A Crumbling Cybertruck, An Intricate V10 Diesel Engine And A Win For Keis In This Week's Car Culture Roundup

Since its launch a year ago, Tesla’s flagship Cybertruck electric truck has been stumped by all kinds of pretty mundane obstacles. It’s so far been caught out by snow, slight inclines, water and now one Cybertruck owner reports that a pothole left them with a $34,000 repair bill. - Owen Bellwood Read More

Good morning! It’s Monday, December 16, 2024, and this is The Morning Shift, your daily roundup of the top automotive headlines from around the world, in one place. Here are the important stories you need to know. - Owen Bellwood Read More

There are some true engineering marvels of the automotive world out there, like the Bugatti Veyron, old Formula 1 racers such as the Lotus 78 and even humble city cars like the Scion IQ can have some pretty incredible engineering inside. Now, a teardown of a diesel engine produced by Volkswagen in the early 2000s has proven why it’s one of the most intricate and complex pieces of engineering out there. - Owen Bellwood Read More

Law-abiding Japanese car enthusiasts are having their rights stripped away in state after state because a group of pencil-pushing nobodies with nothing better to do keeps poking their noses in it. The non-profit non-government lobbying group the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators has been involved in the banning of Kei cars and other legal imports to Rhode Island, Georgia, Maine, and Massachusetts, and now have their sights set on Colorado. The Colorado DMV is weighing a proposal to revoke existing Kei vehicle titles and registrations and deny future registrations. - Bradley Brownell Read More

The legendary GMC Syclone was just about the fastest thing you could buy in 1991 with 280 horsepower from a 4.3-liter turbocharged V6 and all-wheel drive for traction from a dig. In head-to-head tests the early-90s supertruck was quicker than a five-times-as-expensive Ferrari when new. In Car and Driver testing the Syclone ran a 5.3-second 0-60 time and a 14.1-second quarter mile time. Can you beat that with, like, five grand and a dream? - Bradley Brownell Read More

If Congress can’t pass a continuing resolution to fund the federal government by Sunday, Republicans will have caused yet another government shutdown. Speaker Mike Johnson appeared to be willing to work with the Democrats to make something happen, the Washington Post reports, but then Elon Musk started tweeting, and before we knew it, the continuing resolution was dead. It wasn’t just one tweet, either. Musk spent hours trashing the bill, posting something like 70 times in an attempt to stop its passage. Ultimately, he was successful, but that does raise one important question — Who the heck is running Tesla while Musk plays president? - Collin Woodard Read More

Good morning! It’s Wednesday, December 18, 2024, and this is The Morning Shift, your daily roundup of the top automotive headlines from around the world, in one place. Here are the important stories you need to know. - Owen Bellwood Read More

At the 2024 Video Game Awards last week, Naughty Dog released the announcement trailer for its first new game franchise in ten years. Called Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet, it’s centered around a bounty hunter in a late 20th century-style sci-fi world, and it looks like an exciting, ambitious turn for the studio behind games like “The Last Of Us,” “Uncharted,” “Jak and Daxter,” and “Crash Bandicoot.” To all of us at Jalopnik, the best part of the trailer is the reveal of the hero’s Porsche spaceship. - Daniel Golson Read More

Subaru owners, apart from WRX vape bros, are a very specific type of person. They’re outdoorsy, granola and folksy in a corporate sort of way. That means they fit in perfectly in places that represent those same sorts of ideals and aesthetics, places like Portland, Oregon. Needless to say, they’re everywhere in that Pacific Northwest city, and “everywhere” isn’t even hyperbole. - Andy Kalmowitz Read More

Good morning! It’s Thursday, December 19, and this is The Morning Shift, your daily roundup of the top automotive headlines from around the world, in one place. Here are the important stories you need to know. - Andy Kalmowitz Read More