Living in a city where most normal people can’t afford to own and store a car, wouldn’t you long for a trip to the drive-in? Now car-starved Manhattanites can have their cake and eat it too—at the world’s smallest drive-in theater. The DRV-IN is a one-car stall is inhabited by a projection screen, a simulated star-filled night sky, and a 1965 Falcoln convertible, seating six. Movie-goers can book the car and their choice of films for seventy-five bucks per screening. Unless you really do plan to pack the Falcon with six people, that could be an expensive date—but in a town where a parking spot for your car can cost as much as most other cities’ two-bedroom apartments, it must seem like a bargain.

Source: bookofjoe via BornRich

I remember being pretty sad when New York City’s last Checker cab was retired from service. While the current Ford Crown Victoria might seem substantially less iconic than the Checker, it’s been the durable workhorse of New York’s cab fleet for decades. But that looks like it’s about to change: as the fleet ages and gas prices rise, the venerable V8-powered Crown Vic looks like it’ll soon be put out to pasture, though the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission has no idea what to replace it with. Given Toyota’s hunger for world domination, I wouldn’t be surprised if they were positioning the Prius to be next choice of the world’s largest purchaser of cabs. Still, girthsome Americans worry about the comfort of the compact hybrid, cargo space is clearly an issue, and the Commission is despairing that "there isn’t a vehicle now on the market that can solve the city’s needs." They’re even negotiating with automakers to produce a custom purpose-built Taxi of Tomorrow, which if it turns out anything like NASCAR’s Car of Tomorrow, won’t make too many people too happy.

But what might be a good pick from automakers’ current offerings? Say you’re a cab driver who has to spend all day in your vehicle, you don’t want to get murdered at the gas pump, and you want to be able to carry a decent number of passengers and their stuff.  What would you want to drive?

Those of you who don’t know, the Northeast got hammered by two storms within two days of each other. Where I live in Albany NY, we managed to get 16 inches by the time it was all said and done. Thankfully I had my new snows on and was able to continue Christmas shopping and find some time for a reverse donut or two. I’ve got a ton of good memories driving in the snow, from keeping a fishtale going for a mile on a vacant highway in my Parisienne to driving in snow so deep my front bumper was plowing. The best was making 75 dollars in one night getting people unstuck from snow banks without using a truck. For all of you that live in the South or out West, you don’t know what you’re missing. For those of you that do know what I’m talking about, what are the best snow driving memories that you have?

These Cubes were spotted at the Pratt Institute in New York, where they are being modified for the New York Auto Show in May. Still no word on when exactly these cool little cars will land at Nissan dealers. More over at Jalopnik.

Check out Gwen’s Grand Prix. She did much of the bodywork and sprayed that luminous House of Kolor candy-lime and black two-tone. Not only did the paint turn out beautifully, she’s got some great glam-shots of the car amidst all kinds of interesting backdrops, including this dilapidated warehouse district in Buffalo, NY—one of my favorite crumbling upstate burghs.