Part four in my vacation post series brings us to the Petersen museum in LA, a place which I'm sure needs no introduction.

I did both the guided vault tour and perused the main display. No pictures allowed during the former, which, given how quickly the guide moves from car to car, is honestly the best way to do it. You can't really absorb all the info, look at the car, and take a good pic, all within 30 seconds or so. The experience would feel rushed and incomplete.

My favs from the vault tour were four cars. The first three were the 'dictator limos,' namely Saddam's Grosser Landaulet, Khrushchev's Chaika, and a random Buddhist Lama's Hongqi. The fourth is the round-door coachbuilt Rolls owned by the widow of one of the Dodge brothers. The design is still striking today as it must have been the better part of a century ago.

There are pics and vids of the vault online, but in lieu of my own, here is what I found parked in the lobby:

It's one of the original gold-plated DeLoreans, parked next to the very DeLorean concept car I saw earlier at Pebble Beach!

As for the main display, they suggested I go from the top floor down, so that's what I did.

Top Floor

Most of this floor can be broadly defined as "origins."

The sign next to the Smith Motor Wheel from 1915 below makes it seem like it was made by Cugnot in France in 1769!

The Cugnot was a huge steam-powered vehicle made for the French military to haul stuff horses couldn't. The motor wheel existed to be attached to carts, meaning you could motorize anything that already had wheels.

Even though it's from 1915 and not 1769 as I had originally thought, it's a fascinating item nonetheless.

Another interesting exhibit was this one, containing automotive interior accessories from roughly the fifties. Look at the various car phones or in-car shaving kits and coffee machines. It's rather endearing to see how people looked at dashboard accessories at the time.

Apologies for the shade in the last two pics. The lighting wasn't super optimal for photography.

Concept cars carry another definition of "origins." They had ones from both the modern era and from mid-century!

Perhaps there's no one car that so broadly embodies the "origins" definition like the Tucker 48! It was an extremely early mover for countless technologies, and is probably the biggest "shoulda coulda woulda" of the entire automotive industry, as an adjacent museum curator put it. Easily my favorite car on this floor.

Notice the little manual shifter on the column!

This floor was also where the movie cars were. My two favorites among the ten or so were these, all of which were of course used in filming:

Middle Floor

One could define this floor as what cars are capable of. The headliner on this floor was the hypercar display! So many carbon fiber bodies

Quite a few hotrods were nearby.

On the other side was a room full of McLaren race car lineage.

A small section had some outside-the-box definitions of what a vehicle is capable of. My favorite was this invisible motorcycle by a Japanese designer:

"Invisible" doesn't have to mean you can't physically see something...it can also mean you simply don't notice it at all.

Not gonna lie, though, my favorite on this floor wasn't any of that... Nestled in the electric car display was this:

The morning before I visited, I happened to see a post about a children's book they made when they launched the EV1. This car was literally marketed to people as a household pet! No wonder they got so attached to these cars, and no wonder they hated GM so much when they crushed them afterwards.

This particular fluffy, adorable little puppy was the one that got road-tripped from LA to Detroit. The guy's road trip blog is still up, in all its early-90s-Internet glory!

http://www.kingoftheroad.net/charge_across_america/charge_html/chargehome.html

Lower Floor

I can't wait to show you this. My favorite display in this entire museum was across almost all of this floor: a display full of actual Bond cars!! Enjoy.

Lastly, a small part of this floor had the various Mercedes-Benzes that Andy Warhol featured in his paintings.

That about covers my time at the Petersen. More vacation content to come.

Well before OG Oppo was brutally decapitated like a doomed crewmate in a game of Among Us, I drove my little Zastava the hour or so to my mechanic's shop. The aim was to fix a plethora of leaks, change the belts, plus to finally get it to freakin' start reliably.

The engine ended up producing some sort of worrying smell about 30-45min in (it's been so long now, I can't remember exactly why). With a strong desire to not have to call a tow truck, I pulled onto the hard shoulder of the highway and waited for the smell to subside before continuing. Eventually, we reached our destination, but not before the brake pedal suddenly got as hard as a rock.

But no, that wasn't enough: later that day, as my mechanic was pulling it into the shop, the shift linkage broke! He had to muscle the car into neutral, which could now literally only be moved by pushing it.

