Maybe you've never heard of the Hacienda Hotel, but you may have seen a Cessna 172 with "Hacienda" plastered on the side in big, goofy letters hanging in the Las Vegas airport. They're connected. | Continue reading
What happens when you take six brand new electric cars and drive them until they run out of juice? The delightful blokes at Carwow decided to put it to the test. There are so many questions to answer here, and the scientific method will provide. Obviously, by testing these cars i … | Continue reading
The American space program, I think we’d all agree, has its own very particular set of audiovisual signatures that immediately evoke all kinds of images and feelings. There’s a certain NASA look to the objects of space travel—that gold foil stuff, lightweight aluminum frameworks, … | Continue reading
In India, honking is not used as a sign of aggression; it's just how you get through the country's massive, chaotic streams of traffic. Audi is now designing louder, longer-lasting horns specifically for the Indian market. | Continue reading
There’s always a push by carmakers to get automotive superlatives—fastest production car, best fuel economy, longest electric range, cheapest or most expensive car, whatever. Carmakers eat that crap up and then inscribe it on plaques. But they’re not eager for just any superlativ … | Continue reading
Jonathan Leo loves his cars, but not commuting in them. He lives in San Diego and works for the Navy, so he takes the city’s trolley to work as often as he can. Then, on the weekends, he unloads his 2012 Mercedes Benz C250 on some of California’s best roads. | Continue reading
While modern agriculture is filled with very modern technology, farmers have been butting heads with some of the biggest farm equipment builders over tech issues, specifically the fight for their own rights to repair equipment they own. This has led to strange, maybe not-so-legal … | Continue reading
If you ever manage to take a peek inside the train operator’s compartment on the subway, the whole operation might strike you as kind of simple. There aren’t a whole lot of controls to work with. But that’s just an electric train. When it comes to steam engines, things look a lot … | Continue reading
In June of 2008, the very-wealthy co-creator of PayPal, Elon Musk, and then-California Governor (and actor) Arnold Schwarzenegger, confirmed codename WhiteStar. This was not the plot to an Expendables movie. This was reality, and the groundwork for the Tesla Model S had been set. | Continue reading
Nissan the car company never really cared who Uzi Nissan was. Then it decided he had something it wanted very much—the website www.nissan.com, which he created for his small retail computer business in 1994—and it sued him for $10 million. When the two Nissans went to war, Uzi Ni … | Continue reading
As we head into 2020, the number of hydrogen cars available to the public is still dreadfully low. There are less than a handful of them and existing infrastructure is woefully behind anything that would sustain any realistic, widespread usage. But had automakers invested in hydr … | Continue reading
The 2021 Ford Mustang Mach-E is a huge deal. It’s the first high-volume Ford built on a dedicated electric vehicle platform, marking what could be a major inflection point for the company as the world shifts away from gas cars and towards EVs. I had a chance to talk with some eng … | Continue reading
If you’re like me, most of your experience with car headlights has been to switch them from dim to slightly less dim so you can try to avoid hitting all the deer on a drive down a rural road. Car headlamps have come a hell of a long way from the days of old sealed beams you could … | Continue reading
If you want to take the train from Cleveland to Chicago on any given weekday, a distance of approximately 350 miles, you have two options. You can catch the Capitol Limited departing at 2:59 a.m. or the Lake Shore Limited at 3:45 a.m. | Continue reading
Next time you feel the need to justify to a family member, friend, or random acquaintance why you drive an old shitbox instead of a much more comfortable, modern vehicle, here’s another reason for you to trot out: your old shitbox, unlike every modern car, is not spying on you. | Continue reading
“Planes are like houses,” Courtland Savage explains. “They hold value like houses and they’re sturdy like houses as well.” | Continue reading
I started my career at a big daily newspaper. I learned to be a journalist in the trenches with people who were thoroughly steeped in the community they covered. The idea was that you weren’t just some detached observer chronicling things from afar. You were a part of that commun … | Continue reading
What is America if not a country for people trying to speed from one ocean to the other in a car as fast as possible? The most notable of such efforts is called the Cannonball Run, and it’s just had its previous record cross-country time from 2013 shattered by three guys in a Mer … | Continue reading
Mercedes’s parent company, Daimler, made €7.6 billion (or about $8.4 billion) in profit last year. But as we’re all in the midst of an electric car revolution, Daimler has apparently decided that some heads must roll, and it’s cutting at least 10,000 jobs to facilitate the switch … | Continue reading
For all the crap we give Tesla, they rightfully deserve to be lauded for the Supercharger network of fast-charging stations. You want to drive across the country in your electric car? Easy peasy, thanks to the ability to quick charge up to about an 80% tank of electron juice in a … | Continue reading
The Tesla Model X went into production in 2015, and the future of 2015 looked bright. We’d all drive around in pods shaped vaguely like eggs, with gullwing doors that are smart enough not to hit other cars. The Tesla Cybertruck prototype debuted in 2019, and in the future of 2019 … | Continue reading
I just want to be clear, right off the bat, that I love weird automotive design. I’m also quite fond of simple, possibly even crude designs. I’m not afraid of new, even strange automotive ideas. And yet, somehow, I still can’t even with this new Tesla Cybertruck, a truck that fin … | Continue reading
Ford and GM both had the same job at hand: get a mass-market EV into production, something that people will like. Ford responded by making an all-electric sporty crossover with a name everyone will recognize. GM made the Chevy Bolt. | Continue reading
A few years ago, Mustapha Harb realized there was a problem in his field of research about how autonomous cars will change the way people travel. The solution to the problem he settled on was as simple as it was revealing. | Continue reading
When trawling through a Formula One paddock very briefly for the first time back in 2015, my first thought (after I got over the glamor of it all) was, my God there are a lot of tires here. Each team had stacks of tires lined up outside of their garage. Tires were being carted fr … | Continue reading
