Welcome to Must Read, where we single out the best stories from around the automotive universe and beyond. Today we've got reports from Texas Monthly, Popular Mechanics, and Petrolicious.
I'm a big fan of Texas Monthly and have a couple of friends who work there, so I was delighted to see a story I could include in Must Reads. This take on the Border Patrol station where celebs regularly get busted was worth it just for the Willie Nelson anecdote.
The evidence room of the Hudspeth County jail is a pothead’s treasure trove. There are stacks and stacks of bags and sacks and big cartons and small white boxes, all full of marijuana and crammed to the ceiling of a cinder-block vault the size of a four-car garage. Each bag and sack and carton and box is stamped with a case number and sealed with evidence tape, but the skunky aroma of all that pot is irrepressible, overwhelming, positively intoxicating. According to West, when he showed this room to Willie, the pothead king exclaimed, “Whoa! Y’all got a lotta shit here. You don’t need mine, give it back.”
Brett Berk takes on the Tesla v. Dealers war that's raging in courtrooms and showrooms and finds this interesting tidbit.
However, despite Tesla's current combative nature toward the established dealership system—and in what might be a disappointment to those hoping Tesla will disrupt the current car-buying experience—O'Connell tells PopMech that the EV-maker is not ruling out the possibility of establishing its own dealer network once the company grows large enough. "Elon and I have both said that there is a time when we will also want to sell our cars through franchise dealers," O'Connell says. "When we're selling a high-volume vehicle, hundreds of thousands a year, it's going to make a lot more sense to place 100 cars at once with a franchise dealer than to sell them one by one as we do right now."
Rooftop race tracks are such a brilliant/terrible idea it's a wonder we don't see more of them.
Built partially on the local football team’s grounds, partially inside the factory’s walls, and most notably on top of and in between the factory buildings themselves, the approximately one kilometer longtrack was made of brick pavers with sectioned concrete banking for its southwest and north west bends, needed to allow the nearly 90 degree turns between the peaked rooftops of the huge assembly buildings it ran atop. These corners look pretty tame in photos, but they’re actually quite steep—it’d be very difficult to climb, let alone thread a primitive, speeding car through one. A causeway allowing public access to a nearby hill allowed people to sit and watch cars being flogged high above the surrounding greenery, making it a popular picnic spot.
Photo Credits: AP/Petrolicious
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