Since yesterday’s Ford street rod was so well received, I think it’s time to give Chevy their due. The General Motors division, in addition to bringing along a raft of custom Camaros to this year’s SEMA show, also produced along a rather tastefully done up 1955 Chevrolet Bel Air with an attractively finished LS3 crate motor dropped into the engine bay.
Not bad … not bad …
Dropping a new mill into and old car has been going on since the new models first started rolling out more than a hundred years ago. Shoot, that’s what made the hot rod craze what it is when it started back in the 1950s. But here’s a modern take on the hot rod, literally. FoMoCo decided to up and drop its latest 3.5 liter EcoBoost V6 into a 1934 Hot Rod and show it off at SEMA. Sweet!
“Dodge Challenger SRT10″.
Got a helluva nice ring to it, dontcha think?
The current top-o-the-line Challenger, the SRT8, is a pretty beastly muscle car, one that delivered more than its rabid fans had expected. Quite frankly, its performance statistics are more than enough.
Dodge’s high octane SRT team apparently didn’t think so. I bet what happened is one day after work one of the SRT boys was a little more depressed than usual: the Viper is getting axed, performance now bows to mileage, the days of the muscle car is ending, etc. So he decided, screw it, if we’re going to go out, then we’re gonna go out with one hell of a bang.
Which left the question: how? Well I bet that was solved rather quickly, just get a bigger engine, and a bigger engine means only one thing: going to the Viper for its V-10.
Performance info and pics (including that of the Challenger SRT10 chillin’ with the Viper) after the jump.
Among all of the aftermarket parts and electronics at SEMA, there were plenty of new car care products on display. It’s easy to walk by them in the same way you would at the local auto parts store since most of them look the same, and as far as most of us are concerned, produce the same results. Most of them make ridiculous claims and come in ridiculous packaging.
But there are some car care products which yield better-than-expected results, or are easier to use than others. In the case of our 2008 Best New Car Care Product winner, it’s both: Continue Reading…
Kia showed off their new Koup Concept at SEMA this year. Unveiled at the NY Auto Show earlier this year, Kia is gauging reactions to see if they should put something like this into production.
This “hip” new Kia sports a 2.0-liter turbocharged 4-cylinder engine pushing out 290 horsepower, moving through an AWD drivetrain and a six-speed automatic transmission with paddle shifters. 19-inch carbon fiber wheels, LED lights, and other carbon fiber trimmed parts round out the exterior, while a very modern interior with Ultrasuede seats and an eight-speaker audio system finish the interior. Most of this won’t go into production, of course. The carbon fiber will be gone, the fancy interior materials will be replaced with plastic, and the engine will likely be de-tuned.
Take a look below for more images: Continue Reading…
The new Chevy Camaro was the Official SEMA 2008 car, but based on the amount of Nissan GT-Rs there, I’d say the GT-R was the winner. Every other booth seemed to have their own version of a tuned GT-R. We got pictures of most of them, take a look below for the gallery:
