Everybody reading Jalopnik “knows a bit about cars”, almost by definition. 95% of the people here can feel smug that we can change a bulb, or decipher some obscure car-related paperwork, or discern the solid cars at auction(or on Craigslist) among the risky ones. That kind of easy-for-us task represents most of a…

American Airlines wasn’t the first airline to get 737 MAX airplanes back in service since the grounding in March 2019. That honor belongs to GOL Linhas Aereas Inteligentes SA in Brazil, which resumed service earlier this month

This might also be cool..?

Italdesign have had some hits, but also some misses.

Sometimes, you look at a car, and you just wonder, “Why?” or “Who authorized this?” or “People thought this was a good idea for several years?” or maybe even “Who actually wanted this?” That is exactly how I feel about the Mini Cooper Coupe.

Maybe “financial disaster” isn’t the best description for a project that was close to breakeven. 251 orders is better than a lot of other widebody projects. Not a massive cash cow in its own right, but at least it broke Boeing’s monopoly on what was, at the time, the most profitable end of the market.

I think I passed 300k miles on a Mercedes W220 and a C215 (and got pretty close with a couple of Volvos). Mercedes certainly earned their reputation for indestructible cars, but if it’s got pneumatic or hydraulic suspension, swap that out for old-fashioned springs as soon as you can.

Renoca’s retro landcruisers are beautiful. Well, some of them are.

Mercedes figured it out in 1997 and Porsche in 2002 - making an SUV which irks the purists, whilst generating buckets of money to pay for other cars that the purists like - so Aston Martin is only a couple of decades behind the competition.

I saw that when I was 10 and thought it was the best film ever.

Nothing could be more Peugeot than this.

Scaling up 3d additive-manufacturing is great, but it still can’t compete head-to-head with pressed/machined steel in the mainstream car industry where millions of identical parts are stamped out. Scaling up would target medium volumes, but that only includes restomods if it’s a relatively popular collector’s car like…

It’s not so rare. Scania and FAW make bonneted and cabover trucks on the same platform. Mercedes made the L- and LP-series side-by-side. Mack, Magirus, and Renault (and probably a dozen smaller brands) put a snout on the Club Of Four cab. Volvo would sell you either an F12 or an N12.

Racing is totally relevant! It drives technical innovation for real drivers and real cars on our roads!

Also: The hybrid car only uses internal combustion below 75mph. Sorry, no electric help for starts or accelerating out of tight corners. That wouldn’t be realistic.

To sum up: Ford’s chief futurist has concluded that lots of people aren’t feeling great right now and also it would be good for Ford to think ahead. It’s too bad we couldn’t have come upon these insights in any other way than a big and presumably expensive study.

They might have got some other details wrong, but Mercedes developed a great cruise-control interface in the 1970s (on the W116, I think?) with a simple, intuitive stalk that they kept on using for decades. The UI survived big changes to throttle and engine management. A lot of other manufacturers require you to look…

There was a huge trend for that kind of thing. UFOs and cryptozoology, too. Strangely enough, now that everybody has a high-res camera in their pocket at all times, there aren’t so many people reporting sightings of UFOs and Bigfoot and Nessie. Now that we have easy global access to high-res satellite imaging, very…

GM’s brand strategy.

True Story: I once bought a cheap S-class which had done interstellar miles as exec transport to/from the airport. It acquired a few electrical quirks along the way. The one problem I could never fix was the CD multichanger in the boot, which had exactly one CD in it, of christmas classics.