The 2018 Audi S4 doesn’t look special. From a distance, it looks like any other Audi sedan—a pattern Audi recognizes and could change one day. But it’s when you get up close to the car, when you start to see a red tint to the leather and a diamond stitching in the seats, that you know there’s something more to it.
Read MoreNavigation systems including those found in commercial flights may be disrupted or jammed completely across the southwest U.S. over the next couple of weeks. That sounds pretty bad but do not be too alarmed, it’s not Red Dawn. It’s just the U.S. Air Force and its massive annual Red Flag war exercises based out of Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, as reported by The War Zone.
Read MoreA U.S. Navy EP-3 surveillance plane, flying over international waters, was harassed by a Russian Su-27 Flanker fighter jet yesterday. The Russian fighter jet flew within five feet of the American aircraft, in what Navy officials told CNN was an “unsafe intercept.”
Read MoreThe details about Hawaii’s false missile alarm are still trickling out, and with each new one, the error becomes both more confounding and more terrifyingly slapstick. On Tuesday, the Federal Communications Communication released a preliminary report on the matter, revealing that it wasn’t an honest mistake after all, and that the person who sent the alert actually believed that it was real.
Read MoreThere was a bit of confusion in the office today. What is a tank? As it turns out, many of the things that you think are tanks are, in fact, not.
Read MoreWe’ve all been there, circling the parking lot, looking for just the right spot. And then you hit a curb, and you feel very dumb. I imagine that’s exactly how these U.S. Navy pilots felt after knocking off their $21 million MH-60S Seahawk’s tailwheel while trying to park at a New York City heliport.
Read MoreIt was only Saturday when a false alert went out to cell phones across Hawaii warning that a ballistic missile was heading for the state – and more than that, it was “NOT A DRILL.” Officials later said that the employee who sent the alert would be reassigned, not fired, and, indeed, images of the warning system’s user interface make you wonder how all of this doesn’t happen more often.
Read MoreLook, we’ve all been there: It’s late and we get a hankering for some wine, but sadly there isn’t any in the house. Time to make a wine run. Somebody grab the armored personnel carrier.
Read MoreNuclear bombs—with a few exceptions—are designed to create huge explosions. In some cases, they’re supposed to have extra bits and pieces in the service of making even HUGER (it’s a word now) explosions. Occasionally all of that fails, and what you get is called a “fizzle.” Here’s why it happens.
Read MoreJack O’Banion, Vice President of Strategy and Customer Requirements, Advanced Development Programs for Lockheed Martin may have just unintentionally revealed that America’s next hypersonic warplane is much farther along the development process than previously suggested.
Read MoreWhen it comes to the overall cost of a vehicle, the sale price is only part of the equation. You need to factor in resale, and how much value your car will lose. Some drop slower than others, and according to Kelley Blue Book, these 2018 trucks, SUVs, and an all-wheel-drive sedan will be your best bets to minimize depreciation.
Read MoreThis wasn’t meant to be a glamorous trip. There would be no ice driving nor desert off-roading. I was about to embark on a 300-mile trip to the frigid Northland and I needed a nice pack mule to haul all my junk up there with. And the 2017 Volvo V90 Cross Country proved to be a damn fine vehicle to do it with.
Read MoreI may be a professional race car driver, but my writing gig for Jalopnik doesn’t suck either. (Just don’t tell Patrick that or he’ll take away the peanuts he’s currently paying me.) Case in point: a snowy, hoon-filled test of the new Acura NSX. Is it good to blast a $150,000 hybrid supercar around an empty winter parking lot? Hell yes it is.
Read MoreIf you had a bad experience at a car dealership, there often isn’t much you can do. In some cases you can get a lawyer involved, but if you truly think a dealer isn’t operating within the confines of the law, you can report them to the Federal Trade Commission who can investigate and even fine dealers who are in violation of their regulations. Here’s how.
Read MoreThe idea behind the Winnebago Minnie Winnie RV is simple: it’s a toilet on wheels. Also a living room, bedroom(s), command center, party pad... OK, so it’s a whole house you can park wherever. It also makes car racing way more fun and easy. And no, that doesn’t involve setting lap times in the housebus.
Read MoreMohit wanted to do the responsible thing and bought a 2016 Camry. It’s fine, but having a boring car and a boring job just isn’t going to cut it. He wants something that appeals to his sense of adventure, but won’t break the bank. What car should he buy?
Read MoreLincoln made a car called the “Continental” 20 years ago. You don’t remember it. No one remembers it. That’s because it was bad. But now there’s a new Continental, and the 2018 Lincoln Continental is the Lincoln should’ve made a long time ago.
Read MoreForget the fad diets and the workout plan. There’s only one way to make 2018 better than 2017, and that is five liters of American V8 power under your right foot at all times. It won’t even cost a lot—have you seen how cheap the last-generation Ford Mustang GT is these days?
Read MoreRight away most of you have read the headline and thought, “Of course not, McParland! How obvious do you need to get?” I too thought this was common sense—until I got an alarming amount of emails from readers that have put themselves in a tough spot because they agreed to finance their buyers.
Read MoreSpring semester is just getting started and for the commuters among us, that means you need a reliable car to get you to and from campus on time. If you’ve come here looking for the perfect ride this semester that fulfills all your needs as a student, you’ve come to the right place. Here are my picks for the top five “back-to-school” cars.
Read MoreThere exists the implication that if you are driving a Mercedes-Benz S-Class, you are in something that is—at least on a few levels—the very best car in the world at the time it was produced. It’s the S-Class’s entire raison d’être, or whatever the hell that is in German. There are other luxury flagship sedans and coupes, sure. But none of them are supposed to be as good as this.
Read MoreNicholas has wised up and decided to get the heck out of NYC. He wants to take a cross-country road trip with his girlfriend, see the sights, make new friends and find a new place to live. But he needs the right car to make the journey, what should he buy?
Read MoreLike many of you, I’m a sucker for fast wagons. Unfortunately, most fast wagons like the Mercedes E63 AMG fall into the destroy your bank account category. This cheap Audi S6 Avant may also qualify for that label, but it will just do so gradually.
Read MoreThe 2018 Mini Cooper S E Countryman All4 has a long name and a smaller battery than almost any other plug-in hybrid in existence. But even though it’s a small step toward electric driving, it’s got a lot of personality for a car you connect to a wall socket.
Read MoreWe have covered many times how Cadillac was once the so-called “standard of the world,” but has struggled in recent decades to regain some market share from the German luxury car brands. But now, Cadillac finally has a tool to score customers and it’s not a product or some fancy technology—it’s decent lease deals on par with BMW, Audi and Mercedes.
Read MoreJason has owned some pretty unique, (some may say questionable) cars in his lifetime. But now is looking for a solid commuter car that has comfort and power, of course, it still has to have some character. What car should he buy?
Read MoreMoving can be stressful, especially if you’re moving to a big city like New York just a few days after graduating college. During these busy times, it’s best to minimize distractions and limit the amount of tasks and responsibilities at hand, which is why my editors decided to get me a 640 horsepower Cadillac CTS-V for my first weekend in town. Here’s what I learned.
Read MoreThere is a freedom in driving a car for a long time after it’s been paid off. But not every vehicle can go the distance. If you’re the type to keep your car for a long time, have a look at this survey breaking down the most popular models that owners tend to keep for 15 years.
Read MoreBenjamin is a paramedic from Omaha who, like most paramedics, has a bit of a wild side. He wants to get some kind of beat up, cheap, muscle car and turn it into an off-road battle machine. This is what Jalop dreams are made of. So what car should he buy?
Read MoreSince the end of the recession, the story of the auto industry has followed one major narrative: record monthly new car sales thanks to cheap credit and pent-up demand. Sure, some brands and automakers did better than others, and over time the market shifted to crossovers, trucks and SUVs over sedans and small cars, but things were generally fine and dandy. But December’s sales numbers indicate the party may be winding down a bit, and those sedans and small cars are in worse shape than ever.
Read MoreAs the resident car buying expert, I try to stay away from absolute statements because every car buyer’s needs are unique. That being said, you should always splurge on heated seats, regardless of where you live.
Read MoreThe mathematical skills of the American population are, for the most part, pretty poor. Dealerships and lenders will often use this as an opportunity to take advantage of people, but sometimes the opposite happens when someone with bad math skills walks away from a good deal because they don’t understand how the numbers work.
Read MoreWe love to clown on the Fast and Furious movies a lot, but, really, I think those movies probably did more good for our community than most.
Read MoreAs much as I hate seeing the word “emotional” used to describe every new run-of-the-mill crossover or SUV, there’s also no getting around the fact that our love for cars and ownership is an emotional response, oftentimes rooted very much in the car’s aesthetics.
Read MoreSometimes at night, when I’m having trouble getting to sleep, I like to imagine the design brief for the Dodge Dynasty. “A car. Just make a car,” it reads in its entirety, and for styling inspiration they included some diagrams from the Illinois DMV driver’s manual. The result, the Dodge Dynasty, is a potent and powerfully forgettable vehicle. I bet most of you forgot about it until just now.
Read MoreStereotypes are almost never good, but sometimes they ignore race, religion and gender and instead deal with cars.
Read MoreUnless you yourself witnessed the physical crushing of your car, there’s no guarantee that you won’t come across it again after you’ve sold it—even if you sell it to someone living on another continent.
Read MoreNormally when I want to show you a car I believe you’ve never heard of, I limit myself to one car. Not today. Today I’d like to introduce you to two fascinating cars from the same company, the Australian kit and production car maker Bolwell. I chose these two cars, the Nagari and Ikara, because I’m not sure there’s a better spread of beautiful to ugly in the lineups of any other carmaker.
Read MoreEvery car with an engine has an exhaust pipe. Some are prettier than others, but who cares? I certainly didn’t, until I looked closely and realized, hey, a little sliver of chrome goes a long way to making a car’s backside look good.
Read MoreI’m pretty sure everyone reading this is familiar with the old “blinker fluid” jokes. In case you’re not, it’s one of the oldest, most worn and tired gags in all of the automobiliverse. It’s so old it’s become a tradition; we even named our signature cocktail after it. That’s why I decided it’s time to see if, somehow, blinker fluid could really be A Thing.
Read MoreDon’t underestimate the importance of your car’s interior design. It’s what you’re stuck looking at every time you drive, after all. There may be no one right way to craft the perfect interior, but there are plenty of ways to do it wrong.
Read MoreEarlier today, Mohit asked for some help on what he should get to replace his 2016 Toyota Camry. One commenter had a better idea.
Read MoreLet’s be absolutely clear here: all these terms are pretty stupid. I mean, generally, I think the very idea of Supercars are sort of stupid as it is, massively expensive, absurdly capable and fast vehicles that are doomed to spend most their lives immobile in some jackass’ climate-controlled car-spa. Still, they’re here, they can be fun, and companies that build them like to call them “hypercars” now. It’s time to set some standards.
Read MoreYour car’s dashboard is like your car’s press conference: it’s how the car communicates with you, officially. Sure, you get rumors in the form of noises, smells, and shimmies, but those gauges sitting in front of your face represent the information the Carmaker has decided to share with you. What if that information was totally useless?
Read MoreWhat you don’t know is that Jalopnik is simply a cover for highly trained, extremely unemotional and incredibly effective secret agents, operating globally to destabilize the norms of the automotive world.
Read MoreI suppose it’s possible that you weren’t aware that it was Thailand’s National Army Day on January 18th—that may explain why I didn’t get a card or a call from you or anything. That’s okay, I’m not mad, because I’ve just learned that Thailand is still using a good number of beautifully-maintained Volkswagen Type 181s (we called them Things here in the U.S.) in their military.
Read MoreFor the most part, cars change hands as their owners decide not to keep them anymore. This can happen for good reasons, bad reasons or just natural reasons. Did you sell a car once and then come across it again with its new owner? What was that like?
Read MoreSome of you may recall that late last year I fulfilled a longtime automotive-ownership ambition and took delivery of a 1990 Nissan Pao from the amazing Duncan Imports. It’s been a few weeks, and I’m delusional enough to think you’re still curious, so get ready for a full report on my first almost-month of Pao ownership.
Read MoreRude people are everywhere: at the coffee shops, the grocery stores, in the prisons and jails—and at car meets. They stand around, acting like they are clever, passing judgment on everyone, when really the only thing they’re doing is pissing you off and being dumb.
Read MoreI’m sort of denying myself a bit of fun this week because the car I’m picking isn’t one I have nothing but contempt for. Usually, I like to write these because I can vent righteous vitriol at the most boring, lackluster cars ever slapped together by the hands of defeated humans. This time, I don’t think the car is awful, but it is sort of meh, especially in the context of whose name was on the car: the Triumph Acclaim.
Read MoreSome cars are just better suited to more extreme weather than others. I wouldn’t take a Honda S2000 out in a blizzard unless I already had an extremely convoluted life-insurance fraud scheme all planned out. In the same way, I wouldn’t take a Toyota 4Runner to a drift competition with any hopes of winning. But sometimes, you have to make do with what you have, brave the elements and hit the road with a vehicle wholly unsuited for bad weather duty.
Read MoreI can honestly say there’s no show quite like the Tokyo Auto Salon. There are other tuner shows like SEMA and the Essen Motor Show, but the TAS has its very own and unique style. When the rest of the world is oohing and aah-ing over the latest tech and the latest trucks, this unmistakably Japanese show is where things get wonderfully weird.
Read MoreHere’s a thought for you to occupy your Friday afternoon while you try to look like you’re working: what if you could breed cars like animals? What if you had a full car-ranch, and using the same principles of animal husbandry and genetics that humans have been using to breed animals for millennia, you could breed your own new breed of car. What would breed?
Read MoreIt all starts somewhere. This hobby, or as some may call it, a sickness. Our obsession with cars usually begins when we get infatuated with one particular model, then it branches out from there. Tell us about the car started your enthusiasm for speed.
Read MoreControversial Japanese tuner Liberty Walk wanted to make an impact.
Read MoreThe Chevrolet Monte Carlo is dead now. Nobody can hurt it anymore, and it can’t hurt me. But dammit, the last generations of Monte Carlo were sad front-wheel drive pretenders and it still makes me mad and I can’t get over it.
Read MorePretty much everything you touch or interact with on a modern car has been rethought, re-engineered, re-designed, re-focus grouped, re-everything’d, over and over. With one notable exception: the sun visors. There hasn’t been any substantial upgrade to these surprisingly important bits of equipment since we started slapping illuminated mirrors on them in the 1950s. It’s time to rethink sun visors.
Read MoreRevenge is a dish best served deep fried with pickles.
Read MoreIt’s probably safe to say more women are involved in the world of motorsports than ever, but starting grids are still largely dominated by male racers. Pippa Mann, currently an IndyCar racer and one who finished 17th in last year’s Indy 500, is actively seeking to change that by building a community for female drivers through a scholarship at the Lucas Oil School of Racing.
Read MoreWe all have hot takes about cars—it’s what makes being part of a community so engaging and fun. Unfortunately, sometimes that means you have to hear unsavory things about your car from other people.
Read MoreIssues with cars don’t usually live on the surface. It takes careful inspection, or a bit of ownership, before you realize something is off. Sadly, this can lead to people getting more heartache than they bargained for.
Read MoreThe 2018 North American International Auto Show kicks off tonight in Detroit. That means that the internet is soon going to be flooded with pictures of whatever insane concept car was brought to the event. Most of the time, concept cars are made to show off a particular style that the automaker wants to convey in future models or a new technology that’s being worked on.
Read MoreI realized that it’s been forever since we’ve done an automotive Would You Rather, so let’s take care of that, right now. Remember, this is the sort of thing your brain needs, right there along with frequent cerebellum massages. So let’s get to it!
Read MoreIt’s that time of the year. A fortnight hasn’t even passed to give us time to recover from the New Year meets, we now have the grand circus that is the Tokyo Auto Salon weekend and the craziness surrounding it. While North America prepares for the first big “proper” motor show in Detroit, Japan continues the wild events with the mother of all tuning shows. First up: Subaru.
Read MoreWhoever denies this is lying. You pull up to a stoplight, that one really good song comes on, and sometimes, you just gotta drum. You just gotta drum the song out, preferably by banging on the steering wheel. This guy took that idea to its natural conclusion.
Read MoreI can barely convince my friends to go see a movie. The Rolling Death Van Club in Portland, by contrast, is able to coordinate meet up after meet up, helping each other buy, fix up and run the coolest old vans in the country. Looking at all of these tattoo’d, pierced survivor van owners, suddenly I feel like the piece of shit who doesn’t have his life together.
Read MoreThe act of showing a prototype car at a car show with the intent of taking money for reservations can have two possible outcomes, with two possible motives: First, everything could go great, and people would get their cars. This is rare. The other way is that everything goes to hell and nobody gets their car, and everyone loses their deposit. Nobody’s happy. This outcome can be caused by either simple failure or a premeditated grift. In the case of the Dolo, no one is really sure what happened:
Read MoreIn a perfect world, nobody would try to mark up a car hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars over MSRP. New cars would sell for exactly what the manufacturer said what they’d sell for and not a penny more.
Read MoreI feel like I’ve been picking on Saturn pretty hard for these Meh cars—it was only a couple months ago we featured the deliriously bland Saturn L-Series—but I just can’t deny Saturn’s unnatural skills at making really, really boring-ass cars. Besides, what’s going to happen? Is Saturn’s PR department gonna call me and complain? Will they not give me any more press cars? Ah, it’s funny because they’re dead.
Read MoreFollowing the supercar-centric meet at Hanyu Parking Area the day before, I wasn’t sure of what to expect from Daikoku as basically everything one could possibly want to see was already at Hanyu. But like always, Daikoku never failed to surprise.
Read MoreThis will be the big year for cars, right? The year when they finally can fly, drive themselves, fix our traffic problems and also be fun, beautiful and spirited to drive if we so choose, right? Maybe some of those things will happen and maybe none of them will. But the year is still young, so we’ll see what winds up happening.
Read MoreI’ve always thought that animal names make fantastic car names. They’re visceral and evocative and loaded with personality. If you said you drove a 1985 Mongrel Cheetah, I’d have a pretty good sense of what that car is like. Or a 1998 DNF Bison. Or a 1964 Zintar Sparrow. You get it. Right now, in the jet-pack-image-evoking year 2018, there’s over a dozen cars still named for animals in America. Update: I added a couple more I forgot.
Read MoreJapan does the New Year differently. There aren’t any major fireworks displays, instead countdowns are done at shrines and temples and people eat soba noodles. But because it’s one of the few days during the year where people have some time off work, it also means a lot of car enthusiasts come out to play.
Read MoreWe live in a pretty polarized era. The internet has turned the world into a gigantic family Thanksgiving table, and everyone’s fighting about pretty much everything, always, forever. I know this. And yet I still have to admit I’m surprised by the level of anger and vitriol I’ve seen regarding something that you’d think would be as emotionless as possible: the question of whether or not to warm up your car in the cold.
Read MoreThe Pacific Northwest is home to Dirtfish Rally School, the hub for rallycross (and to some extent, rally) in America. There are a few interesting reasons why.
Read MoreMuch like the act of wearing live hamsters as a merkin, whether or not to warm your car up in cold, cold winter is something nearly everyone seems to have an opinion about. We’ve tackled the issue before, and I’m still on Team Warm, but there’s still a lot of controversy around this important question. Let’s take another look.
Read MoreNow that we can wash our hands of 2017, we can also finally take a good, realistic look at 2018 and what it will bring for cars. Twelve months is a long time, so what kind of developments do you think they’ll bring to the automotive landscape?
