Santa's ready to ride a Hellcat at Los Angeles

Tuesday, 4 December 2018

Motor shows are held to showcase all the latest product and technologies, right?

Well - yes and no. They like to have a bit of fun as well. After all, the public pays good money to attend such events, so they deserve to be entertained as well as educated.

So here's a selection of a few exhibits that are more entertainment value than education at this year's Los Angeles Motor Show…

Dodge created Santa a new ride for an advertising campaign, so of course it was at the LA show.

* Who says EVs can't be sexy? Not Audi.

* Meet the Gladiator: the Jeep ute you have always wanted**

Santa's Hellcat ride

In a pre-Christmas advertising campaign created by Dodge, Father Christmas declares: 'I think my ride is due for an upgrade!'

Subaru was all about encouraging people to adopt unwanted pets at the LA show. And, being Los Angeles, it did it with a dog kissing booth, just because.

So he and his elves get stuck into creating a brand-new sleigh out of a 6.2-litre hemi V8-engined Challenger SRT Hellcat Redeye.

The car's on display at the LA show. The doors have been removed, it's got a cut-down windscreen, side exhausts, and the meanest pair of skids you'll ever see.

When an ordinary Ford F550 is not enough - meet the brilliantly excessive Karlmann King.

It all raises one big question: will reindeerpower be replaced by horsepower? The children of USA will just have to wait and see.

Want to kiss a dog?

The Jeep Gladiator was only revealed at the LA show, but of course there was one with the full Mopar treatment there.

In USA, Subaru is into encouraging the adoption of unwanted pets. So at its stand, in amongst the product on display there's a kissing booth where the public can - you guessed it - kiss a dog.

During our visit, people were lining up for the opportunity to kiss a very friendly wiry-haired mutt. What fun! Good grief.

World's most expensive SUV?

You could build whatever you wanted out of Lego on the Ford stand, and keep the Lego. Probably not with one quite this big though.

At the entrance to a downstairs area called The Garage, there's the baddest-assed SUV you'll ever see - a vehicle called the Karlmann King and described as a ground stealth fighter. That's because it has bodyshell looks inspired by the Lockheed Martin F35 stealth fighter jet.

This vehicle is said to in fact be a Ford F550 SUV with $2.16 million worth of extras and opulence inside and out.

Normally we wouldn't recommend scribbling on your car with a sharpie, but Dan has a particular talent for it.

Customised Jeep ute already

Trust the Americans. No sooner do they launch a special ute version of the legendary Jeep Wrangler and call it Gladiator, but they also reveal an extra-special model called Rubicon - and then to top it all off, they also show off an extra-extra-special model designed to demonstrate the open-air potential of the Gladiator Rubicon.

Funny car, serious message: this funny car was part of a safety campaign about the dangers of texting and driving.

Understand all of that? We simply went to the extra-extra-special model, which has been created by Mopar, which is Fiat Chrysler Automobiles' parts and service organisation and which also builds small numbers of customised vehicles.

The Mopar model is a flash-looking ute, featuring a lift kit, tube doors and rock rails, off-road LED lights, a mesh sun bonnet, and a specially-designed bike carrier at the rear.

Build a Lego Ford

California offers some serious tax rebates for buying EVs, plug-ins or fuel cell vehicles. More serious than just not paying RUCs...

Ford seems to be into Lego. Not only is a full-sized racing driver made of Lego standing at the Ford stand, but there's also the opportunity for visitors to grab some Lego parts (they get to keep them) and build a figure of their own choice.

Then they are invited to place the figure in front of one of several vignettes, take a picture of it, and share it on social media.

Dan's the man with a pen

Dan Manacher is a young man who likes to go a but crazy with a pen. He's got a stand at the LA show where he's selling caps and other clothing with his own designs hand-drawn on them.

He's got his own car on display, the front of which features his penmanship. For the record, that job took 140 hours and he used up 46 Sharpies.

Message isn't funny

Funny Cars aren't called that because they're actually funny - legend has it that they began to be called that back in the 1960s because they simply looked funny. The speeds they can get up to isn't funny either - the example on display at the LA show has been clocked at 546.9 kmh, and can scorch over 1000 yards (305 metres) in an amazing 3.79 seconds.

The message on the car's flanks isn't funny either. 'Don't drive intexticated' is a multi-media safety campaign in the US to convince people that texting while driving is as socially unacceptable as drink-driving.

A survey several years ago indicated that a quarter of all collisions in USA involved people using their cellphones while driving. Wonder what the figures are for New Zealand?

Read this and weep, EV owners

New Zealand fans of electric vehicles wouldn't like this stand - it details the rebates available in California for the purchase or lease of new fuel-cell, battery EVs, and plug-in hybrids. The rebates, in US dollars, are $5000 for fuel-cell cars, $2500 for BEVs, and $1500 for PHEVs.

The scheme is called the Clean Vehicle Rebate Project, is funded by the California Air Resources Board, and administered by the Centre for Sustainable Energy.

Oh - and there are other incentives available for purchasers of electric vehicles, including federal income tax credits of up to $7500. Makes New Zealand's no-RUCs incentive a bit weak, huh?