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What was originally supposed to be a luxury estate for a high-flying developer in Minneapolis turned into an eyesore when he divorced and later went to jail for tax fraud. A local restaurateur decided to complete the project, complete with an eight-car garage that you drive to through a tunnel with a built-in carwash (sadly, not pictured).An outdoor pool, a private movie theater, and a sauna, plus five bedrooms and nine full baths, mean you really get your money’s worth here.Fifteen million dollars can buy you a lot of house almost anywhere, but only in Minnesota does it get you a home on a private island with an eight-car garage and a hidden access tunnel that features a carwash.

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Located on Lake Minnetonka, the gaudy home started as a 2003 idea by then-developer Jeffrey Wirth. Wirth called it the “Isle of Windemere” after the boyhood summer home of Ernest Hemingway, but it was a case of to have and have not for the developer, who stopped construction in 2006, in part because he was going through divorce proceedings. The New York Post said the property “sat half-finished and overtaken by weeds while the price dropped to $4 million” once Wirth got into trouble with the law, and those problems escalated in 2010. In 2012, Wirth was sentenced to four and a half years in prison for tax evasion. Prosecutors said Wirth and his wife paid just $7567 in federal income taxes between 2003 and 2005, despite income of almost $28 million.

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With Wirth out of the picture, the unfinished Windemere castle was purchased in 2013 for $1,875,000 by local restaurateur Kam Talebi. The Post says he then spent around $5 million to complete the project and make it look mostly the way Wirth originally planned. The builder with whom Wirth originally worked, David Erotas, came on board to help Talebi finish construction. Erotas told Artful Living Magazine in 2013 that Talebi planned to “scale down the interiors—which were admittedly pretty over-the-top, but many of the unusual features he’s going to keep.”
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Talebi has now decided to sell the mansion, so if you like the idea of approaching your garage through an underground tunnel with the aforementioned carwash, then you might also love the glass elevator and chandeliers, the marble countertops, and plenty of panoramic windows where you can confirm that the sun also rises over the surrounding lake. There’s an outdoor pool, a small movie theater and bar, and a weight room and sauna, along with five bedrooms and nine full bathrooms. All this for the $15 million plus annual property taxes of just over $71,000.

(c)RMLSMN via Realtor.com

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It’s not that guests are forced to go across the river and into the trees to come visit, but they also don’t have to use the carwash tunnel. There’s a bridge to a terraced motor court, the Post says, where you can get into the garage from the side. Erotas told the local city council in 2014 that forcing visitors to enter the garage gives the owner the “opportunity to screen the entrance from adjoining properties . . . another consideration was security.” Because you never know who might be stopping by to try and snag a free carwash.
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As much as we’d love to have a vast collection, most car lovers can’t afford, maintain, store, or look after a bunch of cars. Life and income limits many of us to two cars, which inspired this week’s challenge, the two-car solution. We set a generous budget of $40,000 to find the perfect pairing to suit all of our needs wants.Regular viewers will notice that contributor Jonathon Ramsey isn’t on the show this week. Stranded by a shattered windshield in a small-town hotel without decent WiFi means we don’t get to see what sort of unhinged two-car collection he would’ve gathered. So, we invited back Luke Sellenraad, a C/D staffer and now GM-employee. Sellenraad chooses a 2003 S2000 and a 2010 Lexus GX460. We could see Ramsey choosing both of those, but probably not at the same time. Road & Track’s newest staffer, John Pearley Huffman who rarely reads the challenges and believed the budget to be $30,000, selects two low-mileage Mazdas with manual transmissions. His fun car is a 2006 NC-generation Miata, while his practical choice is the slower-than-slow CX-5 manual. Pearley admits to never having driven the CX-5 with a manual, which leads the rest of the crew to try to warn him about how slow the things are. We also bring up the body roll of the early NCs, but in typical Pearley fashion, he dismisses all of our concerns.Senior editor Joey Capparella follows Pearley down Miata way. However, Capparella’s 2016 Miata is ten years newer and while we can’t fault the vehicle choice, the price seems quite high for a five-year-old Miata with 50,000 miles. To balance his two-seater, Capparella selects a 2011 Acura TSX Wagon that draws respect, but we wish the wagon had been offered with the TSX sedan’s manual gearbox.By the time deputy testing director K.C. Colwell’s choices are revealed, we almost expect to see a two-seater as his “play” car. Colwell presents his Japanese-market 1995 Toyota High-Ace pickup first, leading some of us to think it’s his fun choice, but his enthusiast choice is actually a garnet-red 2008 Lexus IS-F. His 416-hp V-8-powered sedan might not have a manual, but Colwell expects it to outlive everyone else’s choices.Last to present is deputy editor and host Tony Quiroga who opens with a rust-free but slightly ratty 1988 Mitsubishi Montero two-door manual similar to the four-door Montero we compared back in 1991. Pearley believes he sees rust in the radio, which is as ridiculous as that sounds. The remaining $33,000 of the $40,000 budget goes to a fine-looking 1991 Porsche 911 Carrera 4 convertible that looks pleasingly original, but the choice gains no traction with the rest of the shoppers. Pearley, with zero evidence, seems to think that the 911 is a scam. Lots of laughs in this one, but hopefully Ramsey will get a new windshield installed before we record next week.

