As America in 2017 struggles with how much to publicly memorialize the ugliest parts of its past, Detroit has found another way to honor painful history and show that teachable moments have the potential to lift up an entire neighborhood.
I know what you’re thinking. What is this dummy trying to accomplish here? Of course, I know about stop signs. But maybe—maybe!—you didn’t know this: stop signs weren’t always red. We’ve talked about other red things before, and there’s a reason we ended up with red octagons telling you to STOP. I swear it’s…
I tend to give a lot of shit to the Bugatti Veyron (and now, the Chiron) but I do it because, well, it’s worth it. The idea of $2.5 million-dollar cars making over 1000 horsepower and capable of 240+ MPH that mostly do nothing but sit in garages is ridiculous. But a $36,000 car making more than 1000 horsepower and…
It’s kind of hard to imagine a time when there wasn’t some basic law and order on the streets, but this snapshot video from the 1930s is a perfect display of just how random and unpredictable the various traffic signals across America could be before we established the standardized system of today.
Today, and, really, for a few decades now, having an automatic transmission is the boring option. But it’s important to remember that this wasn’t always the case. There was a time when automatic transmissions weren’t just exciting for technological reasons, but because there was some real drama to the whole process.…
This charming little 1956 cartoon commissioned by the Automobile Manufacturers Association is interesting because it seems to have, at least according to some sources, lead to the development of the famous mid-century-future cartoon series the Jetsons six years later. The similarities are pretty striking, and the…
When I look back to cars made over a hundred years ago and compare them to the cars that still bear the same names today, really they share nothing more except the badge on their noses. Rolls-Royce is one of the greatest examples of this.
The wheeled, rounded-rectangular volumes of space enclosed by a metal shell and propelled by a small engine at one end or the other that we call a ‘minivans’ are some of my favorite vehicles ever. For whatever reason, a lot of companies like to claim to have the first of these: Chrysler likes to say so, as does…
I’ve written before about the fascinating and sad tale of Josef Ganz, the Jewish engineer who designed much of what would become the Volkswagen Beetle before being erased from history by all those unpleasant Nazis. Now, the lone surviving example of a car that’s the most direct VW Beetle ancestor, the Ganz-designed…
I have a lot of respect for automotive engineers. I always have. While I’m not exactly certain that respect is reciprocated in any way, somehow I’ve managed to con the Society of Automotive Engineer’s Mobility History Committee into letting me give a talk at the SAE World Congress. Tomorrow! I better practice.
Happy St. Patrick’s Day! Normally, I like to write about interesting Irish cars on this day, but this time I’m going to give in to my basest of urges and write, yet again, about old Volkswagens. But it’s got to relate to Ireland somehow, right? Of course it does. Luckily, there’s a really strong link between Ireland…
Everyone has their idiosyncratic car fetishes, and for me it’s space utilization. That’s part of why I love mid-engine designs so much, especially on non-sports cars. It’s so hard to do right, but when it happens, the packaging becomes sublime. That’s why I’m so taken with these stillborn mid-engined Wartburg…
Every modern McLaren, from the 2011 MP4-12C to the P1 to the 720S is powered by a single family of twin turbo V8s. This engine didn’t come out of nowhere; it started life in a largely-forgotten supercar from Nissan.
It’s International Women’s Day, so it seems like a good time to give some attention to one of the under-appreciated heroines of motoring: Florence Lawrence, possibly the first real silent movie star and the inventor of a turn-signaling device and a stop-signaling device.
Now, again, it’s rumored that General Motors may be selling its German division Opel to Europe’s last-standing collection of automotive fuckups, PSA Peugeot Citroën. This is not a surprise. General Motors spent nearly an entire century—no, I am not exaggerating—running Opel like a crazy person.
If you fall down the Internet rabbit hole looking into autonomous cars, eventually you’ll arrive at Francis P. Houdina. Yeah, Houdina—not Houdini, but we’ll get to that a minute. Why’s Houdina relevant? He tested out a driverless car. In 1925.
Fans of the Nissan Skyline are familiar with the RB series of straight sixes, now legendarily powerful engines never sold here in the United States. But there was an RB engine that stands above them all, an incredibly rare one, all because Nissan never built it.
Quick, think of things that are fast! Rockets? Okay. Cheetahs? Sure, absolutely. Bullets? Oh, yes, quite. A piping-hot bowl of rich, creamery soup? Ah, generally, no. Not so much. Then why do we call cars that have been made to go faster “souped-up?”
Nissan built a rival to the Acura Integra back in the 1990s, but nobody seems to remember it. Part of that, I’m sure, is because the car was never sold in the United States. Another part, I’m also sure, is because the car had absolutely no styling.
The 3.5 liter, 640 horsepower Mercedes ‘M291' 180-degree 12 cylinder engine died twice: first when it repeatedly failed on the race track, and second when the entire racing series it was designed for came to an end.
