While watching the FIFA World Cup a few weeks ago, my boss noticed players sitting in race car seats, and ordered me to figure out why. So I reached out to one of the biggest race car seat manufacturers, Recaro. Here’s what I learned. | Continue reading
Major automakers and startups are vying to launch electric vehicles in the U.S. in the coming years, competing for a small slice of the car buying public. But however crowded the field gets here, it’s nothing like what’s going on in China, which now has, no joke, 487 electric veh … | Continue reading
The current-generation Chevrolet Corvette Z06 is sold as a 650-horsepower supercharged track weapon, yet that hasn’t been the case for owners who have had the car go into limp mode on track. More Z06 owners have brought a fourth class-action lawsuit against General Motors over th … | Continue reading
In a June 2017 meeting with Tesla employees, CEO Elon Musk solicited their complaints about safety issues and promised to address their concerns, so long as they refrained from trying to organize a union, the National Labor Relations Board alleges. | Continue reading
Back in February, I documented a brief and stupid saga involving the vending machines that allow you to buy MetroCards to ride the New York City subway. Now, thanks to William Finnegan in The New Yorker, we have some more context about those machines. Hilarious context. Enlighten … | Continue reading
Over 400 feet of total jumps have been completed by Travis Pastrana tonight in Las Vegas: one jump over 52 cars, one jump over 16 buses, and one jump over the fountain in front of Caesars Palace hotel and casino—breaking three of legendary daredevil Evel Knievel’s most insane rec … | Continue reading
California’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health has opened a new investigation into Tesla, after receiving a complaint from one of the automaker’s employees at its assembly plant in Fremont, California, a spokesperson confirmed. It’s not immediately clear what the complai … | Continue reading
You might remember last month we wrote about a strange political ad that was making the rounds suggesting German Chancellor Angela Merkel thought Americans were “suckers” and that Germany (and especially Volkswagen) was planning to “dump cheap cars” on the U.S. market. Something … | Continue reading
Tesla has been building cars for nearly 15 years, but it’s still learning the best way to do that as it ramps up production of the make-or-break Model 3 to the target of 5,000 cars per month. It’s much more a running work in progress than you might think. | Continue reading
It sounds unbelievable for any car to lap the 12.94-mile Nürburgring Nordschleife course in only 5:19.546 seconds. The Porsche 919 Hybrid Evo went 51.58 seconds faster than the former overall lap record, with an average speed of 145.3 mph. What’s even weirder, though, is that the … | Continue reading
I recently traded a friend of mine I met on the Dark Web some very rare vintage erotic lenticular pictures of Tyne Daly from her Cagney and Lacey era for a cordless drill with a battery that never needs recharging. I was having trouble getting it to work, so I opened up the batte … | Continue reading
Despite one of America’s top generals calling the World War II Jeep “America’s greatest contribution to modern warfare,” the little 4x4 wasn’t perfect. In fact, it rolled off the assembly line in 1941 with a terrible design flaw that could have sent soldiers barreling into oncomi … | Continue reading
Yeah, that just happened. Romain Dumas climbed behind the wheel of Volkswagen’s electric I.D. R and just beat the all-time Pike’s Peak record set by Sebastien Loeb by setting the first-ever time under eight minutes. | Continue reading
This is a story of hubris, determination, emissions, an Impala, and, of course, the amazing Soichiro Honda. It's a reminder that innovation can beat strength, and that the most defining characteristic of any giant is not its size, but it's susceptibility to cleverness. | Continue reading
Late Wednesday, after Tesla filed a lawsuit against former Gigafactory technician Marty Tripp, the ex-technician shared emails with the Washington Post that highlighted a heated back-and-forth between him and CEO Elon Musk. At first, it seemed like Musk fired off a quick jab befo … | Continue reading
One of the big issues concerning electric vehicles is how pedestrians struggle to hear an oncoming, naturally-silent electric car in the streets. Following my recent first drive of the 2019 Jaguar I-Pace in Portugal last, I think Europe already has this figured out. | Continue reading
Have you ever wondered about the electricity that courses through your car? Do you suspect that there’s a captive bolt of lightning held in a magic jar? Of course you don’t. You’re not a Neanderthal. You know there’s a battery and an alternator. You may even know your battery pro … | Continue reading
In order to achieve production goals, Tesla started up a third production line this weekend. The two existing lines must take up quite a lot of space inside the former GM/Toyota facility, as the third line was built not in the factory, but in a temporary tent structure outside. T … | Continue reading
A recently terminated Tesla employee filed a lawsuit against the company Tuesday, claiming the automaker violated a California state law by failing to give proper notice when it allegedly laid off hundreds of workers this month. | Continue reading
