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.
Last Friday, at the pretentiously-named-with-a-comma-even “The Quail, a Motorsports Gathering” event in Monterey, California, Hennessey Performance Engineering unveiled the engine that will power its new flagship supercar, the Venom F5. HPE claims the engine is a “newly developed unit,” and that the engine is entirely…
The 1980s were the Jurassic Park of Japanese car design. Engineers were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should. A case in point: the all-mechanical four-wheel steering system in the Honda Prelude Si 4WS. Too expensive, insufficiently practical, but totally wonderful.
This is one of the most common shared experiences in all of automobilia: You’re outside a car, trying to get in. The person inside the car is attempting to open the door lock at the same time you’re pulling the handle to open the door. A comedy of errors ensues, with each of your actions canceling out the other’s,…
“Wait a second,” you scream at your computer. “You mean to tell me that U.S.-spec McLaren Sennas don’t get the same exhaust as the euro-spec ones?” This is true, but for once it’s not a bad thing. Our American Sennas are even rowdier than what’s pootling around Europe right now.
If you’ve ever looked at floor-mounted automatic transmission shift levers, with either disdain or genuine gratitude, you’ve probably noticed that they tend to fall into two main categories: the ones that have a simple, linear path through the PRNDL family, and those that use a convoluted, maze-like route through the…
Last year, Audi announced it would be bringing a suite of driver assist technologies, “Traffic Jam Pilot,” to the United States, but it would be difficult to get that approved through U.S. auto regulations. it turns out, it was too much for Audi, which has bailed.
Horizontally-opposed engines are often referred to as “boxer” engines because the motion of the pistons sort of resembles a boxer, punching. Really, though, if any engine should be named for a boxer, it’s the other kind of opposed engine: the kind where the pistons actually “punch” right at each other. They’re called …
Earlier today I wrote about the latest version of the Ariel Atom, and I have to say the one thing I wasn’t expecting to be that impressed about on the car was its instrument cluster. But, as usual, I was wrong! The new Atom 4 has a fantastic instrument cluster, an all LCD one that’s not hampered with needless and…
Have you ever wondered about the electricity that courses through your car? Do you suspect that there’s a captive bolt of lightning held in a magic jar? Of course you don’t. You’re not a Neanderthal. You know there’s a battery and an alternator. You may even know your battery provides DC current that the car uses, but…
The first thing that happened when I drove a Tesla on Autopilot was an instant, unsettling feeling of not being comfortable in the car at all, thinking it’s always a moment away from crashing. Slowly, I got used to it and calmed down, just like everyone else I’ve talked to who has used Autopilot. This video from a…
Chrysler has somehow managed to highlight the Chrysler Pacifica’s biggest flaw in this commercial featuring actor Kathryn Hahn. That biggest flaw, as we noted in our review, is a shifter dial that can easily be mistaken for a volume knob, and Chrysler appears to show Hahn doing just that in this commercial.
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…
California has approved the biggest innovation in license plate technology since science figured out how to trap wild letters and numerals onto a plate of metal: the electronic license plate. The state claims they could save up to $20 million per year on postage, but there’s some pretty huge questions about that, as…
Hot damn, everyone, it’s that special time again! It the time we display an image of a car’s chassis for you here—via computer—and you use your eyes to send an image of the chassis to your brain—via optic nerve—and then you use your brain to try and figure out what car the chassis is from! Are you ready? Good.
Uber informed “about 300” workers of their termination earlier today as part of plans to shut down its self-driving car testing program in Arizona following a fatal crash in March, where one of the company’s test vehicles struck and killed a pedestrian, according to The Arizona Republic.
If we’re going to be talking and thinking about autonomous cars, self-driving cars, robo-cars, drive-o-droids (copyright pending) or whatever the hell we want to call these things, we should get a sense of exactly what they do and how they do it. How do they know what’s around them, and how can they potentially be…
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 …