So to recap, on top of these existing issues:

1. Engine oil leak
2. Transmission oil leak
3. New belts needed
4. Starter rebuild needed
5. Further investigation on any reason why it potentially wouldn't start/run properly with items #1-4 addressed

We now also had:

6. Brake pedal solid as a rock (surprise, surprise, the replacement master cylinder the bad restorers installed is probably a pile of crap)
7. Broken shifter linkage

Now, this doctor's visit was never meant to be a short one, especially since fixing a botched resto can take who knows how long. As such, I added in a couple of "might as well, while it's there" items:

8. Replacement of the passenger's door latch (the one on the car now cannot lock; I finally found a brand new one!)
9. Replacement of the clips holding the door cards in place

In all this misfortune, I got lucky. The only other Zastava 750 owner in Vancouver reached out - his car succumbed to the rust monster, and he won't have the time to fix it in a long while. As such, he had some parts to give away and asked me if I needed anything... Long story short, he gave me a brand new starter for zero dollars!

That of course means we're adding:

10. Starter replacement (the old one will still be rebuilt, so I have a spare I hopefully will never need)

Part of the botched resto is the laughably terrible paint job: the paint is flaking off and has tons of trash beneath. In particular, the engine cover has giant chips coming off like Goldmember's skin flakes (see above). The blue parts of the body look good from ten feet, however, and the interior parts like the door jambs are inexplicably perfect.

My plan was to get the engine cover repainted as part of this visit, then get collector's plates for the car. I'd get the exterior fully repainted at some undetermined point down the road.

Sounds pretty good, right? I'll get back to that in a minute.

The reason why all this work isn't done yet is two-fold:

Parts Availability

I had to source all the parts before work could begin. I have a few classic Fiat parts websites online plus a couple sources in Serbia; the problem is, all of them have what they have when they have it... So if you don't get the part you need when it shows up, who knows when or if they'll have it again.

I will say that I managed to source all the needed parts surprisingly quickly, but it all still took its time. That leads me neatly to:

Scheduling and Priorities

Besides the classic Italian cars my mechanic knows inside and out, he also fixes modern, everyday cars. In essence, 'hobby cars' (including his own) take a backseat to someone's daily driver that needs attention. And this is a guy that really believes in doing it right the first time, so you can imagine the demand in a city where cutting corners is the norm.

On top of that, he wants to block out a week to crank my car's work out in one go. Finding a week for that will...uh...take a while.

This doesn't bug me because (a) he's not charging me on a time basis, but on a per-job basis, and (b) the car hasn't been able to move under its own power for about nine of the ten years I've had it; I don't want it back until it works.

Now, remember those plans for the paintjob? Well, all this waiting has revealed just how crappy the paintjob really is: the blue on the roof has cracked and faded hard since I dropped it off. It's already way too fargone to even have a hope of getting approved for collector's plates as it is.

So, in order to take advantage of $300-500 a year insurance, I'll have to spend like $6,500 to have it repainted properly first...

Needless to say, I have no intention of even considering any paintwork before it's mechanically perfect.

But yeah, that's the update. It's a waiting game to hopefully fix its many, many problems in one go. It'll be a while before we have scenes like the one below again.

But we’ll get there.

During my recent vacation, I met up with a good friend of mine who's also very much into cars. Besides carving some roads up together, we also made the drive back to Canada in tandem.

If you've ever been to Oregon, you'll know that due to the laws there, gas station attendants are a mandatory part of the experience. Naturally, as car people, we don't really want someone who 'doesn't get it' to drip fuel all over our paint, or to damage the finish with a careless move of the nozzle. A surprise to precisely no one, both my friend and I shared that opinion.

As such, the northbound drive out of California was marked with a fill-up at the final Shell station found in said state, in the hopes of not touching any fuel filler caps until Washington.

Now, the distance from that station to the nearest one in Vancouver, WA was going to be a bit over 550km (~340mi). Not impossible, but certainly pushing it if you drive like a car enthusiast...

Admittedly, though, we weren't even entertaining this idea all that seriously after we left that last California station: we thoroughly enjoyed the drive to our overnight accommodations in Eugene. But on arrival, we realized that both our distances to empty showed more than enough range to get to that not-so-elusive station on the WA side of the greater Portland area.

Challenge accepted.

We left the following morning with a rather light foot - my friend in particular. My pace on the short drive to the highway was completely chill: Efficient mode, just enough gas to get going, shifting at well under 3k rpm. Nothing too special, though I likewise wasn't paying specific attention to the levity of my inputs.

