In today’s Cold Start, our Jason Torchinsky showed us the wonderful world of valet parking tickets. They’re almost always line drawings of a car from two decades or longer ago and they all seem to fit into two categories: squashed and unsquashed. The unsquashed line drawing ones have impressively good detail for something you’ll stare at for a split second before tossing the slip into the trash. Valet tickets aren’t the only place you’ll find sweet drawings of cool cars on everyday slips of paper.
Friend of the show and today’s COTD winner Stef Schrader pointed out one good reason to pay for parking in Austin, Texas. With a purchase of parking from a meter in Austin you get a picture of a sweet Saab!
A few years ago, this was something noticed by Doug DeMuro. Check out the wonderful Saab 900 in the parking receipt he posted on Twitter in 2018. It’s in color and everything!
The detail here is totally unnecessary, yet awesome. Perhaps the Saab came in a clip art package, so it could be accidentally great, but a black-and-white illustration of a car would achieve the same end goal. Either way, we love it. What other unexpectedly sweet car illustrations have you found on throwaway objects?
Have a great weekend, everyone!
Image: Doug DeMuro
I would gladly park illegally to get a new Saab 900
I couldn’t think of two more completely different “things” than Saab and Doug :-0
Both come with quirks and features
But one is charming while the other is annoying!
The Mackenzie brothers? Take off, eh!
My new co-worker (second day) locked his keys in his car today.
We were the last two employees in the parking lot and I saw the expression on his face and his body language as I was pulling out, waving goodbye.
I get very excited when people lock their keys in their cars.
What kind of car nerd doesn’t.
Yay! I get to try to break into a strangers car, while simultaneously helping the same stranger with a car problem.
It’s fun. It’s like a car puzzle you have to solve with a bunch of strangers and whatever tools you can scrounge up from your surroundings.
You know you car dorks love it too.
Someone locks their keys in the car in the grocery store parking lot, next thing you know four to five strangers are standing around it with spools of string and random lengths of different gauges of wire, some dudes offering up a rubber door stop he just bought.
Who among you don’t always want to get in on that.
I seek it out. I try very hard to keep the word Apathetic out of any present or future descriptions of me.
I have successfully helped strangers, co-workers, friends, family, but most often myself break into cars with the following methods:
Took my dogs for a walk, where was I?
We were once trying to get in my friends car and some lady passing by asked if we were stealing it. We replied that actual car thieves would have been inside ages ago.
Really COTD is a late comment 6pm.in a column released at 5 pm.
As a west coast U.S. reader, don’t even get me started. COTD comes out before I even get off work. I prefer COTY.
But I now use the COTD comment section to get across my random automotive thoughts as I light up a joint. Because nobody reads these except weirdo’s anyway.
I blame the sun for shining down on different parts of our stupid, spherical, rotating planet at different times.
Then again. What is time exactly?
Anyway Austin is a cool city and those are cool sticker backings. It’s nice to see that a city government, or at least one city employee cares about what they do.
The weirdest I’ve seen is when you get a parking sticker from the City of Regina, the package uses a Geely Panda to demonstrate proper sticker placement.
It’s the city that rhymes with fun!
Whoa. I wanna see that one.