Seems like Apple really didn’t understand automobiles. Gull wing doors on a van? No. Four seats in a van? No. All computer and no haptics? No. An automobile is a tool for transporting people and cargo. It’s not a smartphone.

Self-driving vehicles, like flying cars, is the technology of the future... always in the future. Developing autonomous vehicles for public roads is a task several orders of magnitude more difficult and more expensive than people think. Autonomous tractors are child’s play compared to a vehicle that has to interact…

I don’t know why Stellantis should be marked out. There are plenty of manufacturers in the list to share the “not worth the money.” The one who nominated the Wagoneer says it sells really well in his neighborhood. The Jeep Wrangler nominee says the price is the same, adjusted for inflation, as earlier years and it…

Why does everything have to look like a truck and have high hood lines so you can’t see little kids in front of you? And this minivan doesn’t have stow-and-go, which makes minivans much more useful. It’s not just dropping the seats into the floor, but those cavities under the floor can be used as great storage areas.…

The most common thing we do with a car is commute, and 7/8ths of the time we do that alone. We don’t need two to three tons of vehicle to accomplish that comparatively trivial task. Right now, the main benefit of an EV is for commuting. The problem is that manufacturers have gotten addicted to high profits and no…

Consumer Reports always has had a thing for Toyotas. Frankly, any pickup can go over 200,000 miles. The only minivan mentioned is the Honda. Any Mopar minivan can go past 200,000 easy. I’ve had 8 Caravans and Town and Country vans I’ve taken past 200,000 and two I took past 300,000. My present T&C has 240,000 miles…

A minivan. She’ll be hauling stuff back and forth. No one will want to steal it and you could get a good one for less than $15,000. I bought my latest one, a 2012 Chrysler T&C, for $5800 at 156,000 miles, and now it’s at 240,000 miles and going strong. Too bad the short wheelbase Caravans were dropped. That would be…

I live in northern Minnesota — six months of winter and gravel roads. My car is usually the dirtiest one around when I go to warmer climes. When temperatures are consistently below freezing, just leave the car cold. Colder is better. Don’t put it in a heated garage. That’s the kiss of death.

Another analysis gives it a Cd of 0.48. Is the Tesla Cybertruck aerodynamic? (airshaper.com) Plus total frontal area must also be taken into account. If the truck were driven aggressively, i.e., high speed, then total drag will be huge. Aerodynamic drag increases with the square of the speed. How to calculate…

Yes, my teenage granddaughters don’t like our 2009 Prius because it’s too cramped for them. They would rather ride in their and our Mopar minivans. That gives an indication of where small BEV design should go: narrower (in true two-across seating only), longer (for more legroom and six seat 2/2/2 option) and taller…

This is the wrong time to be buying a new car to keep for the next 20 years. The industry is going through a paradigm shift, and what cars will look like then will be very different from what they are now, and no one knows what the state of liquid fuels or batteries will be like that far into the future. I’m going to…

Electrons flow better when it’s cold, but lithium-ion batteries can’t take a charge when they’re cold. They have to brought up to temperature first. For years, I’ve been saying that BEVs need to be designed differently to handle cold temperatures. They need more thermal insulation. When you have an IC engine pumping…

The slideshow did not say what should be in the car. When you live in places with real winter, like North Dakota or Minnesota, you should have sleeping bags, high energy food, folding snow shovel, flashlights. Don’t run the engine when you’re in a snow drift during a blizzard. That’s what sleeping bags are for.…

Vehicles going off road and being spotlessly clean. I live on a gravel road. My cars are always dirty. If I wash them, the clean only lasts moments before the cars are dirty again. The lack of dirt makes the ads look totally fake.

Oh come on. Most of these are vehicles produced in tiny numbers. Typical boomer car? How about minivans, half-ton pickups, any beater you could get for less than a thousand.

I’ve been reading stories for decades about the desperate need to upgrade our electric grid. This need far predates EVs. The problem is that there is little profit in moving electricity around the country and into our homes and businesses. I think the grid should be federalized, like our highway system. They’re both…

I recently bought a 2009 Prius with 240k miles. For performance, it’s sufficient, except it’s quite sensitive to cross winds. My feeling is that if you want to race, do it on a track, not the highway. I’ve never had to put my foot to the floor, except with a beater 1961 Olds with the little aluminum block V-8 and…

Europe is a humid place and is not accustomed to the large swings in temperature that low humidity causes. And Europeans think 4C/40F is cold because they live in such a mild, maritime climate.

How do you see out of that thing, and how do you see anything, like little children, in front of it?

Biden didn’t just try passing legislation. The legislation actually passed and has been the most significant effort in moving this country away from business as usual to a paradigm shift. Those shifts are always painful and take time. We should have done this thirty years ago, but Reagan took the solar panels off the…