Read MoreIf I had to pick one time in history to be an automotive engineer, I’d have to pick the mid-to-late 1930s. Well, as a Jew, there’d be some pretty serious trade-offs about that era, of course, but as someone who loves rear-engine designs, it was the Golden Age. While most of the rear-engine pioneers we normally think about were European, there was some fascinating work going on in America, and some of that work was far more radical and strange than you’d think. Like what GM was doing.
Read MoreIt might not seem like a big deal to you, but waking up one morning and going from having your gas pumped by an attendant your whole life to suddenly having to pump it yourself can be mildly terrifying! My heart goes out to those poor Oregonians who are freaking out over this.
Read MoreThe people who don’t understand, they say things like, “It’s just a car,” “Just buy a new one,” or “Why are you doing this to yourself?” They don’t get that cars aren’t just useless hunks of metal. They’re also teachers, man.
Read MoreA James Bond villain would never kill you quickly. They would never just grab a gun and shoot you. That would be way too easy, as Dr. Evil noted. That’s why the roof crush machine from the safety wizards at the IIHS would be perfect for one of their lairs.
Read MoreBack in May, we reported on an acid-green Corvette Z06 that crashed into a tree in Michigan after excessive speeding, which smashed the car to pieces and left the two passengers inside with broken bones. The driver, Jie Fu Gong, 22, has been sentenced to nine months in jail.
Read MoreI got my 2015 Volkswagen TDI Sportwagen in June and promptly named it Jolene because, well, I knew it was a cheater, but she was still so damn good-looking I couldn’t help myself. Jolene is still pretty, but she had her first run-in with America’s crumbling infrastructure this past weekend. Hours after warning Jalopnik’s Detroit auto show team to look out for potholes in my hometown, I hit a pothole.
Read MoreYesterday, we brought you the story of how a drugged driver sent a Nissan Altima through the wall of a dentist’s office, which normally would not be remarkable except that the dentist’s office was on the second floor. Now, new video has emerged showing that the Altima practically jumped a bus.
Read MoreAs the automotive industry progressively improves the safety of its vehicles, it seems issues of driver awareness and visibility also increase. Thickening pillars and smaller windows coupled with an awkward road design make for a particularly dangerous intersection in Hampshire, England that suffers from a phenomenon known as “constant bearing, decreasing range.”
Read MoreIf you don’t see the sign, expect to do the time (paying off your increased insurance rates after sliding on a sheet of ice that was formerly an off-ramp and straight into a pileup of crashed cars).
Read MoreWatch the brake lights as this Kia Sorento takes off from a drive-thru ATM in Rockford, Illinois two days before Christmas. They never come on, even as the car hits a berm, goes airborne and bunny hops another car.
Read MoreWe’ve been hearing about the impending arrival of the Lamborghini Urus SUV for months and like many of you, my gut reaction was: “But why?” Now I’ve sat in one at the Detroit Auto Show, I no longer care. All I need to know is how soon I can drive one.
Read MoreAt the Detroit Auto Show, I had the chance to talk with the director of Ram Truck Engineering, Rob Wichman, about the new 2019 Ram 1500. As there was a naked chassis just sitting on display, we got a close-up look at some of the nerdy bits of Ram’s new truck.
Read MoreThe new 2019 Mercedes-Benz G-Class may look the same on the outside, but there are some huge changes underneath. So I sat down—well, technically, crouched down—with G-Class head of development Oliver Metzger to look at some hardware. It was awesome.
Read MoreThis year’s Detroit Auto Show had a big focus on trucks and autonomous crossover concepts, and most of the big stuff was out of the way before the show even officially began. That left the other companies some space to show up with some surprises.
Read MoreInfiniti brought one of the most intriguing concept cars to the Detroit Auto Show this year, in part because it was one of the only actual concepts revealed, but also because it’s a beautifully sculpted package that finds a tricky balance of design and new engineering. Here’s what its designer had to say about the future of their designs.
Read More“Autonomous cars” and “electrification” have joined “mobility” as the auto industry’s most darling buzzwords, but what made the biggest splash at the biggest new car show in North America? This year, it was leaf-sprung trucks and a V8 manual pony car.
Read MoreNürburgring lap times, for carmakers, are like football games in college. Almost everyone participates, despite onlookers’ attention ranging from “don’t care at all” to “this is the most important thing ever” until someone wins—then, it’s a big deal. But Hyundai isn’t into ‘Ring records, for a strangely good reason.
Read MoreFord trotted out the 2019 Ford Mustang Bullitt at this year’s Detroit Auto Show, along with a highly special guest: the original Mustang used in the 1968 Steve McQueen film, Bullitt. Jalopnik’s on-hand photographer Kurt Bradley got a close look at the iconic car that was, until just a few years ago, thought to be lost.
Read MoreFiat Chrysler bossman Sergio Marchionne spoke a series of words at the Detroit Auto Show that suggested that not only is Ferrari definitely planning an SUV, it could come as soon as 2019, and it “has to drive like a Ferrari.” He also refers to it as an FUV, for “Ferrari Utility Vehicle,” and from this I think we can all extrapolate that it will be fast, deeply stupid, and make Ferrari a metric crapton of cash.
Read MoreThe 2019 Ram 1500 has a new mild hybrid system, a glorious optional 12-inch touchscreen display, and storage cubbies all over the interior. But that interior is also hiding some neat design easter eggs that call back to classic truck stuff.
Read MoreWe’ve been big fans of what Honda’s been up to lately, what with fast and fun stuff like the Civic Type R and the NSX. Besides that expensive supercar, however, the fun hasn’t really trickled up to the Acura luxury brand—the last TLX we drove was far more dull than it looked. But Acura seems intent on fixing that by bringing back the Type-S line. This is good news.
Read MoreThe Jeep Cherokee KL gets a mid-cycle refresh for 2019, and now it not only doesn’t look hideous anymore, but it also gets essentially the same 270 horsepower turbocharged four-cylinder as its stablemate, the mighty Jeep Wrangler.
Read MoreThe Shelby GT500—an insanely powerful version of the Mustang pony car—bowed out when the new generation car launched for 2015. But now it has returned starting in 2019 as a 2020 model year, and it’s set to be the most powerful street-legal Ford ever with over 700 horsepower.
Read MoreThe new 2018 BMW X2 compact crossover, was publicly unveiled today at the 2018 Detroit Auto Show, and examples will probably waste no time in multiplying like rabbits within the garages of suburbanites everywhere. There is no doubt in my mind that it will sell in droves, but the best thing about it is that at least BMW is done pretending with it.
Read MoreIf you have an apartment or house that you simply need filled to the ceiling with automotive swag, auto shows are the best place to get your free and pointless shit. You are handed so much branded crap at these shows that it’s frankly kind of gross. However, hocking brand shit on eBay while the press conferences are still ongoing is an exceptional sort of atrocious behavior.
Read MoreI am 100 percent for getting instructions from animals, like if dogs were able to give directions and lions passed on delicious pasta recipes. In Nissan’s new Xmotion Concept, revealed today, the helpful animal of choice is a koi.
Read MoreThe Hyundai Veloster has always looked fast, but it’s never really backed that up with tons of speed. That changes now, because the Korean brand just launched the 275 horsepower 2019 Hyundai Veloster N at the Detroit Auto Show, bringing Hyundai solidly into the hot hatch segment. And it’s about time we got some excitement around here.
Read MoreThe all-new 2019 Hyundai Veloster is here, and there’s good news: it’s still a total weirdo. And that’s partly because the new hatchback is a lot like the lovable outgoing one.
Read MoreAcura has never been more American than it is now. After three straight years of selling more than 50,000 RDXs here, we’re getting the first one designed and developed in the States in the form of the 2019 Acura RDX.
Read MoreToday at the 2018 Detroit Auto Show, Nissan unveiled a blocky concept that is neither a new Z car nor a GT-R. It’s called the Xmotion Concept, pronounced “cross motion” and not “ex-motion” because Nissan makes the rules now.
Read MoreMercedes-AMG seems like it’s almost trying to lose its identity of a niche little corner of the Benzian empire—rare, loud, imposing and blanketing the nearest intersection with tire smoke. But none of that matters now. For just a moment, I’m going to enjoy this straight six with an AMG badge.
Read MoreLexus understands that a modern flagship should be a massive, comfy, opulent SUV, so it introduced the LF-1 Limitless Concept at the Detroit Auto Show.
Read MoreIf there’s one thing I’ve caught myself saying in the last few years, it’s that there just aren’t enough AMG models. We are at an utter shortage! Thankfully, though, Mercedes just gave us three more to choose from. And they all use the new 3.0-liter straight-six with the 48-volt hybrid assist, so the go-fast brand is adding electricity to the mix now.
Read MoreThis is mean, but not inaccurate: Infiniti hasn’t done anything truly interesting in a good while. Nissan’s luxury brand spent years faltering as it tried to stand apart in a crowded field, with plenty of weird false starts like the canceled high-performance Q50 Eau Rouge along the way. But while it’s just a design concept and technology demonstrator, the Infiniti Q Inspiration Concept is worth paying attention to.
Read MoreOne can be forgiven for forgetting the Toyota Avalon exists. It’s pretty far from an enthusiast vehicle, the market’s currently hostile to big sedans, and it could be argued the Toyota brand hasn’t had any cool large four-doors in the U.S. since the Cressida packed a straight six and rear-wheel drive. But the Avalon is a thing, and it’s all-new and back for 2019. Let us gather now and behold it.
Read MoreWe’ve known that the new 2019 Ram 1500 pickup truck, called the “DT” platform, will get some significant design changes. But now we have a lot more info on what’s under the refreshed sheetmetal.
Read MoreMercedes-Benz showcasing a first generation G-Wagen frozen in amber may have just been a marketing ploy to promote their tie-in with the rebooted Jurassic Park film franchise, but it served as an apt if unintentional metaphor for the vehicle. This has been a car frozen in time, with a body virtually unchanged since the 1970s when it was meant for military use. Tonight, they unveiled more of the same with the 2019 Mercedes G-Class, but also something much much better.
Read MoreSedans and small cars are in a bad way right now as buyers flock to crossovers and SUVs, but they still matter at Volkswagen. In particular, the Jetta matters, as this Golf-with-a-trunk remains the brand’s best-selling vehicle. As VW seeks to recover from the diesel cheating mess, here’s the bigger, hopefully better Jetta it needs to get the job done.
Read MoreThe 2019 Ford Mustang Bullitt has shown up just in time for the 50th anniversary of the film and its epic car chase scene. Between the green paint, dark grille and signature fuel cap, I think Steve McQueen himself would be stoked to jump it off some steep streets.
Read MoreWhile we’re prepping for the Detroit Auto Show over here, the 2018 Tokyo Auto Salon is underway. If you’re in the area, you should make a beeline for Subaru’s booth, because there is some truly awesome stuff there.
Read MorePlenty of companies are going to CES this year with big and flashy announcements of how they will “disrupt” things. Toyota is one of them, aiming to change up shopping with its new e-Palette concept. It’s an intriguing idea, but one that I could only see working out in places where street-side real estate isn’t terribly precious.
Read MoreHyundai’s offering at this year’s CES seems to be yet another crossover, but this one will be a fuel cell vehicle with autonomous features. And Hyundai tapped some ex-Google and ex-Tesla people to do it. Yes, the concept is boring, but for an autonomous car maybe that’s fine? Let the normals have their driverless cars if they don’t want to drive.
Read MoreI was blasé about driving the Classic Recreations Ford Mustang GT500 because of its name. “Recreation” sounds like “copy”, and why bother with a knockoff when you’re spending six figures on a car? But between the look, sound, and good lord that shifter, this is easily one of the most exciting cars I’ve ever driven.
Read MoreEveryone has a Honda Accord story. Maybe it was your mom’s car. Maybe you had one in college, or used to join your friend on his delivery food runs. Maybe yours had Type-R stickers you’d prefer not to talk about today. With 13 million Accords sold since 1976, you may even be driving one right now. And if you’re not, maybe you should be, because 2018 Honda Accord is one fine regular car.
Read MoreI never really planned it this way, but despite being a proud American, I’ve been driving on a sort of regular basis right-hand drive cars for over 10 years now. I started with my lovely (if currently forlorn) Reliant Scimitar, and now I also have an imported Nissan Pao from Japan. I’ve been driving on the wrong side of the car for a good while now, and I get asked about it often enough that it seems like I may as well share some of what I’ve learned.
Read MoreIn October 2003, Billy Wayne Woods and his family packed into a luxury $181,000 motorhome for a fun getaway to Florida. Call it a textbook American vacation: their destination was Disney World, and with his wife, Shirley, his son and daughter-in law and two grandchildren in tow, the trip would surely be one to remember. But on the return home for the Alabama family, the vacation took an abrupt turn for disaster.
Read MoreThings are getting worse for Harley-Davidson, the maker of motorcycles that your dad aspired to ride. They will be closing a plant in Kansas City, Missouri, the company disclosed today, while reporting fourth-quarter profits that fell 82 percent (!) compared to the fourth quarter of last year. They also announced they’ll be making an electric motorcycle, so there’s that, too.
Read MoreSaddling up on a machine called “Monster” from a company known for building ferociously fast motorcycles might seem intimidating, but the 2018 Ducati Monster 821 is really pretty placid. It might not be a track day choice, but the usability of its power make it a damn fine daily rider.
Read MoreIt feels like a lifetime ago, but the Detroit Auto Show came and went this month! There were a lot of trucks and crossovers, some cars, and what you don’t often get to see, the media people doing what they do. Here’s a kind-of behind-the-scenes look at those people.
Read MoreToday’s GoPro and cell phone clips have exceptional video quality, but the audio always seems to be lacking. So please take a listen to this Lamborghini Diablo GTR take off, shot nearly a decade ago.
Read MoreLook, if you’re the sort of person that can’t bear for people to see you tearing up a little then best move on to another story. Because I’m not going to lie to you, this is a tale made of highly potent industrial-grade hartwarmium. It’s about the love and loss of a 1985 Toyota Supra, and the love and determination of a son to make his father very happy.
Read MoreIf you’ve been following along with the BBC’s Natural History Unit, most notably for the Blue Planet II and Planet Earth II documentaries, one of your token reactions probably was, “How in the hell did they film that?” Well, in the case of the unit’s newest documentary, Big Cats, sometimes the crew uses little remote-controlled buggies that zoom across the land to catch up with cheetahs running. It’s very cool.
Read MoreIn the automotive community, it seems like short shifter throws are universally lauded, but I don’t think they should be. I like my throws long. Very long. At least, in certain vehicles.
Read MoreIt seems most of us err on the side of “no thanks” when it comes to Mazda Miatas re-bodied to look like classic Ford Mustangs. But the Miata is a versatile platform with many good qualities, and now a reader has pointed me toward a Miata-based customization project I find much more compelling.
Read MoreFalconers can rejoice because the days of stuffing their birds into their carry-on luggage are behind them. Lufthansa apparently offers an on-board solution for the hordes of falconers traveling by air, and it only costs other people their seats.
Read MoreRight now, in America I think it’s easier to get an SUV than it is to get, say chlamydia. Pretty much every single car brand you can buy in the American market offers (or has real plans to offer in the near future) either an SUV or a crossover/CUV type of vehicle. But not all. There’s still a few holdouts.
Read MoreToday Lamborghini is a small piece of the hulking Volkswagen empire, with a GT racing program, a successful line of supercars as well as, soon, an SUV cash cow. But there was a time when the company was a bit more fly-by-night, and in few cars was that as clear as in the 1995 Diablo Jota, a car I forgot about until today.
Read MoreTeam O’Neil Rally School shared a video recently about the differences between braking with two-wheel drive and four-wheel drive, but people complained the test methods were unfair. So, the school tested it again, and drove home their surprising point: A 4WD system can actually brake better than a 2WD one.
Read MoreCities, states and countries around the world have their sights set on banning diesel cars by a set date. In particular, there’s some high-profile cases ongoing in Germany that could decide whether cities there can ban diesel cars. This, it turns out, has German retailers freaked out.
Read MoreI never realized how quick you could steal a tailgate until I owned a Ford Ranger. It seemed like every other time I flung the tailgate open, it’d slide off the tabs with ease—and thieves are well aware of the simplicity. Tailgate thefts declined slightly in 2017, according to a new report, but the actual number could be higher because no one knows how many go unreported.
Read MoreThere’s a homeowner in Dusseldorf’s well-to-do Oberkassel neighborhood that came up with what might be one of the most expensive solutions do deal with the problem of people parking too close to his driveway: He bought two cars, just to keep them parked on either side of the driveway, like bookends.
Read MoreAn Amtrak train carrying Republican members of Congress to a retreat in West Virginia reportedly struck a dump truck Wednesday, according to multiple reports.
Read MoreMaking rounds on the internet is a video apparently showing police officers rush a mechanic’s shop near Atlanta, Georgia after hearing loud, rapid banging noises. Those noises, the police thought, came from a gun, but in reality, they were produced by a modified Japanese sports coupe.
Read MoreI really did not think people needed to be told this, but apparently they do: Movies aren’t real and watching a Fast and Furious movie does not suddenly make you a drift king or a champion street racer. Sheesh.
Read MoreSixteen years ago now, the Honda Passport, a strange and somewhat beloved SUV that was actually built by Isuzu, died. Now, according to Automotive News, the Passport might be coming back.
Read MoreTake your car in for the airbag recall if it applies to you! Takata started 2018 by issuing a recall for another 3.3 million airbag inflators, while automakers are literally going door-to-door telling drivers to get their car fixed if it needs the fix. Meanwhile, another person has died due to a defective airbag inflator, bringing the total death toll to 22.
Read MoreI hate to have to give up my Jalop-card, but I can’t keep this secret any longer: before I bought my second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh Jeeps, there was another vehicle. One that I actually cared about quite a bit, but that I’ve remained rather secretive about over the years: a 2005 Saturn Vue.
Read MoreA few years back, a drift team in Japan that normally runs Toyota Corolla AE86s branched out into drifting minute kei car front-wheel-drive hatchbacks, easily purchased for about $300. The trick is PVC pipe pressed over the rear tires and, dammit, this is one of the best ideas I’ve seen in a long time.
Read MoreI think one of the most under-appreciated eras of automotive manufacture has to be the electric car market from the 1960s to the 1980s. I love this era because it was one of rampant ingenuity and creativity, dominated by small, independent manufacturers, and all they had in common was that every single car they made was objectively terrible. Like this fascinating weirdo, the Electraction Rickshaw.
Read MoreFormula One’s estimated 2017 revenue was around $1.38 billion, and a lot of that money goes to the teams that actually make the races happen, but not all of it. Here’s a handy breakdown showing how much, in video format.
Read MoreThere’s little more that the automotive internet loves arguing about than pointless definitions, but what I didn’t realize is that enthusiasts have been debating what a “GT car” is for the past 55 years. No, not the race cars, or the trim badges that get stuck on cars that sometimes don’t deserve them, but a grand tourer in the true sense of the term.
Read MoreSitting in front of my house right now is a red 2018 Toyota Camry XLE, which I’ll be trying to hoon for the next week. Trying. So tell me: what do you want to know about the most ubiquitous of Japanese family sedans?
Read MoreVolvo’s all-new Compact Modular Architecture can be seen today in its new compact crossover, the XC40. Back in 2016, the company said that the versatile platform would support a battery-powered electric vehicle, which is shaping up to be a production version of the 40.2 Concept.
Read MoreThe older I get, the more I try and subscribe to the “you do you” ethos when it comes to taste in cars. Stance? Sure, bud. Everything Liberty Walk does? If you enjoy it, why not! Donks? They’re part of a thriving culture most people don’t even bother to understand. But this... this 1997 Mazda Miata that’s been “converted” to a 1965 Ford Mustang?