My friend, however, disappeared very early on behind me! I remember wondering if he had dropped an item in the car or something...

The journey began that morning with my distance to empty being 24km higher than the amount of kilometers we needed to cover. Only after the first couple slow fuel-efficient minutes on the highway did I check my DTE again. That delta was no longer 24km - it was now 1km!

I radioed my friend to tell him my newfound worry as I turned the A/C off. He retorted, "no wonder; you made quick work getting out of town back there!"

With our cruise controls having already been so firmly fixed to the speed limit that eighteen-wheelers were passing us - as glacial as their maneuver was - I was convinced there wasn't much we could do to improve my situation. I'd surely have to rely on the politeness of whatever gas station attendant would be subject to my request to fill my own gas. However, my friend had his vast F1 knowledge up his sleeve and suggested I draft him to gain more range. He was sitting pretty with an extra 14 miles or so (~22km), after all.

"Worth a shot," I replied. He passed me and our experiment began.

All those nuts pegging their Insights to the Mansfield bars of tractor trailers may have a point after all: drafting my friend's Evora added over 100km to my DTE by the time we reached northern Oregon!

Needless to say, my A/C had long since been switched back on.

Over in the Evora, however, things weren't looking so good. We had been trading DTE readings the entire time, and the Lotus' delta had been dropping, fast. Given my newfound range riches, we switched spots so the Evora could draft the M4 instead.

The remaining bit of Oregon proved to be quite warm for my friend. Not because of the summer heat, but because using the A/C in an Evora robs most of ten miles from the range, according to the trip computer! Cracking a window open robbed four miles. Adding to his thermal experience was the fact that, despite our best efforts drafting, the range simply didn't seem to improve quickly enough.

"The fuel light just turned on," he reported, probably somewhere between Woodburn and Wilsonville. I, meanwhile, was leading us both literally and figuratively with a sixth of a tank left.

We hadn't even reached Portland yet, and the final bar of his digital fuel gauge had halved. By the time we were driving through the southern edge of Portland, that half had halved itself. "I didn't even know it got that granular," he quipped.

Regardless, it seemed that he just might make it. I joked that it would be a 'scripted for TV' level of closeness, as the needle in my own fuel gauge dipped below that last sixth... The full irony of those words made itself apparent while coasting through the northern part of Portland, the moment when that last bit of digital British fuel gauge extinguished itself.

"My distance to empty now reads three dashes, and it's telling me to 'refuel now!'" He was officially nervous that he might not make it to any gas station. I found one nearby that happened to be the northern-most Shell on the Oregon side. With my hearty delta still largely intact, I told him I'd lead us to that Oregon Shell the second he decided to make the call.

A minute later, he made the call, and we re-routed. It was no longer a race to the state border, but a race to get fuel at any cost.

The off-ramp conveniently looped right onto the street where the station was. We soon saw what in that moment was the friendliest, most welcoming symbol in the world peeking above the roofs and utility poles, diagonally to our left: a big yellow seashell. Waiting for a little flashing green arrow, after the stale red we encountered at first, was the only thing between us and the looming possibility of having to get out and push the Lotus the remaining few meters.

Good thing they added all that lightness.

Imagine our surprise when the cars immediately next to us got their green light while our left turn signal stayed red... We were going to have to wait what would undoubtedly feel like an hour for the next light cycle to pass, with the Lotus running on literal fumes! The supercharged Toyota V6 was still idling normally, but it was anyone's guess how false that tiny sense of comfort really was.

So close, yet so far.

The '2GR that could' still had something to combust by the time the next light cycle finally came. This time, we got our flashing green arrow! My friend gingerly let out the clutch and feathered the gas, as we single-filed over the tram tracks and into the gas station.

The attendant let us pump our own gas.

It's been too long since I went on a proper vacation...I figured I'd make up for lost time and carve out a solid road trip for myself. I'll get to other parts of said vacation in later posts - in short, it was crafted around two pillars, the first of which was finally going to Monterey Car Week...in my own car, no less!

If you've never been, imagine the wildest Cars and Coffee you've ever seen quite literally taking over an entire town for a week. Not only do all your childhood posters come to life, but during this time, people drive cars which otherwise never see the light of day as if they're Corollas or something.

Nothing drives this point home more than randomly seeing a Diablo SV, street-parked next to an Equinox and a Camry, in a totally random part of Monterey.

