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Vert-A-Pac train cars kept your Chevy Vega's price in check

Our apologies to those who've seen this before, but for the rest of the class, how awesome are these pictures of the Vert-A-Pac shipping system General Motors came up with to ship the Chevrolet Vega back in the 1970s? Developed along with Southern Pacific Railroad, GM was able to double the amount of Vega models it could ship by packing them into the unique storage cars vertically.
At the time, rail cars could fit 15 vehicles each, but Chevrolet was able to lower shipping costs by making it possible to ship 30 Vegas per rail car, in turn allowing the price of the Vega to remain as low as possible. Each rail car had 30 doors that would fold down so that a Vega could be strapped on, and then a forklift would come along and lift the door into place. All the cars were positioned nose down, and since they were shipped with all of their required fluids, certain aspects had to be designed specifically for this type of shipping, including an oil baffle in the engine, a special battery and even a repositioned windshield washer reservoir. See for yourself in our image gallery above.

Cadillac XT4 crossover to be built in Kansas City

Cadillac's upcoming XT4, a crossover we've previously known as the XT3 in a long series of spy shots of heavily camouflaged mules, will be built at General Motors' assembly plant in Kansas City on the same platform as the Chevrolet Malibu, Bloomberg reports, citing people familiar with the plan. That will give Cadillac another entry in the red-hot luxury crossover segment and, GM hopes, help to reverse a sales slump in the U.S. It'll also breath life into the Kansas City plant that makes the slow-selling Malibu, where GM cut a third shift last year, by sharing the assembly line between the crossover and sedan and defraying costs for each vehicle. The XT4 was known most recently as the XT3, with styling cues based on the Escala concept sedan from 2016. It's slightly smaller than the XT5, Cadillac's top-selling vehicle, and will also augment the full-size Escalade in Cadillac's stable of SUVs when it makes its expected debut later this year. Cadillac last week reported its second-highest-ever sales mark with 356,467 vehicles, an increase of 15.5 percent over 2016. But that mark papers over an 8 percent sales decline in the U.S. to 156,440 vehicles. The luxury brand is on a hot streak in China, where sales jumped 50.8 percent last year to 175,489 units.Related Video: Image Credit: Brian Williams Plants/Manufacturing Cadillac Chevrolet GM Crossover sales cadillac xt5 cadillac xt4 cadillac xt3

The U-2 spy plane needs high-performance cars to help land

Typically, aircraft deploy their landing gear from three main points. Most military aircraft, for example, deploy two gears at the back and one forward, like a tricycle. Some civilian aircraft flip the layout, with two in front and one in back - tail-draggers. The U-2 Dragon Lady is wildly different than any of these. With a 103-foot wingspan but a body that's just 63-feet long, the layout of the U-2 makes a traditional landing setup infeasible. Instead, the U-2 utilizes a pair of wheels, one up front and one in back. With such a bizarre layout, landings are so tough that since the U-2's earliest flights at Area 51, the US Air Force has used high-performance chase cars to guide the pilot down safely. The landing process isn't over there, though. As this video from Sploid shows, balancing out the aircraft to fit the detachable "pogos" – think training wheels for spy planes – is a comical procedure requiring a number of airman using their full body weight to even out the U-2. This video also recaps some of the great vehicles that have served as chase vehicles for this legendary spy plane. They include Chevrolet El Caminos, and the Fox-body Ford Mustangs so favored by the California Highway Patrol. For the last several years, the USAF has utilized products from General Motors, using fourth-generation Chevy Camaros, before switching over to the Pontiac GTO and most recently, the awesome Pontiac G8. It's fair to say that if you're a gearhead in the Air Force, this is the job you want. Check out the video, embedded up top. News Source: Sploid via YouTubeImage Credit: Sploid Chevrolet Ford GM Pontiac Military Performance Videos