A round up of brief pickup, SUV and automotive news items of note from the week ending February 27, 2026. A $500 engine that can produce 1K horsepower + more
We see a lot of news stories cross our desks in the course of a week. Not all of them are big enough to warrant a full writeup by your tireless Pickup Truck+SUV Talk staff, so we’re bringing you this weekly round up of all the little stories we thought you might want to know about.
$500 Engine Project Aims to Make 1000 HP
Some automotive maniacs with big dreams bought a $500 junk Nissan Titan truck with the aim of turning the engine (a 5.6L V8) into a super-powered 1000 HP beast to power a drag racer. This article is a decent summary, and you can follow the quest on their YouTube page.
Cybertruck Does the Mint 400; Watch From the Driver’s Seat!
The good people of Autopian have a cool story about a specially modded Cybertruck racing in the fabled Minto 400 desert race. That’s cool enough, but even cooler is you can (virtually) climb into the modded Cybertruck yourself and race alongside them, via their YouTube page, which is streaming the whole thing!
Zoxx Social Club Outlasted GM, Falls at Last
The infamous bar that GM couldn’t kill (and not for a lack of trying, we assure you!), variously known as Zoxx Social Club, Zoxx 411, and a few other names, has fallen at last. Condemned by the city it existed in, the bar owned by a GM employee was next to its Janesville, Wisconsin plant and upset the company so much they fired the owner for refusing to shut it down. The plant closed in 2008 and was demolished in 2018; the bar persisted until this year. And it was a favorite of site publisher Tim Esterdahl’s very own father!
GM Big Boys Make It to the UK
Big news for our UK based readers and anyone who ever yearned to drive enormous SUVs down Hobbit-sized roadways — a luxury UK car importer is announcing it’s bringing some of GM’s biggest vehicles to English roads! That’s right, you can soon drive Escalades, Yukons, Denalis, Tahoes, Suburbans, and more down roads that are roughly 2/3 the size of the vehicle in question. Fun!
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