Back in 2017, Elon Musk had grand visions for the Hyperloop test track built by The Boring Company, his tunneling firm, in Los Angeles. It would have proprietary vehicles with varying capacities for private travel, public transport, or freight. They would travel along electrified … | Continue reading
These days, we keep hearing automakers talk about all the partnerships they’re forming for autonomous cars, car sharing, large-scale electrification, and just general “mobility solutions.” A lot of it is bullshit meant to make the companies appear on the cutting edge, and some is … | Continue reading
“This is a nutcase who is addicted to fucking with the trains.” | Continue reading
“This is a nutcase who is addicted to fucking with the trains.” | Continue reading
Days after Uber began selling stock, the National Labor Relations Board’s top lawyer gave the company a huge gift. In an advice memo, the general counsel’s office determined that Uber’s drivers are independent contractors, not employees. If drivers are legally determined to be e … | Continue reading
Police in Providence, Rhode Island Wednesday pulled over a May Mobility self-driving shuttle just hours after it was pressed into service for the first time. Making its debut in Rhode Island, the officer pulled in behind the shuttle as it was dropping off passengers and lit up th … | Continue reading
The Titanic was immense in its day, but would be dwarfed by modern cruise ships. Union Pacific’s Big Boy locomotive was large when it was brand new in 1941–and still looks colossal next to modern trains. One special Boy has been in the barn for a long restoration, and is finally … | Continue reading
A disturbing amount of us use our phones to talk, text, or send our awful tweets while behind the wheel, but you might want to think twice before sending that next tweet, and not just for self-preservation purposes. More and more insurance companies are monitoring your cell phon … | Continue reading
For most Soviet citizens, buying a new car was financially impossible. To put things in perspective, Alexander Petrovych (who built one of the cars you’ll see here) made a monthly salary of 140 rubles in the 1970s. At the time, a new Lada cost 6,030 rubles. So, if Alexander reall … | Continue reading
I know, I know, dunking on the Wall Street Journal editorial board is a bit like smacking your four-year-old nephew’s would-be jumper out of the air before it even leaves his hands. But in an Op-Ed last week it peddled the tired and disingenuous notion that electric cars, by the … | Continue reading
Every couple years, it seems like a new design for a roof rack that slides off and down an SUV comes out, is really neat, and then I never hear about it again or see it on people’s rigs. Why don’t these catch on? | Continue reading
The 2019 Audi E-Tron has not had an easy time so far. It was delayed last year over software updates and we recently found out that its range isn’t particularly up to par with its competitors. Now delivery has apparently been delayed because of battery supplier issues and engine … | Continue reading
Tesla is adamant that its cars are significantly less likely to catch fire than your average car, as Reuters reports, but that still hasn’t kept a surveillance video from spreading worldwide, showing a Tesla Model S bursting into flame and all but disappearing, Spinal Tap-style, … | Continue reading
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m something of an automotive packaging fetishist, which means I really, really appreciate a vehicle that really works to maximize its interior spaces well. Which is why I’ve been so taken with electric startup Rivian’s pickup concept, which leverages t … | Continue reading
What if I proposed digging two 35-mile tunnels that would begin and end right next to two train stations that currently have service between one another? And this tunnel would be right underneath an existing highway? But this tunnel would be used to skim cars along tracks at spee … | Continue reading
I told the blokes here at Jalopnik I was pissed at Ferrari and wanted to tell a few people. They said I could do it here. Stay with me, this might take a while. | Continue reading
A company in San Diego co-founded by a former Marine has been scooping up the abandoned scooters that litter city streets owned by the startups Bird and Lime for months, giving some of them back to Bird in November in exchange for more than $40,000. Bird and Lime have since calle … | Continue reading
Boston Dynamics, in case you haven’t been hanging out at your local robot bars and nightclubs, is a company that has been producing incredibly impressive yet somehow oddly unsettling robots, often in vaguely humanoid or animalistic forms. One of their robots, a canine-like machin … | Continue reading
Containing the Notre-Dame Cathedral conflagration in Paris was a heroic effort by dozens of people. While invaluable parts of the 856-year-old cathedral were destroyed yesterday, it was thankfully not a complete loss, and something of a miracle nobody died. Part of the credit goe … | Continue reading
BMW and the other German automakers will dump billions into getting factories and workers ready for the electric car revolution, Nissan’s Carlos Ghosn has some health issues that could interfere with his trial, the United Auto Workers try again with Volkswagen and so much more fo … | Continue reading
This is a Compaq LTE 5280 laptop from the early 1990s, running a bespoke CA card. In 2016, McLaren Automotive—one of the most high-tech car and technology companies on the planet—still uses it and its DOS-based software to service the remaining hundred McLaren F1s out there, each … | Continue reading
