85+pics Clean Carfax Fully Detailed & Serviced! Call Today! on 2040-cars

Auto blog

Ugly Moto makes beautiful motorcycle art [w/video]

Ugly Moto is a horrible name for a company that makes such wonderful motorcycle art. The creation of artist Francis Ooi, the company's illustrations focus on some of the iconic racing bikes of the 1960s and 1970s.
The artwork has an elegant simplicity that really makes it pop. It would fit just about anywhere from a home office to the bedroom of a young gearhead. Ooi has completed six illustrations so far covering classic cycles from Honda, Ducati, Yamaha and even Harley-Davidson. According to his site, the Suzuki RGB500 ridden by Barry Sheene will be the next one released. All of the prints are priced at $65 and are limited to 100 copies. They are all about 16.53 inches by 23.58 inches in size.
According to his website, these prints are just a hobby for Ooi and his real career is as the creative director at an ad agency. He creates the illustrations on his Mac, and he estimates that each design with about 800 components and layers takes about a month to complete. You can get idea of the process involved in the time-lapse video below.

Honda Smart Home, NJ dealer show the power of solar

Car dealerships are not usually thought of as "green" enterprises. They sell, after all, the fossil fuel-powered vehicles that account for about 18 percent of the CO2 emissions created in the US each year. As demonstrated by Rossi Honda in Vineland, NJ though, it doesn't have to be that way. Sure, the franchise still sells cars - lots of them - but they power the entire operation with sunlight in a way that provides ancillary benefits. The franchise has installed over 900 solar panels to become electric-grid neutral. Owned and operated by the seemingly indefatigable Ron Rossi, the franchise has installed over 900 solar panels to become electric-grid neutral. They aren't plastered across the roof of the showroom and service center, though. Instead, the array is mounted on canopies over his inventory, protecting them from sun, snow, and hail. Costing about $1.3 million to install, Rossi expects the system to save twice that amount in electricity bills over its 25-year life expectancy. Not bad, right? It makes us wonder why all dealerships don't do this. Honda itself recently completed its own solar project. The super-efficient Honda Smart Home is equipped, not only with its own beefy 9.5-kW solar array, but also with a 10-kWh lithium battery-based stationary storage system to buffer the building's electricity. Amongst its many party tricks, the home incorporates a DC-to-DC charging set up that allows the complimentary Fit EV to charge with half the efficiency losses of a typical home charging unit. While the installation is quite impressive and will serve as a "laboratory" of sorts for different groups involved with the project at the University of California, Davis, we can't help but wonder if the Japanese automaker couldn't get a bigger bang for its environmental buck elsewhere. A program, perhaps, to help its many franchise dealers to take up the Rossi challenge and go grid neutral. You can watch Rossi show off his array and other increased efficiency efforts by scrolling below for a pair of videos: one from Honda and one produced by Automotive News. As a bonus, we have time-lapse footage of the Honda Smart Home going up accompanied by press releases discussing both efforts. This content is hosted by a third party. To view it, please update your privacy preferences. Manage Settings. This content is hosted by a third party. To view it, please update your privacy preferences. Manage Settings. This content is hosted by a third party.

Next Honda Ridgeline to eschew weird visuals, go mainstream?

Last year, Honda gave us the first furtive glance at the next-generation Ridgeline with a shadowy photo of it in profile (above), and it promised that the pickup would "come to market in less than two years." That would have put the truck on track for a 2015 debut, but the automaker hasn't said anything more officially about the new model since then.
A new report from USA Today might shed some new light on the mysterious model. It claims that the next Ridgeline has more conventional pickup styling than the original model in a bid to conquest some buyers. You can get that feeling from the sketch, which appears to showing something far more traditional than the unorthodox original Ridgeline, whose odd tapering bedsides terminated in a double-hinged tailgate.
USA Today goes on to claim that the new Ridgeline will go on sale around late 2015 or early 2016. That's a bit later than expected, but fits with an earlier rumor.