It may seem like cars are only getting more and more normal. If this keeps up, will new cars ever be weird again? Come out to the New York Auto Show tonight and hear us yell about it on a live panel.
That’s right, we’re hosting a throwdown (that sounds more exciting than panel, right?) on the future of weird cars, if fun and strange automobiles have a future at all.
On the panel is going to be:
Me: Your friendly moderator and host. I once wrote the foreword to a book on weird cars. It’s Michael Banovsky’s Weird Cars. It’s great.
Kristen Lee: Jalopnik’s resident practical enthusiast. If a car doesn’t make sense, she understands why.
Bob Sorokanich: Formerly a Gizmodo blogger, Bob’s now deputy online editor at Road & Track. He has seen more crazy car startups fail than I can remember.
Jamie Kitman: Currently on staff at Automobile, Kitman knows just about everything there is to know about weird cars, possibly because he owns them all. He’s an authority in car history and his garage includes a preselector-equipped Riley Kestrel, which is a car I encourage you all to Google.
What are we going to talk about, exactly? We’re going to be going over how and why cars were weird in the past, and how they could be boring or weird in the future. It’s easy to see it going either way. We could get lots of small-batch 3D printed driverless cars that could be made out of no-need-for-crash-structure foldable designs, or we could all just get regulated into globalized Camrys and nothing else.
When? Friday from 7 to 9 p.m.
Where? The New York Auto Show, inside the Javits Center, in the North Hall, just past Mitsubishi. There’ll be a little stage. Yes, you’ll have to buy a ticket to the auto show to attend. It will be worth it.