The Cobo Center, the Detroit convention center that hosts the North American International Auto Show each year—is named for Albert Cobo, the mayor of Detroit from 1950-1957. Cobo was a racist and a bad mayor, and, today, current Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan urged that his name be removed from the venue.
Car design is an incredibly competitive field. The jobs are hard to get, the work is intense, and it takes years before that first idea actually becomes part of something real, something drivable. On top of all that, the work is pretty anonymous for most, and it’s hard to get any sort of direct feedback from people…
Finally, after five concept cars, a ton of screaming and stress tears, and plenty of stagnant potential, Volkswagen seems interested in bringing the latest I.D. Buzz bus concept to production by 2022. You can’t tell, but I’m definitely cautiously squinting right now.
At the Detroit Auto Show this month, there were a lot of interesting vehicles, and even more uninteresting ones. But my favorite machine there wasn’t even a car. As we kept running all over the Cobo Center, I kept occasionally seeing these little Urb-E electric bikes zipping around. I was intrigued for two main…
The Jeep Wrangler is a very unique vehicle, in that it somehow manages to convince nearly 200,000 buyers a year to drop serious coin on a car built on 1950s tech. And really, it’s got no rivals. The question now, with a new Ford Bronco finally official, is what does that have to do to compete with Jeep’s off-roading…
Good morning! Welcome to The Morning Shift, your roundup of the auto news you crave, all in one place every weekday morning. Here are the important stories you need to know.
What do cars look like? A question a child (who doesn’t get out much) might ask, but not a childish question. Automotive styling, like fashion or diets named after cities, goes in trends. So what are the design trends we’re seeing now? To figure this out, I tried a little experiment.
Hello from Detroit, home of Motown, the U.S. automotive industry and, perhaps the most innovative development in this town’s history, a combination Applebee’s-IHOP. These are exciting times to live in the Motor City; nothing gets residents’ adrenaline pumping like the lingering concern of their cars are being broken…
At a mass-market auto show in America, it’s pretty difficult to find anything that’s genuinely weird in the ways I tend to like: small, strange, slow, and ideally with peculiar engineering. Happily, down in the basement, I found something that came close enough, and took it for a spin: a funny little concept car from,…
Okay, so the 2017 Detroit Auto Show was kind of an endless parade of Toyota Camrys, boring crossovers and empty corporate patriotism. I didn’t care. I take the pictures and I managed to find some great stuff anyway. Take a look at a metric shit-ton of shots I took Monday and Tuesday.
Good morning! Welcome to The Morning Shift, your roundup of the auto news you crave, all in one place every weekday morning. Here are the important stories you need to know.
The Toyota Camry is the fourth best-selling vehicle in America. Toyota sold more than a third of a million of these sedans in 2016. So why does its face look like that?
Look, I’ve got an engineering background, and I love nerding out with other TI-89 totin’, khaki wearing, pocket protector-having math geeks. And yet, I knew the best way to explain Infiniti’s Variable Compression engine would be to talk with one of their engineers. Well, there wasn’t one around, so here goes nothing.
Vice President Joe Biden just can’t quit endearing himself to the American people. When asked what he will do after leaving the vice presidency later this month, he said he’d like to buy America’s greatest rip-snorting V8-powered sports car: a Chevrolet Corvette.
For me, the biggest news of this year’s Detroit Auto Show was the latest Volkswagen Microbus concept that will very likely never appear and send me into a foul, black mood that leads me to attempt to punch a horse and end up in jail. Today, I went back to ogle the Bus a little more, and I saw that VW had made a…
Once the Bentley Bentayga came out, I figured a Mercedes-Maybach SUV was inevitable. But now we have confirmation that it’s happening from Mercedes chief Dieter Zetsche himself. And it’s going to be enormous.
Joe Biden only has about a week left as Vice President of the United States. So what’s a hardcore car guy like him supposed to do before he leaves office? Go to the Detroit Auto Show and sit in all the really fast stuff, naturally.
The Volkswagen Atlas is the mid-size SUV that the brand should have sold in the US over ten years ago. Instead, we got the overpriced Touareg. Volkswagen hopes to avoid the mistakes of the past by pricing the upcoming Atlas in-line with other mainstream crossovers.
Much as I am annoyed by Audi’s endless parade of crossovers and SUVs, and Audi’s lazy new styling and Audi’s not-totally-unraveled involvement in the Dieselgate scandal, Audi sure as hell knows how to make pretty paint. Here’s an Audi R8 in Riviera Blue. This is good.
