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After discovering Hummer was going to make an H3 Truck, I found that Hummer was hoping to move in on the Jeep Wrangler with a small convertible SUV. I can’t imagine a cooler way to get to the beach…

Tougher than nails. Notice that the door panels bevel out; most Hummer body panels are deliberately flat. I love the exposed hinges on the doors and bolt heads on the fenders.

With the roof panels removed, there’s enough room for a surf board. My guess is the slotted vent near the windshield base is an air intake for the engine. This allows the SUV to drive in deep water without the engine inhaling water.

Don’t miss the rugged details of the hood.

A loaded gun.

If I would’ve stuck with Industrial Design as a career, this is the type of drawing I would be doing for a living. I’m kinda jealous.

Halo? Anyone? I think Hummer knows who their demographic will be for the HX.

First, the good news: Hummer is making an H3 Truck. Now the bad news: it’s not as cool as the concept.

H3T Concept: Looks great on the moon and in your driveway.

The sweet chrome around the windshield is gone, as is the titanium-looking rocker panels are blacked out. Although the small cab looked cool, the quad-cab will be practical.

The H2 SUT was the H2 with the back notched with a small truck bed.
But the H3 Truck has a long wheel base to make room for a useful truck bed.

Notice the dirt bike wheel clamp in the front of the bed. I say it’s time for Hummer to sponsor the X-Games.

Customize the H3T?

I know that car guys get all worked up when it comes to customizing trucks and SUVs. They argue that these are rugged vehicles that help men explore jungles and mountains. It’s a violation to the species if you tame a wolf to become a house dog.

I understand why purists think the way they do, but I don’t agree with them anymore. The reality is that most people don’t have enough money to buy a new vehicle like the H3T and then use it exclusively off road. He needs it to run errands, haul furniture, and pick up a friend to go to a movie. This is how real people live in the real world. It’s not a sin to buy a Hummer and then keep it on paved streets.

Here’s the deal: the world is ready for a new breed of custom cars. I don’t need to see another ‘32 Ford, another suped-up Japanese racer, or a million-dollar muscle car. It’s all been done. Imagine a tough, menacing SUVs creepin’ low through town. Urban warriors.

To give you an idea of what I’m talking about, look at Dwayne Wade’s H2 Truck that earned the the “King of Bling” at GM’s annual competition. The most noticeable change to his truck are the massive 30″ inch rims. Can it go off road? No. Does it look cool? Yes. That’s enough for me.

Baller!

Summary: It’s time for someone to start dreaming about what they’re going to do to the Hummer H3 Truck. There’s no shame in it.

NBC is releasing a 2-hour TV movie reintroducing the 80’s TV show Knight Rider. Michael Knight will NOT be played by David Hasselhoff, but has been replaced by a unknown soap opera actor Justin Bruening. And the black Pontiac Trans Am will be replaced by a Ford Mustang. If the show takes off, NBC promises a TV series.

The original concept sketch.

A computer rendering

The real deal: KITT 2008.

Now that we’ve looked at the pretty pictures, let’s talk about what this means for the “stock value” of the Ford Mustang.

Why Knight Rider Will Break the Mustang

1. It’s not a Pontiac Trans Am. The switch to a Mustang may not mean much to most people, but to car guys, it might seem like a violation the purity of the original show. Putting a Ford Mustang in the place of the Pontiac Trans Am is like two teams trading quarterbacks on the day of the Super Bowl. The universe is in chaos. But when you take a few minutes to think about it, you’ll remember that the original Knight Rider was an average show that only lasted four seasons. You are giving Pontiac too much credit if you argue that the new show is doomed to fail because they cast a Mustang as a crime fighter.

2. Knight Rider didn’t help the Trans Am. I’m sure that the original Knight Rider boosted sales of the Pontiac Trans Am back in the 1980s, but it hasn’t made the car a legend. Really, it’s been 27 years since Knight Rider debuted, giving America plenty of time to get excited about the Trans Am again. I’ve been to dozens of car shows in the past decade and I rarely see a 3rd Generation Trans Am (1982-1992). You can’t blame it on the fact that they aren’t old enough to be collectibles again, because I regularly see rows of 1994-1996 Impala Super Sports. If you’re not into anecdotal evidence, consider the the fate of the original KITT: in 1982 Knight Rider Trans Am sold for a pitiful $20,000, lot #732.1 at Barrett-Jackson in 2002. That’s less than the cost of a 2002 Chevy mini van. Lets pause to think about how uncool that is.

3. The show will flop and drag the Mustang down with it. This would be a valid fear if the release of this new body of the Mustang was timed with the debut of the show. But the Mustang came out four years ago, and it has a solid fan base amongst all demographics (young and old, male and female, Republican and Democrat.) A TV show can’t destroy that. If this show does flop, nobody will blame it on the Mustang.