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The 1970s-era Opel Manta was mainly a Europe-market car, although it was sold in the U.S. for four years. The earlier Manta A has become a cult favorite, so it makes sense that Opel chose it as the subject of a restomod to showcase electrification in the Manta GSe ElektroMod.It’s small, light, and low on horsepower and range, but we love it anyway. Too bad Opel has no plans to manufacture one.Few Americans remember the Opel Manta, even though it has been sold here from ’71 through ’75 and, as we wrote in our November 1976 issue, “has always found favor with this magazine.” It’s a different story in Europe, where the original Manta had a successor that was built into the late 1980s. But while the Manta B was long seen as a tacky pseudo-racer, its image just recently beginning to recover, the Manta A has always been regarded as a real designer piece: a car priced for the masses, but of almost stunning beauty and sensuality.Prices for vintage Manta A models have long been on the rise, and given its cult status, it was a natural fit when Opel was looking for a suitable candidate for a restomod as a showcase for electrification. And so Opel’s engineers took a Manta A and turned it into a compact, sporty stand-alone EV that makes us long for a time of smaller, lighter cars—and perhaps even look forward to an electrified future.

Opel

The original Manta was fitted with 1.2-, 1.6-, and 1.9-liter four-cylinder engines, rated between 60 and 105 horsepower; the top-of-the-line GT/E was rated at 117 mph and took around 11 seconds for the zero-to-60-mph sprint, underscored by Opel’s typical brawny sound.

The electric conversion bumps power to 147 horsepower, which are still transmitted to the rear wheels through a four-speed manual transmission. Rowing through the gears is possible but not necessary. You can also just leave it in fourth gear. The instantly available 188 pound-feet of torque renders the first three gears strictly optional.The relatively small 31.0-kWh battery pack, which can be recharged at 9 kW, limits range to a modest 125 miles, but it also helps keep weight at just around 2500 pounds. This EV is nimble and likes to be tossed around corners, especially since its 195/40R-17 front and 205/40R-17 rear tires, on Ronal wheels, provide far more grip than the Manta’s original rubber.

Opel

Opel calls the one-off EV the Manta GSe even though, back in the Manta A’s time, the GS and GS/E designations were reserved for the upmarket Commodore range. Visually, it is a highly successful restomod effort: the glass and panels remain untouched, the chrome bumpers are gone, the quad headlights make way for Opel’s current headlight style, and the quad taillamps are replaced with LED units. The black hood, a signature element of Opel’s sporty models, remains, and the “visor” that takes the space of the grille can display messages, such as the slightly cringeworthy “I am on a zero e-mission.”

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The interior is enhanced with ultra-futuristic display panels, the original airbag-less steering wheel gets a 12-o’-clock mark, and the headliner is now clad with Alcantara. As a fun touch, the recuperation rate can be adjusted with a classic slider positioned below the central screen.Keeping sensitivities of the collector scene in mind, Opel is quick to point out that the Manta GSe was created from a car that needed restoration anyway; no pristine example has been touched. And they even point out that it would be possible to revert this example to its original condition. To which we say: Don’t do it. And figure out how to put this one into production.
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In the U.S. in 2020, according to the Governors Highway Safety Association, vehicle-related deaths of pedestrians were up almost 5 percent—and they rose even more in proportion to the lower number of total miles that vehicles traveled during the pandemic year.Infrastructure weaknesses and poor lighting conditions were partly to blame, but the safety group also blames the growing popularity of larger SUVs and trucks.One New York state senator is proposing a safety rating system for the big vehicles based on how likely they are to hurt or kill pedestrians in a collision.Last year may turn out to have been one of the deadliest years on record for pedestrians. Early projections by the Governors Highway Safety Association say that the total number of pedestrian deaths in 2020 were up 4.8 percent, and that was despite a pandemic-influenced 16.5 percent drop in vehicle miles traveled.

