Since I was a kid, eagerly scrutinizing cars in parking lots, I remember noticing something that only showed up on a few brands of cars: Fords, Lincolns, and the occasional Mercury. That something was a set of five little buttons, each bearing a pair of numbers, placed near the d … | Continue reading
Wealth buys you a lot of freedom. Freedom to do whatever dumb crap you want to do. (Which for most wealthy people means working until they die to accrue more wealth. Something I will never understand). But in the European Union, you aren’t even afforded the freedom to spec your c … | Continue reading
Rimac, the Croatian electric supercar maker, is in the process of acquiring Bugatti from Volkswagen, according to a couple of reports this morning. This is apparently because Volkswagen is tired of spending boatloads of money on Ferdinand Piëch hobbyhorses. | Continue reading
Coronavirus has had an unprecedented and somewhat unpredictable impact on the car market. Despite the economic downturn, car sales are hot with new car inventory, in some cases, being limited due to factory closures and used car inventory at record highs. However, for some cars l … | Continue reading
Is there anything vehicle lighting systems can’t do? If you think they can’t assist in saving the life of a child, then, buddy, boy are you wrong. And it’s not just me saying that: drivers in the remote town of Igugig, Alaska proved this a few days ago when they came together and … | Continue reading
Some of you may recall how a week or so ago I had to defend myself from angry Tesla-stans regarding my statements about how Level 2 semi-automation—the level of autonomy where Tesla’s Autopilot operates—sucks. It sucks because the sort of vigilance tasks demanded of the not-reall … | Continue reading
The electric revolution is coming, and it will be live streamed. This week electric charger infrastructure company Electrify America announced a partnership with Love’s truck stops to install 28 new stations in six states. The company recently installed its 2000th charging statio … | Continue reading
It’s easy to forget that tires are important shock absorbers that work alongside the rest of the suspension system to smooth your ride since you never get to watch some of the work they do. Until you put a camera in one. | Continue reading
There hasn’t been a splashdown of an American crewed space capsule since the Apollo capsule from the Apollo-Soyuz joint U.S.-Soviet Union space mission in 1975, at least not until yesterday, when astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley returned to Earth from the International Spac … | Continue reading
Uzi Nissan, the legendary owner of the nissan.com web domain who fought with the automaker of the same name for nearly a decade in court, has passed away from Covid-19 complications this month. | Continue reading
Manuel “Matty” Moroun died on Monday at 93 years old. That name might not mean much to you if you’re not from metro Detroit or Windsor, Canada, but around these parts, he was known mainly as the billionaire who owned, among other things, the Ambassador Bridge, which just happens … | Continue reading
Plug-and-play LED replacements for halogen headlight bulbs are a popular car mod. LEDs often look brighter than incandescent lights, but “looks brighter” and “illuminates better” are not the same thing. I got a stern talking-to from an actual lighting expert about LED retrofits, … | Continue reading
If you go to pretty much any car company’s website in 2020, you’ll find a “build-and-price” page where you can pick colors and options for any model, see how specs look and get an MSRP. That’s been around for ages, but you might not have seen an older example of a digital car con … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
Electric GT has done some cool EV-swap projects for old cars. The outfit’s probably best known for building the electric manual-shift Ferrari that made the rounds a few years ago. Now its offerings are expanding to enable more electric retrofits for a wider range of classics. | Continue reading
Today, a story about Nikola, a startup that is valued in the billions despite having no revenue, appeared on Bloomberg, headlined “Nikola Founder Exaggerated the Capability of His Debut Truck.” Within about an hour, Nikola’s founder was rage-tweeting, calling for the author of th … | Continue reading
As millions of Americans warm up to an old idea (cops are bad!) and Minneapolis appears ready to disband its police department, let me offer another step on the path toward abolishing America’s police and forming a more just country. Let’s straight up give up on all traffic stop … | Continue reading
We have received several reports from Honda employees that the entire Honda network is down, and seems to have been compromised by a ransomware attack. The attack happened yesterday, June 7, and is impacting Honda’s overall business operations globally, in what seems to be both b … | Continue reading
San Francisco’s iconic Golden Gate Bridge was recently renovated, but something the engineers failed to take into account was the terrifyingly eerie noise the new changes would project throughout the entire Bay area. | Continue reading
When BMW bought Rover group in 1994, it got the Land Rover brand which had rapidly expanded the SUV market in the 1980s. To keep the trend alive, BMW took what tech it could from Land Rover, and with a two-hour sketch, produced its own SUV—the BMW X5. | Continue reading
Sure, the world may be collapsing all around us thanks to the relentless march of that spiny little bastard, the Coronavirus, but some important things are still pressing on, undaunted. One of those things is the progress of my order of a $900 Chinese-built electric car from the … | Continue reading
Toyota’s made no secret of its hydrogen fuel cell ambitions. A new joint venture with five companies in China means it’s digging in even deeper. | Continue reading
It’s been months since I first had this ridiculous idea to buy the cheapest car I could find on Alibaba, and there’s been so much convincing the bosses, fees to be paid, paperwork to be filled out, logistics to be handled, and just getting it from the warehouse to my house in Dav … | Continue reading
Earlier today, on Taiwan’s National Highway 1 near the Zhongshan High Chiayi Water Section, a Tesla Model 3 crashed right smack into the roof of an overturned truck trailer. It appears that the wreck was caused by the Tesla’s Autopilot system not detecting the large rectangular o … | Continue reading
