Carpool mk I
"The Great Canadian Carpool"
All great works of invention have their beginnings in a prototype. Before the famed Model T, Henry Ford built his ‘quadracycle’ in a gardening shed, and long before Thomas Edison developed the commercial light bulb, British scientist Warren de la Rue enclosed a coiled platinum filament in a vacuum tube, which is still the blingy-est way anyone has ever tried to light a room. So too did we, the co-creators of Carpool DeVille get our start in putting hot tubs into General Motors products in another time and place, and likewise do we owe much credit to people that gave their creative energy, their spare time, and their student loan money to this first prime mover: The Carpool Mark 1
Briefly: While we were engineering undergrads at McMaster University, this idiot skipped out on his sublet in my student domicile, but in his wake, abandoned a 1982 Chevy Malibu in the driveway. Over a keg of beer, someone joked that the car should be turned into a hot tub. It was the sort of ambition that is supposed to be discarded as soon as the next day’s hangover reveals its impracticality, but we were too young, too brazen, too determined to find a reason not to go to class to let go of what seemed to me then to be a slam-dunk of an idea. Why don’t we turn this car into a hot tub? I got down to work, and before long, friends got wind of what I was doing and offered to help. The rest, as they say, is history, and history best told in pictures with flippant captions. Enjoy!
Briefly: While we were engineering undergrads at McMaster University, this idiot skipped out on his sublet in my student domicile, but in his wake, abandoned a 1982 Chevy Malibu in the driveway. Over a keg of beer, someone joked that the car should be turned into a hot tub. It was the sort of ambition that is supposed to be discarded as soon as the next day’s hangover reveals its impracticality, but we were too young, too brazen, too determined to find a reason not to go to class to let go of what seemed to me then to be a slam-dunk of an idea. Why don’t we turn this car into a hot tub? I got down to work, and before long, friends got wind of what I was doing and offered to help. The rest, as they say, is history, and history best told in pictures with flippant captions. Enjoy!
The Legend of El Presidente
There are ghosts, they say, of carpools past, and carpools that never were. The sacred, shifting mists of memories and myths tell this story...
Some time around 2005, after a life long with adventure, mishaps and glories, Carpool Mk1 expired. No one knows for certain where it ended up, though rumours abound: It's in a warehouse of the Museum of Civilisation in Hull, Quebec... It's at the bottom of Hamilton Harbour... It's been converted into a flower box on E. Stanley Avenue in Vancouver... We may never know. We should never know. However, after its demise, the hole left by its rich existence demanded to be filled, and in the spirit of these sorts of things, it demanded to be filled by something better. And something.... bigger.
Back in the day, if you have a Chevrolet and you were looking to upgrade, tradition dictated that you consider maybe an Oldsmobile or - if life had been good to you - a Cadillac.