Apart from the copious, eventually jading amounts of actual exotics, you have more events available than time to attend them. Below is my account of the ones I chose.

I hope you like cars.

Laguna Seca

Leading up to the actual races on Saturday are a bunch of qualifier races held on the preceding days. The interesting part is two-fold:

(1) the cars being raced are vintage race cars. We're talking anything from century-old Bugattis to modern LM racecars, and quite literally everything in between.

(2) Not only can you watch all these races, but your ticket gives you free roam of the paddock!

The Auctions

Like Laguna Seca, the auctions last all week. You can attend public previews to see every single car they're gonna sell, alongside attending the actual auctions, if you're itching to bid on that Ferrari F50. As cars get sold, the cars populating the previews change.

RM Sotheby's:

Gooding:

Legends of the Autobahn

Almost self-explanatory: it's a show of all German cars, except Porsches.

Photo limit reached! Continued in comments.

I guess I should make a post, too

As I’m sure you’re all hearing for the first time (jk), I met up with @CarsOfFortLangley , @gmctavish , and @Exage03040 to tackle the Stawamus-Indian Arm FSR.

I was fairly confident, given the previous owner of my truck - an industrial auction territory manager - spent many of its first two years and 173k km on roads like this one (albeit sans step rails, which I added).

(Y'all should have seen the massive clump of hardened dirt I took off the top of one of the skid plates, after I bought this thing )

Given the truck was in great shape after all that, it would clearly be able to handle this notoriously easy trail.

However, the trail ended up being more challenging than anticipated - prior weather conditions seemed to have obliterated several water crossings, making the approaches quite steep.

You only realize this when you’re staring at such a crossing through your windshield. There’s no turning back at that point: the only option is to man up and find the best line through.

While the step rails have 13” of ground clearance - and the front bumper a bit more - quite literally every centimeter you could squeeze out would prove valuable in crossing the unexpectedly steep, rocky terrain, without leaving a part of your vehicle on the trail.

Good thing there’s touch-up paint.

In the end, a full work day’s worth of surprisingly rough remote trail driving only managed to leave:

• A couple minor scrapes on the bottom of the step rails, which I'll be able to touch up
• Damage to the already faded front bumper (cheaply repainted by the PO due to his usage)
• A bashed front license plate bracket (already cracked due to the PO's usage)

I'm yet to crawl underneath it, but I don't anticipate finding anything worrysome.

I had tackled a couple much smaller trails before, but this was my first real offroading experience. As such, it yielded quite a few lightbulb moments...

For instance, I now know why the PO had the front bumper and grille repainted, or why the wheels have some gnarly chips on the middle of the spokes. I know how he cracked the front plate bracket, why the clearcoat below the door handles was so faded, or why the rocker panels were so full of chips that I had to get them repainted before I could get the paint polished.

Most interesting of all, this experience bore a cool idea for a future off-road rig (or two), which I'll keep a secret until we get there...

Until then, the truck will return to bad weather/practical/hauling duty as I continue bringing it up to Fancy Boi 4x4 status, and prepping it to tow a car hauler.

Shout out to the guys for spotting me! Was a good time tackling the trail and hanging with you all.

Without further ado, here are the rest of the pics!

Links to the guys' posts about the drive (in order of posting):

https://opposite-lock.com/topic/25390/cofl-offroad-stawamus-indian-iii-oppo-meet

https://opposite-lock.com/topic/25491/stawamus-indian-fsr-oppo-trip-iii

https://opposite-lock.com/topic/25662/repost-the-stawamus-oppo-meet-exage-grindset

The crown jewel of Car Week, the whole point of its existence, is the event on the last day (Sunday): the Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance. The entire day is reserved for perusing the finest cars, almost exclusively from before WWII (many from before WWI!). You get up close and personal with their unbelievable level of craftsmanship and attention to detail, as you're serenated by the calming voices of the show hosts via loudspeaker.

The most colorful description of the level these cars are at was when the cars which won awards that day were driven from the display lawn to the stage. Imagine a massive, hundred year old V12 driving literally half a meter past you, without making a sound. The average modern car isn't any quieter than anything here which wasn't deliberately made to be loud...

It's quite the thing to behold. Nothing primitive about these century-old cars.