Read MoreAlright, so, Ford’s performance-oriented ST lineup is admittedly a little thin. But that’s fine, because Ford is going to give us an Edge ST and also, possibly, an Explorer ST, too. Nothing screams fun like performance crossovers and SUVs, I always say.
Read MoreYou’ve probably seen Ernie’s giant red sedan drift car on YouTube or Fred Lump Lump on Instagram if you don’t know him in person. But he missed his flight home to LA from Mexico on Jan. 25 and his family hasn’t heard from him since. Now the internet is looking for him, and hopefully we can help.
Read MoreIn a bold heist pretty much guaranteed to prevent scurvy, a family of five from a town near Seville, Spain attempted to steal almost 9000 pounds of oranges using a little Suzuki Esteem sedan and what looks like A Daewoo wagon. Damn. That’s a lot of oranges.
Read MoreBuying Lamborghinis, Ferraris and Maybachs and flaunting wealth seems like a good idea until Bulgaria, one of the most impoverished members of the European Union, decides to have police stop and check expensive cars and investigate owners for tax fraud and money laundering.
Read MoreHave you ever been driving along, happy and content, when you found that your way was blocked by some insurmountable obstacle, like a pair of stacked mid-size city phone books, or perhaps a shoebox full of sand? If you’re like most people, you probably slammed on your brakes and, you know, died there. Too bad you didn’t drive a Mitsubishi Outlander, according to this Instagram ad!
Read MoreStrava’s fitness tracker isn’t just good at revealing secret government bases, it’s also quite good at outlining your favorite racetracks.
Read MoreBuick is pretty proud of the new 2019 Regal TourX wagon, which in addition to being quite handsome, seems like a really great value. Good news for wagons, too: the automaker predicts that up to 50 percent of Regal buyers will opt for the longroof instead of the sedan, as long as they don’t call it what it is.
Read MoreWhen AutoGuide shared a story Monday with the headline that the Honda S2000 is “definitely never coming back, Honda exec says,” it seemed like a bold and foolish move by Honda to shut the door completely on one of its most iconic cars. But Honda isn’t, and those ideas appear to have come out of nowhere.
Read MoreThis is not a movie set. This isn’t from some post-apocalyptic new film starring Will Smith. This is a real, honest-to-God high-speed train that’s been abandoned and left to die. And it looks like something out of our dystopian future.
Read MoreA little less than four years ago, I agreed to accept $9,600 from Bank of America at an interest rate of 4.24 percent, so that I could buy a 2008 Honda Fit from a friend. This morning, I paid it off. I have had, in other words, a lot of time to contemplate the deep stupidity of taking out a loan on an asset that begins depreciating immediately.
Read MoreCurrently in America, if you want a sports car that wears a Nissan badge without spending about $100 grand, you have one option: a Nissan 370Z. The 2018 370Z is essentially the same car Nissan started selling nine years ago, and while it is high time for a replacement, there’s no evidence one is in the works. But that doesn’t mean the Z is going away anytime soon, either.
Read MoreMazda has been vocal about its plan to continue developing internal combustion engines despite a major industry push towards electification and EVs. The company displayed its innovative Skyactiv-X engine last year, and now Automotive News reports that a next generation motor—called Skactiv 3—will offer efficiency levels that could yield overall CO2 output similar to that of some EVs.
Read MoreAround 2:18 a.m. on Sunday, California Highway Patrol said they got reports of some sideshows happening in Oakland. Among the things included? Scores of cars, fireworks, and a green laser, which eventually got someone arrested.
Read MoreBack in 1976, Ford began developing a new small truck platform of its own: the Ranger. A frugal, fuel-efficient truck for the hardworking American, the Ranger was born as a contingency plan from Ford for an industry and consumer shift to smaller trucks that evolved into an icon. Now it’s back, so here’s a look at the mess of politics, recession and war that brought on the 1983 original.
Read MoreYou know how when you transform yourself into a cat and go hunting at night, it’s easier to catch a light-colored pigeon than it is, say, a crow? Of course you do. Unsurprisingly, autonomous cars have similar issues spotting dark-colored vehicles, which could make dark-colored cars more challenging for a future with autonomous cars.
Read MoreHappy Monday, pals! You’ve just interrupted these two talking in hushed tones about something that sounded very, very strange. They stopped immediately, and looked at you. Now they want you to get in the Thunderbird. It’s gonna be a weird week.
Read MoreAmerican Le Mans Series champion and Le Mans veteran Scott Tucker is now more likely to be known as payday lending scam artist and convicted felon Scott Tucker. Through nefarious means, primarily deceptive undisclosed payday loan fees, was able to amass a fortune, some of which he used to fund his Level 5 Racing program for years of top-flight motorsport, and win multiple national championships.
Read MorePeople use the term ‘race car for the street’ to describe all kinds of cars, but it’s hardly ever actually true. Motorsport demands so much of a car that it could never truly meet the rigorous demands of daily use. Race cars are optimized for smooth racetrack surfaces, not the pockmarked streets of workaday life.
Read MoreIt isn’t really news that we don’t enjoy discussing Balance of Performance in motorsport, but it’s become an integral part of the discussion, especially in endurance racing. BOP is effectively the means by which the series officials try to level the field on lap time; adding ballast, adjusting pit stop refueling times, and fitting various diameter engine air restrictors. In a pro class like IMSA’s GT Le Mans, the point of BOP is to make the race about things like strategy, driver capability, an
Read MoreAt the recent Marrakesh round of the Formula E championship, actor Orlando Bloom was given the opportunity to drive one of the series’ electric open-wheel cars around the course solo. Bloom celebrated his 41st birthday by suiting up and strapping in. Unfortunately for him, it ended in rather humiliating fashion. In the wall.
Read MoreI can’t legally stop you from spending 30,000 green US dollars on this beautiful 31-year-old low-mile Toyota midship runabout, but I must implore you not to. Found on Craigslist in Indianapolis is this one-owner sports car with an incredible minimalist interior, excellent handling, and the coolest angular 80s styling Japan could muster, but there is no way it’s worth thirty grand. At just over 10,000 miles, this Toyota is barely broken in, but who in their right mind would spend 30k? It’s not ev
Read MoreMazda has one of the most esoteric collections of cars in the basement of their Southern California facility, and they’re looking to expand that collection with perhaps the strangest car they’ve ever produced: The Mazda Millenia S. With a supercharged Miller-cycle 2.3-liter V6 engine, this large front-wheel-drive sedan replaced the rear-drive Mazda 929. The Millenia was as sporty as it was comfortable, going head-to-head with Nissan’s Maxima.
Read MoreThis gorgeous first-year Ford Mustang was stolen from a garage in Los Angeles on Friday, and the owner wants to know what happened to their pride and joy weekend ride. This is a minty four-owner fastback pony car, and they’re rightly freaking out about the car having gone missing. The police report has been filed, but a detective won’t be on the case until Tuesday. Knowing LA, there are so many automobile thefts that it may not get much more than a cursory acknowledgement from the police. Perhap
Read MoreIf you were a stylish Italian who wanted a mini-car in the 1960s, and the Fiat 500 was just too ubiquitous, you likely would have ordered up an Autobianchi Bianchina. While this car was based on the same Fiat 500 platform with the same basic 17-ish horsepower, it was somehow even cheek-pinchingly-cuter than the Fiat. Even contemporarily, the car was ascribed the moniker of ‘the rich man’s Fiat’.
Read MoreThe billionaire who cosplays as a Bond villain and claims artificial intelligence will be the end of mankind is arming 20,000 of his devoted followers with flamethrowers on a Saturday evening.
Read MoreLego’s Speed Champions line of sets already has an impressive roster of classic and contemporary race cars like the Bugatti Chiron and the original Ford GT40. According to Lego enthusiast site The Brothers Brick, Lego has expanded their garage to include at least nine new models.
Read MoreStep aside, Oldsmobile, Plymouth is here with the Caravelle. It’s got enough room for six people because here at Chrysler, luxury trumps safety. Get outta’ here Buick with your Century has nothing on this.
Read MoreThe VW Up(!) is Volkswagen’s adorable little compact car that we don’t get in the United States because life is unfair and cruel. VW decided to spice up the Up a bit by adding a GTI trim. Just look at it. It’s like a tiny Golf GTI.
Read MoreWe all have cars that we feel ashamed for liking. Whether they’re boring or just flat-out stupid looking, some cars we just can’t help but like them for one reason or another. I’ve nearly incapable of feeling automotive shame ever since I daily drove both a Toyota Camry and Chrysler LeBaron but I even have a few cars I’m almost afraid to admit liking.
Read MoreBefore the much-maligned Chrysler k-car was birthed from the depths of the Chrysler Corporation, we had the Chrysler L-Platform. This new front wheel drive platform consisted of the Dodge Omni and Plymouth Horizon hatchbacks and Chrysler made almost one million of them. The Horizon and associated vehicles were seen as essentially disposable and they pretty much were. My dad cracked the engine block of not one but two Dodge Omnis.
Read MoreWe’ve already geeked out a little over the 2019 Ram 1500’s interior when we first saw it at the Detroit Auto Show. After getting a little more time to climb around the cab, we found even more interesting stuff.
Read MoreHere is a message to all of you who are scouring the import shop websites and Craigslist and Bring A Trailer in search of Skylines and Autozams and rare Audis: you’re doing it wrong. You should be importing Ford Falcons instead.
Read MoreWe here at Jalopnik are pretty proud of our Instagram feed. We love to show off what we’re driving, what we see on the street, and the occasional manufacturer photo of a Mitsubishi Pajero getting massive air. But there’s a whole world of Instagram we’ve been neglecting, and that’s where you come in.
Read MoreDespite “free” and “airlines” rarely belonging in the same sentence, American Airlines will start serving free beer and wine on certain flights from Chicago to New York in April. Of course, “free” is an illusion to make us think corporations are less terrible than they really are, and we’re paying for it somehow.
Read MoreChris Evans-less Top Gear will be returning for its 25th season soon, and already things are looking quite fun from a new trailer, released today. We just don’t have an official air date yet.
Read MoreThe Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agency will soon have the ability to track billions of license plates across the U.S., according to a new report from The Verge.
Read MorePortland newspaper The Oregonian reports that after seeing a car driving slowly around a Taco Bell parking lot with a cat on the hood, someone called the cops. Police questioned the car owner earlier this week, who said he regularly takes his cats to parking lots, lets them get on the hood and drives around at 5 mph.
Read MoreWe’re still wondering why.
Read MoreThe Lexus LC 500: A sleek and beautiful V8 spaceship, nearly perfect in every way, except for the fact that it lacks convertible and high-performance versions. But that just might be in the cards for it, according to this latest rumor.
Read MoreHave you ever come across an ad for a used modern car that mentions the vehicle had just received a tune-up? What does “tune-up” even mean in regards to today’s cars? Well, in all likeliness, the seller of the vehicle in said advertisement doesn’t know what they are talking about. They probably just buzzword-bombed the ad to catch the attention of an unsuspecting buyer. However, I am here to tell you that there is such a thing as a modern car tune-up.
Read MoreDo you know what a tonneau cover is? Of course you do. But, just in case someone reading over your shoulder at this public internet computer at the public library doesn’t know, it’s a weatherproof fabric cover used to cover the open part of a roadster without the indignity of putting up the top. What I want to know is would you use a roadster with a tonneau cover in lieu of pants?
Read MoreGerman automakers have been fighting to keep diesel around for years, even funding an experiment in 2014 that pumped diesel exhaust into the lungs of 10 cartoon-watching monkeys, New York Times reports.
Read MoreNew York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, one of the more loathsome politicians New York has ever produced—which is saying something considering the competition—has finally stumbled upon a good idea: congestion pricing for Manhattan’s streets. He’ll probably mess it up, though.
Read MoreBack in 1990, General Motors stuck a 7.4-liter V8 into a 1500 chassis Chevy pickup and created an icon. The 454 SS was little more than black paint, a red logo on the side and dual exhausts rumbling out the back, but it was great in a way that I can’t imagine being reproduced today.
Read MoreIn an even bigger scam than college itself, people can now get a degree in a concept that’s been around for 100 years and still hasn’t caught on: flying cars.
Read MoreIt’s easy to think of the earliest figures in the automotive industry as nothing more but characterless stern faces from black and white photographs. But that doesn’t square with Wilhelm Maybach taunting cops and getting into a police chase with one of the very first vehicles powered by a modern gas engine.
Read MoreThe National Transportation Safety Board interviewed the engineer and a conductor last week involved in the Amtrak train derailed in Dupont, Washington on December 18. Both had just recently recovered from injuries sustained in the crash, which killed three and injured dozens of others. On Thursday, the NTSB revealed part of what the Amtrak employees said, but the statements prompt more questions than answers about the wreck.
Read MoreWhat a weird sight this is, you think to yourself, wondering if the scene in front of you is real. That McLaren race car over there certainly belongs on a track, not a street. Ha! McLaren got you this time. Your silly crossover is no track car, therefore this is no track. That McLaren is a road car. It just looks like a race car.
Read MoreThere’s something magical about a car modification that costs over $30,000 and results in making a car that’s louder, rougher, smokier and objectively less useful than when you started. It’s also now only capable of 15 mph. And yet, somehow, the car is so much better than before. That’s the case with Frank Rothwell’s steam-powered Land Rover.
Read MoreRimac, a car startup out of a small town in Croatia, plans to show us its new electric supercar in March. The company said it’ll be faster, more expensive and more luxurious than its first—the Concept One, which came out of nowhere rated at nearly 1,100 horsepower and able to destroy a LaFerrari in a drag race.
Read MoreAfter the Detroit Auto Show, Jalopnik staffers David Tracy, Raymond Cinemato and I found ourselves making dinner on the few surfaces of Tracy’s kitchen that isn’t covered in car parts. Naturally, we had Spotify cranking, which kicked off a debate about which music genre has better car call-outs.
Read MoreBathrooms on commercial flights are a great thing, albeit a little small. Without them, a couple of hundred people would be trapped in a flying air prison and whining about their need to pee. (The “flying air prison” part is unavoidable.) But, yes, the one place of freedom we all have on flights is getting even smaller.
Read MoreThe Citroën Twelve, also known as the Citroën Traction Avant, debuted in 1934. It was advertised as being a “car of an entirely new conception,” a claim which, at least this one time, holds up pretty well! See? Not all car company promises are wrong and bad.
Read MoreThe 996-generation Porsche 911 was a break from tradition. Not air-cooled, not overbuilt, not right, at least if you listen to the hardcore Porsche enthusiasts. And the car’s original brochure from the end of the ’90s reads like Porsche knew that a backlash was coming. They knew it.
Read MoreImagine you own a 2014 Ferrari 458 Italia Spider. Great job being excellent. You love it. OK, now, picture this: One night, you drop your primo Italian sports car off at a valet. Later, that valet—for whatever reason—gives the keys to your ride to someone else. Oops. That’s exactly what happened last summer to a Florida resident, and now he’s taking the interesting step of suing the resort that employed the valet.
Read MoreBMW is having a hard time figuring out our electro-autonomous future. After making a splash there early on with the i3 and i8, its alternative energy offerings have languished. Now the company has to adapt in a way that could mean losing the whole “driver’s car” thing. Either way, BMW and its Mini subsidiary are apparently rethinking things at the moment.
Read MoreWhen a salvage team pulled a Jeep from the bottom of a lake Monday, it had been there for more than a week. All the owner did was lend it to friends for a sight-seeing trip in Vermont, who, according to USA Today, said Google’s Waze GPS app instructed them to drive off of a boat launch and into Lake Champlain.
Read MoreThe Ford Bronco may be coming back, but it looks like Land Rover will be leading the charge in the return of full-size two-door SUVs.
Read MoreRolls-Royce, when not content making gargantuan, hulking sedans and coupes for today’s plutocrats, is now busying itself with making gargantuan, hulking SUVs as well. While we’ve seen prototypes of the vehicle, RR will soon be revealing the Cullinan in full in private showings this summer. This only means one thing: leaks.
Read MoreLong ago, when my blogging hands weren’t so frail, President Donald Trump revealed a vague outline for a $200 billion privatization-centric infrastructure program. Trump even dedicated an Infrastructure Week to highlight his supreme dedication to the infrastructure. But still, a year later, we have nothing beyond that same, super vague game plan. That could change soon! Maybe!
Read MoreRunning from the police is a bad idea, especially after you’ve stopped, handed over your driver’s license and given them time to sit and process your information. But, people still do dumb things all the time, like this BMW driver, whose escape was captured on video.
Read MoreThis has to end. Enough is enough. The new Mercedes C63 AMG, with its twin-turbocharged 4.0-liter V8, does not sound inferior to the old Mercedes C63, with its naturally-aspirated 6.2-liter V8. Listen! The madness has to stop.
Read MoreLotus CEO Jean-Marc Gales got pulled over in one of his company’s sports cars last January for doing 102 mph in a 70 mph zone. But a judge allowed Gales to get by without a single point on his license, because the boss’s lawyer argued that it was “vital” that Gales continue test driving cars himself.
Read MoreDon’t pretend like you’re above watching a school bus full of children slide out-of-control on ice. Nobody was hurt, and the motion of the long bus is almost graceful as it glides down the traction-free road. Also, the voiceover in the video is somehow just right:
Read MoreIt’s easy to get jaded about BMW these days. Even though the automaker builds things that range from the objectively excellent to the genuinely interesting, it often feels like that driving passion that made it famous gets lost in a sea of bland crossovers. It’s also because BMW set an awfully high bar for itself once.
Read MoreI’ve just given you enough time travel-suppositories to take you back to America in 1940. I’ve also provided you with a line of credit so you can purchase a brand-new, American-made car. There’s what you have to choose from up there.
Read MoreThe clownshoe BMW M Coupe is one of the greatest cars the company ever produced. Also, apparently, it had one of the strangest brochures I have ever seen.
Read MoreOn Sunday night, there were, at first, reports of an explosion in rural Ohio along State Route 571 in New Carlisle. What it seems to have been instead was just a massive silo collapse, which spilled 10,000 tons of corn across the road. The road remains closed.
Read MoreLast week, it was rumored that Ferrari may be planning an insane 700 horsepower 488 GTO, and now a strange striped Ferrari 488 seems to have leaked.
Read MoreCar brands are big fans of, well, branding, and car branding has inevitably made it into that one store with all of the cheap clothes and none of the durability expected of other stores—the one that sucked you in with low prices before its apparel emerged from the wash as a limp, disintegrated ghost of its former self.
Read MoreIn a bit of lecturing that is not just smug and annoying but also, uh, telling on his company a bit, Uber’s CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said Tuesday that (shockingly) the secret to getting a better passenger rating was “aggressive” tipping.
Read MoreNormally, we think of four-wheel drive as something that helps you move, not stop. When you’re trying to make the car stop, whether or not you’re in 2WD or 4WD shouldn’t really matter much, right? I mean, that’s what I’d guess, but I can’t say I know for certain. That’s why this video from Team O’Neil Rally School is so good—they actually tested this out.
Read MoreOh my God, my friends, even though this happened on Friday—a whole four days ago—I’m still relishing the instant karma I was fortunate enough witness go down while I was driving. I can’t wait to tell you about it.
Read MoreYesterday we covered Ford’s new service advisory allowing owners of 2016 and 2017 Ford Focus RSes to get new head gaskets free of charge and—in some cases—new cylinder heads as well. Now The Blue Oval has divulged how many vehicles have been affected, and it’s not exactly a small number.
