while i was in Camboda, i was thumbing through a ridiculous wad of bills (about 4,000 Cambodian riels = 1 US dollar) when i got a good look at the back of the 500 riel bill. i saw a depiction of the Kizuna bridge spanning the Mekong river, symbolizing a modern Cambodia but a second, closer look revealed two tiny (identical) cars on the bridge. recognize it? it’s the Honda (Acura) NSX.

aside from the fact that only a relative handful of people in Cambodia can actually afford one, how spectacular is it that the Honda NSX has made it onto legal tender?

Ferrari recently released images of the new 458 Italia and i feel like i should be excited about them but i’m not; i think it looks terrible. in fact, when i first saw them, i thought they were quick renders done by some sort of Norwegian design student. let me show you what i mean.

1) what appear to be intake vents for the hood come off as “angry eyebrows” and transform the overall shape of the headlight into that of a perilously sharp sock puppet.

2) the garish front air dam looks like an afterthought and the overall feel of the front bumper reminds me of a mid ’90s Japanese economy car.

3) the positioning of the taillights over the rear vents make it look very awkward. it looks almost as if they removed a set of conventional taillight clusters, covered the empty space with gutter grating and then slapped on some spare Enzo taillights they had laying around.

4) i think i’m right in saying that there has never been a production car with three exhaust pipes. do you know why? because only five year-olds would put three exhaust pipes on a car. it looks absolutely awful.

what happened, Ferrari?

spent the day shooting a big motorcycle cruising event thing with lots of bearded, tattooed bikers. it went pretty well until some drunk white kid called me a “son of a bitch” for “bombing Pearl Harbor.”

didn’t think that sort of thing happened anymore.

i think i just caught the notoriously unemotional Dani Pedrosa cracking a smile. i wonder what queries were going through his neuro-net processors.

i’m not quite sure how many layers of hilarity and irony accompany this news but Hummer is reportedly being sold to the Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery Company. brilliant!

yesterday: i stand on the corner chatting with two homeless friends sharing a flask of vodka. a beautifully immaculate Aston Martin V8 Vantage roars by.

dumpsters are great because rich people are dumb. case in point, i found a perfectly good lower grille from a 2006-2008 Volkswagen Rabbit/Golf GTI at a posh building near downtown Los Angeles. how perfectly good? how does bubble wrap fresh from the manufacturer sound to you? mmm!

so if you know someone who’s got a current generation GTI, kick his lower grille in and link him to my auction page. thanks!

this is the plateless silver Tesla Roadster i spotted parked next to a crappy building in Los Angeles a couple of nights ago. it’s certainly not my rarest automotive sighting (i’ve stood between two Alpina Z8′s and, on another occasion, saw two Bugatti Veyrons at the same dealership) but it’s arguably the most significant. to many, the Tesla marks the beginning of the end for sports cars as we know it and is proof that efficiency and performance are not mutually exclusive. it’s a sign of greater things to come and standing briefly in its presence was a strange and wonderful experience for me.

oh yeah, the beep you hear at the 0:04 mark is a text message from my old roommate: “steal that shit it’s silent no one will know it’s gone”

i remember a time when ‘hybrid’ meant a Nissan 240sx powered by a redtop SR20DET or a Honda Civic with an H22a shoehorned into the engine bay. now when people throw the H-word around, it usually conjures up images of glass-eyed hippies who are out to change the world one bout of regenerative braking at a time. i imagine they feel good about themselves as they squeeze their little tumor-shaped death traps through traffic, looking down their noses at gas-guzzling miscreants as they check their fuel economy gauge to make sure they really are still better than everyone else.

i’m sure a lot of normal, decent people out there drive hybrids as well; it’s just a shame that they’re so frequently associated with the insecure losers who have turned it into a trend.