A bit of history before we dive into today's photodump. The Pebble Beach golf course is located on 17-mile drive, which is actually the main street of a giant gated community. You actually pass through a toll booth to drive on this road!

Anyway, 17-mile drive was originally a racetrack for the residents. After someone's car understeered onto somebody else's lawn, the track got its painted lines and was no longer used for racing. But so that the racing world would not lose 17-mile drive's most fun section, they decided to duplicate it when building the Laguna Seca track - this section of Laguna Seca is called the Corkscrew!

During the Concours d'Elegance, though, 17-mile drive is closed, becoming the designated parking lot for the event! Drive the road until you find a spot (lede pic), then catch one of the many coach buses that shuttle you to the show.

Nothing can prepare you for the amounts of Duesenbergs, Pierce Arrows, Rolls Royces, Lincolns, and Zagatos you're about to encounter, though.

I want to highlight one car in particular: a Chrysler 300 made by Ghia. The striking part of this car for me was how it manages to be both blatantly American and blatantly Italian at the same time.

This kind of cultural yin-yang is virtually impossible to find, at least in the automotive world. It's a massively difficult balance to strike, given how strong and different both of those countries' design languages are.

A section of the main lawn was saved for the "unorthodox propulsion" category... Among them was a Stanley Steamer, a wood-burning Citroën next to a coal-powered one, a hundred year old electric car (it escapes me which one exactly), and...this.

I finally got to see a Chrysler turbine car in person!! The heat it pushed out as it drove by for its award could have kept all of us warm in the 14 degree Celsius weather.

More about the Concours d'Elegance in the comments.

The second C&C was in fact technically outside of LA, taking over a huge mall parking lot in Orange County. I think half of all GT350s sold are here in LA, along with many, many other cars.

Of particular note is this Aston. I believe it's one of the 25 or so factory replicas made a couple years ago, with the full suite of Goldfinger gadgets!

General Carspotting

Some say you can just go to Car Week and not attend any events, having more than enough to see just by walking on the street and visiting the parking lots of said events.

This is true.

That concludes Car Week part I. Part II coming in a week or so.

@gettingoldercarguy OTOH, straight acceleration can only take you so far... I'd argue the experience of a manual ICE car counts for more than people think.

In my first post, I mentioned my vacation had two pillars, the first being Monterey Car Week. Well, the second pillar was going to BMW M’s facility at the Thermal track for some performance driver training.

My car came with the M Driver’s Package, which means it has an increased speed limiter (280km/h vs the usual 270) and a voucher for a training session at one of BMW’s many track facilities worldwide, the closest being Thermal, just two hours or so east of LA. That facility only does the M Driver's Package training once a month; the August date was conveniently the week after Car Week! So I planned my entire trip around those two events.

Now, when something's included with your particular spec, you'd think it wouldn't be a problem to redeem it with the same company that sold you the car...

Imagine my surprise and frustration when BMW Canada told me my car didn't have the M Driver's Package at all, while I was holding the Canadian MY20 M4 order guide in my hand:

If you know me at all, you know I research every nut and bolt before I buy a car. Naturally, I knew exactly what I was buying, and knew damn well my car had that package. I had to chase this for four months before BMW finally gave me what I paid for - no small part of that effort was my dealer emailing back and forth with corporate, trying to convince them to do the right thing.

Meanwhile, the date that I wanted (and soon needed) went from 15 or so available spots down to six, then down to only ONE left. They couldn't actually get me any date before all this song and dance was very much complete. I had of course booked all my hotels around this date, plus the training session was the only reason I was going to Palm Springs to begin with. So while I did have a plan B, the frustration doubled as we got closer to my trip without any resolution.

By the time BMW finally sent me and processed my voucher, it was the week before I was leaving for California...and that one lone spot somehow stayed available until I was able (allowed?) to nab it.

That seems to be a theme with this car.

Anyway, it was all smooth sailing from that point on. The session itself was great! Due to the desert heat (37 Celsius at night, about 45 during the day), summer sessions start at 6:30 AM, so you're done by the early afternoon before the heat reaches its peak.

Of course, for sessions like these, you don't use your own car, but they provide you a fleet of new M cars to use in the various exercises.

We used the G82 M4 Competition for some braking exercises and several lead-follow laps on the main track at the Thermal club (the instructors led us in G80 M3s):

On the track, the G82s were naturally very capable, having no trouble getting up to the recommended 130mph on the back straight, or with producing crisp upshifts at the recommended 6,000rpm, nor cutting the ideal line through every corner. Have no doubt it was a good time. But it's a big, heavy car and you feel every bit of this. I bet the ~500lb advantage of my F82 would go a long way here.