Read MoreIn Scotland, a state-of-the-art automated parking garage shut down 15 years ago after going bankrupt, leading many to speculate that vehicles were left stuck within its confines. Recently, demolition crews have been tearing the old garage down, revealing that indeed, there are still cars inside.
Read MoreThe year: 1980. The automaker: Nissan. The people: a dedicated, crack squad of engineers and designers who knew that Japan’s burgeoning economy was creating a new class of discriminating luxury sports coupe buyers who would accept nothing short of total perfection.
Read MoreIt was only a matter of time. All the signs were there. Finally, in America, Corvettes are taking over drifting. Surprisingly, the momentum feels like it started abroad.
Read MoreI just want to be clear that I’m not against strapping big things to the roofs of little cars to move them. I’ve done it myself. But, if you’re going to do this kind of risky thing, you have to do it right. A huge, wind-catching aluminum box held to a curved roof with no roof rack and just one rope is absolutely not doing anything right.
Read MoreThis quick video from Carwow over in the UK put together the four most recent Civic Type R generations, plus a special edition Mugen FN2 for good measure, to compare them all in one big head-to-head comparison. While we didn’t get any of these Type Rs except the most recent FK8 generation, it’s still quite an interesting look at Honda’s forbidden fruit Civic.
Read MoreNobody ever talks about the Aston Martin Rapide! Don’t you wonder why that is? I saw a guy driving in one yesterday and he seemed quite satisfied with the state of things.
Read MoreBarrett-Jackson’s 2018 Scottsdale auction just wrapped up and everyone’s rich dad went home happy with a NUMBERSMATCHINGIKNOWWHATIHAVE 1970 Chevy Chevelle SS that’ll sit untouched in a garage for the rest of eternity. Occasionally my dad and I will watch the auction live because I will always have a soft spot for ‘60s-’70s muscle cars and trucks, but can we all admit how silly prices are getting?
Read MoreBuick went against the traditional muscle car formula in the mid-1980s to create the muscle car that defined muscle cars for that era. Instead of the normal, big V8 in a mid-sized car, the 200-horsepower Grand National and later 276-horsepower GNX (Grand National Xperimental) made use of a turbocharged V6 with glorious, glorious boost.
Read MoreDude, look! DK’s ride is for sale!
Read MoreWay back in 2011, Toyota president and CEO Akio Toyoda discussed the Lexus brand with some potential buyers at the Pebble Beach Concours. He heard a chorus of “Lexus is boring” and “Lexus should clearly define their brand.” As it happens, 2011 was a down year for Lexus, which was handily outsold by BMW and Mercedes, despite being the luxury car sales kings in 2010. Toyoda vowed then that Lexus would never again be described as boring, and that set about a wholesale change in the brand. The “corp
Read MorePSA Group, the parent company of Citroën, DS Automobiles, Peugeot, Opel, and Vauxhall, wants to come back to the U.S. market with low-volume production models, likely on a similar method as Alfa Romeo’s return to the U.S. They are, however, also considering a ride-sharing model as well. In either case, PSA Group have begun the process of setting up a new North American headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia.
Read MoreYou can’t really ever completely keep a car-lover from the focus of their obsessions. That’s why things like kits for turning Fieros into Ferraris exist and why people build Lamborghinis in basements. It’s also why a pair of brothers ended up building the only sort-of Porsche-approved sort-of Porsche 356s in East Germany. This is an amazing story of determination, luck and a beautiful ignorance of when to quit.
Read More3D printing has given people a whole new way of manufacturing and designing things, including folks in the automotive industry. Bugatti, for example, is looking to 3D print brake calipers. This is actually a really cool development that could absolutely change the future of component manufacturing. While I’m sure this process is by no means cheap, there are some projects—space exploration, for example—where no expense is spared. Also, Bugatti.
Read MoreThe newest Ford GT has already achieved a nearly mythical status due to its wild looks, weird as hell aerodynamics and sheer exclusivity. It’s also no secret that it’s freaking fast: 647 horsepower out out of a twin-turbo V6 is not going to be lethargic.
Read MoreThere are two important things that a new Maybach will communicate to you within the first five minutes of driving it: It feels significantly different from other cars you’ve driven, and if someone else pulls up in a Lexus LS you feel instantly and palpably superior.
Read MoreChevrolet’s Corvette ZR1 is a bonkerballs flagship supercar like none the US has ever produced, with 755 supercharged horsepower and an easy-peasy 210 mile per hour top speed. It’s available with a big ole wing and awesome lightweight track-focussed wheels. If you like V8s and power and America, you’d be silly not to want one. This Corvette looks like a million bucks, or at least $925,000.
Read MoreWhile Campagnolo is primarily known for their work in manufacturing bicycle components, making wheels, gearsets, and specialized racing bits, they were, for a while, the coolest automotive wheel manufacturer ever. Owed to the fact that Campagnolo was among the first companies to have perfected magnesium wheel manufacture.
Read MoreTwo-time WRC champion Carlos Sainz has failed to complete the Dakar rally for the last three years as a factory Peugeot entrant, but perseverance and patience has prevailed with Sainz not only finishing the rally, but taking home the champion’s laurels to boot. This was his last best chance to win Dakar again, as his Peugeot team announced that 2018 would be their final attempt at the rally for the current program.
Read MoreWe are in the middle of a bitter cold winter, and as automotive enthusiasts we share a largely universal hatred of snow and ice, right? I’ve personally inflicted damage to bumpers, differentials, and control arms, thanks to icy roads. Perhaps I’d have been better off with a traction-enhancing spray on my car’s driven wheels.
Read MoreMost automotive enthusiasts know that cars tend to lose a bit of power with age and use, as wear and tear can take its toll on a car’s internals. On this episode of LegitStreetCars on YouTube, the host Alex shows just what kind of horsepower numbers his beater AMG’s hand-built engine can put down after almost twenty years and 178,000 miles of abuse.
Read MoreIf you’re not yet familiar with Rod Millen’s Leadfoot Festival, you really ought be. In the same vein as Goodwood’s Festival of Speed hillclimb, Rod Millen has crafted his own hillclimb in New Zealand on his own property, which he lovingly refers to as ‘Leadfoot Ranch’.
Read MoreIn the 80s and 90s, Italian design house Bertone was dabbling with automobile sales: Think Bertone X1/9. In the 1990s they began dabbling in the off-road market, assembling bits from a couple of automakers to develop the “Bertone Freeclimber” small SUV, which they sold to eager Europeans.
Read MoreAccording to a story that appeared in the Los Angeles Times, seasoned former auto executive Bob Lutz had some nice words to say about the Tesla’s Model S but some less-than-shining comments about Tesla itself.
Read MoreThe Acura Integra was for everyone that wanted a Honda Civic but didn’t actually want a Honda Civic.
Read MoreThe Chrysler TC by Maserati is a confusing car. Is it a Chrysler LeBaron with some Maserati badges? Maybe? Is it a Maserati with some Chrysler LeBaron parts? I don’t know. I even own a LeBaron and I’m not sure what the TC is. Our own Jason Torchinsky recently had to explain this discrepancy to his son.
Read MoreFord rolled out the 2019 Mustang Bullitt edition at the 2018 NAIAS in Detroit last week. Pricing for the special edition Mustang hasn’t been revealed yet but the very first Bullitt Edition just sold for a fair bit above MSRP.
Read MoreIn the late 1970s, cars were getting smaller. While it took the United States a few years to figure out, the world collectively decided that cars didn’t need to be the size as an oil tanker.
Read MoreIt’s the middle of winter and driving sort of sucks right now. I don’t drive a WRX STI rally car so there’s too much ice around to blast down any country roads. Unless you’re running a low-grade fever, it’s probably not a great idea to drive with the windows down either. Ice builds up on my car every morning and it’s just a dismal time to drive.
Read MoreI’ve been thinking about the Dodge Neon a lot lately, on the advice of my clergyperson, and I happened to come across information about the original 1991 Neon concept car. Um, IT’S FANTASTIC. You should already be about 60 percent wow’d by just looking at that picture, but I’m gonna blast the needle out of your wowometer with the next facts I’m about to lay down here. Are you ready? You’re not, but here goes anyway.
Read MoreThe owner of this 2016 Jaguar F-Type R came home to a “frantic” property manager yesterday, who informed him that his car was damaged. “I thought he meant something rather minor, because he knows I am pretty obsessive over my car,” he told Jalopnik. It wasn’t minor.
Read MoreI’ve just learned a horrifying fact: I’ve been pluralizing the name “Prius” incorrectly, and you probably have been, too. Did you assume that the regular rules of English plural words applied, such that it would be “Priuses?” I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.
Read MoreA great horned owl flew into the grille of an SUV driving in Virginia this week, riding some 160 miles before it was rescued. The owl, as you can see, doesn’t look very pleased. He’ll be all right, though, a local animal control agency said, even if he emerged from the grille a bit worse for the wear.
Read MoreThe whole point of motorsports photography is to be fast: quick to be at the action, quick to file your photo. Here’s the complete opposite.
Read MoreLast night, it happened again. Like a shot, I was awake, drenched in sweat. I looked at my headboard and cursed my bloody fingernails. Scratched into the wood once more, I’d scrawled “WHY DID DAIHATSU NAME ITS 1970S JEEP TAFT??” Now, finally, I have an answer, and hopefully, resolution.
Read MoreUnless you’re driving around in some ‘80s econobox, chances are you have electric door locks in your car. As with anything, these electric locks will eventually wear out, leaving you to use a physical key to unlock the door. The horror!
Read MoreAlright, so here’s a wild and fun rumor that we heard: The upcoming Ferrari 488 GTO will be faster than a LaFerrari. Does anyone need a car that fast? That’s not the point, buddy!
Read MoreShut down the internet, everybody: I have found the world’s greatest Miata.
Read MoreHave you ever been so messed up that you’ve gone to an ATM, took out about $200, and rolled it up and ate it like a burrito? Me neither, yet, but 28-year-old Douglas Francisco came pretty close when he was found passed out in his Hyundai, blocking the drive-through lane of a Bank of America. He tried to order a burrito, thinking the bank was a Taco Bell.
Read MoreThe Lexus LFA supercar was almost beyond comprehension. Jalopnik bossman Patrick George once described it perfectly “Its name stands for Lexus Fucking Awesome.” Lexus knows we want another one, but will they ever build it? Well, it hasn’t said yes, but it hasn’t closed the door either.
Read MoreI am looking at the 1996 BMW 8 Series brochure in front of me and I see (among many scenes of restrained and technocratic luxury) a grand total of 11 exterior colors, a collection of various subdued grays, greens, blues and reds. But there were other colors. There was ... yellow.
Read MoreIt’s some people’s worst nightmare: You’ve put diesel in your gas tank, or vice versa. For gasoline-powered cars, it’s thankfully a pretty rare occurrence, since diesel nozzles are usually a bit larger than gas ones. But that won’t matter if the tanks themselves are filled with the wrong type of fuel, as apparently happened at a Maine gas station recently.
Read MoreOh, man, when a bird poops on my car, I see red. Here I am, working so hard to keep it clean and shiny, and the little feathered bastard thinks it’s alright to just swoop by overhead and drop a missile. Luckily, there are some things that you can do to clean the crap off easily.
Read MoreSometimes form follows function. Sometimes form has nothing to do with function. Sometimes you have to take a hairpin turn in your Citroën 2CV van at speeds that are just barely on the safe side of safe.
Read MoreI think most of us now know that you shouldn’t leave things like laptops, phones or iPods in our cars. We still worry about people stealing our wheels, but our seats? Most people probably don’t think about that.
Read MoreRum and sea travel is supposed to be a good thing—at least, if we take our pal Captain Jack Sparrow’s always logical and reasonable advice. But maybe not so much this time, since a bunch of molasses casually started turning into rum in the cargo hold of a ship in Houston, knocking a worker unconscious.
Read MoreEveryone remembers the Fuel Shark, right? A ridiculous blue glowing buttplug that you’re supposed to stick in your car’s 12V socket to get better gas mileage but in reality does nothing? We exposed these jackasses a while ago, more than once. Somehow, though, I missed this YouTube video advertising them, and, once you watch it (well, the first part), you’ll see why I regret not having seen it sooner.
Read MorePolice in Rhode Island are looking for two people who apparently unbolted an $80,000 camera designed to catch speedy drivers in the middle of the day, plopped it in the bed of their truck, and then sped off.
Read MoreWhat do you do if you’ve destroyed a set of clothes while working on your vehicle? You Ask a Clean Person to reach into her bag of laundry tricks and tell you about all the grease-stain removal products she’s got listed in her mental rolodex.
Read MoreIn June of 2016, BMW announced it won a contract to supply the Los Angeles Police Department with 100 electric cars—a multi-million-dollar program the chief said “made sense for taxpayers and for the environment.” Hah. The LAPD has barely used them.
Read MoreSince every other automaker has hooked a giant basketball pump up to its typical car design and inflated it into a big, awkward, hulking plague of a vehicle, even the luxury-supercar makers are getting on board. But McLaren isn’t into all of this. There won’t be a McLaren SUV, the company said.
Read MoreMontreal police probably rolled their eyes at the idiot who parked their snow-covered early ‘90s Toyota Supra right in a snow-removal lane, completely blocking in other parked cars. They went to ticket the car, and got to the point of lifting its very real windshield wiper when they realized, hey, this isn’t a snow-covered car—it’s a snow pile shaped like a car. Ooooh! Zing!
Read MoreIt turns out that if you’re going to do something extraordinarily stupid in a car that results in a cop being injured, one of the busiest and most surveilled places in America isn’t the best place to try it. Two suspects have been arrested in connection with Sunday evening’s Times Square burnout and hit-and-run of a New York City police officer, an incident that garnered widespread attention in the car community and in the national media.
Read MoreWith The Blue Oval announcing the 2019 Ford Mustang Bullitt this week, I couldn’t help but look back at the other two Bullitt edition Mustangs: the 2001 fourth-generation model and the 2008 fifth-gen, the latter of which I think is one of the best Mustang designs of the past 40 years.
Read MoreThe American southwest is heaven on Earth for off-road enthusiasts. There are big tracts of different terrain types you can legally run 4x4s and motorbikes across, which is awesome. To help keep things that way, people running the Mint 400 are being proactive about preserving these kinds of places.
Read MoreHey, BMW. Focus here, bud. Look at me. You seem warm. Do you have a fever? Is everything OK? Is there any reason why, in any circumstance, you would think it is normal or acceptable to turn some standard-ass Apple CarPlay software into a subscription? You know this stuff is included on a $17,000 Honda Fit, right?
Read MoreWhen I finally learned what torque was in high school physics, I was absolutely elated because finally there was a term taught in the classroom that could relate school with my car knowledge. If you needed a simple yet effective brush-up on torque and horsepower, here’s a video for you.
Read MoreHm, you might say. I can think of many more cars that “needed” more horsepower than the GT500, which last had 662 horsepower and will soon have something in the 700 range. The Toyota 86, the Subaru CrossTrek, come to mind. Nah. No car makes you need more power than the GT500.
Read MoreBack in ‘95, I was not particularly concerned with Acura’s lineup. I didn’t care much about cars in general then, but if anything interested me it was going to be the muscle cars and European sports cars of the ‘60s and early ‘70s. How little I knew.
Read MoreAre you tired of seeing small Mercedes crossovers everywhere yet? No? Great, because more are headed our way.
Read MoreWhen looking at the qualities of a major company’s CEO, having consistent and confident ideas about the future is a good start. Fiat Chrysler and Ferrari CEO Sergio Marchionne doesn’t have that. He’s more like a Magic 8-Ball that gives a different answer about his company’s direction every time someone asks.
Read MoreAfter Japan’s third-largest steelmaker, Kobe Steel, revealed last fall that it falsely labeled products it had supplied to over 500 companies across the world, automakers raced to figure out whether any safety issues emerged as a result of using the affected parts. On Wednesday, Toyota said it completed an internal review and found no problems with its cars.
Read MoreFor decades, Englishtown Raceway Park in New Jersey has been home to the NHRA’s Summer Nationals. But today, the track announced it’s stopping drag racing, effective immediately. Other activities at Englishtown will continue, notably Club Loose’s drift events, but this is an abrupt end to an era.
Read MoreWhen Infiniti showed off the sleek Q Inspiration Concept at the Detroit Auto Show, it was actually moving under its own power thanks to the radical new variable compression engine. Evidently, however, that motor isn’t really the future of Infiniti, as Nissan’s CEO announced an aggressive plan to go pretty much all-electric and hybrid by just 2021.
Read MoreThe northeast is experiencing another blast of cold this week, and I’m so tired of it. It’s hard to feel compelled to do much of anything when it’s this cold. But there’s this video that may help all of us see the frigid temperatures in a new light.
Read MoreThe old “hachiroku” Toyota Corolla AE86 is one of the most beloved cars in the automotive world. Simple, light, rear-wheel drive and not much else. But these 1980s heroes are getting old and frail, except for one in Japan.
Read MoreKia brought a new 2019 Forte sedan to the Detroit Auto Show. Now, it has an optional CVT—confusingly reffered to by Kia as an “IVT,” more on that in a moment—and its engine runs on the Atkinson Cycle. It also copied enough of the Kia Stinger’s look to glow up and be kind of hot.
Read MoreWithout question, the most exciting category of modern cars, for the money, has to be China’s sort-of-legal Low Speed Electric Vehicle segment. These cars allow you to drive your dream car, as long as you don’t mind funhouse mirror proportions and power levels unlikely to exceed ten horses. I personally don’t mind, especially if it means that vehicles like the BMW 600-knockoff Eagle EG6300K exist.
Read MoreYou really did it. One of you maniacs out there actually spent a hot $102,000 on a 1989 BMW E30 M3 with 35,000 miles.
Read MoreAmid the usual auto brands who come to these kinds of things like Chevrolet and Toyota, the hundreds of thousands of visitors who go to the public says of the Detroit Auto Show will see a name they may not be familiar with: GAC, or the Guangzhou Automotive Co. Group. This is because this Chinese company does not sell cars in the U.S.—but next year it plans to, its leaders reiterated at a press conference here.
Read MoreHonk honk! Who’s a big car? I’m a big car. I’m a real, big car. I’m a remote control car playing with the big cars up on Highway 59 in Houston! Beep beep. Look at me, the real big car on the freeway.
Read More“All of you said all said this would work!!! Shit! Shit! Shit!” Anthony Levandowski reportedly screamed after he was publicly accused of stealing trade secrets from Google.
Read More“Grand Commander” has to be the highest-ranking name in the Jeep global lineup, at least until their rumored Renegade-derived Demigod crossover comes out. The 2018 Jeep Grand Commander is a China-only SUV with seating for seven, and will be formally revealed in April at the Beijing Auto Show. Our pals at Car News China got it first.
Read MoreThe Airbus A380 weighs over 300 tons empty and, as of the year of our Lord 2018, is the world’s biggest passenger airliner still in production. Alas, all things must die and, as The New York Times reports, the A380, too, might soon die.
Read MoreAbout two months ago, Formula One Managment released their new logo, and it’s you know, fine. It’s not an amazing triumph of design, but it does the job. The problem is that it already seems to be doing a job, just for 3M, selling a line of compression socks and tights and gloves.
Read MoreIn December 1977, Steve McQueen wrote the owner of one of two Mustangs used in the iconic chase scene from Bullitt. “Again,” McQueen wrote, “I would like to appeal to you to get back my ‘68 Mustang.” But he was rebuffed and, for nearly 40 years, the car pretty much disappeared.
Read MoreToyota has been the last major automaker to resist ceding the user experience of its in-car infotainment systems to dangerous, bloodthirsty outsiders like Apple and Android. That hard line appears to finally be cracking, with the 2019 Toyota Avalon announcement mentioning support for Apple’s CarPlay, with support on more vehicles to follow.