So much of truck-bragging is done backwards, I think. Most truck owners, if inclined to brag, like to talk about how big their engines are, how many cylinders, and so on, as though the sheer size of the numbers they’re spewing makes them tough. I maintain the opposite is true; do … | Continue reading
The first thing that happened when I drove a Tesla on Autopilot was an instant, unsettling feeling of not being comfortable in the car at all, thinking it’s always a moment away from crashing. Slowly, I got used to it and calmed down, just like everyone else I’ve talked to who ha … | Continue reading
This feels like something from a William Gibson cyberpunk dystopia novel, where the government has become so weak and useless, private corporations have been taking over the basic upkeep of the nation. But it’s not a William Gibson novel, there’s no plucky protagonist with some s … | Continue reading
Recently, on the advice of someone online who claimed to be a doctor (I later found out it was a nine-year-old and a dog, working together) I attempted to microwave an elixir made from Propecia, Red Bull, and mildly used cat litter. Lacking cover to prevent boil-over, I used an o … | Continue reading
Tesla has been dogged by reports that it fails to report serious workplace injuries on legally-mandated logs, and now the automaker’s former safety director is claiming in a lawsuit that he was fired in retaliation for raising concerns about the alleged practice. Update: Tesla h … | Continue reading
If you’ve ever seen a picture of a World War II Jeep with brown paint between the points of its “invasion star,” you might have assumed it was just an aesthetic touch. But it was much more than that: the paint was there to keep soldiers safe. Here’s how. | Continue reading
The former environmental minister for Germany’s most populous state wanted an electric car while in office, because, well, EVs are “green” and good for our planet while it still exists. But Germany’s truest green boy couldn’t handle an EV as a daily driver, and returned his Tesl … | Continue reading
CarMax is an absolute powerhouse when it comes to pre-owned vehicle retailing. It sells more than double the used inventory than their nearest competitor and they make significantly more money doing so. The primary reason for this is simple—most people are overpaying. | Continue reading
Mary didn’t know anything was wrong with her old Ford SUV when it was loaded onto a container ship in Europe in mid-2015. But she found out the hard way when it caught fire below deck, taking $45 million worth of other cars with it, causing another $55 million in damage to the v … | Continue reading
Marci Robin was buying a Fiat 500X from a West Palm Beach, Florida dealership, and was in the final stages of signing all the paperwork, when she was presented with a strange but simple question: was she a robot? | Continue reading
If we’re going to be talking and thinking about autonomous cars, self-driving cars, robo-cars, drive-o-droids (copyright pending) or whatever the hell we want to call these things, we should get a sense of exactly what they do and how they do it. How do they know what’s around th … | Continue reading
In some corners of the world where Elon Musk’s word is taken as gospel, there’s a prevailing view that it’s irresponsible for news outlets to cover car crashes involving semi-autonomous technology as diligently as we’ve seen lately. Whether it’s Tesla investors stanning hard for … | Continue reading
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. | Continue reading
Heads-up displays, once reserved for fighter jets and vehicles in sci-fi movies, are quickly proliferating in common cars. I’ve now tested BMWs, Cadillacs, Mercedes-Benzes, Mazdas and more with information projected onto their windshields—and I have yet to experience a HUD I like … | Continue reading
Uber has concluded the likely reason why one of its self-driving cars fatally struck a pedestrian earlier this year, according to tech outlet The Information. The car’s software recognized the victim, Elaine Herzberg, standing in the middle of the road, but decided it didn’t need … | Continue reading
A self-driving minivan belonging to Google’s self-driving car unit, Waymo, was involved in a crash in Chandler Arizona on Friday. The aftermath looks brutal. | Continue reading
The Silicon Valley gazillionaire of concern today is Jan Koum, now ex-CEO and co-founder of WhatsApp, a Facebook subsidiary. Koum, according to the Washington Post, is peacing out over the usual complaints of “strategy” and “Facebook’s attempts to use its personal data and weaken … | Continue reading
BMW’s M division is one of the most successful and legendary names in in the car world, but it all started out with a Ford. | Continue reading
Hardcore truck people probably don’t think of the 2017 Honda Ridgeline as a “real truck,” but I just towed a classic Ford Mustang over the Appalachians with one. So why aren’t there more trucks in the U.S. built on a unibody platform like the Ridgeline? I talked to engineers at H … | Continue reading
In May of 2017, British “driver” Bhavesh Patel climbed behind the wheel of his white Tesla S 60 and headed off down the crowded M1 highway at about 40mph. Itching to relax, Patel switched on the autopilot function and swapped to the passenger seat for maximum comfort. After kic … | Continue reading