Because fewer of us were driving, the GHSA projects a startling 21 percent increase in the rate of pedestrian deaths per billion vehicle miles traveled (VMT). That would be the largest annual increase in that rate since reporting began in 1975. In raw numbers, the association is predicting 6721 pedestrian deaths, and 2.3 deaths per billion VMT. It will be at least six months until the final numbers are available.The GHSA did find some good news in 2020’s projected numbers: 19 states and Washington, D.C., saw their pedestrian deaths decrease last year. Of those, Alabama, Florida, Hawaii, Kentucky, Massachusetts, New York, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina are all projected to have double-digit declines in pedestrian fatalities compared to 2019. The GHSA, which represents the state highway safety offices, found plenty of reasons for those numbers: infrastructure and lighting issues, to begin with. In 2019, three out of four pedestrians were killed at night, and about the same proportion were not at an intersection, according to the GHSA. But as the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) found in a report last fall, some people out driving during the height of COVID restrictions were taking more risks—a statistically important number of them were driving faster, driving while impaired, or weren’t wearing seatbelts. Distracted driving continues to be a problem. So while some activists and politicians point to the ever-rising numbers of SUVs and trucks, the problem is more complex. Those states seeing declines have SUVs and trucks, too, after all. It is also impossible to ignore some correlation between the increasing popularity of SUVs and the increasing number of pedestrian deaths. According to the GHSA report, between 2010 to 2019, the number of pedestrians killed by an SUV increased by 69 percent, while the number involving passenger cars was up 46 percent. According to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), pedestrian deaths accounted for 17 percent of car crash fatalities in 2019 as compared to 13 percent in 2010. A small-scale study in 2020 by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety demonstrated the increased risk to pedestrians caused by SUVs. “Between 20 and 39 mph, three out of 10 crashes with SUVs resulted in a fatality compared with just five out of 22 crashes that involved cars. So, a pretty significant increase for SUVs,” IIHS spokesperson Joe Young said. While auto manufacturers have taken steps over the past several decades to make SUVs less dangerous in vehicle-to-vehicle crashes, “What this study tells us is that those efforts did nothing for pedestrians,” Young said. Trucks and SUVs Rated 1-5 for Pedestrian Safety?The New York State Senate has introduced a bill, SB 4307, that would require a pedestrian-safety rating for every vehicle, scoring them on a 1 to 5 scale similar to the ratings NHTSA already applies to vehicles. The difference is that this would rate vehicles based on the damage done in collisions with cyclists and pedestrians. The bill’s author, Sen. Andrew Gounardes, who represents Brooklyn, said SUVs and trucks are exactly the reason he’s advocating for a new rating system that would be implemented by the New York Department of Motor Vehicles.”Most people aren’t primed to think about the impact that their vehicle purchases have on the greater safety of people in the environment around them,” Gounardes told Bloomberg. “We hope this will help educate people in a way that will help them see the consequences of their choices.”If this bill were to become law, the ratings would be posted online, and all vehicles for sale in New York State would be required to display the 1-5 numerical rating.Safety Tech on BoardTechnology may help with pedestrian safety. “But we’re not there yet,” Pam Shadel Fischer, GHSA senior director for external engagement, said. The crash technology that’s expected to be adopted on all new cars by 2022 was designed for vehicle-to-vehicle detection. Automated emergency braking and front crash prevention technology, for example, will engage the brakes if a stopped vehicle is detected, but you can’t count on every vehicle to detect the presence of a human in every situation. In addition, lane-keeping-assist technology may alert a driver to a pedestrian, but its strength is in detecting cars.However, as the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety points out, SUVs and other large vehicles are gradually getting safer: “Earlier research had shown that SUVs, pickup trucks and passenger vans were two to three times more likely than cars to kill a pedestrian in the event of a crash. However, most earlier studies were based on crash data collected in the 1970s, ’80s, and’ 90s. Since then, SUV manufacturers have made substantial design changes.”IIHS started testing vehicle-to-vehicle detection systems in 2019, measuring how well they alert a driver to the presence of a pedestrian. Safety-minded SUV buyers can look at the “front crash protection: vehicle to pedestrian” test results for their vehicle of choice on the IIHS website. “Even if these systems can’t fully stop a vehicle, they may slow it down substantially. And that makes a huge difference when you’re talking about a vehicle striking a pedestrian,” commented IIHS spokesperson Joe Young.
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