Read MoreOn Jan. 9, when temperatures in nearby Yorkton, Saskatchewan, reached a low of about 10 degrees fahrenheit, Kristyn Eftoda and her husband Wade were commuting home on a highway near Dropmore, Manitoba, when they noticed that the road was a sheet of ice. That’s when Wade, in a moment of inspiration, grabbed his skates.
Read MoreI, like many of you out there I am sure, once thought to myself, “Hey, I’ve seen the chase scene from Bullitt about 900 times. I should watch the whole movie. It’s probably good.” No. It’s not. Run while you still have a chance.
Read MoreIn Scottsdale, Arizona, this week, you could become the new owner of an all-electric beast carved from pure Canadian red cedar—the world’s fastest motorized log.
Read More“WOOOOO!” go the cheers. “YEAHHHHHHH!!!!” a man yells. They scream. They holler. But worst of all, they clap. And they clap for—and this is true—a fucking Volkswagen Jetta.
Read MoreThe 2019 Ram 1500 is getting a mild hybrid system, with an electric motor boosting all gas V6 and some V8 trucks. Projected gains are significant, but don’t expect record-smashing mpg.
Read MoreIncredibly, nobody was killed in this bizarrely impressive wreck, so you can be grimly amazed without all the guilt. A driver, who admitted to being under the influence of drugs, managed to launch a Nissan Altima through the wall of a second-story dentists’ office in Santa Ana, CA.
Read MoreA New York City cop has been injured after trying to stop what appears to be a Mercedes-Benz C63 AMG from drifting through Times Square, and the incident was all caught on video.
Read MoreDan Gurney, the first racer to achieve wins in Formula One, NASCAR and IndyCar and one of the most revered and accomplished figures in motorsports history, died Sunday, family members have confirmed. He was 86.
Read MoreFord has promised a Ford F-150 Hybrid and a battery electric performance car to be called the “Mach 1” for 2020. The company’s presentation at the Detroit Auto Show inferred the car would be a Mustang variant, but now Ford’s people imply it’s an SUV instead.
Read MoreIf you missed our annual pre-Detroit Auto Show karting event last night, I’m sorry to say you missed a good one. T-shirts! Trivia! An art car! Trike racing! Brutal contests of speed! A fine time was had by all.
Read MoreWithout the crowds, without the ‘booth babes’, without the hustle and bustle, the Tokyo Auto Salon is a gorgeous affair comprised of everything from widebody Porsches to drift cars to body kits for Civic hatchbacks. It’s an incredible display of incredible cars, and I’ve personally always wanted to attend. (Update: The video has been added.)
Read MoreBilling the project as an experiment in ‘slow TV’, Australia’s SBS television network ran The Ghan: Australia’s Greatest Train Journey for 17 hours straight last Sunday. While some described the programming as ‘like watching paint dry’, other fanatics couldn’t put down the remote. A 3-hour highlights package of the event garnered some 400,000 viewers, and the full 17-hour stream gathered intrepid viewers who treated it as a test of their own endurance.
Read MoreIf you’re anywhere near Detroit this coming week and love cars but are sick of all the usual car stuff, boy are you in luck. The Sketchbattle is back, and it’s happening at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, January 16! Sketchbattle is auto design twisted into a bloodsport, and you don’t want to miss it.
Read MorePrior to Saturday’s 425km stage, Frenchman Stephane Peterhansel had led the 14-day rally by 27 minutes over Peugeot teammate Sainz. Over the first few timing sections of the 7th stage from La Paz to Uyuni, Peterhansel had cleared another 3 minutes over Sainz, running like a man possessed. Unfortunately, while trying to negotiate a pass on one of the bike class competitors, Peterhansel struck a large rock at full speed, sustaining heavy damage to the left rear of his 3008DKR Maxi buggy.
Read MoreWith the FIA WEC super season nearing its kickoff this May, many LMP1 manufacturers and privateer teams have announced their intention to participate. With the loss of Audi at the end of 2016 and Porsche at the end of 2017, I figured LMP1 all but dead, but things seem to have rebounded a bit with a bigger field than we’ve seen for a few years, actually.
Read MoreThere is beauty to be found in the simplicity of this 1954 OSCA 2000 S. Very little in this car is extraneous, only providing exactly the bare minimum of what a driver might need to get to the end of a motor race. The design, while coated in a liberal sprinkling of bonnet vents, is incredibly simple. Complex shapes are few and far-between in this body-by-Morelli barchetta, and that’s part of what makes it great.
Read MoreWatching crash tests of newer cars can be a great way to learn about which car would be the safest for you or your family. It’s also an excuse to watch YouTube videos of expensive cars plowing into barriers at 40 mph without worrying about the occupants.
Read More“CAMARO IROC-Z” blasts from the heavens. It’s time for the Camaro that’s “lookin’ so hot, so good.” Now you can own your very own Camaro named after the International Race of Champions. You can be a champion.
Read MoreModel maker Luca Iaconi-Stewart has been building a stunningly accurate model of a Boeing 777 for almost 10 years. This model however, is made out of manila envelopes and glue.
Read MoreThe JDM Suzuki Jimny instantly captures the heart of anyone that sees it. Just look at it. It’s a tiny off-road vehicle you could probably fit in a backpack. They’re adorable.
Read MoreThe 2018 Detroit Auto Show kicks off this weekend, with a lot of potential for some big reveals, and just as much potential to be a big disappointment (as with every auto show).
Read MoreLast week, an Instagram user posted video of a skier being propelled by a car on the streets of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The skier ultimately failed, and now the police have gotten interested.
Read MoreYou know how I’m always complaining about the lack of color for cars? How sick I am of living in a drab, monochrome, colorless automotive world? Well, I sure as hell can’t complain about what Volkswagen is doing for the Golf R, because, color-wise, they are bringing it. Well, in Canada at least.
Read MoreThe Southland Leisure Centre is Calgary, Alberta’s premier destination for hot tubbin’, water slidin’, and wave poolin’ in Canada’s frozen wastes. Sometimes people like to go there with clothing, and sometimes, without any clothing at all. The latter makes people angry. Very angry. So angry that they threaten to smash cars.
Read MoreHello, and welcome back to the exhausting news cycle surrounding the alleged upcoming all-new successor to the Toyota Supra. Today’s update comes from Auto Express, which claims the new car will debut at the Geneva Motor Show under the Gazoo Racing brand.
Read MoreThe 2018 Detroit Auto Show kicks off on Saturday, and if you’re in town you should most definitely come hang with Jalopnik at friends at Kart 2 Kart tomorrow night!
Read MoreIn December 2016, Tesla settled a lawsuit with over 100 Model S P85D owners in Norway, who had accused them of inflating power numbers in the car’s marketing. Tesla settled for about $8,600 for each owner, or they could get some car upgrades or other forms of relief. Now, nearly 80 more Norwegian customers say they also want in on the action.
Read MoreWith every day we seem to inch closer to fully driverless cars in series production, but it’s still not clear if they’ll ever fully displace human-driven cars. One of the more cogent takes on the issue comes from, of all places, Toyota’s factory race program in Japan.
Read MoreFor as much hype as GM’s ‘production ready’ driverless, control-free car has gotten, both from GM themselves and the media, you’d think they’d have bothered to make something that looks like they, you know, thought about it for more than an afternoon. Sure, the tech is impressive, but the design is terrible, and hopefully will not be a sign of things to come for autonomous vehicles.
Read MoreThe next-generation Mercedes G-Wagen is being hatched within the next few days at the 2018 Detroit Auto Show. I guess that makes this ’79 280 GE encased in “amber” the blueprint provider.
Read MoreI understand that there’s an innate urge to drive into inflatable things you may see on the road: those wavy-arm tube guys, giant inflatable animals, and so on, but, generally, it’s best avoided. Sometimes, though, those smug inflatables get what’s coming to them, like what happened to the finish line of the 2018 Women’s Tour Down Under cycling race in Australia.
Read MoreMercedes-Benz and Aston Martin have recently shown off ultra high-strung Formula 1-style roadgoing supercars. They’re fine. But Toyota’s Gazoo Racing just debuted the GR Super Sport Concept, and it’s better. Instead of being F1-inspired, Gazoo’s “road car concept model” is based off its 24 Hours of Le Mans program. And Le Mans is better than F1.
Read MoreI’ve been doing some homework on the Ford Ranger, oh, for no reason, when I came to the realization that the Ranger, and other small trucks like it, are pretty good vehicles that families could get a good use out of before handing down to the next generation.
Read MoreTurkmenistan’s batshit president, Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov, the same man who just banned black cars because he thinks white cars bring luck, has instituted a ban prohibiting women from driving cars. So, in case anyone has forgotten what a jackass this despot is, this is a good reminder.
Read MoreFord today said that it would tell 2,900 owners of certain 2006 Ford Rangers to stop driving their cars immediately. Owners need to bring them in for fixes after they’d previously confirmed that a second death had been linked to a bad Takata air bag, according to Reuters.
Read MoreI’m not sure what you’re doing or how your day has gone, but I’m pretty sure whatever’s going on will be made better by just looking at this ad for this beautifully-realized Volkswagen-powered Isetta truck. Holy crap, that thing looks fantastic.
Read MoreMother Nature has been another kind of mother to to California lately, first with the intense, state-wide wildfires and now, with the coming of intense rains, California is having to deal with flooding and mudslides. Combine mudslides with windy, hilly neighborhood roads, and you get things like this, where a Prius becomes a river ride.
Read MoreSo much about Henrik Fisker’s EMotion concept unveiled at CES this year is both exciting and, for now at least, almost completely untested. Those eye-catching butterfly doors, for example? Fisker still has to figure out how to produce them at scale. He still, also, needs to get a factory. And then there’s the battery, a version of which Fisker says will ultimately have a range of 500 miles or more, though we might not see that one for years.
Read MoreDespite being the more exciting cars to read about and drive, sports cars and supercars usually aren’t on an automaker’s top moneymaker list. Which is why the first wave of electric offerings will be cars that appeal to the mass market. After that is when the fun stuff starts coming out, if this chatter about Porsche is to be believed.
Read MoreIf you ever need proof that you don’t need a ton of power to have a fun car, take a look at this Ford Crown Victoria P71. It only puts 230 horsepower to the rear wheels, but the owner has modified it to the point that it’s basically “a fat Miata.”
Read MoreJanis Zettel of Clearfield City, Utah was given a non-running ‘73 Volkswagen Super Beetle as a gift by her son. While neither her nor her son was that interested in getting the Beetle running, Zettel liked the car, which she named Lucy and painted to look like a ladybug. Deciding the car made her happier as lawn art, she had it placed in a tree in their front yard. Now, Clearfield officials are demanding it be removed because, I suppose, they hate fun.
Read MoreLooking for a car? Looking for a car that’s down to clown? Looking for a car that’s active and speedy and keen on engaging in vigorous driving maneuvers? Well, good friends, direct your eyes to the sweet cherry that is the Mazda 323 GTX.
Read MoreI’ve never been on a cruise before because I have never wanted to be on a cruise. I do not see what is so appealing of being stuck on a big ship with four thousand other people when getting caught in a storm in the middle of the ocean is a possibility. Which is exactly what happened to this cruise ship.
Read MoreLess than 24 hours ago, Ford teased a new ST performance variant of... something. Was a new Fiesta ST coming to the Detroit Auto Show? Maybe an F-150 ST in the spirit of the old Lightning? No, it turns out Ford is doing an Edge ST in an attempt to make crossovers interesting which, I mean, good for them.
Read MoreSnow and ice lays before us. Veritably, it is the danger driving season. Nothing will set your brain sideways quite like this re-edit of the 2009 Rally Norway, where Citroëns and Fords and Subarus and Mitsubishis raced in white. Also, one guy had AC/DC on.
Read MoreToday I emerged from my Thought Chamber, opened up the internet and saw a picture of an F90-chassis BMW M5. “That’s a high number,” I thought to myself, my limber brain switching over the previous F10, E60, E34 and E28 generation codes. “But is it the highest number?”
Read MoreThe OG Land Rover, and I mean the first one which had been missing for decades, has apparently been found. Land Rover’s restoration specialists say it was hanging out in a garden down the road from the company’s Solihull, U.K. headquarters after a long life of sitting in other piles of dirt. This year, the trucklet’s being restored.
Read MoreA homeowners’ association in Auburn, California has rescinded its imbecilic policy that allegedly forced owners to keep their overhead doors open from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday, The Sacramento Bee reports. Thank goodness—perhaps there is hope for this world yet.
Read MoreYou wanna be cool, don’t ya?
Read MoreWell, I know it’s early in 2018, but I’ve already gotten my favorite email of the year. It’s a press release that boldly answers the question we’ve all been asking: What’s with the Birnbom situation? Has Marvin Birnbom found a way to personalize his 2016 Cadillac CT6? The answer, I’m delighted to say, is yes. Yes he has.
Read MoreIf you’re one of our few regular readers who doesn’t get blackout drunk on fuel injector cleaner every night, then it’s possible you’ll remember these pictures of what appears to be the new Toyota Supra in prototype disguise. You also may recall that we pointed out something that appeared to be a small camera. It wasn’t. But now we know what they are.
Read MoreThis is one of those stories that, at first, just seems simple and terrible. Unfortunately, the more that gets revealed, the less simple everything becomes. The whole thing revolves around one awful event: a 1981 DeLorean destroyed by fire. However, since it’s blown up on the local news and Car Internet, a lot of people are asking questions about what happened.
Read MoreFord released a cryptic new teaser with the former Top Gear Stig Ben Collins hinting at a new ST model. What the hell could it be?
Read MoreWell, here’s my favorite car video today. It’s the internet’s Most Sensible Car Reviewer Extraordinaire Doug DeMuro in Initial D.
Read MoreI won’t hide my disgust when it comes to Las Vegas; I find it visually offensive. I look away in disgust at all these rubes, shipped in from their flyover states, dressed in their outlet mall clothes and relying on the cloak of night to hide their botched plastic surgery and stretched paychecks, all while acting like fools at the blackjack tables. Pathetic. As if true riches are won and lost in a game of cards and not through generations of thoughtful tax evasion.
Read MoreThe Tokyo Auto Salon happens this week too, and with it comes an STI version of the Subaru Viziv Performance Concept. Here’s a teaser. Let’s hope the wing is adequately huge.
Read MoreTesla finally got around to working out automatically activated windshield wipers, launching another “beta” test for the feature last week. There’s a slight issue involving the wipers flinging water onto owners that still needs ironing out, but Elon Musk has announced that a fix is on the way.
Read MoreWe know that the 2018 Mazda6 will finally come with some turbo power, but sadly the bigger motor will be only paired with an automatic transmission. However! It seems that the Mazda6 may be adding an all-wheel drive variant as well, and we seem to have America’s auto safety regulator to thank for that information.
Read MoreImagine taking an off-road truck, lowering it, and fattening it with a wild widebody kit that looks like it’s supposed to go on a drift car. Actually, it might be kind of awesome. Maybe this many wrongs make a right.
Read MoreAt least 13 people have lost their lives in Santa Barbara County and many more have lost their homes and cars as heavy rains brought mudslides and flooding to Southern California Tuesday. Vegetation which would normally hold the hillsides together was burned away in last month’s wild fires, leaving the area vulnerable.
Read MoreAfter announcing a partnership back in August, Toyota and Mazda have settled on a location in Alabama to build a new $1.6 billion production facility, according to Automotive News. The move follows an industry trend of shifting or keeping automotive production stateside.
Read MoreThe current generation of Mini Cooper launched way back in 2014, so now it’s time for an update. Here’s the bad news: it’s not getting any major changes, like the dual clutch gearbox option seen in other markets. But on the bright side, it’s getting more British. A lot more British.
Read MoreWe already know the 2019 BMW 8 Series is going to sound good, but we only had a vague idea if it looked good. Pictures have now leaked on BMW site Bimmerpost.com, however, and we can see it in much of its glory.
Read MoreBecause automakers enjoy pointless spitting contests and have the resources to participate, we get things like BMW’s specially developed method to refuel a car during an eight-hour world-record drift. But not everything went smoothly, and the more refuels they did, the more the cars smacked into each other.
Read MoreOh, silly BMW-Supra. You can try and disguise yourself all you want, but you know, deep down, that we see you. And you also know that you secretly love it, don’t you? Don’t you? You know you do.
Read MoreThe last year in cars saw a small decline in overall sales and a few signs of trouble ahead, even as trucks, SUVs and crossovers dominate the landscape. So what do we possibly have to look forward to in 2018? Hope, or despair, await us all next week at the Detroit Auto Show.
Read MoreMost of the time when we look at the high-performance cars everyone dreams of having one day, numbers are big—horsepower, cylinder count, displacement, price tag. But we often ignore some of the most incredible numbers performance cars can give us: their hilariously low fuel-economy numbers.
Read MoreWinter can really get you down, especially when it’s painfully cold outside. Fortunately, this sense of despair can be easily cured through the proper, very sideways use of a neatly plowed parking lot.
Read MoreIf you spend all of your days agonizing over which 964-generation Porsche 911 to buy, RM Sotheby’s “Exclusively Porsche” collection heading to Amelia Island just gave you an easy answer. The 964 is good in all its forms, so you should buy all of them.
Read MoreThe New York City subway is bad. We all know this. But this is how bad it got today:
Read MoreHyundai is working on some kind of sports car project, as the company appears to have confirmed at CES. The exact nature of the car isn’t clear, but it really should be a supercar. The stars are aligned. The time is right.
Read MoreA few years back Volkswagen debuted a 900-horsepower Passat converted to rear-wheel drive with a Chevy V8 to run in Formula Drift. It seemed like sacrilege, at least until the moment we heard the yowl of its 8-into-1 exhaust.
Read MoreIf you still dream in diesel and are in the market for an executive sedan with lots of torque and great fuel economy, we have some good news. Unlike some other Bavarian automakers, BMW seems to be keeping the diesel option alive in America with the upcoming 540d xDrive.
Read MoreHe’s right, some do say it’s art, but this looks more like revenge. And taking out your vengeance by taking a car key to somebody’s paint job? That’s, like, one of the worst things you can do to a car.
Read MoreIn this week’s display of homeowners’ association idiocy, the Auburn Greens complex in Auburn, California is allegedly requiring all of its residents to keep their garage doors open during the week, all because one resident had people sleeping in their garage, Sacramento-based news channel KCRA 3 reports. Of all possible solutions to this “problem,” this HOA appears to have found the very dumbest.
Read MoreKia showed up to CES with the Niro electric crossover concept, which previews a production model that will go on sale later this year. According to the presentation, the Niro has a 238-mile range and charge up to 115 miles worth of juice in just 30 minutes.
Read MoreSome companies introduce entirely new cars at CES, other companies are just in town to peddle smaller things, like components. Hyundai, meanwhile, was in Las Vegas on Monday just to announce the name of their next fuel cell car. It will be called Nexo. Nexo!
Read MoreThe Ford Focus RS is a direct competitor to the legendary Subaru WRX STI in performance, all-wheel drive capability and rallying prowess. We have found at least one other way it competes directly with Subaru.
Read MoreYeah, the new Viper (RIP) is nice. It’s sleek and actually good to drive (I’m told). But I’m not interested in that one. I want a first-gen Viper. The one that had no airbags or traction control. That’s the good shit.
Read MoreThe sad reality of city driving is that getting there is only half the battle. You sit for an hour on I-35 wishing for the sweet release of death, hoping you’re on time. You made it! Until the fact that you have to find a parking space (and there isn’t one) makes you annoyingly late. Luckily, new navigation systems being may help you drive straight to an open space.
