Coda. Boring car. Boring company. Boring photo.

L.P. Hartley — ‘The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.’

Frederic Lanchester patented a disc brake system over a century ago. The Tucker’s safety innovations have been exaggerated. They didn’t have safety glass, they had a windshield that popped out. The Tucker’s “Safety Chamber”, was the space under the dashboard where the driver and front passenger would jump into if they…

You think FDR would have had such a law to sign in 1938 if Ford hadn’t started moving industry in that direction 12 years earlier?

Please explain how you make a profit by paying your employees to buy your products. It’s more like moving money from one pocket to another, subtracting costs in between.

I’ve learned some history, fucking and otherwise (Henry had a mistress named Evangeline Dahlinger). The fact that Henry Ford cheated on his wife, embarrassed his son in public, and held some backward notions about some Jews (he divided world Jewry into two groups, the boogeymen of his imagination and those “good Jews”…

History you say? More like a myth. The notion that unions got us the weekend and 40 hour week is one of the more common myths about organized labor. The 40 hour work week and weekends were the result of Henry Ford moving Ford Motor Company to eight hour shifts in 1926. Prior to that, there was a 9 hour shift plus a…

I own a Lotus Elan and my brother has an original Mini Cooper, two cars often described as handling like go-karts, but I’ve always preferred the alternative cliche, “Handles like a slot car”.

Every year at the NAIAS (aka Detroit Auto Show) there are a bunch of Formula SAE teams from the area colleges downstairs at Cobo Hall. Enough to stage a race. I keep telling their advisers that the best thing they could do to promote Formula SAE would be to organize a brief sprint race (maybe 5 laps) on a blocked off…

But it’s not just weird as an artifact of an earlier electric era, it even looks weird, in a charming way, with a downward-sloping face and enormously tall windows:

I left my kids in the car and I leave my grandson in the car. As long as the temperature of the car is safe, the car is locked, and I can see the car, I don’t see why I should wake a 3 year old that’s napping while I run into the FedEx store, just to appease some self-appointed nannies.

Denigrating what others hold sacred is a constitutional right in the United States, the foundation of all of our other freedoms. Do you really understand the concept of freedom of conscience?

No, but there were plenty of Americans at the event who wanted to hear him and express their own constitutional rights to freedom of speech and assembly.

Anger is fine. Shooting people for drawing cartoons that mock your religion is not. There was controversy but no Christians shot anyone over works of art that featured a crucifix in a jar of urine called Piss Christ and a painting of Mary festooned with dung.

You can even see the International Scout’s front leaf spring on the Monteverdi Safari

I think that unlike a lot of athletes and celebrities, Dale Jr. gets it. Without the paying customers in the stands, the kids waiting in line for an autograph, it doesn’t happen. Junior seems like a mensch. I wasn’t a fan of his father, his rough driving or his favored treatment by NASCAR, but he appears to have…

On this day in 1926, Ford Motor Company becomes one of the first companies in America to adopt a five-day, 40-hour week for workers in its automotive factories. The policy would be extended to Ford’s office workers the following August.

You seem to have the words “business” and “charity” confused. Without shareholders, the enterprise wouldn’t exist and workers wouldn’t be employed. Samuel Gompers, the father of the American labor movement, said that the biggest sin that capital can commit against labor is to fail to make a profit.

Ricardo, AVL, IAV, Mahle, and Roush do a lot of the engine development for the major car companies.

That was the business model of Continental Motors, who supplied many independent American automakers with engines into the 1950s. As the Big 3 and larger independents started developing modern, high compression, overhead valve V8s in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Continental’s conservative flathead, inline engines…