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Nissan's ad campaign for the Frontier has the pickup engaging in absurd and impossible stunts like snowboarding, dune-riding and catching an airplane wheel in the bed of the truck. The commercials are, in word, terrible. Let's use physics to show you why. More »
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Henry Ford may have popularized the American car, but it was legendary General Motors Designer Harley Earl who, through his concepts, made it sexy. One example — the Corvette's twin brother, the Oldsmobile F-88 — was so desirable, Earl secretly crated the entire concept car out of GM and shipped it, piece-by-piece, to his friend and former competitor. More »
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Surpassing 250,000 miles on a single car during its lifetime is a remarkable feat. Paul Habib, Jr. did that on his 2006 Honda Civic in just the first two years he owned it. This month, five years after buying it, he'll cross 750,000 miles. His goal? To hit over 1,000,000 miles. More »
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It's St. Valentine's Day, which means couples eating heart-shaped pizzas at home and lonely people hooking up like sweaty electromagnets. For the former there's Tums, for the latter at The University of Michigan there's Senior Kellyann Wargo, who just launched a Walk of Shame Shuttle to ferry the lovesick and hungover home on February 15th. More »
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Sakichi Toyoda was born in Japan 145 years ago today on February 14th, 1867. By all accounts a hard-working entrepreneur, Toyoda's greatest success was building a small business manufacturing textile looms. That business ended up growing into a company that, for two years beginning in 2008, became the world's largest automaker. That company is named Toyota. We've always wondered: Why the change from "d" to "t"? More »
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This is a story about how I found the basement for the world's most storied auto museum with a key from an old Volvo and realized I loved something more than cars. Specifically, how I loved the woman who would end up with the questionable honor of being my wife. More »
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This is a story of old ships, childhood summers, inline-8 diesels and a four-letter word. This is the story of the 52-year-old M/S Amur, a vaguely abandoned 282-ft passenger riverboat. Without this rusty old Danube cruiser, I would not be here. More »
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James Garner, like a several other notable actors, has a longstanding love of racing. After starring in Grand Prix in 1966, he started a long semi-career in racing, owning a racing team, preparing Ramblers for the Baja 500 race as part of a deal with AMC, and driving Indy 500 pace cars three times. The guy loved racing. More »
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The perils of New York City parking are legendary. Often times the space between a legal and illegal parking spot is often times no more than one sheet of paper. Here's Kathryn A Higgins' story from Thought Catalog that could probably be just as easily titled "How NOT To Park Your Car In Manhattan." — Ed. More »
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Kevin Kewley and his friends like adventure. So, to follow up their off-road parasailing experience why not compete in the grueling Baja 1000 race? Unfortunately, that race is a little pricey, so instead they tried to cross the same distance for $1,000. Here's their story. —Ed. More »
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Like most car-obsessed folks, I have many more toy cars around than a reasonable person with a mortgage should. It's a limited way of satisfying car-ownership urges without turning your yard into an oil-soaked scrapyard. Well, turning it into more of one, I mean. More »
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Here's the situation: You wake up, dazed, and find yourself floating weightlessly in the cramped confines of a Soyuz orbital module, possibly the victim of a prank by wealthy, well-connected friends — or maybe some espionage plot. Maybe you owe money to some powerful Russians. Who knows — maybe you even planned it. Whatever the reason, you're there, and now you need to take charge of the situation. I'm here to help. Here's how to fly it. More »
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I was with my 15-month old son, Otto, at the playground in Griffith Park the other day and saw something that reaffirmed my faith that maybe, just maybe, some of this current generation of kids will grow up appreciating cars the way I do. More »
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Chrysler's Clint Eastwood ad was the most controversial commercial (for various reasons) of this year's Super Bowl. But it wasn't controversial enough that someone acting on behalf of the NFL should have had it pulled off YouTube. How and why they did it demonstrates just how easy it is for someone to falsely claim copyright protections. More »
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My fight against the check engine light still goes on, though, like an uncle with an extensive collection of pornography, I'm sure many of you were hoping I'd just keep it to myself. Well, like your pervy uncle, I won't. I can't. And, I'm not alone. More »
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As one of the first to call the Chrysler Clint Eastwood commercial from last night's Super Bowl a "political ad" — for a moment I felt like the brouhaha over it was partly my fault. Well, until the political hacks weighed in and I realized they were living in a fantasy world. More »
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No laws will change our capacity for stupidity behind the wheel. People will drive and text no matter what legislation is passed. But I think I know how we can use technology to mitigate the danger to fellow drivers. Enter the Center-Mount Distraction Light (CMDL). I think you'll love it. More »
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We all remember our first car, and although few of us still have it — even fewer of us probably were thoughtful enough to tell that car how we felt about it. But Kelcie Moseley did just that at Thought Catalog. Here's the letter she sent. Write your own in the comments below. —Ed. More »
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Yesterday, Heather Peters proved one woman can strike a blow against a major automaker when she succeeded in a landmark California case against Honda for making false claims about fuel economy.The key? Take them to small claims court. With her help, we've created this definitive step-by-step guide to how she, like a modern-day David, took on Goliath — and how you can too. More »
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Editor's Note: This is the first of a new Jalopnik series called "Objects In Motion" where we pose car-related questions to our on-call physicist, Dr. Stephen Granade. This week we're asking him how to convert a car to work on the moon. —Ed. More »
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Loving Ferris Bueller's Day Off doesn't make you weird. That's normal for any child of the '80s. Even more normal is feeling pissed off at Honda for its "Ferris Bueller" Super Bowl ad. More »
