Cars have been around for more than a century now. We take it for granted that we have names like ‘automobile’ and ‘car’ to describe these four-wheeled beasts we love so much; they’re the only names we’ve ever known. But, friends, it could have been worse. It could have been so much worse.
In 1987, BMW announced to the world that it was officially not screwing around anymore when it put a 5.0-liter V12 into production, setting a 300-horsepower standard for luxury and refinement. It was only a few years later that BMW would produce probably the ultimate V12, the 618-horsepower heart of the McLaren F1.…
BMW, being German, keeps a historical archive. Luckily for me, it’s searchable, so you can go look up your favorite Z3 brochure or whatever. I decided to see what would come up if I just typed in “drift.” As it turned out, solid gold hits.
We’ve written plenty before about the wonderfully weird electric car market of the past, but, thanks to The Dallas Morning News for digging up an old story this week, I want to stake out the 1975 all-electric Elcar as my likely favorite pick of that era.
If I told you that there once existed a man who had himself sealed inside a car for over a year while trying to drive to all 48 contiguous states, and then, after not quite managing that, decided to try to collect pajama bottoms from every U.S. governor, you’d very justifiably think I was some loon making things up.…
BMW is a V8-heavy company today, with twin-turbo versions filling up just about every big-power model it has on sale. It’s hard to even remember when they were completely alien to the Bavarians, and how it broke back into the world of eights with a compact 3.0-liter, flawed from the start.
Besides a few of the minor, current examples of driverless cars cruising around cities like Phoenix, we’re still decades away, if ever, from a full-fledged takeover of autonomous vehicles on public streets. The achievements that have been made to date, however, can be attributed to pioneering engineers like Ernst…
I’m having a hard time pinpointing exactly what it is about the Milnes-Daimler Omnibus that makes me so uncomfortable. This thing is bulky. It’s big. It looks like it shouldn’t function and yet somehow it did. People of the early 1900s, tell me what you were imagining with this bad boy.
One of the concepts carmaker PR and marketing people have come to really latch onto in recent years is the idea of a carmaker’s “DNA.” By DNA, they mean a fundamental set of ideas, technical concepts, and design that have come to define a given manufacturer. It’s not a bad way to think about things, but it can lead…
Porsche recently gathered a group of nine cars from their history to remind you that pretty much everything they’ve ever built looks just a little bit dorky.
As an unapologetic Volkswagen obsessive, I feel like I’ve seen almost every old, archival photo of the prehistory of the iconic Beetle, even the disturbing and difficult ones from the car’s birth under the Third Reich. Of course, I haven’t seen everything, and occasionally I’ll encounter a truly unexpected photo that…
Have you ever started planning a road trip only to realize how annoying it is to pack everything? I mean, you’re gonna need a tent. If you’re hitting the lake, you can’t forget the boat? And there’s nothing worse than trying to find non-perishables because your cooler can only last so long. It’s such a hassle that…
This clip from a 1971 episode of the BBC television show Tomorrow’s World has so many appealing details to me, most notably the featuring of a lovely UK-spec 1962 Volkswagen Beetle, but the true star of it is the remarkably forward-thinking navigation system the Beetle is fitted with. It uses some cutting-edge…
About a month ago, I went on vacation in Prague and paid a visit to the very lovely National Technical Museum. It’s awesome and definitely worth a visit. Because if you do go, you’ll see a sleek, silver 1937 Tatra 77a parked on the ground floor, which I later learned was actually shockingly good at killing Nazis…
Every so often, there’s a car so wild and such a hilarious failure that history tries to dance around it. The records of these automotive mishaps are skimmed over with little more than an awkward, “yeah, um, also we kinda messed up—but look at the good things instead!”
Our own Kristen Lee took a trip to Prague earlier this year, where she presumably danced around on cobblestone streets and said “woo woo look at me, I’m Kristen!” and slapped waiters with cold cuts or whatever the hell it is Kristen does to relax. She won’t tell me. But, she did show me some pictures she took at the …
WWII connoisseurs looking to add some old vehicles to their collection, rejoice: you can now nab a beautiful 1942 Jeep Willys on Craigslist if you’re up to making the trip down to the El Paso area.
When the Lamborghini Gallardo debuted in... 2003? Wait, lemme Google that. Yep, 2003. I remembered that off the top of my head. I have a problem. Anyway, when the Gallardo debuted, everyone criticized it for not being a “real Lamborghini,” small with a V10. But that idea wasn’t as new as people think.
Hands up if you weren’t one of the lucky kids who grew up in the presence of a kid-sized electric car, one of those pink Barbie Jeeps or sleek convertibles. If you’re still bitter about not being able to squish your body into a tiny car but aren’t keen on smart cars, then you’re in luck my friend: the world’s…
It’s hard to put the success of the Mazda Miata into perspective, a unbelievably huge hit from a rather small company. How small? Small enough that Mazda didn’t have enough money to to put out the Miata and a minivan at the same time, and it chose the minivan first.