Read MoreIntroducing Toyota’s new body pod concept called the e-Palette at this year’s CES, the automaker’s president, Akio Toyoda, offered up a few ideas on how it could be utilized: parcel delivery, ride sharing, mobile e-commerce. Toyoda had one more: Burning Man! Yowza.
Read MoreRolls-Royce is often like that kid from grade school who always talked about having better stuff than everyone else. “Oh yeah? Well my mom bought me a Razr because I didn’t want a lame silver flip phone.” Perhaps that’s why, instead of putting a normal chair in its London showroom, Rolls found a $52,000 one.
Read MoreWe’re in a strange era for instrument clusters and dashboards right now. It’s a transitional period, thanks to the very rapidly-growing adoption of full-color LCD matrix displays into and, in some cases, replacing the traditional instrument cluster. Sometimes, though, new tech isn’t always better, as this Mazda 3 dash cluster demonstrates.
Read MoreOnce upon a time, BMW set a Guinness World Record for longest drift. Toyota then beat it twice in three years. So, because bragging rights are very serious in the car world, BMW decided to shatter both records without the modifications allowed to make the drift go more smoothly. That required some creativity.
Read MoreWinter is officially here and that means it’s time for winter tires. It might seem like a great expense—if the tires on my car weren’t made for all seasons, why do they call them all season tires?—but trust us, they’re worth it. Really. Not sure which kind is best? Here’s what you need to know before buying some.
Read MoreOne of Australia’s most major highways, the Hume Freeway linking Melbourne to Sydney, has seen some interesting traffic patterns as of late. It’s all thanks to the tar in the road literally melting under sustained 100-plus degree temperatures of a heat wave.
Read MoreCar sales overall weren’t as stellar as they’ve been in the United States last year. Yet predictably, the best-sellers were comprised largely of a group of trucks, SUVs and crossovers. No surprises there. The worst-sellers, tragically, were a smattering of fun enthusiast cars, small cars and phased-out models.
Read MoreIt’s fun to look back on BMW’s history through rose colored glasses and remember how great they were. The video focuses mostly on the E38-generation 7-series and the E39-generation 5-series, both great cars in their own time. There are also short discussions with BMW higher-ups; perhaps most interesting of those is conducted with BMW Design Chief Chris Bangle. If you want to relive the radness of the late 1990s through the BMW looking glass, just press play.
Read MoreWhew, this is an odd story with a lot to unpack. Let’s start at the beginning. Over 100 years ago, two drivers Nagel and Mikhailoff competed in the 1912 running of the Monte Carlo Rally in their Russo-Baltique (shown below). The car did not win, but its ability to finish has inspired decades of pride from the region.
Read MoreThe famed 11-foot-8 bridge, affectionately known as ‘the can-opener bridge’, is a train trestle in Durham, North Carolina that has been tearing the tops off of unsuspecting rental trucks for years. This particular crash happened on New Year’s Eve, and the trend doesn’t show any signs of ending in 2018, so hold on to your butts and watch the destruction.
Read MoreThe 1950s were heady days in the automotive world. The post-WWII era brought sweeping advancement in technology, design, and horsepower. Money was flowing, and things were quite prosperous in the United States. A corresponding increase in car sales and a demand for large and luxurious cars led to ballooning prices. By the end of the decade, a full one in six Americans were employed directly or indirectly by the industry.
Read MoreAs long as people have been selling cars, they’ve also been knowing what they have. This isn’t just an internet-age problem, either. Sellers know more than you, and have done for a very long time. If you’re going to low-ball them, don’t even bother calling, because their ratty and rusty old Jeep is VERY RARE.
Read MoreThere have been car-versus-bike drag races since there have been cars and bikes to pit against each other. They are always interesting to watch, as the tech balanced between the two different worlds has progressed at a mostly even pace. Bikes use light weight and aero to their advantage, while cars tend to use grip and power.
Read MoreThere are a lot of ‘rules of the internet’. You’re likely familiar with a few of them, and most of them are awful. Just over a year ago, my best friend and I were talking about wheels and crafted our own ‘rule 152', which dictates “If you image search any car followed by RPF1, someone has not only fitted it with Enkei RPF1 wheels, but it probably looks great”. There are almost no exceptions to rule 152, because this wheel is available in a number of sizes, widths, and offsets. Not only that, but
Read MoreIt’s 1983 and you have a brand new Mustang GT. What are you gonna do with it? Drive erratically in a foundry of course. That’s what this car was made to do. There’s nothing more badass than sitting stationary in a shower of sparks.
Read MoreWood paneled surf wagons from the late-40s and early-50s are undoubtedly cool. Mercury Sable station wagons are not cool. “But what if you combined them” you ask to the frightened man sitting next to you on the bus. He quickly looks away.
Read MoreSomeone in Rhode Island decided to venture out during the worst of this past week’s “bomb cyclone” that pummeled the North East. This would be quite an undertaking in any vehicle but one nameless resident decided that the perfect car for their winter trek would be a Mercedes SL with the top down.
Read MoreIf you combined a Gundam robot with a JDM Toyota, a Bosozoku car is probably what would come out the other end. Several yard long exhaust pipes and bodykits that would make a Group B rally car cry are the norm. The crazier the better.
Read MoreThe Eastern part of the United States is having a bit of a hard time when it comes to weather recently. We are experiencing what has been called a “bomb cyclone” which means that the Northeast is starting to look a little like Hoth. That doesn’t mean that we can’t have some fun in our cars.
Read MoreThere aren’t too many reasons you might have traveled through Stewart Airport, but if you have, you know it’s about as bustling as the sloth enclosure at a zoo. So the idea of clearing out the quiet with the world’s largest passenger jet is kind of hilarious.
Read MoreI have looked into your heart and I know who you are. You grew up on Gran Turismo dreams, pitcturing the day when those radical Nissan Skyline GT-R speed machines would be legal (and like, really legal) in the United States so you could drive so fast and so gloriously into your shining future. But! I am here to tell you that if you’re beholden to the GT-R alone, you are wrong.
Read MoreWhat you need is winter tires. And you might need more ground clearance than you get with a 2002 Lexus IS300 Sportcross. Maybe. Kind of. Not really.
Read MoreWere you sad and despondent that you didn’t get a chance to buy a Ford GT? I know some people were. Well, cheer up! Because you don’t have to wait for everyone’s Don’t Sell Your Ford GT For Two Years contract to expire anymore: There’s one headed for auction later this month.
Read MoreAround 13 years ago, the site of the sinking of the U.S.S. Thomas Donaldson, a World War II-era transport ship, was discovered in the Barents Sea on Russia’s northern coast not far from their borders with Norway and Finland. In the past few years, the Russian Navy has pulled the tanks the ship was carrying from the water, shooting some remarkable video in the process.
Read MoreHello brands. I understand that you have many dynamic stories that you would love to engage with millenials, Gen-Y, Gen-Z and other lucrative cohorts. I’m here to help! I love your brands. I am not selling my soul just to collect a fat check to afford this life-ruining 1977 Maserati.
Read MoreThe Tesla Model X is an impressive performance machine, one day embarrassing cars at the drag strip and the next helping to pull giant trucks trapped on just the slightest snowy incline.
Read MoreOne of my favorite car shows out there right now is also one of the simplest: two people, in an interesting car. It helps that the the two people are funny, and one of them is Jerry Seinfeld. Oh, there’s also coffee, but I don’t know shit about coffee. It’s Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee, and it’s coming to Netflix today.
Read More“Morning Sickness” was a common issue with a lot of 1980s-era General Motors cars. When it was cold outside, turning the steering wheel required the strength of a giant.
Read MoreEvery car interior these days needs to be something. Oh, it’s a spaceship. Oh, it’s a lounge. Oh, it’s a fighter plane. Oh, it’s a boat. Screw that. This is what the inside of an Alpine A310 looks like, and it’s just a car. And it’s perfect.
Read MoreThe new Mercedes X-Class truck is finally real and, today, Mercedes unveiled some classy ways for you to use it, like when you’re camping in the Carpathian Mountains.
Read MoreNearly 20 years ago, an 11-second car was fast. It’s still fast now, but back in the early 2000s, if you had a 11-second car, your shit was fast. Now it’s 2018 and a stock Mustang GT that you could walk off the lot with today can lay down an 11-second quarter mile like it’s nothing. What a time to be alive.
Read MoreFerrari CEO Sergio Marchionne thinks an electric Ferrari would be “obscene,” despite the industry heading that way. The quietness bothers him, and he wants to keep Ferrari “pure,” whatever that means. But not everyone’s allergic to plugs, and a shop’s one-off electric Ferrari 308 GTS will go to auction soon.
Read MoreParts of the Northeast are getting hammered by frigid temperatures right now, just 24 hours after a winter storm dropped a blanket of snow across several states. Near Boston, some people awoke Friday and found the storm had consumed their cars with ice.
Read MoreI (Erik here) have never been to Las Vegas, which I’m told is both kind of exhilarating in addition to being extremely bleak. Strangely, I’ve been told the same thing about CES, which I’ll be in Vegas to cover this year with Ryan Felton. Here’s the car stuff we’re excited about!
Read MoreEveryone loved Baby Driver, the hit movie of 2017 about the kid called Baby who had a ringing in his ear and did crimes for the mob, but whom we apparently liked because he crushed on a girl and deep down he was a good person. Baby is back, and so is his red Subaru WRX.
Read MorePanasonic has been on the fringes of the automotive industry for some time with various deals and partnerships, the biggest one being with Tesla and its Gigafactory. But it would appear the company is making its own plans, if this spy shot sent to us supposedly from next week’s CES venue is anything to go by.
Read MoreNew York City is in the midst of an entirely regular snowstorm that nonetheless has inspired the media to perform some silly stunts. One of the many positive things about the snow, though, from a driver’s perspective, is that the city has suspended alternate side parking regulations, meaning you can keep your car parked in a Thursday spot right where it is until next week.
Read MoreThere were a lot of good cars braving the blizzard in New York City today. These are some of them, and even more are parked. We went out in my colleague Mike Ballaban’s Lexus IS300 wagon to go find them.
Read MoreWhile most automakers had a tough 2017, Aston Martin is profitable again after about a decade, surging on to a record year of sales in 2017 thanks to the new DB11. And it’s only getting started.
Read MoreIf you’ve ever had problems with your neighborhood HOA complaining about your cars, what’s going on right now in Turkmenistan should help put things in perspective for you. As of this month, black cars have been made illegal in the capital city of Ashgabat, and black cars have been impounded. This all seems to be because Turkmenistan’s president, Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov, is a superstitious loon who really likes white.
Read MoreSki lifts are the cars of the ski slope, just without pretty much any of the standard safety features, and strung up dozens of feet above the ground. This makes ski lifts extremely precarious in windy situations, as evidenced by this terrifying video taken at a ski resort in Vorarlyberg, Austria, on Wednesday.
Read MoreIt is bitter cold and snowy across much of the United States today, and sure as frozen fingers and salty floor mats, some brilliant individual out there is going to put hot water on their ice-coated windshield.
Read MoreYou knew it was coming. It was inevitable. The 2018 Dodge Challenger Demon markups. They are here. One is in Phoenix. Another is in Vegas.
Read MoreThere’s really a lot that we don’t know about the upcoming BMW/Toyota Supra/Z-number sports car project. Engine, transmission, styling—we have good ideas, but no definites. To this list of uncertainties we add: some cool-as-hell taillights.
Read MoreIt’s that time again: time for the car companies to roll out their new semi-autonomous crossovers and fast-selling pickup trucks at the 2018 Detroit Auto Show. So, as is tradition, we’re gonna find our thrills at annual readers vs. writers karting tournament next weekend. You should come kick our asses like you usually do!
Read MoreIn the latest episode of The Grand Tour, Richard Hammond won the “Lack of Continuity Award” for driving two different McLaren 720Ses in the same clip—which he had to do, because he destroyed the first car by filling its fuel tank with water. That’s right; Richard Hammond did it again.
Read MoreIn case you haven’t heard, planes are safe now. In presumably that spirit, a flight this week included an unusually frantic moment,after one pilot slapped his co-pilot, according to multiple reports. Both stormed out of the cockpit, leaving the Jet Airways flight with 324 passengers onboard briefly unattended.
Read MoreI’ve got bad news for those of us who don’t want to live in an automotive landscape solely populated with bloated SUVs and slightly less bloated crossovers: We’re boned. In case you’re still hopeful, here’s a bit of news that should kill that optimism: Ford just cancelled their refresh of their Fusion mid-size sedan, because no one cares.
Read MoreAlpine has returned, updating the formula of its classic rally-winning sports car for the modern world, and teaching some new lessons for competitors from Alfa Romeo and Porsche.
Read MoreThe configurator for the 2018 BMW M5 is live and available for your use, which includes, of course, selecting your colors. Like so many cars today, “colors” is code for mostly grays, whites, blacks, and maybe one or two actual colors. In BMW’s case, both are blue. I think we can do better.
Read MoreI can’t be alone in thinking this, that modern Audis are damn-near indistinguishable from each other. The A4 looks like the A6, which looks like the A7. It’s only when you get around to the back of the thing and see the badging can you really discern which model you’re puzzling over. Thankfully, though, it seems like Audi has recognized this and will soon change things up.
Read MoreThe Chevy Bolt outsold almost every other plug-in hybrid and electric car that wasn’t a Tesla Model S in 2017, making it one of the most successful electric vehicle launches in recent memory.
Read MoreIf you’ve always wanted a first-generation Volkswagen New Beetle convertible, but wished that the styling was less clean and more complicated and convoluted and confusing, then boy are you in luck, because there’s a fake-wood paneled New Beetle convertible with a hood and grille from a PT Cruiser with your name on it. Hot damn.
Read MoreThe days of squeezing into an airplane and being greeted by the photo of an unnaturally happy flight attendant who never breaks a stare—instead of a real one, of course—could soon be over. The in-flight entertainment screens that taunt your face on almost every trip are on the way out at some airlines.
Read MoreSome look at Rolls Royce Silver Shadow II and see an exquisite piece of work, the epitome of automotive luxury and class. Others may see a blank canvas, and go to work tearing it apart, running homemade piping along the roof, and turbo plumbing out of the nose, and now you can buy it.
Read MoreDavid Bowie was a man of class and style. He had an awesome collection of art and furniture and at least one mirror-finished Mini Cooper. But in the early 1980s, his daily driver was as timelessly rad as he was: this 1981 Volvo 262 C Bertone. And it just sold for supercar money at auction.
Read MoreWhat’s likely one of the more commonly fantasized excuses for a car chase was no excuse early New Year’s Day, as Carl Alewine witnessed the birth of his daughter handcuffed to the hood of his car after getting pulled over speeding to the hospital.
Read MoreWe’ve all been there, sitting on a plane for an excruciatingly long time, waiting for it to taxi to the gate, or waiting for it to do something mysterious—whatever it is it doesn’t much matter to you in the moment. You just want it to be all over. A passenger in Malaga, Spain, was feeling this way on New Year’s Day after a thirty minute wait for his plane to reach a gate. Instead of standing around hunched over and daring the people across the aisle to jump out before he could, he just used the
Read MoreIn high school, I was lazy and—like the driver above—regularly drove around during the winter with only a fraction of my windshield cleared of snow and ice. This is dumb. Don’t do this. Clear everything off.
Read MoreA couple years back, a little shop in Washington making carbon-bodied hot rods with Ford Focus SVT headlights took the title of the world’s fastest production car away from Bugatti. Then they quietly disappeared.
Read MoreI’ll let you in on a little secret: the best Infiniti ever was the original one, the Q-ship, the first Q45. But there hasn’t been a truly cool big sedan from Infiniti in some time. Can whatever this concept turns into change that?
Read MoreWhen I see things like bedazzled iPhone cases, I scoff because they look like trash. But this bedazzled Lamborghini Huracán? This is very much my shit.
Read MoreHello and happy new year. I have returned from a multi-day meditation period—where I consumed nothing but mint tea and contemplated the energy of the galaxy—until I finally was able to center my thoughts around a singular Opinion: blue is the best color for cars.
Read MoreWhen a car stops working, the average human doesn’t stop and take the time to filter their reaction. But hopefully U.K. driver Andrew Wilkins left the typical profanities behind when his Volkswagen Golf wouldn’t respond well last month, because it was full of acorns. “Ah, nuts!” is the only appropriate response here.
Read MoreIt’s worth remembering that, occasionally, magic still happens in the world. Sometimes it’s a miraculous recovery from an illness, sometimes it’s a sublime work of art, and sometimes it’s a hot dog that manages to stay perched on a truck’s bumper for over 120 miles, like this tenacious Texan hot dog.
Read MoreChristopher Nolan’s Dunkirk took full advantage of the visual and aural sensations of filmmaking, but his noted inspiration when developing the stunning war drama came from a time when movies were still silent.
Read MoreEveryone is tripping over themselves to create the first autonomous car, but they forget that Wilton Knight already designed it in 1982 in the form of KITT. And here’s your chance to drive an awesome replica.
Read MoreAfter experiencing the stark sleekness of the Tesla Model 3’s dashboard, we’ve been fighting amongst ourselves about whether or not modern cars should bother with gauges. Here is our debate.
Read MoreHello and welcome to 2018! If you need some good news to start this year, please be advised that the famous and controversial Japanese tuning house Liberty Walk has begun messing with the normally classy and stately Lexus LC. This is a good thing.
Read MoreJanuary 1st, 2018 was a terrifying day for many residents of Oregon, because on that day a law went into effect that stated that Oregon counties with 40,000 or less people would be allowed to let normal, mouth-breathing citizens pump their own gasoline right into the gas-holes of their cars, like they were rocket engineers or something. Of course, people do this every day in every state but New Jersey, which is why the rest of the country is pointing and laughing at all the panic.
Read MoreThe Ferrari LaFerrari hypercar has always been a lovely car with a profoundly dumb name, but I often like to fantasize about which other cars would be improved by its 6.3-liter hybrid V12 engine. Would it fit under the hood of a Porsche 924? That’s worth finding out, because a LaFerrari engine with just 20 miles on it ended up for sale on eBay.
Read MoreIt’s easy to be tricked into thinking that ripping a sweet, tidy donut in the Hoonigans’ tiny parking lot is no big deal when so many guests on their Daily Transmission reels make it look so easy. Thankfully, their blooper reel of crashes and carnage proves otherwise.
Read MoreThe Atlantic has a nice long story about the National Valet Olympics, which I had no idea were a thing until today. They sound kind of intense!
Read MoreMany of us have a basic idea of what our car’s clutch does, but still find all the teeth and springs confusing when we actually look at one out of the car. Fortunately, Learn Engineering on YouTube put together this simple animation that may be the clearest description yet of how your clutch really works.
Read MoreOn Sunday night, a parking garage went up in flames in Liverpool, England, destroying 1,400 cars but, somehow, seriously injuring no one in the process, including six dogs that were rescued from the blaze, according to The Guardian.
Read MoreCommercial planes are a nightmare. The last thing anyone should want to do is board a giant hunk of metal, only to be sealed inside with people they’ve never met while precariously speeding through thin air. Commercial planes sound like even more of a nightmare when a bird joins the party, causing the flight to turn completely around.
Read MoreI’ve been driving in and around this goddamn city for 10 years now, which makes me an expert.
Read MoreIn response to the massive corporate tax cut passed by the Republican-led U.S. Congress, major companies have said they’re doling out relatively small bonuses to workers, thereby attempting to shed any notion they exist solely to make a profit. It’s misleading PR, because of course corporations solely exist to maximize profit, and a case involving Henry Ford from a century ago can help explain how that idea evolved.