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Badge engineering has been part of the auto industry ever since someone figured out the magical mix of calculus and alchemy that somehow makes money by selling the same car under different names. I've never been entirely sure how this actually works, but it must — because automakers continue to do it. More »
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I was pleased when Fiat announced their return to America, but, now that the brand is settling in, I realized there's an issue. See, any new 500 driver with a flat or a dead battery is now going to have to endure the cries of "Fix It Again, Tony!" — the beloved-by-many-meatheads derogatory acronym for Fiat — from passing motorists, which many Americans have been desperately waiting two decades to once again yell. More »
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Mark Mothersbaugh, whom we all know from Devo and those orange hats, currently has two pieces of automotive art in a Los Angeles exhibition that carries on one of the oldest car-art traditions, the double-ended car. More »
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New York City is proud of its six upcoming Nissan Leaf cabs, but more than a hundred years ago an all-electric fleet of taxis served the city using technology that even today would still be considered cutting edge. More »
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When a pair of British-trained Czech and Slovak assassins attacked one of Nazi Germany’s most sinister leaders in Prague in May 1942, they were armed with submachine guns and anti-tank mines. But even these were not enough. To complete Operation Anthropoid and kill Heydrich, Jan Kubiš and Jozef Gabčík needed a little help from the SS-Obergruppenführer’s favorite Mercedes convertible and the swarm of microbes in its upholstery. More »
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We exclusively broke the news of Nissan Europe's Juke R project back in September. All we knew then was some strange "super Juke" crossover had been endowed with a GT-R's engine. Since then, we've seen all 11 episodes of its build-video series on YouTube. Now we've driven it. But is it all we hoped for? Let's find out. More »
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I think there's been some sort of unspoken, secret agreement between car designers and automotive engineers where designers get all the celebrity and coffee table books about them, as long as they leave space on the cars to stick badges explaining all the technical stuff the engineers worked so hard for. Maybe there's a backrub exchange as well. That's really the only way to explain the sorts of arcane and frankly, ridiculous badges found on many cars. More »
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In Ronald Reagan's day, it wasn't smart for an American politician to be seen in a Japanese vehicle, but the soon-to-be-President quietly kept a quirky Subaru BRAT at his ranch in California under an agreement that the automaker would get progress reports from Reagan on the little truck's performance. Read about how this strange arrangement came to be in this report from Benjamin Preston exclusively for Jalopnik —Ed. More »
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It's pretty easy to dismiss the "check engine" light as just stupid, because, well, it is. I suppose if you thought that the cause of smoke coming from under your hood had something to do with the floor mats, then, sure, the "check engine" light is handy, but beyond that, it's useless. But that's not the real problem. The real problem is that the "check engine" light is a tool for the propagation of consumer ignorance about their cars. Which is why it needs to die. Now. More »
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Rauno Aaltonen drove a Mini Cooper S to the model's last victory in the 1967 Monte Carlo Rally. It was a stunning victory, but Aaltonen's been harboring a secret. How he actually won. Here, he shares that secret with Autos.Sympatico.ca's Matt Bubbers. —Ed. More »
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These photos, taken in February, 1978, show a Dino 246 GT being unearthed from the front yard of a home in Los Angeles. The photos have been making the rounds online for years. But what's the real story? How'd the Dino wind up underground, and where is it now? More »
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I want to start by coming out and saying I'm not one of those car luddites who think everything should hover in some magical past; while I'm very fond of old-school cars, there's an amazing amount of amazing new tech in cars, and LCD dashboards in so many new cars here at the Detroit Auto Show are a genuinely great advance. Except for one big issue: Knobs, switches and buttons? They're now officially doomed. More »
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Concept cars aren't just wank jobs of empty, aspirational futurism. They're goal posts. They're psychedelic mind-expanding drugs made from carbon-fiber origami and starlight. They stand as public examples of not just where a car company could go, but where—barring a collective public gasp at an engineer's daydream gone overly onanistic—one of the fundaments of American culture will go as soon as technology and manufacturing capability allow. More »
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"Technically they didn't serve the sushi in the bus," laughed a man who attended a party thrown by Ford in the Henry Ford Museum last night. "But you could have carried the sushi up there." More »
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Last month when Steve Rock saw the warning lights on his BMW 335i suddenly light up he quickly called his BMW dealership, who informed him he should bring his car in immediately. Once there they dismissed the warnings and sent him on his way. Two days later the steering in his BMW failed and he crashed off the road. More »
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Okay, Jalops, hear me out; I have an idea here I think we can all have fun with, and I'll need your help. What I'd like to do is, every week I'll draw a hypothetical car, a car from an alternate reality, that you, the Jalopnik commenters, come up with. I know it's probably hard to hear right now over the sound of thousands of minds being blown, so I'll clarify: More »
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Electric cars are terrible. They just are. They're a solution for a problem we don't have. Or rather, they're a solution for a problem we aren't about to change: our sprawling, big-ass cities filled with things we can't afford to buy yet must haul around. (Like kids.) More »
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In a new book by journalist Adrian Humphreys, Jimmy Hoffa's onetime driver Marvin Elkind claims that the Teamsters boss was buried in Detroit in the foundation of its most iconic building — the Renaissance Center, current world headquarters of General Motors. The book is called "The Weasel: A Double Life in the Mob" — and here, for the first time, exclusively, is that full, chilling excerpt. —Ed. More »
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The other day I posted about why we call station wagons "station wagons", and in the comments I noticed a fair amount of discussion in the comments about whether or not certain cars were officially wagons, or just hatchbacks. Sure, it's a question a child might ask, but it's not a childish question. More »
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