2005 - Bmw X5 on 2040-cars

Auto blog

The Homer to contest 24 Hours of LeMons

It's finally happened. A 24 Hours of LeMons team has built the definitive interpretation of The Homer from The Simpsons for competition in an upcoming race. As you may recollect, The Homer is the fictional car designed by Homer Simpson for his brother's car company. Designed with a separate compartment for screaming children and other Homer-centric goodies, the animated machine bankrupted its parent company and put Homer's brother out of a job. Now we get to watch it race other crap cans as it tackles Southern California's Buttonwillow Raceway on June 29. Scott Chamberlain, Kris Linquist, Reid Conti, Ben Reilly and Mike Yepes will helm the machine, and Jeff Herman serves as the team's creative director.
The racer is the latest incarnation of a well-abused BMW 3 Series. The team campaigned the same E30 under the "Prickstine" banner as a Chrysler Imperial tribute and "Porcubimmer," the latter being a riff on the ever-popular joke about the difference between porcupines and BMW models. Never gets old. You can check out a video of the finished Homer below, and be sure to like the team on Facebook to see updates from the race. Now, about that Canyonero...

BMW M3 driving off cliff is a chilling PSA

We're a little shocked that the unnamed owner of this cliff-diving E46 BMW M3 would upload the in-car footage of his accident to YouTube. Not only that, he uploaded two videos: raw footage of his roll down the cliff (it looks like somewhere in the Southwest, maybe Arizona) and a tribute video for his BMW that suffered the most severe consequences of understeer. Not only does uploading the videos leave him wide open for judgment by fellow enthusiasts (just read the YouTube comments), but we imagine if the police and his insurance company somehow don't know about the incident already, they will shortly. Scroll below to view for yourself.
The raw footage shows the sort of driving that led to the M3's violent tumble, and it serves as a good public service announcement reminder for everyone out there: Just like the Spengler's streams, double yellow lines aren't meant to be crossed. Also, hard driving is one thing, but hammering on public roads at speeds clearly above your skill levels as a driver is not only a recipe for legal trouble, it's a script for ruining your car at the very least, if not your life.

BMW rethinks all-wheel-drive M cars

BMW M hasn't been able to decide whether it wants to jump on the all-wheel-drive bandwagon or not (with the exceptions of the X5 M and the X6 M, which are based on AWD architecture). That might be changing though, since M's president Friedrich Nitschke recently realized that 70 to 80 percent of Mercedes-Benz E63 AMGs are ordered with all-wheel drive. Earlier this year, Nitschke said that there were no new AWD M models planned, so this comes as somewhat of a surprise.
"On our cars we are thinking of all-wheel drive, but it won't come before we get the successor of the M5 and M6," Nitschke said in a Motoring report. "That's the timing and it's not practical to react in the current life cycles."
"On our cars we are thinking of all-wheel drive." - Friedrich Nitschke, BMW