When it comes to the various bits of infrastructure that help keep us safe while we drive, most likely the greatest cost-and-simplicity to benefit ratio has to be painted lane lines on roads. They’re just stripes of paint, but they make driving vastly safer and more manageable th … | Continue reading
On March 15, 2018, a pedestrian bridge at Florida International University collapsed, crushed the cars underneath, killing six people and injuring 10 others. The tragedy was the result of a litany of errors by the contractors designing the bridge, an independent reviewer supposed … | Continue reading
On Monday, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi was roundly condemned, including by this website, for telling Axios’s HBO show that the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi by the Saudi government was “a serious mistake,” just like when Uber killed a woman with its self-driving car. Khosro … | Continue reading
Another year, another predicted new-car reliability ranking from non-profit consumer products researchers at Consumer Reports. And this year, the domestic automakers aren’t looking so good, taking up 11 of the bottom 12 spots. Here’s a look at reliability rankings for all the bra … | Continue reading
Almost immediately after it was released unto the world’s population of properly-equipped Teslas in September, Tesla’s Smart Summon feature, which allows a completely unpiloted car to drive to meet the owner via a smartphone app, people were reporting a lot of less-than-optimal r … | Continue reading
Alaina Gassler is the sort of kid that, were my parents have heard of her when I was growing up, would have caused an immediate and unflattering comparison between myself and her, with lots of glancing back and forth between me, on the floor losing at some Atari game, and whateve … | Continue reading
On Thursday, October 27, 1904, 115 years ago this Sunday, at precisely 2 p.m., New York City erupted in a cacophony of celebration. The city’s factories—there were many then—tooted their whistles in a call to mark not a shift change, but an historic turning point in the city’s h … | Continue reading
Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who once failed to sue the Top Gear television program for libel over the show’s review of a Tesla Roadster, is once again beefing with Top Gear over the drag race results between the Tesla Model S and Porsche Taycan published to its YouTube channel. | Continue reading
In what will surely go down in history as one of the most Galaxy Brain court rulings of all time, a Michigan appeals court determined that a tire rotation does not, in fact, include tightening the lug nuts. | Continue reading
If you want your car to automatically brake for collisions, beep when you’re about to back into something, turn on its wipers when it rains and deploy its airbags during a collision, you’re going to need a lot of sensors. And when those sensors start being used for phone accelero … | Continue reading
For years I’ve gone back and forth over the practice of obscuring license plates on photos on the internet. License plates are already publicly-viewable things, so what’s the point in obscuring them, right? Well, now I think there actually is a good reason to obscure your license … | Continue reading
You won't find Fordite digging through your backyard. It's also called Detroit Shale, but it's not a mineral or a gemstone. It's actually dozens of layers of baked paint culled from auto factories and polished into everything from pebbles to earrings. It could be the most Jalopni … | Continue reading
At the beginning of October, Lyft rolled out a mandatory app update for its drivers. After installing the update, drivers noticed they could no longer see how much the rider paid for any given trip. It’s yet another move that potentially undercuts Lyft’s (and Uber’s) legal logic … | Continue reading
The idea of converting classic cars to EVs has been around a while, and a number of companies, including some major automakers, have been retrofitting old, classic cars with all-new EV drivetrains. Individual tinkerers have been doing this as well, but it’s not as easy as you’d h … | Continue reading
The Soviets dominated the early days of space travel. Up until the Apollo manned lunar missions by NASA, most of the big space firsts and milestones were followed by a little hammer and sickle. It was frustrating and demoralizing for the West. But, once, in 1966, on the verge of … | Continue reading
There’s been a lot of debate over how much good the EV tax credit does, whether the number of cars it covers should be increased or if it should be phased out altogether. But in the meantime, people and companies are falsely claiming millions of dollars of tax credits. | Continue reading
Eight years ago, it looked like BMW was positioning itself in a good place for the electric future. It founded BMW i, a sub-brand to bring electrified products to its dealers, and invested massively in carbon fibre reinforced plastic production to make lightweight, efficient vehi … | Continue reading
It came to me in the wide, swishy passenger seat of Jonathan Ward’s 1949 Mercury hot rod. All the right smells were imprinting the moment we rolled through industrial Chatsworth, California. Sun-heated steel from the dash; stretched leather; a vague tinge of nicotine on Ward’s j … | Continue reading
As part of his ongoing defamation lawsuit filed by Vernon Unsworth, the cave-diver Elon Musk called a “pedo guy” on Twitter and told a reporter is a “child rapist,” Musk was deposed by Unsworth’s lawyers, forcing him to talk for hours about the incident in excruciating detail. | Continue reading
This month, 30 years ago, the Berlin Wall finally came down, and Germany began the process of re-unification. Before that, though, Berlin (and Germany) was split, with East Berlin transformed into a police state dedicated to building as many large, slab concrete buildings as poss … | Continue reading
One of the biggest advantages of electric vehicles is that they can potentially have far more packaging flexibility than combustion-engine cars. Companies have been taking advantage of this, as you can see in Tesla’s twin-trunk designs and Volkswagen’s volume-maximizing reborn el … | Continue reading
You’ve seen the annual “Top Safety Pick” car ads and the crash-test videos, with cars slammed into objects as their own debris pours down around them like a snowstorm. Perhaps the latter even convinced you not to buy a car you so desperately wanted. | Continue reading
When you hear the term “vanlife,” what typically comes to mind is a young, attractive couple doing yoga in front of a spotless Sprinter van perfectly customized inside to look like a log cabin. At sunset. On a beach. Believe it or not, you don’t necessarily need to be an Instagra … | Continue reading