The instructors took us out for some very sideways hot laps in the G80s at the end, which itself was a ton of fun. I also managed to record two full lead-follow laps while riding shotgun, but don't quite see a way to attach that video here.

As a side note, the track at Thermal has condos along its edges: there's a private garage at the ground level of each one, and two levels of living space above that looking directly at the track. They told us the only way to get a membership at Thermal is to buy one of these condos, which are allegedly often priced at 2 mil or so...

The next car we used was the F87 M2 Competition with the DCT for an emergency avoidance exercise, along with autocross on BMW's dedicated (smaller) track at the facility.

This thing was made for autocross, and was a ton of fun to thread through the course. I missed out on having the fastest autocross time of the day by a literal hair, as it turned out there was also someone else there that day with autocross experience

Last but not least, we used F90 M5 Competitions for the skidpad exercises. Put it in RWD mode with traction fully off, and do circles trying to initiate a drift then immediately correct, five times a lap. Later on, we tried to hold drifts as long as we could, finishing with a race of sorts where we'd try to get around the skidpad without spinning. Spin and you're eliminated!

Of all the things we did, drifting was the only thing I had zero theory or experience of. Would've loved to spend a bunch more time on the skidpad, as I just began to get the hang of it at the very end.

To wrap it up, I highly recommend doing the performance driving training at BMW M's Thermal facility (or any other). The full-time instructors - with 20 years of racing experience each - are there the entire time giving feedback (and can jump in the car with you at any time you want). Plus, the group isn't too large: only six people per session.

While it's mainly about performance driving, they very purposely bake things into it which you can and should use in everyday driving. Besides certain exercises clearly being about on-road safety, most of the classroom portion at the beginning was about looking where you want to go...

Anyway, you get a certificate of completion in the end! I now have to find out if my speed limiter was already increased when the car was built, or if I have to show them this certificate before they'll do it

The only gripes I had were that (1) you have to share a car with another person, and (2) I would've wanted it to last a full day. Both those are solved in another more comprehensive (and a bit more expensive) M performance driver training course.

The provided catered lunch, however, was better than some restaurants I went to:

More vacation posts to come.

@gmctavish I saw one the other week, with a D plate and parked along an off-ramp with its four-ways on. Not sure what to make of that.

@CB my dream roadtrip was the two-week, ~3,000km Euro Delivery trip I planned for 2020:

• Pick up M4 at BMW Welt in Munich
• Drive to Monaco via Swiss alps
• Check out the French riviera
• Drive to Munich for the break-in service via Lake Como/Italian mountain passes
• Unrestricted autobahn to Frankfurt
• Nurburgring Touristenfahren
• Unrestricted autobahn to Munich via Stuttgart

I’d have done it too, if it weren’t for that meddling pandemic. Only two years later did I have a chance to do a proper road trip in my M4; I made it happen in one of my other favorite places.

• Drive from Vancouver to the Bay Area
• Attend Monterey Car Week
• Drive to Palm Springs for BMW’s M Driver Training
• Drive to LA for canyon-carving, car shows, and beach time
• Drive to SF via PCH
• Chill in Sausalito
• Drive back to Vancouver (in tandem with a friend, with his own new sports car)

@beefchips My friend did this in a Lada some years ago! It was some organized rally, and he loved the experience.

He also still has the Lada.

@MidEngine Any change of weather seems to traumatize drivers here

@Exage03040 Granville Island parking is free after 6pm, and rush hour ends at about that time. I’d be down for 7-ish?

@HFV_Junkyardin Obligatory:

@CarsOfFortLangley I think @Someoneatacura will be excited to hear this

@CarsOfFortLangley An S65, if not the Maybach equivalent that @e90m3 mentioned.

@amoore100 On the topic of multicolor elements, the South American Ram 1500 gets separate turn signals in a clear housing for the incandescent tail light option:

I greatly prefer it to the mostly-red combination tails the North American trucks get:

TBH, if mine didn’t have the LED tails, I’d have found a way to retrofit the South American tails…

@amoore100 I’m all for this, provided the turn signal is amber underneath. BMW and Audi seem to achieve this today (with their Euro models, at least).