The idea of comparing the pace of development of computers to cars has been around a while. Snopes traces the idea all the way back to some early-internet joke in 1997, even. Fundamentally, it’s sort of an absurd comparison—the two technologies are so different, they’re really no … | Continue reading
Ford announced new software Wednesday that will allow police to kill “99.9 percent of viruses” that may be hiding on surfaces in 2013-2019 Ford Police Interceptor SUVs. The software is already in use in some police precincts and is available for all current-generation vehicles. | Continue reading
After weeks of hardship due to decimated demand, the car rental giant Hertz filed for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy late Friday night. Hertz has been struggling to keep its head above water since the Covid-19 crisis began, and it seems the company has held out for as long as it could. It … | Continue reading
The latest infoporn from Hunch.com delves into the site's proprietary user data system to uncover the characteristics of people who can drive cars with a stick shift vs. those who can't. | Continue reading
There’s a hacker/security researcher with the Twitter handle GreenTheOnly that has been doing some interesting work with used Tesla parts. This time specifically, he’s acquired three Tesla Model 3 integrated media control units (MCU) and Autopilot (HW) units (known as the ICE com … | Continue reading
Autonomous cars will need to see the world, just like we human drivers do occasionally when we glance up from our phones to peek out the big window up front with the wipers. Currently, all production cars with semi-autonomous features (remember, there are no completely self-drivi … | Continue reading
As you may be aware, Elon Musk and Grimes have rubbed their space-genitals together over a Tleilaxu Axolotl tank and crafted themselves a human child. That child is now complete, and it’s a little boy, and, contrary to recent rumors, he’s not named Influenza. That would be ridicu … | Continue reading
I know Mercedes-Benz likes to crow about “inventing the automobile” in 1885, but we all know that’s complete bullshit. Motorized, wheeled vehicles capable of transporting a human being have existed since at least 1769, and there were actually quite a number of these very early ca … | Continue reading
In an attempt to hang out with friends without risking the spread of coronavirus, I’ve built a drive-in movie theater in my backyard. Here’s how I did it. | Continue reading
I don’t spend much time thinking about boats or marine research these days, as I gave up on the marine biologist dream when I was 9 years old and found out the plesiosaur was extinct. But when I run across a boat as weird as the RP FLIP, as happened to me today, my brain goes int … | Continue reading
Automobile benchmarking company Munro & Associates is well known for having criticized the Tesla Model 3, with founder Sandy Munro calling the car’s quality flaws similar to “A Kia In The “90s.” But now Munro has a Tesla Model Y, and after looking at it and talking with Munro … | Continue reading
First, Tesla CEO Elon Musk dismissed the spread of the Coronavirus that causes covid-19. Then he called the general alarm over the pandemic “dumb.” Then he doubted that there was a shortage of ventilators and said that children were “essentially immune.” He said that “false posit … | Continue reading
Starsky Robotics is a self-driving truck company that was the first company to run an unmanned semi on a public highway. It’s now shutting down though, and its co-founder has some unusually sensible and honest things to say about the industry, unusual only because the industry is … | Continue reading
Tesla will be held accountable for Autopilot crashes, Nio has big plans to expand, and there are fewer traffic deaths in the United States than in past years. All this and more in The Morning Shift for Tuesday, February 25, 2020. | Continue reading
As you’ve likely heard, the hot new virus everyone’s talking about and slowly descending into paranoia regarding is the Coronavirus (COVID-19), a new and rapidly-spreading virus that’s already caused over 2,700 deaths. Nobody wants this mess, so, naturally, its caused a resurgenc … | Continue reading
Recently sold on the website Only Used Tesla is what is believed to be the highest-mileage Tesla Model X in the world—a 2016 “90D” rental car/shuttle with over 400,000 miles on the odometer. The company that owned it, Tesloop, gave me the vehicle’s full maintenance records, so le … | Continue reading
Formula One preseason testing is well underway, and so are all the rumors. This time around, those rumors center around Mercedes, which appears to have developed a neat little steering trick to create more toe by pushing or pulling on the steering wheel. | Continue reading
Computers are absolutely, unquestionably amazing, incredible things that have radically transformed the entire human experience, and will very likely continue to do so. The progress that’s been made on systems to drive cars via computers over the past decade has been absolutely a … | Continue reading
First off, let me be clear that while, yes, I am talking about WD-40, a commercially available product, I in no way care if you buy it or not. This is not sponsored content, and I have no dog in this pond. I don’t care if you never, ever buy WD-40 ever again to use on your car pr … | Continue reading
One of the less-considered side effects of car features moving from hardware to software is that important features and abilities of a car can now be removed without any actual contact with a given car. Where once de-contenting involved at least a screwdriver (or, if you were in … | Continue reading
As if personalized and vanity license plates could not get any worse, folks might soon be able to add emojis to them, if this new Vermont bill passes. And I always thought Vermont was such a nice place. | Continue reading
Japanese tire giant Bridgestone is hoping to beat Michelin’s so-called Tweel to the airless tire market with a new model launching soon for semi trucks, according to a report from Automotive News. Bridgestone’s airless tires use a web of recycled thermoplastic instead of pneumati … | Continue reading
Byton had an unveiling at CES this year that went over, among other things, the partnered content it is going to shove into its massive 48-inch screen, and I couldn’t help but think that this is a step in the wrong direction. | Continue reading
Garbage trucks are amazing. They work in continuous stop and go driving in every possible environment, from incredible desert heat to being cold-soaked in temperatures so low that it doesn’t matter if we’re talking Celcius or Fahrenheit. They’re driven on icy roads with the tires … | Continue reading