My conclusion is that people liked KITT as a crime-fighter, but they didn’t like him enough to like to crown the Trans Am. If I could use a sports analogy, they liked KITT as a player, but it wasn’t because of his uniform. It doesn’t matter if Steve Nash plays for the Mavericks, Suns, or Celtics, he’s still the best team mate on earth.

Why Knight Rider Will Make the Mustang

I think there’s more reason to believe that a Mustang as Knight Rider will be a good thing for everyone…

1. Hollywood was good to the Delorean. Anyone from the 1980s can pick a Back to the Future DeLorean out of a parking lot at a car show, even if they don’t know what the name it is. The DeLorean may not be a quintessential “classic” like a ‘57 Chevy, but it’s one of the few cars from the 1980s to be lionized by the American public. Keep in mind that it was a car was a piece of junk and it ruined GM’s golden child John DeLorean.

2. Hollywood was good to the Shelby Mustang GT-500. Consider what consider the 2000 release of the movie Gone in 60 Seconds did for the Shelby Mustang GT500 Eleanor. That car has an absolute rock star in the movie. At the Barrett-Jackson Car Auction in Scottsdale, the “original” Eleanor sold for $675,000. There were probably 20 Eleanors on the set used for different stunts, but the Eleanor that sold at the auction was the most functional, least beat up car. Did I mention that Eleanor wasn’t not even a real Shelby? It’s an ordinary ‘67 Mustang fastback scooped out of a junkyard and dressed up to look like a customized Shelby. Recreating that car has become a cottage industry. These replicas have sold for six figures at Barrett-Jackson every year since then movie came out in 2000.

3. If OJ’s Bronco was good for Ford, Knight Rider will be good for Ford. You would think that Ford would’ve canceled their archaic full-sized Bronco by the time OJ used it as his getaway wagon on national TV. At the time, it was only driven by employees of the Forestry Service and the Department of Transportation. It had zero sex appeal. I read several articles after the murder trial that claimed that sales of the Bronco shot through the roof.

4. TV saves careers. Just for fun, I’ll use an analogy that car guys won’t care about: Jessica Simpson and Nick Lache. People wondered these young lovers were smart when they chose to broadcast their first year of marriage on an MTV reality show called “The Newlyweds” back in 2003. The show wasn’t good for their marriage (divorced in 2006), but the show gave Jessica’s brief singing career a jolt of Hollywood that has aloud her to stick around for the last five years and she’ll probably around for another five. Not bad for someone with no tangible talent. (Don’t ask me to explain why Nick’s career didn’t do the same, I’d have to talk about the complex relationship between famous girls and the non-famous girls who love to hate them, thereby making her more famous.)

http://www.highperformancepontiac.com/hotnews/hppp_0607_2008_pontiac_trans_am_concept/photo_01.html

Conclusion: Ford Wins

Rumor has it that Pontiac will release a rear-wheel drive muscle car sometime in 2010 or 2011, but as of today, nobody knows if it will be branded as a GTO or a Firebird Trans Am. Regardless, it’s not worth it to GM to speed up the concept model if there isn’t a lot of commitment from NBC behind Knight Rider. GM doesn’t have time to mess around with a show that might end as soon as it begins, they’re in the fight of their life with Japanese heavyweight Toyota.

When it came time to turn on the cameras and start filming, NBC needed a star. Ford was ready with lots of hype and a badass Mustang with a tank of gas. Good luck happens to people who are prepared when opportunity arrives.

Chrysler announced last month that they’ll stop producing four cars: Chrysler Crossfire, Pacifica, PT Cruiser Convertible and Dodge Magnum.

Apparently the DaimlerChrysler relationship sucked and now they’re breaking up. The new owners are trying to make Chrysler a strong, profitable brand again. That includes closing some factories and getting rid of some of their models. I’m not an industry analyst and I have no idea how to run a car company, so I have nothing to comment about their strategy.

But I will say this: the Magnum is a badass car. Every custom car guy knows the Magnum is a rare success that stands apart from dull American cars. But the masses needed some convincing to dig the low-slung wagon, and I don’t believe Dodge did their job to market the Magnum. So now they decided to get rid of the car. Boo!

Chip Foose’s sweet magnum.

If the Magnum was a rock band, they’d be okay with not making it mainstream, but they’d keep their strong fan base and thrive in the indie rock scene. They might become legends in time. Unfortunately, the Magnum is not a rock band. Once the production stops, it stops. The show is over. Only time will tell if it becomes a classic.