Read MoreWhen is a Tesla not a Tesla? Well, when it’s today’s Nice Price or Crack Pipe RAV4. Let’s see if the price for this Tesla-powered Toyota makes it an electric dream.
Read MoreToday’s Nice Price or Crack Pipe Renault shares its name with one of the most famous—and infamous—video game series around: Grand Theft Auto. Let’s see if this hot coupe’s price makes it look like a steal as well.
Read MoreCadillac dominated this past weekend’s 24 hours of Daytona, and now, with today’s Nice Price or Crack Pipe Allanté, it could dominate your driveway too. That is, if its price doesn’t automatically give it a DNF.
Read MoreToday’s Nice Price or Crack Pipe Corvette is for those of you who love all things Chevy, and lament the passing of that marque’s El Camino. Will you feel the same love for this custom’s price? Let’s find out.
Read MoreBuilt by Mitsubishi and sold by Chrysler’s now defunct Eagle brand, today’s Nice Price or Crack Pipe Summit wagon is an example of what was once called a “captive import.” Let’s see if this cute mini-MPV’s price makes it captivating today.
Read MoreImitation is said to be the sincerest form of flattery, and if that’s truly accurate then today’s Nice Price or Crack Pipe Forester is as earnest as Wilde’s Jack Worthing. That’s because it’s aping the JDM STi edition. We’ll have to decide how sincere the seller is about its price.
Read MoreThe ad for today’s Nice Price or Crack Pipe Mercedes 380SE says it was owned by a proverbial little old lady. Let’s see if its price is enough to get anyone’s granny panties all in a bunch.
Read MoreThe seller of today’s Nice Price or Crack Pipe sporty Civic says he’s “testing the waters” with his ad. Let’s let him know whether or not he’s all wet.
Read MoreHey guys and gals, do you remember Mitsubishi? No? Well check out today’s Nice Price or Crack Pipe Evo IX and see if that jogs your memory. In fact, let’s see if its price makes you want to come running.
Read MoreWith its Ferrari inspired looks and grumbly Ford engine under its hood, today’s Nice Price or Crack Pipe Miata is one unique and wild beast. Let’s find out if its price could turn you into an animal tamer.
Read MoreToday’s Nice Price or Crack Pipe MGB rocks a soft top and a saucy Rover V8. Let’s see if its price tag is low enough that you’d let that Rover take over.
Read MoreIf you wanted to take one lap of luxury then you could do far worse than to do so in today’s Nice Price or Crack Pipe Mk VII. We’ll have to decide if you should also be lapping up its price.
Read MoreHow do you envision your own death? Might it be behind the wheel of something as badass as today’s Nice Price or Crack Pipe Mazda? Let’s find out if anyone can—or should—afford to go in this style.
Read MoreThe seller of today’s Nice Price or Crack Pipe T4 Doka says it’s literally sitting at the dock with two of its smaller “Sinka” brothers. Let’s find out if its price might make it a worthy port ‘o call.
Read MoreDespite its 6-wheel underpinnings, the seller of today’s Nice Price or Crack Pipe custom Jeep Cherokee says it’s never seen snow. Much the pity to that, but we’ll have to decide if it will also ever see a buyer.
Read MoreToday’s Nice Price or Crack Pipe Bimmer E21 currently calls America’s smallest state, Rhode Island its home. Let’s see if its price will make it kind of a big deal everywhere.
Read MoreHave you ever wanted to experience the army, only without all the fighting, getting up early, and everyone telling you what to do? Well, maybe the price tag on today’s Nice Price or Crack Pipe Jeep M715 will let you soldier on.
Read MoreToday’s Nice Price or Crack Pipe 928 is good from far, but far from good, the result of it having been sitting for years. Might its price still warrant a standing ovation?
Read MoreJapanese luxury cars have come a long way since today’s Nice Price or Crack Pipe Maxima was built back in ‘86. This was once Nissan’s most opulent offering here, but now it’s just a nice old wagon with plush tufted seats. Let’s see what all that old school splendor is worth.
Read MoreDo you require coffee or some other sort of stimulant to wake you up? Well need no more my friends because, while today’s Nice Price or Crack Pipe Caddy may itself be a sleeper, its mods will definitely keep you awake.
Read MoreToday’s Nice Price or Crack Pipe MR2 will soon need some transmission work. Could that demerit still have you shifting the bucks needed to buy it?
Read MoreThe longer wheelbase Wrangler LJ is a rare enough beast, but add to that the V10 of today’s Nice Price or Crack Pipe edition, and you’ve got yourself one hell of a Jeep. Let’s see if it comes with one hell of a price to boot.
Read MoreOszkar Bacsi told me that every time he goes out in his heavily modified 1969 Porsche 912 Slantnose, he wonders if he’ll come back in one piece. Not exactly the most comforting thing to hear while riding shotgun up a worn out canyon road at dusk, but I understood why he said it.
Read MoreNASCAR teams are working on an online racing league where they would draft players to compete for a six-figure payout, according to a report from Sports Business Daily. The league would take place on iRacing, a subscription simulator that even professional drivers practice on, and likely be broadcast online.
Read MoreAfter some consideration, Formula One has finally decided to end its use of grid girls starting with the 2018 FIA F1 World Championship season. About freaking time.
Read MoreBeing unfamiliar with Peter Brock is pretty much unthinkable to Australian auto racing fans, but for much of the rest of the world, that’s the sorry state we live in. This is a shame, not just because Peter Brock was a truly gifted driver and ran a great factory-approved tuning company, but because the story of his downfall is truly fascinating, and involves a box of crystals and epoxy that tap into mythical orgone energy. Seriously.
Read MoreThe all-electric Formula E bills itself as the future of motorsports. And despite the current lack of huge-name talent, noise and drama we expect from most forms of racing, automakers like Jaguar, Nissan, Audi and Porsche are all-in. Starting later this year, meet the car they’ll all race with.
Read MoreAfter apparently enjoying racing about 22 more hours than he’s used to at the Rolex 24, Formula One’s Fernando Alonso decided he’ll compete in all of the FIA World Endurance Championship races that don’t conflict with his F1 obligations this season. He, presumably, hates sleep.
Read MoreWhile IndyCar and sports-car regular Townsend Bell was racing the Rolex 24 Hours at Daytona International Speedway this weekend, he tweeted, someone allegedly stole a lot of racing jewelry he’d acquired over the years—including a winning watch from the 2014 Rolex 24 and 10 Indianapolis 500 rings, he said.
Read MoreThis is why you should never stand outside of a corner on an active rally stage: You could get very, very hurt.
Read MoreWhile we always hope that the Jalopnik Bump results in a win, sometimes we’re impressed enough with a team merely finishing the race. The Honda of America Racing Team (HART, for short) works in prep for their Acura NSX GT3 around regular nine-to-five day jobs at Honda’s headquarters in Ohio, and they actually finished their first-ever shot at the full 24 Hours of Daytona.
Read MoreWe’ve been yearning for a new BMW 8 Series for years, and now it’s finally here, having debuted at the 2018 24 Hours of Daytona. One of the best parts about Daytona is the ability to get up close to the different cars and look at all of the interesting parts.
Read MoreWhile there were plenty of teams that got lots of hype for superstar drivers or new cars at the Rolex 24 this year, it was the relatively low-key No. 5 Cadillac DPi-V.R of Mustang Sampling Racing that limped it in for the overall win. They didn’t just beat their own engine overheating issues at the end—they beat an old distance record.
Read MoreThe 24 Hours of Daytona—IMSA’s annual season-opening festival of utter vehicular masochism and pretty lights—is more alive than ever thanks to some big names and a deep field of cars. Not only did the infield sell out entirely, but the fastest prototypes are on pace to break the record number of laps ever driven at the Rolex 24.
Read MoreOne of the most exciting recent developments in Formula One is the reappearance of drivers driving in other series. For some reason—an unwillingness to risk getting hurt or break their focus or whatever—that hasn’t happened much recently. But as F1's Fernando Alonso and Lance Stroll have found out at this year’s Rolex 24, the world of endurance racing can be brutal.
Read MoreWith around six and a half hours left in this year’s 24 Hours of Daytona race, 2017 24 Hours of Daytona winners Wayne Taylor Racing already threw in the towel, citing safety concerns with their Prototype class-spec Continental tires. Tire failures have dogged an otherwise fairly standard Rolex 24, with many happening on the right rear corners of the series’ fastest Prototype cars.
Read MoreI know we like to say that the racing year in United States starts with a bang, but we meant the figurative “bang” that is one of the world’s toughest day-long races. Not a physical bang caused by crashing out on the formation lap.
Read MoreThe addition of a small Jalopnik sticker on a race car is believed to have mystical qualities that propel you to the front of the field. This weekend, we’re seeing if the mighty Jalopnik bump works on a group of Honda employees’ epic side project: the No. 69 Honda of America Racing Team Acura NSX GT3.
Read MoreFormula One’s American broadcast will be on ESPN next year, which people are understandably apprehensive about. But in some good news, F1 may push back start times, allowing we of the Red, White and Blue to sleep in past 6:30 a.m. on the weekends. On a lazy Sunday morning, that’s a decent consolation prize.
Read MoreMany of us who race in cheap-car amateur endurance series have wild fantasies of running like the pro teams we watch at places like Daytona or Le Mans. One set of six-time 24 Hours of Lemons winners racing today is living out that dream by racing in the Continental Tire Sports Car Challenge race, and I am infinitely jealous.
Read More“Just look at this insanity: Camaros, Skylines, HiAces, RX-7s, Jimnys,” NoriYaro explains, showing the field at a drag racing event at Twin Motegi Ring. “Japan: it never doesn’t deliver.”
Read MoreThe 24 Hours of Daytona is a wonderful beginning. It kicks off professional endurance racing in the United States with a glorious bang—a ridiculously difficult full day of endurance racing that puts teams’ wits and patience to the ultimate test. We’re here to take it all in, and for me to embrace my inner Florida Woman.
Read MoreDon’t even bother to watch the .gif above. It’s all smoke and slide and flash, but it doesn’t do this Aston Martin V8 Vantage rally car any justice. The noise it makes is profane. It would be banned as obscenity in most lesser nations. It is, in short, insane and sublime.
Read MoreGreetings from beautiful Daytona Beach, where the Florida Man sightings and spring-like weather shockingly aren’t the main appeal this week! I’m here for the Rolex 24, where endurance teams battle for an entire day around Daytona’s road course. This year is extra special, with Formula One drivers and new cars in the mix. Here’s why we’re so excited about it, and why you should be, too.
Read MoreThe Sauber Formula One team made a baffling and surely destructive move last summer, announcing that it would replace its Ferrari engines with objectively terrible Hondas in 2018. Sauber hired a new team boss at 9 a.m. on a Monday a couple of months later, and he called a 10 a.m. meeting to axe the Honda deal.
Read More“It’s not all left turns!” we NASCAR fans cry, trying to reason with people who have already categorized us as weirdos who like when cars make circles. “They go to road courses! They make right turns, too!” But we know in our hearts that NASCAR drivers usually don’t love extra turns, and that we cannot argue.
Read MoreWhen Danica Patrick announced her retirement last year, she said that she would also give the Daytona 500 and Indianapolis 500 one last go before bowing out. She named the two races the “Danica Double” but it was unclear who her team would be, until now.
Read MoreHonda rider Joan Barreda Bort injured his knee badly on the seventh stage of the Dakar Rally this year, which he then went on to win. It took three more stages with a completely busted knee—one so badly injured that Barreda couldn’t even stand on it—before Barreda retired from the rally.
Read MoreSome things on this planet are just pure and good. Japan’s Netz Cup Vitz Race is one of those things. Take a zillion of the little hatchbacks that we get in the United States badged as a Yaris, and go racing. Watch, and smile.
Read MoreNASCAR’s favorite son and driving god Dale Earnhardt Jr. accidentally tapped a tree after a snowstorm that blasted parts of North Carolina. He said he tapped the tree because he was going a bit fast, but consider this, southerners: if Dale Jr. is struggling to keep it under control, maybe it’s not the best time to go out.
Read MoreBless you, Mississippi, and your ultra chill rules about what qualifies as “street legal.”
Read MoreAfter an alleged wreck between Dakar Rally competitors Carlos Sainz and Kees Koolen, who can’t even agree on whether it happened in the first place, Koolen is threatening legal action. Koolen told Autosport it “would have been a lot easier” for Sainz if Koolen had died, because then he wouldn’t be able to talk.
Read MoreThe Olympics are fun. They’re a time when we can sit at a TV, pretending we like other humans as well as our country, all while cheering for athletes whose names we learned 10 minutes ago on Google. The Olympics will be even more fun when Dale Earnhardt Jr. runs around with a microphone on the broadcast.
Read MoreDan Gurney died Sunday at age 86, and to say that he lived a full life would be an enormous understatement. He wasn’t just one of the world’s most prolific racing drivers, or the namesake of the Gurney flap and the Gurney bubble. He even started the tradition of spraying champagne on the podium. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Here are the incredible things Gurney did that revolutionized the sport itself.
Read MoreFormula One’s use of grid girls is still “under review,” but instead of deciding whether to axe the concept altogether, F1 will try to make grid girls “more relevant” to competition. This weak and complacent move was, of course, going to happen the whole time. It was silly of us to think otherwise.
Read MoreThe most famous winter rallies in the world take place in the frozen norths of Sweden, Norway and Finland, but the gnarliest ones take place right here in America. Why? Because we run our snow rallies without studs.
Read MoreMcLaren Formula One driver Fernando Alonso’s quest to win the Triple Crown of Motorsport is one of the most pure and good things in motorsport right now. Lest you think “guy who likes racing does more of it and has fun” is a no-brainer, here’s ex-Red Bull F1, ex-Porsche 919 driver Mark Webber with a bad take.
Read MoreIf you keep popping tires, perhaps you should take a page from the No. 321 Dakaras Toyota. These crazy Lithuanians put the two good tires on the front of their Toyota Hilux and pretended it was just a big front-wheel-drive Yaris. They went over 24 miles with only two front tires to reach the finish line for Stage 4.
Read MoreRally is one of our favorite motorsports for going deep into nature—beyond the limits of civilization, cell service and sanity—and blasting through it with a car. This is also what’s makes it extremely difficult to broadcast, but somehow, the World Rally Championship figured out how for every stage in 2018—not for free, but the cost is pretty reasonable.
Read MoreLast season was another disappointment for the McLaren-Honda team, but it will give us something else that’s very cool. McLaren let a documentary crew film the inner workings of their 2017 season for a new four-episode series on Amazon: Grand Prix Driver.
Read MoreMost Formula One drivers said they wanted more cockpit protection on their race cars to lessen the chance fatal injuries, so the people who run the sport listened—kind of. But money talks, too, and it’s pretty loud.
Read MoreThe World Rally Championship heads to the Rallye Monte Carlo later this month, and good news! The 2018 cars are already out testing. Here’s a sampling of the world’s angriest little hatchbacks that will compete for total rally domination this year.
Read MoreThere is something strangely but deeply fascinating about seeing huge off-road race trucks get completely caught up by a large sand dune.
Read MoreBryce Menzies was the best shot in a while for someone trained in North American desert racing to win the Dakar Rally, until he fell victim to a weird sort of crash. Here’s how such a little bump could send him and his X-Raid Mini end over end.
Read MoreDakar Rally rookie and truck jump record-setting badass Bryce Menzies was involved in a major crash on the second day of the 14-day-long rally. Menzies, whose extensive off-road racing experience made him the best hope for an American to win this year, crashed less than four miles into today’s stage out of fourth place overall.
Read MoreThe incredible 14-day Dakar Rally kicks off through South America Saturday and American off-road racer Bryce Menzies is finally getting to race it. Menzies wanted to race the Dakar last year, but was badly injured when a world record jump attempt went wrong. Now he’s there in an X-Raid Mini—one of Dakar’s best teams—and is the U.S.’ best hope for seeing an American win it all.
Read MoreFormer American Le Mans Series champion Scott Tucker was sentenced to 16 years and 8 months in prison for illegal payday lending practices, reports The Kansas City Star. The $2 billion lending enterprise funded Tucker’s lavish lifestyle, which included racing an Audi LMP1 at Le Mans as well as his Level 5 Motorsports team based in America.
Read MoreFormula One has never been big on that “internet” stuff, mostly because an old, angry and confused man ran the sport for years. That led F1 to be frustratingly absent online, and in an era when a lot ofyoung people would rather pay to look at their phones and computers than pay for cable, that’s not a good way to be.
Read MoreThe acres of flooded cars for sale after a major hurricane can be temptingly cheap, but as the POS Racing team is finding out, there are extremely good reasons why. POS Racing bought a 1992 Honda Prelude that they’d like to race in the 24 Hours of Lemons, and it came with a whole lot of water for free!
Read MoreIs your pesky BMW M12 inline four not cranking out enough power? Today is your lucky day! The full kit for a Garrett turbo as big as your face from a 1986 BMW Formula One engine is up for sale on eBay for just £8,750.00, or $11,854.15 in ‘Murica Bucks. It’s hard to think of a cooler ex-F1 part than this.
Read MoreThe BBC reports that rally champion Donald Milne, who also mentored rally legend Colin McRae, died after his private airplane collided with a fire-service helicopter in Spain on Saturday. Milne was 65 years old.
Read MoreNissan thinks it can use its recent experience building a Le Mans prototype in its Formula E electric racing program. That’s interesting, because the experience was centered around the GT-R LM Nismo, a radical front-wheel-drive prototype that never raced with a functional hybrid system. You know, the part that’s usually electrical.
Read MoreIn early 1980s, Nissan was on a mission. It was fighting Toyota for supremacy in the Japanese market, trying to prove itself with high-tech road cars and flame-spitting race cars to draw people into the showroom. And it was making a case for itself, but it had a problem.
Read MoreI usually do rallycross in a white Subaru Legacy Turbo wagon. We nicknamed it the “Space Shuttle” after I sent it over some huge jumps. One of my friends got hit in it and still owes it a non-holey door, but whatever, it runs. At last month’s event, it faked me out. It started right up with a fresh battery—until it didn’t.
Read MoreA draft of the Trump administration’s next budget proposal reportedly suggests the U.S. is planning to end support for the International Space Station by 2025. That’s a terrible idea.
Read MoreYou know that while airplanes fly through the air, they’re still technically on planet Earth. You also know that at some point, a vehicle could get so high up that it would be in outer space. That all seems a bit vague, but it turns out, space has a definite on-paper start point, and it’s precisely 327,360 feet up.
Read MoreIn what is hopefully not a sign from God regarding the future of the automotive industry as the Detroit Auto Show ends, what seems to be a meteor just streaked through the skies around Detroit, setting the sky ablaze and rattling windows.
Read MoreYou think you’re all “cool” with your Bugatti Chiron and its nine miles to the gallon. Feh! Feh, I say. What does that have, a mere 1,479 horsepower? Weak. What you need is a Saturn V rocket.
Read MoreThis past Sunday night, SpaceX launched into space what may have been the most important payload they’ve ever launched: a super-secret U.S. government satellite called Zuma. While the launch of the Falcon 9 rocket appeared to go okay, it now seems apparent that the Zuma satellite is lost, and so far neither SpaceX or the U.S. government is willing to take the blame.
Read MoreIf there’s one building at NASA’s Johnson Space Center that houses all of the eye candy, it has to be Building 9. Robots! Vehicles! Life-size models! Builds in progress! There’s something new you’d want to explore, drive around or tinker with around every corner. It’s almost too much cool stuff to process all at once.
