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Most hot rod builders chase horsepower with a turbocharger or a bigger cam — but a rare few skip straight to doubling their cylinder count instead. A 14-liter V16 swap sounds like something out of a tall tale, yet boutique engine builders have made versions of it real, repurposing marine and industrial architecture for street use. Here’s what it takes to shoehorn sixteen cylinders into a car that was never designed to hold them.
A 2017 Dream Giveaway sweepstakes paired a numbers-matching 1967 Camaro RS with a Lingenfelter-built 2017 ZL1 pushing well past factory horsepower — plus $35,000 cash, all for a $3 ticket. The real story isn’t the prize total, it’s what Lingenfelter actually built before handing over the keys. Read on to find out.
Pontiac handed Hal Needham four Trans Ams to destroy for Smokey and the Bandit, and three of them did not survive filming. The fourth finished the shoot so beaten that crew had to push it into position. That wreckage turned a slow-selling coupe into Pontiac’s best seller and made Burt Reynolds inseparable from a black and gold Firebird. Here is what really happened behind the scenes, and what those cars command today.
The IROC-Z name is back — not as a factory Camaro trim, but as a modern revival project unveiled at SEMA by builder Mark of Lethal Garage. In this interview, he walks through full pricing, what buyers actually get, and clears up one big misconception: there’s no race series returning, just driving classes and a yearly charity race among owners. It’s a deep dive into what it takes to responsibly resurrect a nameplate with this much history behind it. Watch to hear the full story straight from the person building it.
FCA filed a trademark on the Cuda name, and the easy reaction was to dismiss it as routine housekeeping. What made this one worth a second look was the filing classification covering badges and decals, plus the fact that the company had already trademarked Barracuda a couple of years earlier. Two filings in a row is a pattern, not paperwork. Here is what the name is worth, and what would have to happen for it to return.
Lokar’s Muscle Car Shifter Knob is built to replicate the look and feel of a factory GM shifter closely enough to fool most people at a car show, and it won SEMA’s award for Best New Interior Accessory Product. The install is straightforward but order-dependent: the shifter has to be in Park, the set screw inside the knob has to stay untouched, and the adapter housing has to be held steady while tightening. Here’s exactly how to avoid the mistakes first-timers usually make.
Ron Reolfi’s 1968 Chevrolet Camaro disappeared from outside his North Canton, Ohio workplace in twenty minutes back in 1981 — and stayed gone for 33 years. The reason it eventually came back has nothing to do with luck and everything to do with a title that never legally changed hands. Watch the full story of how a decades-old paperwork trail reunited a man with the car he never stopped losing.
Ramo Stott’s #7 Superbird won four races across ARCA, USAC, and NASCAR-adjacent competition in the early 1970s, and current owner Doug Schellinger has spent years turning its scars into documented history, down to a rear window that Stott himself deformed with a blowtorch to pass tech inspection. Every ding, weld, and mismatched panel on this car has a story and, often, a photograph to back it up. Read on to find out how a blown engine and a stubborn NASCAR inspector shaped one of the most authenticated winged cars left on the road.
The car chases people still talk about have one thing in common: almost nothing about them was faked. Real drivers, real streets, real risk, and in several cases real crashes that stayed in the final cut. From a 1968 Mustang tearing through San Francisco to a Peterbilt stalking a Plymouth Valiant through the desert, here is what made each of these sequences work and why CGI has never quite replaced them.
Tom Scarpello ran Ford’s Special Vehicle Team from 1998 to 2004, then founded a company to answer the question he kept hearing at car shows: why not just build the original Mustang again? Revology does not restore old cars. It builds new ones on officially licensed reproduction bodies, powered by Ford’s modern Coyote V8, with modern steering, brakes, wiring, and air conditioning. Here is what that actually gets you, and what it costs.
A knock on a truck’s passenger window at a red light turned into a national news segment after driver Ricky Thornton pulled a gun on the motorcyclist surrounding him, telling Inside Edition afterward that he felt threatened and wasn’t taking chances. The footage and Thornton’s own explanation split viewers over whether his response was justified self-defense or a dangerous escalation. Watch to see exactly what happened at that red light, and judge the moment for yourself.
SpeedKore of Grafton, Wisconsin built a 1970 Dodge Charger around a 9.0-liter Mercury Racing QC4v, an engine designed for offshore powerboat racing, then added twin 94-millimeter turbos for 1,650 horsepower and ran it through a Tremec six-speed manual. It was the first time that marine engine had ever gone into a road car. The carbon fiber body proved even more commercially significant. Here is what that swap actually required.
Elon Musk first confirmed the Tesla Model Y would share its platform with the Model 3 sedan on a quarterly earnings call — but the crossover didn’t actually reach the public until its March 2019 unveiling, with production following in January 2020. When it arrived, roughly 76% of its parts were shared with the Model 3, and Tesla offered four powertrain configurations plus an optional third row. Here’s how the promise from that call actually played out.
The BMW i8 paired a 1.5-liter three-cylinder engine with an electric motor, a carbon-fiber passenger cell, and swan doors, then asked $143,400 for the combination. It hit 60 mph in about 4.2 seconds and returned an EPA rating of 76 MPGe. Almost nothing else on the market in 2017 was attempting the same thing. Here is what BMW actually built, and what the i8 predicted about everything that followed.