Fuzzy Bus

Back in my days in high school, the neighbors next-door would restore a car every summer. It was so much fun anticipating what model would be brought in during the late spring. Most of the time, I had to watch the process from a distance, but every so often I’d be invited to assist. Even so, I felt very privileged to witness the transformation of old, rusty metal into a majestic like-new vehicle. My favorite over the years was probably the ’49 Volkswagen Bug, with its classic white wall tires and smooth lemon paint job. Part of the thrill was having some hands on knowledge of the older model just before the new beetle hit the market.

Now that I’m a little older and wiser, and many car shows later, I’ve started thinking about restoring cars of my own. It’s a big project and nothing like the small custom wheels job I had done on my college ride. Getting started is the hard part, because you have to choose which car you want to work on out of the ones that are available. In making the selection, I know for certain that I’d like to use whitewalls – as homage to my childhood memories. There have also been some great retro-style designs lately for specific car parts – take this grant steering wheel selection for example. Finding parts that will fit just right is somewhat of a challenge, but like a treasure hunt it’s a thrilling adventure.

General Motors has reported a three month net loss of $15.5bn (£7.8bn) as North American sales fell by 20%.

GM took a $3.3bn charge for buying out the contracts of 19,000 hourly workers who left at the end of June.

It also wrote off $1.3bn because of reduced values of big, used cars, which cut the value of formerly leased cars owned by its financing unit, GMAC.

Without one-off charges, GM lost $6.3bn compared with a net profit of $891m in the same period of 2007.

It is the third biggest quarterly loss in the carmaker’s history.

GM shares fell 4.7% in early trading.