Uber has a complicated relationship with public transportation. It’s quite obviously cannibalizing trips from trains and buses from those who prefer and can afford a convenient, private car service. At the same time, the company claims to address the so-called “last mile” problem … | Continue reading
This year, the only American team in Formula One debuted with a new look and a new title sponsor. Rich Energy, an “elite” energy drink for “the discerning customer,” stands proud as Haas F1’s partner for the 2019 F1 season. But few can find Rich Energy for sale, and people are h … | Continue reading
There once was an era where transportation planners believed cars zipping along highways was the sustainable future of transportation. They thought every problem could be solved by more highways with more lanes. Some even believed stacking highways ever-skyward was not only an in … | Continue reading
When carmakers team up with other companies to sell cars and other products, the results are usually, uh, strange. Like those Harley-Davidson edition Ford F-150s or the Mercury Villager Nautica or even that deeply weird Etienne Aigner-edition Volkswagen Cabriolet. Even in this al … | Continue reading
Lately, I’ve been sort of obsessed with the problem of charging electric vehicles. While, ideally I think a battery swapping system makes the most long-term sense, no major automaker seems to be putting any effort into that, so, for now at least, we’re stuck with the charging sta … | Continue reading
You may recall that there’s been a lot of effort on the part of big companies—carmakers, agricultural equipment makers, consumer electronics companies, and more—to make it not just difficult, but actually illegal for owners to repair or modify products they bought and own. We’ve … | Continue reading
It started, I think, as a joke. | Continue reading
We’ve already heard that VW and Ford have agreed to “investigate collaboration on....electric vehicles,” but now a new report by German newspaper Der Tagesspiegel suggests that VW’s ideas on EV collaboration span well beyond Ford. According to the story, VW wants its MEB platform … | Continue reading
There are over 140,000 miles of privately-owned standard-gauge rail in the United States, vital to the transportation of billions of tons of freight and people. Occasionally, it gets really cold where some of those train tracks sit. Like right now, in Chicago, where Wednesday’s h … | Continue reading
There are over 140,000 miles of privately-owned standard-gauge rail in the United States, vital to the transportation of billions of tons of freight and people. Occasionally, it gets really cold where some of those train tracks sit. Like right now, in Chicago, where Wednesday’s h … | Continue reading
The police department in Fremont, Calif., the same Fremont where the Tesla factory is, just bought a used Tesla Model S 85 to replace a retiring Dodge Charger. The car has been fitted with all the standard cop-spec accessories and will soon go on duty as part of a pilot program t … | Continue reading
“Nobody at the coffee shop will remember you if we stop at one-million nine-fifty.” And that’s how a professional cattle rattle gets someone to pay the headline-winning price of just over $2 million for the first 2020 Toyota Supra off the production line. Thankfully this isn’t si … | Continue reading
You’d barely even know it, but CES just happened this week. In the last couple years the big technology trade show was very much a car show, where automakers and startups alike showed off the latest in hopeful self-driving systems always billed as just “a few years away.” In 2019 … | Continue reading
The day after Christmas, Tesla CEO Elon Musk gave us an unexpected gift. Brake pads on Teslas would “literally never” need to be replaced, he said, thanks in part to the electric car’s regenerative brakes cutting way down on brake pad use compared to a conventional car. That seem … | Continue reading
In 1987, BMW announced to the world that it was officially not screwing around anymore when it put a 5.0-liter V12 into production, setting a 300-horsepower standard for luxury and refinement. It was only a few years later that BMW would produce probably the ultimate V12, the 618 … | Continue reading
Volkswagen, the company that brought us Dieselgate, wants us forget its last eco-disaster by promising to bring affordable electric cars to the masses starting in 2020. Those cars will ride on an all-new electric platform called MEB. The automaker calls it “one of the most import … | Continue reading
A body shop in Bulgaria has posted some incredible pictures onto its Facebook page showing 11 essentially never-before-driven 1994 BMW 5 Series (E34s) just sitting there. Alone. Yearning to carve some mountain roads. Here’s a close look. | Continue reading
It is with great sadness and regret that we must report that Asimo, Honda’s humanoid robot, will grace this land no more. Honda has ceased development of Asimo, thus bringing the 18-year story and/or life of the child-sized robot-child to a close. | Continue reading
I generally like people, which may be why I never fail to be surprised when I encounter people being truly unrepentant dickheads for no good reason whatsoever. That’s what seems to have been going down at a Tesla Supercharger in Hickory, North Carolina, where a Tesla owner was at … | Continue reading
Okay, so Lincoln is, for real, bringing suicide doors back to the fancy but unfortunately slow-selling Continental sedan. Just not very many of them, and those that do get snatched up by buyers are destined to become instant collector’s items. | Continue reading
“Fat, dumb and happy.” That’s how convicted former Fiat Chrysler exec Alphons Iacobelli and Monica Morgan, the wife of former United Auto Workers Vice President General Holiefield, wanted to leave union officials feeling as a result of an illegal scheme they’d crafted that—accord … | Continue reading