While smacking your hand into the center of a steering wheel is the generally-accepted default way to sound a car’s horn, there’s been a number of other methods over the years: rings, buttons, stalks, levers—honk-producing actions have been wildly varied. Perhaps one of the greatest yet mostly forgotten ways was an…

As a painful-to-be-around hardcore old air-cooled Volkswagen geek, I sometimes forget that the arcane details and quirks of these old cars are not necessarily common knowledge to everyone. That’s why I was actually surprised to find that some of my colleagues—equally hardcore gearheads though they are—didn’t know the…

Boy, am I glad to see you again. It’s a new week, and that means we get to start a whole new oil-soaked journey down the rich, twisty highway of automotive everything together, again! Hot damn, right? Metaphorically cram into the back seat of that Fronte with me, as Smokey McTurtleneck and Flora Print there hop in the…

Cyan Racing, once called Polestar before Volvo bought the name and performance division, is an independent racing team that campaigned Volvos to Touring Car racing victories, most recently winning the 2017 World Touring Car Cup. Now Cyan has partnered with Volvo’s weird new little brother, Lynk & Co to run a Lynk & Co…

Right by my house is a small bar called The Amber Flash, one of the oldest and most run-down turn-signal fetishist bars. I went by there the other night for a nice crisp Blinker Fluid to, you know, take the edge off, when I noticed two sullen guys slumped over at the bar, holding damp paper towels to their faces.

We don’t actually have any truly self-driving cars on the roads just yet, but, according to a new poll, 71 percent of drivers across the world think they can buy one today. Of course, they can’t. Perhaps even more alarming, 11 percent of drivers are okay with the idea of having a little nap while using current driving…

You have to admit, this is a pretty ambitious logo for a carmaker to try with the old make-the-logo-out-of cars technique. I especially like the Spider Veloce there with its doors open, standing in for the man or baby being eaten by the snake. Happy Friday, pals!

The Volkswagen Type 2, better known as the Microbus, VW Van, Hippie Bus, Kombi, or whatever else, may be one of my favorite vehicles of all time. Even though it has a sort of whimsical reputation today, the truth is that it’s one of the most straightforward and rational vehicles ever developed.

I’m not sure what’s going on this week that’s bringing us all this disgusting stuff, but here we are. At least this time there’s a journey from revolting to acceptable, a pattern we should all strive for in our lives. The car here is a 1994 Eagle Talon TSI that’s spent a decade in the woods, and has accumulated a…

On most flights I’ve been on, everything gets held up even if something as minor as the latch that holds the rolling trash-dolly in place is too tarnished. Only after it’s perfect can the plane take off. That sure as hell wasn’t the case with this Air India flight, which kept right on going even after the pilot…

Race cars designed to do one very specific thing very well are usually fun, in some way. Dragsters, F1 cars, track beasts like the Ariel Atom, cars made to race for pinks at streetlights like the Hellcat, they all have that certain assured quality of something that knows what it was made to do. That may be why this…

I’m pretty sure that driving while you really, really have to take a shit is at least as dangerous as driving drunk. Your body tenses up, your focus shifts from the road ahead to the road within, on which you’re desperately trying to stop the flow of, um, traffic—it’s just dangerous. Better to pull over and find a…

BMW is fortunate among auto makers in that it has one of the most recognizable and iconic design elements, its twin“kidney” grilles. Often imitated, these oblong-shaped features have been on nearly every front-engined BMW since 1933. Once, in the hands of a very famous Italian designer, this design element took an odd…

One of our dashing readers emailed us just now with a question I’m not really sure I’m seeking an answer to: “Want to know just how truly disgusting people are?” our reader asks, rhetorically, because he damn well knows the answer. He suggests that those who want to know the answer to that question simply seek out…

Being a writer in this glorious modern age is fascinating. On one hand, it means every little mistake you make is immediately found and people all over the world get to call you a moron in real time. On the other, it means that your readers can get directly involved, which I love. That’s why today’s Meh Car comes from…

Yes, that’s a lovely Saab 96, so why does the look on that Meeths-shopper look so terrified? That woman looks like she’s using all of her might not to lose her shit. Whats’s going on here? Is that Saab the ghost of her former Saab? I’m confused.

Just in case you’re skeptical about just how much work a drag racer’s parachutes do to slow down a speeding car, here’s an excellent demonstration. Even though they’re not making that hot caliper-on-rotor contact of the brakes, a car’s drag chutes are incredibly important, as you can see right here on Pro Mod racer…

The modern internet as we know it can best be thought of as a sophisticated global distribution system for cat videos and pornography, with some sideline abilities to order products and receive electro-encoded letters. The human desire to control emotions via recording cat actions on film, however, pre-dates the…

Hey pals! You know what we haven’t done in a while? Not that, I made some promises to people about that. I’m talking about having a good, honest, tricky-but-fair taillight identification quiz! This is how you spend a Sunday afternoon, people. Not glumly riding out the clock on the weekend, watching depressing Dr.Who…