What a week! We’ve had the last of the Holley Hot Rod Reunion galleries run through, we’ve seen Chad and Cole take on Rocky Mountain Race Week and walk away pretty much unscathed, and now…it’s apparently storm season. Yikes…couldn’t just rain a little, we had to get 80 MPH winds, too? Well, at least the rest of this week looks perfect to work on projects! Meantime, we’ve got another helping of some news scraps that have been roasted and prepared with some lime-infused quinoa for you to chew on. This is Scrapple…Enjoy!

1. Another financial free-for-all for Jeep.

FCA has another winner on it’s hands, it seems. On an average of the first full month of sales of the Jeep Gladiator pickup truck, with 2,458 units sold, it appears that the average transaction price was $56,403. That’s a bit of an eye-raiser, considering you can start with the Sport model at $35,040. Even the top-tier Rubicon starts at $45,040. It’s still too early to call it a sales success, but that’s not a bad first foot forward.

2. If you find the Cave of Wonders, don’t keep that secret to yourself!

It’s official: the 2020 Dakar rally will take place in Saudi Arabia. The route will start in Jeddah, on the eastern coast of the Red Sea, will head north before turning inland to the east towards Riyadh, which is scheduled as a rest day, and will see a south-west-north loop to the finish in Al-Qiddiya. In between lies sand as far as the eye can see, including a section known as the “Empty Quarter”, the infamous dune-filled expanse in the country’s southeast.

3. Now that’s meth’d up…

Ford’s Hermosillo plant in Mexico still has a certain problem: Fusions that arrive from the trains down south seem to have spare tires filled to the brim with drugs. This has happened before…last time, thousands of pounds of weed were stuffed inside of tires, and a few of those cars were even sold to customers. This time, over $3.4 million worth of methamphetamine was discovered in the spare tires of cars that had been shipped to dealerships in Ontario, Quebec and New Brunswick in Canada.

4. I’ve seen this in a video game before!

The Smyrna, Tennessee Fire Department recently had to deal with an accident cleanup. Nothing out of the ordinary, right? Well, here’s the vehicle damage: a teal Nissan Hardbody…a maroon Nissan Sentra…and a teal Nissan Hardbody.

When you start seeing multiple cars you wouldn’t normally see, that’s known as the “Grand Theft Auto effect”, which references the video games and the programming that, in short, will put lots of the same models of vehicles out into the world once you get into one. Apparently there was a glitch in Tennessee…

5. This week’s special at the Roadkill Café…

A semi-truck driver got the fright of his life near Tallahassee, Florida when he thumped a 12-foot, 463-pound alligator. It’s not the largest American alligator on record, but that’s still one sizable swamp lizard. Unfortunately, even though the alligator was walking around after the strike, it was obvious that it had been badly injured and the trapper brought to the scene to help remove the creature made the call to put it down.