Hey, while you are all on the topic on a new version, here's an idea for you (I hope this was not already mentioned in the 54 pages of replies!

)
How about a "Car of the month/week/day" option. I believe this would be (somewhat) simple to do. For example, have a cron job run once a day that checks the setting. Then it randomly picks someone to be the car of the week. Then, their car's thumbnail image is shown in the navigation bar, next to the user name info.
Then the visitor could click the icon and it would take them either to the vbGarage home page, or the users vbGarage profile (admin selectable) for more info.
BTW, I love this hack, it works great!
-rs25com