Motorsport back in the day seemed like it must have been one hell of a time. In an era when it was rare to, y’know, actually take your cars out to test them before you brought them to the track, so every so often, a team would show up at the track only to find, lo and behold—their seemingly revolutionary car was a…
The Porsche 959 is remembered as one of the greatest cars of the modern era, and certainly one of the jewels in the crown of Porsche, the eternal sports car king. What’s considerably less well-known is that the car was a fantastic failure at literally every point of its life.
What happens when a car designer for the Indy 500 falls in love with the sleek-bodied German race cars of the 1930s? You get the wildly dramatic street-legal roadster unlike one you’ve ever seen before. You get the 1948 Norman Timbs Special.
The modern American world we recognize today started being shaped in the late 1950s. Automotive manufacturers were taking advantage of the whole “suburbia” concept by building cars you’d want to commute in, and that meant highways were springing up across the nation to more efficiently transport you from point A to…
The Nissan R390 GT1 is a total legend, particularly the single homologation special road car. An entire generation knows the car from Playstation, but few have ever seen it in person. I did. And I found something.
We’ve gotten to the point that a classic Datsun 510, especially the high-trim SSS, is a collector’s car to be polished and preserved. But back in 1969, Datsun ran them in the grueling Baja 1000, and here’s how beat to hell they got.
The pre-Depression car culture in America was something truly incredible to behold. Car companies were popping up left and right, and innovative minds were easily able to make their own dreams and ideas a reality by building consumer cars of their own. Worldwide empires sprung up seemingly overnight only to come…
The idea was revolutionary, simple in concept but more difficult in execution: build a road spanning across the entire American nations. From Canada to the very tip of South America, a stretch asphalt would be ribboned across two continents to unite them in one cohesive whole. And, just like any good road, people…
People have been crashing cars for as long as cars have been around. There are plenty of different ‘firsts’ when it comes to car accidents that it can get a little confusing if you try to figure out who the first reckless driver was. We here at Jalopnik recognize the importance of getting the facts straight. That’s…
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…
