John Krafcik, CEO of Google’s self-driving car arm Waymo, said this week that it will take decades for autonomous cars to be ready to drive in snow and winter. Hm. I wonder what else is going to happen by a few decades’ time. Oh, right.
BMW says the new 2019 BMW 3 Series, which debuted last month in Paris, “moves the game on once again in terms of driving dynamics.” So, to learn the tech behind what makes the new car handle better than its predecessor, I spoke with dynamics engineer Robert Rothmiller. Here’s what he told me.
I’ll be honest, I’m not exactly sure what’s going on in this video, or why. All I know for sure is it’s been making the rounds on Facebook and it’s oddly simple. It’s just a video of someone attempting to open a car door with a key, and that key, from the outside of the car, starts the engine. That’s it!
I’m not sure if you saw this story this morning, but modern cars are absolutely outrageously expensive to fix after even a minor collision. Some of this has to do with all the cameras and sensors and robotic feely-bits crammed into the extremities of cars, but a big part of the blame needs to fall on the fact that…
Computer vision is no joke. It’s remarkably difficult to get inert bits of metal and silicon to be able to look around themselves and generate some idea of what’s around them. That’s why it’s really not all that surprising to see mistakes like this. But that doesn’t mean it’s not also kind of funny, because we humans…
Today, as we swung forlornly in our individual work-pods, a number of us here at the Jalopnik Automotive Content Origination Facility (JACOF) found ourselves drawn into a strange discussion: what counts as an automatic transmission, or a manual transmission? It seems obvious, but it’s actually a little more complex.
While smacking your hand into the center of a steering wheel is the generally-accepted default way to sound a car’s horn, there’s been a number of other methods over the years: rings, buttons, stalks, levers—honk-producing actions have been wildly varied. Perhaps one of the greatest yet mostly forgotten ways was an…
As a painful-to-be-around hardcore old air-cooled Volkswagen geek, I sometimes forget that the arcane details and quirks of these old cars are not necessarily common knowledge to everyone. That’s why I was actually surprised to find that some of my colleagues—equally hardcore gearheads though they are—didn’t know the…
We don’t actually have any truly self-driving cars on the roads just yet, but, according to a new poll, 71 percent of drivers across the world think they can buy one today. Of course, they can’t. Perhaps even more alarming, 11 percent of drivers are okay with the idea of having a little nap while using current driving…
Formula One is a tight-knit world of distant super-technology, secret from all of us. Even the smallest parts have a kind of mythical glow about them, unattainable. But also, old pieces of these cars show up in private hands all the time, and you can just buy them.
1.) The first ever crash between two cars, both equipped with airbags, was between TWO Chrysler Lebarons! Both drivers survived. One’s last name was Woody and the other’s last name was Van Steelant, and I didn’t make those names up.
Just in case you’re skeptical about just how much work a drag racer’s parachutes do to slow down a speeding car, here’s an excellent demonstration. Even though they’re not making that hot caliper-on-rotor contact of the brakes, a car’s drag chutes are incredibly important, as you can see right here on Pro Mod racer…
I’m a little concerned about the lives of some of our readership, as one reader named Anubhav emailed us to let us know he was so bored he was actually spending time on Buick’s website. While this suggests deeper problems, he did notice one strange detail: on the promo video for the Regal GS, the car seems to have a…
I bet most of our regular readers have, at some point, blown the mind of one of their non-gearhead friends by pointing out the little arrow in almost every modern fuel gauge that shows what side the fuel filler is on. It’s a fantastic and simple bit of human-machine interface design, which makes it sort of insane that…
Porsche ran one of its last-of-the-oddballs Indy racers at Rennsport Reunion this past weekend, briefly letting the turbo V8 sing in its 1990 March chassis. What I find particularly charming is how the team pulled some data from the car.
It’s probably an inevitability at this point that we’ll eventually get fully autonomous cars to work properly and people won’t have to drive anymore. It isn’t going to happen soon, but eventually it will be possible. The Brands want autonomy to happen more than drivers do, it seems, because it would be possible for…
Taking any remotely interesting mechanical contraption and replacing one of its covers with a transparent one almost always yields deeply satisfying visuals. And that’s the case here with this Ford F-150's clear rear differential cover, which shows gear oil splashing around the bearings and gears.
Honda’s Variable Valve Timing & Lift Electronic Control system, known as VTEC instead of the more accurate VVTLEC, is one of those things that various parts of automotive pop culture have glommed onto, and as a result, almost everyone with even a passing interest in cars is aware of VTEC and its propensity to kick in,…
Late last month, a 75-year-old Cleveland man got stuck in his hot Cadillac XLR for 14 hours after an issue with the car’s electrical system rendered the power door release buttons useless. The ordeal had the man convinced he was going to die, the Washington Post reports.
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