If you go to actual economists and ask them “X has negative externalities, but some people really need X and some don’t and there’s a big grey area of people who just like X, how can we nudge people away from it without banning X for everyone”, 10 out of 10 economists will tell you to tax it.

Getting hung up on the physical nature of an identifying mark is so 20th century. We have databases now. Mixing up vehicle registrations with driver licensing isn’t a great idea, but in many civilised countries, police can connect to a database and instantly check either or both - fakes stand out very quickly.

Getting hung up on the physical nature of an identifying mark is so 20th century. We have databases now. Mixing up vehicle registrations with driver licensing isn’t a great idea, but in many civilised countries, police can connect to a database and instantly check either or both - fakes stand out very quickly.

In a lot of countries, the driving license isn’t good until you die. The graph of risk over time is shaped like a bathtub; obviously newly-qualified teenage drivers do a lot of stupid stuff, then you get into the habit of driving, then after a few decades the risk creeps up again as technology has moved on, you’re…

I’m not 100% convinced by the interior. Surely all legit police cars have dozens of clumsy screw-holes in the plastic dash, and loose trim where cables have been routed (and then removed when the vehicle left service). There should probably be some broken clips too; scuffed mats; scratches on the airvents where…

And if you’re questioning whether or not that’s true, there are Renaults in the parking lot of a recent Glickenhaus video of the car driving around the parking lot of its assembly facility. I can’t say I see many of those in New York.

Never forget the Škoda cake car. It was genius.

Also; Kinja keeps on mangling any links I add - the hyperlink disappears and the plaintext is randomly moved to the start of a different sentence. FFS. Isn’t Kinja supposed to be a mature platform by now? Why do basic features keep on breaking? I think it’s about six years since Kinja added the bug which resets the…

The XJ had such an amazing mix of American and French DNA. It’s so weird how things turned out.

#Vanlife will always look cool on social media. (It smells bad, but Instagram doesn’t transmit odours).

OK, we all know about Boeing and we like to poke fun at Boeing’s previous difficulties in the market, but really this is a Pratt & Whitney engine incident and P&W had their own dramatic market problems; they’re just not as famous as Boeing.

It’s a refreshing change. Usually the car internet is full of renders, full of CGI electric cars that will never be built. At least this one physically exists, in Matchbox form.

It’s a cool render, but you can’t drive a render.

A few years ago, I had an epic commute, and after a few weeks with the cruise control set to “lightly toasted”, my car needed a lot of TLC, so I took it to a local mechanic who (amongst other things) did some work on one of the diesel injectors.

Impressive! Where did you go after that? Down to Dakar, or across to Mali?

Impressive! How was the rest of Cambodia? Terrifying roads, suicidal overloaded motorbikes, ...?

Starred for the pedantry. We always have time for pedantry.

The minefield between Mauritania and Morocco / Western Sahara is quite tense the first time you drive through it. Stay on the soft sand - if you think you see a road surface, that’s more likely to have landmines.

It’s not sexy, but if you want to reässure a date that you’re an adequate human being and not an axe murderer / fuckboy / arsehole, arriving in a Sensible Volvo is super helpful. Ideally, a Sensible Volvo which isn’t full of junk-food wrappers, doesn’t have many dents, nor any ominous warning messages on the console.