It’s been an exciting summer here in San Diego, but it’s time to go back to Phoenix and pick up life where I left off. Here are some random highlights from the summer, in no particular order:

Escalade School Bus. When I was a kid, I saw a customized, hot rod school bus on the cover of a magazine at the Ingles grocery store in western North Carolina. It was so cool and so outrageous that it made my young mind spin for weeks. This summer, I found this image online, and I got that same rush. I can’t explain it.

I’d buy it.

Kayaking in La Jolla. Candyce, Lauryn, Danny, and I went to La Jolla to rent some two-person kayaks to explore the caves in the cliffs of La Jolla. We were paddling along where the waves wash against the foot of the cliff when stumbled across a huge rock covered with seals. You would think that you would see something like that coming, but I was so caught up in the colorful fish that were swimming around the rocks beneath us.

We backed off the seal rock and watched it like a live performance of Discovery’s Planet Earth. Although I couldn’t figure out why, a male seal was really mad, and he barked and moaned like he was insane. He was just not happy with what was going down. I would think that it was us causing all the ruckus, but he was cool for the first 10 minutes. I couldn’t believe how loud that bull was. It echoed around the cliffs and bounced back on top of us. Maybe he’s just proud of his voice.

Invitation to Write for Suns.com. Near the end of July, I got a phone call from the VP of Interactive Services for the Phoenix Suns. He invited me to join their team of writers by keeping a blog on their website. I already write about the Suns here on supafly.com, but I like the professional challenge of writing for a wider audience.

Boris Diaw in Ratatouille? Speaking of the Suns, I swear they modeled the French chef after French basketball player, Boris Diaw. You decide:

Boris Diaw the basketball player, the animated chef.

Watching Transformers, Twice. I loved Transformers as a kid, even though we were only able to afford a couple of the toys. I got my fix from watching the Transformers cartoon after school. I can honestly say, there was nothing that got me more excited as a child than catching a full episode of Transformers with a bag of sour cream and onion potato chips. It was sensory overload.

The problem with my childhood experience of Transformers was that they never stepped into reality. The toys were always more simple than the cartoon characters they were modeled after. They always took forever to transform, so it was hard to play with them with the same action and intensity as the cartoon. I always wondered if in the future my car would ever transform into a robot and by my friend and soldier. I doubt this will ever happen.

But watching real cars and trucks transform into robots in a movie was exhilarating for me. It was a childhood fantasy that was alone in my head, now exploded onto the movie screen. I enjoyed it so much that I went back and watched it again. I’ll definitely add it to my DVD collection (Napoleon Dynamite, The Passion, The Shawshank Redemption, and Almost Famous.)

I also enjoyed seeing new American muscle cars battle it out.

Bumble Bee the Camaro and Barricade the Mustang.

Kanye West’s new song: Stronger. I can’t stop listening to this track!

Getting off Work, Going to the Beach. Nothing beats getting off work and then going to the beach for two hours. One notable accomplishment for me is simplifying my walks across the street and onto the sand. I now just go in my swimming trunks. I leave behind the chair, books, magazines, sketch pad, towel, umbrella, chair, and bottles of water. I just bring my keys to the house. It’s like having a pool in your backyard, except it’s 200 yards away.

Married at the Beach. Spending a summer out here with Candyce was cool when we were dating, but being married adds intensity and romance to the summer that is unique to newly weds. We make dinner together and eat it outside by candlelight. We go out every other day for a jog (Candyce) and for a bike ride (me) and explore the beach towns north and south of us.

Escondido Car Show. We went to a Saturday night car show in Escondido on Grande Avenue. I caught a glimpse of this custom Chrysler 300 rolling down the street.

The first thing you notice is the suicide doors up front. There are no doors in the rear because they were welded and filled.

Although the imagery is goolish and not my style, I love that it’s outrageous and unlike anything else I’ve seen.

Illustrating a Video Game. I’ve designed a lot of things, but this summer was my first time illustrating a Flash video game for lifeteen.com: Vatican Ninja vs. Pirates. There’s something magical about making a video game because you can take an outrageous concept and make it a reality. The idea behind the video game becomes more legitimate and matter-of-fact once it culminates into a fun, interactive experience. I don’t believe video games can teach morality, because in the end, people will only play it if it’s fun. Once they’re finished having fun, they’ll be done with it. Playing a game is a shallow experience and you can’t take them too serious. But games on our site could be fun to raise awareness for our summer camps and teach a little bit about the regional geography that tells the story. That’s the next game.

Not Remodeling My House. I know that as soon as I get back in Phoenix, I’m going to dive into a quick and intense remodel of the main level of my home. I’ve spent a lot of the summer planning, sketching, and finding materials for the project. Jeff and I have sat down a couple times to re-think the floor plan. The anticipation is boiling inside of me. It’ll be good to be back.