life (media, political and social service jobs are hardly "straight," and who knows what working in comics is) was as a partsman for the old J.C. Whitney Company — Warshawsky's, if you're a Chicagoan. Times sure have changed a lot in the wheel nut racket since then.BTW, Warshawsky's big five-story building had a basement, and that basement had a basement, and that sub-basement had one of Al Capone's vaunted vaults therein. That's where Mr. Warshawsky kept his Model T and Model A Ford parts. No kidding. The place had been right in the middle of the Torrio / Capone mob's turf back in the day. Roy Warshawsky collected Duesenbergs — he bought 'em for a couple hundred bucks each in the 50s and then restored them with original parts from his company and his many, many wreck yards. Beautiful, beautiful cars.
I knew we had something else in common besides comics! I'm a gearhead, too, have been since birth. Grew up following Formula One, Indy and Can-Am, and NASCAR back when it was real stock cars… remember when you could walk into a dealership and buy the street version of a Road Runner, take it home and strip it down, install a roll cage, and take it to the track? That was racing…
I was at Road Atlanta the day Team McLaren lost for the first time in three or more years (to a British privateer running a second-hand 3-litre Porsche off his inventory of second-hand race cars), the reverse-hovercraft Chaparall (2J?) was making noise (the 2-cylinder/2-stroke snowmobile engine that powered the fans was so loud and vibrated so much that they had to start the 600-plus Chevy main engine first or they couldn't tell if it was running), Oscar Koveleski's Polish Racing Drivers of America were using a frilly pink parasol propped in the seat to keep the interior of their car cool, and Linda Vaughn was wandering round as "Miss Golden Gearshift" in a goldenrod bell-bottom pants suit…{…o my lord – linda vaughn's first job was as a dental tech – it sounds like something out of a porn loop or a russ meyers film…)
I don't think the Monkeemobile (a hugely stretched GTO) was from Barris (it wasn't – Stan Jeffries), but it was drivable. One of the original Monkeemobile wound up as a courtesy car at a hotel in Puerto Rico.And then there was the ZZR…
Dean Jeffries, Weber-san. Also creator of Black Beauty, and one of a very few guys that Barris farmed out work to. George's brother, Sam was a top-notch customizer in his day, but after he died, George hired out to Dean, Gene Winfield, The Alexander Brothers, Darryl Starbird, Larry Watson, anybody who needed the money, and in that business, there were a lotta people who were willing to work. Mostly he hired tv customs to Jeffries and Winfield.
I know that. I don't know how that happened between the brain and the fingers…
Oh, yeah. I forgot Tom Daniel. Designed most of George's really wild-ass cars, including, I think, the ZZR.