Read MoreIt seems super boxy, fully-autonomous concepts are all the rage these days. And now there’s a new startup looking to join the fray. Nuro.ai, started by two former Google engineers, revealed a driverless prototype that’s designed to handle low-speed, last-mile deliveries. Think dry cleaning or food.
Read MorePerpetually troubled electric car startup Faraday Future filed a lawsuit on Monday against the company’s former chief financial officer, Stefan Krause, alleging that he stole a number of trade secrets and improperly solicited employees to join him at a new startup.
Read MoreAt this month’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Chinese-funded electric car startup Byton debuted its first vehicle. But Byton wasn’t the only new Chinese-backed at the show. Xiaopeng Motors also debuted its first production model at the show, and now it has $350 million in financial backing from two big-name corporations.
Read MoreThe 2018 Nissan Leaf is set to debut in two waves—a standard version with a 40 kWh battery pack and, later, a longer range spec reportedly with a 60 kWh battery pack. This week, the EPA confirmed Nissan’s claimed range for the standard version: 151 miles.
Read MoreThe Tesla Model 3 is said to be in production hell as the automaker scrambles to ramp up and meet demand and orders for the new electric sedan. There have been multiple reports of hand-built parts that should be automated, delays and poor quality control. Now Tesla employees claim batteries are also being hand-assembled at the Gigafactory plant, which could that lead to further issues, according to CNBC.
Read MoreHere’s something to make you squirm: Ford has submitted a patent application to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for an autonomous police car that could function “in lieu of or in addition to human police officers.”
Read MoreFaraday Future kicked off 2018 with a low-key appearance at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show and a few promo videos shot by popular YouTube stars the company paid to review its prototype. The company supposedly has $1 billion in new funding, but it’s still having problems: It’s head of HR is out, according to The Verge, which obtained a noteworthy email after the departure.
Read MoreTesla has taken hundreds of orders for a new all-electric semi truck that, according to the automaker, it’ll have in production by 2019. With everything else Tesla’s focusing on right now, that’s surely a tall order to fill—but for now, there’s at least this brief sighting in California.
Read MoreAmericans are somewhat starting to warm up to the idea of fully-autonomous vehicles, but, interestingly, less drivers are interested in having their new cars equipped with semi-autonomous technology like Tesla’s Autopilot or General Motors’ Super Cruise. That’s according to a new study from the American Automobile Association.
Read MoreOscar Nilsson filed a lawsuit against General Motors Monday concerning a collision between Nilsson on his motorcycle and a Chevy Bolt involved in GM’s Cruise self-driving test program in San Francisco.
Read MoreToday, Tesla released the outline of a new compensation plan for CEO Elon Musk, which envisions the company growing to a market capitalization of $650 billion. The main takeaway is that Musk plans to take a $0 annual salary, and will only get paid in stock options that depend on Tesla hitting certain market value milestones and financial targets. This sounds audacious, but in reality, Musk could end up walking away with billions of dollars.
Read MoreA Tesla Model S driver smashed into the back of a parked firetruck Monday morning, according to California fire officials, and claims the car was in its semi-autonomous Autopilot mode when it happened.
Read MoreOh, here’s a fun one. You may remember Cadillac’s CUE as the long-running poster child for how terrible in-car infotainment systems and interfaces are, to the point where the laggy and convoluted setup actually dinged Cadillac’s cars in Consumer Reports. Now Cadillac president Johan de Nysschen is here with The Takes about in-car technology, and his target is... Apple CarPlay.
Read MoreRemember a year ago when a video emerged of former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick berating a driver? When Kalanick learned the clip had been published online, he “...literally got down on his hands and knees and began squirming on the floor.” That’s just one of a litany of anecdotes strung together in a stirring feature on Kalanick’s rise-and-fall, published Thursday by Bloomberg.
Read MoreGoogle’s self-driving car unit already has driverless cars on the road as part of a pilot project. General Motors says it wants to have cars without a steering wheel or pedals on the road by next year.
Read MoreThis month, Tesla said that issues with the production line for its Model 3 sedan are being addressed, but the hiccups have caused a months-long delay to the automaker’s manufacturing schedule for 2018. Now two high-ranking employees involved with launching the Model 3 line left the company in recent weeks, Jalopnik has learned.
Read MoreIf you’re looking for an example of how far self-driving technology has to go before it’s ready to be adopted en masse, take my ride in one of Lyft’s first autonomous cars: On a demo ride earlier this month, the vehicle came across a bus that had seemingly stalled out. Rather than let the car figure out how to maneuver around it, a safety driver at the steering wheel of my ride took control of the vehicle and got us out of the way.
Read MoreThere are many issues with putting semi-autonomous cars on the market, not the least of which being customers not understanding what “semi” means and car companies outright adding to that confusion. But the worst part might not be the people who misunderstand it—it might be the people who do.
Read MoreThe auto industry’s flooded with ideas right now about how to advance the goal of producing self-driving cars, but no concept as of late comes close to what Rinspeed produced in a new vehicle the Swiss automaker calls Snap—a roving, autonomous pod-like thing that’s gorgeously designed and immensely weird, and I love it.
Read MoreGeneral Motors is expected Friday to unveil a new driverless concept car without a steering wheel or pedals, as we first reported earlier today, and now we have a first look at the vehicle’s interior.
Read MoreGeneral Motors will unveil a new driverless concept car as early as Friday that doesn’t have a steering wheel or pedals, the latest salvo in the company’s efforts to deploy autonomous vehicles onto public roads.
Read MoreA couple weeks back, self-driving tech company Torc Robotics was testing one of its cars in public when a driver in a Kia almost ran it off the road—purposely. The driver was “super aggressive in front of us,” said Michael Fleming, Torc’s CEO, “and then they switched back into the middle lane, and we both came to a stoplight.”
Read MoreUber is currently facing as many as five criminal probes over various schemes from the company’s earlier years under former-CEO Travis Kalanick, but could face more legal scrutiny thanks to yet another secret program unveiled Thursday by Bloomberg.
Read MoreIn 2013, Audi debuted technology at the Consumer Electronics Show that allowed an A7 to navigate a parking garage and then back into a spot seamlessly. This year’s iteration of the conference showed the industry’s still trying to pursue more auto-parking aids.
Read MoreAutomakers are lining up to flood the market with a litany of new electric vehicles, but as many in the industry know, the currently tiny EV market isn’t going to grow without a serious boom in fast charging infrastructure. But it might be an easier problem to solve than most think.
Read MoreYou get so much at CES these days: microchips, VR headsets, robots, gadgets for olds and desperate pleas for VC money. One thing you don’t often get is realism. But at this year’s tech show, auto and startup executives alike are tamping down expectations about when our autonomous, driverless robot car future will happen. No shit, guys!
Read MoreIt wasn’t anywhere close to its splashy and controversial reveal at last year’s Consumer Electronics Show, but electric car startup Faraday Future still showed up this year’s tech conference. You just had to know where to find them.
Read MoreOn Sunday at CES, new Chinese-backed car startup Byton unveiled its first drivable prototype—an electric crossover with a screen for a dashboard that’s set to launch in late 2019. Afterward, Byton’s co-founder took a veiled shot at Tesla CEO Elon Musk in outlining how Byton was planning to avoid Tesla’s well-known history of production problems.
Read MoreThe latest auto startup to make a splash at CES is Byton, and tonight the new company unveiled its first vehicle: an electric crossover-looking thing that will launch in 2019 and start at around $45,000, the companies co-founders said. It will also have what Byton described as the “world’s first coast-to-coast display.” It’s 49 inches across the front center console. This was Byton’s big reveal, and, I have to say, I came away impressed—if they can follow through.
Read MoreWhile the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas has been gradually integrating automobiles to their show for a few years, the North American International Auto Show has been looking to make the opposite swap to integrate more technology companies to the show. For the 2018 edition in Detroit, you will see displays from companies like Intel and Blackberry, among others. As the auto industry adapts to tech, new car buyers want to know how that tech will be integrated to make their lives easier. Au
Read MoreMazda filed a patent application this week that might help all the drivers in the world who can’t take their eyes off Instagram or their email for a moment.
Read MoreNissan’s recently revamped Leaf EV may be decidedly bland, but if specs that leaked over the weekend are accurate, the car’s forthcoming long-range trim could make up for its lack of excitement.
Read MoreTesla said on Wednesday that it made “major progress” addressing bottlenecks in the Model 3 production line and told investors it made roughly 2,500 of the all-electric cars in the last quarter of 2017. But the automaker again pushed back a production target of 5,000 units per week deeper into 2018.
Read MoreTesla spent the latter half of 2017 trying to bounce back from the sluggish start to production of the Model 3 sedan. On Tuesday, it’s set to report fourth-quarter deliveries, but no one has any idea what to expect. In particular, Wall Street’s in a huge tizzy, and it shows the sometimes-absurd power this one hyped and speculated-over company has on the entire market.
Read MoreAutomakers these days are trying to jam as much new technology as possible into cars to, hopefully, one day make self-driving cars a reality. Nissan Motors is more interested in learning from your brain.
Read MoreA lot of people want to build cars in the year 2018, with an emphasis on the want. That’s because building cars is difficult, an art that the biggest manufacturers have refined over decades and, given the number of recalls we still see, aren’t done refining. Even so, many startups still try. Here’s a guide to the ones that matter.
Read MoreByton, one of many new electric startups in the car scene, is preparing to introduce a new crossover vehicle at next week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, and on Tuesday, it teased out a few images of what to expect. One major focus? Touchscreens—very large touchscreens.
Read MoreThe majority of self-driving tech testing is happening on the pristine streets of sunny California, but across the Pacific, autonomous tech developers in Russia are also working to make robot cars a reality. But in the hellish driving environments found in Moscow, that’s not an easy feat, as a fascinating story from The Guardian recounts.
Read MoreIf you happen to be in Las Vegas for next week’s Consumer Electronics Show, you may have a chance to experience driving in an autonomous taxi for the first time. Lyft is teaming up with Delphi’s tech unit, Aptiv, to offer self-driving cab rides during the conference.
Read MoreThe Tesla Model 3 was revealed 19 months ago, promising access to the fun and futuristic world of Tesla’s high-end electric cars at a relatively affordable price. The car’s been hyped, speculated about, discussed to exhaustion and obsessed over since it was unveiled last summer. But few people have driven one without Tesla’s corporate supervision—until now.
Read MoreGood 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.
Read MoreGood 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, and also one about the Murano CrossCabriolet.
Read MoreGood 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.
Read MoreGood 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.
Read MoreGood 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.
Read MoreGood 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.
Read MoreGood 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.
Read MoreGood 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.
Read MoreGood 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.
Read MoreGood morning! Welcome to The Morning Shift, your roundup of the auto news you crave, all in one place every weekday morning. This is going to be a Trumpian edition today, so please prepare for a lot of nonsense.
Read MoreGood 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.
Read MoreGood 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.
Read MoreGood morning! Welcome to The Morning Shift, your roundup of the auto news you crave, all in one place every weekday morning.
Read MoreGood 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 heading into the 2018 Detroit Auto show. You can check out all of our coverage so far and here’s our new morning video recap of yesterday’s big story:
Read MoreGood 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.
Read MoreGood 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.
Read MoreGood 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.
Read MoreGood 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.
Read MoreGood morning! Welcome to The Morning Shift, your roundup of the auto news you so desperately crave, all in one place every weekday morning. Here are the important stories you need to know, or at least need to be able to text to your friends before they text them to you. You’re gonna be first today, I can feel it.
Read MoreGood 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.
Read MoreGood 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 as electric vehicles slowly take over the news cycle.
Read MoreGood 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 to start 2018 off with a bang.
Read MoreWelcome to 2018, my darling readers! A year that will no doubt be full of wonder and excitement, like a mid-engine Corvette at last, and the ability to import Renault Twingos from Europe.
Read MoreThere are few greater joys on this Earth than a good small car. They’re easy to park and live with, chuckable when you want some action. The 2017 Toyota Yaris iA is the perfect example. It’s an absolute delight with a manual transmission, and a car that’s woefully overlooked on the road.
Read MoreIt’s one thing, intellectually, to hear that full-on Trophy Trucks that run the likes of the Baja 1000 and whatnot do absurd speeds over barren terrain. It’s another to see one do it.
Read MoreThere’s a lot more going on with the redesigned 2019 Chevrolet Silverado pickup than its alien grille and enormous “Z71” emblem. We took a close look at the truck with one of the engineers who put it together at the Detroit Auto Show, and you’re coming along to check it out.
Read MoreDetailed information on intake airflow paths, and the shape and material makeup of the unibody. Data on torque curves and all available paint color names. The breakdown of tweeter speakers versus full-range ones. Nearly every car has a page on Wikipedia, but the one for the Honda Ridgeline stands above most of them for its obsessive level of detail for a fairly pedestrian vehicle.
Read MoreOne of the worst things that can happen is getting your car jacked. This is not something we ever want happening to us, but unfortunately, it does happen. Let’s help this owner recover her stolen Jeep!
Read MoreCheck the clock. It may be time for Ram to finally give us the Hellcat-powered truck we don’t need or deserve, but that we want.
Read MoreWe have some good news, and some bad news. First, the good; Land Rover will fit a 400-horsepower 5.0-liter V8 beneath the hood of 150 90 and 110 wheelbase for a very special edition Defender, called the Defender Works V8. Zero to 60 mph now happens in a claimed 5.6 seconds instead of the 5.6 weeks that it probably took the original Defender, and top speed is increased to 106 mph.
Read MoreAs I enjoy declaring publicly, I am an unashamed space-utilization fetishist when it comes to automobile design. Cleverly designed trunks, compartments, cubbies, all transforming forgotten volumes of space into usable storage, hot damn, that’s what I like. The new 2019 Chevrolet Silverado, I’m happy to say, appears to be a vehicle developed with these same ideas, since it’s crammed full of clever storage.
Read MoreThe 2019 Ford Ranger is finally here after its iconic nameplate took a long break from the U.S. market. But that break is over, because The Blue Oval just debuted the 2019 Ford Ranger, and it looks a lot like the T6 model the rest of the world has had for years—just with some meaningful updates and tweaks.
Read MoreThe 2019 Chevrolet Silverado 1500 LT Trailboss showed its face to the world in December, but tonight the covers are off the entire Silverado lineup and the big news is: Chevy’s half-ton truck is getting a 3.0 liter Duramax diesel engine and a whole bunch of aluminum.
Read MoreA redesigned 2019 Ram 1500 is slated to bow on Monday at the 2018 Detroit Auto Show, but a nice unmasked front quarter picture of one looking fresh off an assembly line has already popped up on Reddit. Check it out.
Read MoreSevered fingers. Calves sliced open by discarded glass. Smashed-open skulls. Workers crushed to death beneath heavy and unsecured containers. And a swirling history of organized crime. These are but some of the horrors that face the employees of private New York City waste collection companies, brought to light by an incredible story from ProPublica.
Read MoreA class action lawsuit was filed against the Ford Motor Company and supplier Bosch on Wednesday alleging that the former installed emissions defeat devices in its diesel F-250 and F-350 trucks, causing them to produce up to 50 times more oxides of nitrogen than allowed by law. This should sound familiar by now.
Read MoreA Colorado man recently took his new Ford F-250—which had a violent front-end shake on the highway—to a dealer, only to be told that the truck was “not designed to go over 65 mph.” It’s a ridiculous and untrue claim in what is just a baffling audio recording. Just listen to this nonsense.
Read MoreIf you want to know why truck enthusiasts love diesels, look no further than the newly-released specs for the 2018 Ford F-150 Power Stroke diesel: 440 lb-ft of torque, an 11,400 pound towing capacity, a 2,020 pound payload rating, and an estimated 30 MPG on the highway. Those are fantastic numbers.
Read MoreWith the new Mercedes G-Class ditching the solid front axle it’s had since the late 1970s, the Jeep Wrangler is the only remaining high-volume SUV in the U.S. with a solid front axle. And while Mercedes claims the new Geländewagen was built to be great off-road, this is kind of a shame. Here’s why.
Read MoreIn Madison County, Illinois, a couple of buddies went off-roading in a new, lifted Chevy Silverado on what they thought was a frozen field. But the field was a pond, and now their truck and the backhoe they rented to extract it are both stuck in deep, frozen mud in an area that—come springtime—will be under up to seven feet of water, Fox 2 reports.
Read MoreLong the preferred choice of Russian gangsters, hip-hop moguls and off-roading one-percenters, the Mercedes G-Class SUV has been an icon since it launched in the 1970s. Despite its undeniably cool looks, it still largely drove like a 1970s car thanks to modest upgrades over the decades. No more. The G-Class is basically all-new for 2019, and now we have official pics ahead of the Detroit Auto Show.
Read MoreThe all-new 2019 Mercedes G-Wagen is planned to debut at the Detroit Auto Show in a couple of weeks, but Mercedes just couldn’t hold back on releasing some interesting details a little bit early, perhaps to reassure us that the new one won’t be too different.
Read MoreThirty one-year-old Andrew Koretz just emailed me about his new company, “Garage Time,” which apparently allows anyone to rent out unused garage space to people who just need a place to wrench. It actually sounds like a great idea.
Read MoreA trip to the U-Pull-It yard can be an adventure. Every once in a while, wandering amongst the rabble, you might stumble upon a longtime crush or a car that should have had a better fate. Let’s take a look at some of those.
Read MoreI’m starting to feel pretty good about one of my seven car projects, so naturally, it’s time to surf Craigslist to find another shitbox. Actually, that’s a terrible idea, but it hasn’t stopped readers from tempting me with all these links to Craigslist crap-cans.
Read MoreThe Moab Easter Jeep Safari is less than two months away, and my $800 Jeep Grand Wagoneer, Project Redwood, is still in shambles. But I’m not as worried as I was, because I made a lot of progress last week.
Read MoreFinally, after many months of Ford Focus RS owners complaining about failing head gaskets, the automaker has issued a technical service bulletin that will replace head gaskets—and, potentially even entire cylinder heads—on vehicles built between Aug. 2015 and July 2017 free of charge. Here are the details of that fix.
Read MoreFor some reason, even after I announced the questionable purchase of my eighth dysfunctional vehicle—a 1979 Jeep Cherokee Golden Eagle—readers continue sending me Craigslist links to total shitboxes, which I definitely shouldn’t buy... Right?
Read MoreI’m the only one of my friends who uses a headlamp while wrenching, and that means just one thing: my friends are fools. So today, in an effort to enlighten the masses, I will describe the sheer joy and wrenching efficiency that 1,000 forehead-mounted lumens can bring.
Read MoreFor months, my $800 Jeep Grand Wagoneer has sat pathetically in my backyard, wondering if someday its 5.9-liter AMC V8—which hadn’t seen combustion in 12 years—might some day live again. Now it no longer has to wonder: the engine runs. But the Easter Jeep Safari is two months away, and I have a crap-ton of work to do. I may be doomed.
Read MoreFor many months, Ford Focus RS owners around the globe have been freaking out about head gasket failures. The issue has led many to believe that Ford screwed up its gasket design, but in recent weeks Road And Track posed a different theory: the gasket wasn’t flawed, per se; it was just the wrong part. I looked into the issue too and this is what I found.
Read MoreThere are equal amounts of fear and bravado when it comes to modifying new cars. Many owners worried they’ll void their warranty don’t modify their car at all. Others make modifications they can reverse if they need to take a car in for warranty work. But few know what a car company even looks for when assessing a modified car with a problem.
Read MoreModifying Toyota Supra engines is all fun and and good, but that gets done a lot. A tuning shop in Minnesota refreshingly didn’t go that typical route, instead combining turbocharged six-cylinder engines pulled from two Supras and combining them into a V12.
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