If you’re like me, you’ve been in this situation countless times: you’re driving along with a trunk packed full of garbage bags of piping hot chili, when you get a flat tire. To get to the tire under the trunk floor, you have to pull out all dozen bags, and in the process one of the chili bags invariably rips,…

Hey, welcome to a new week! I hope your Monday is as sparkly and packed full of big, blinding light glints as this Opel Manta GT/J. What’d they clearcoat those things with, pulverized diamonds?

There’s a bewildering variety of methods and systems and traditions when it comes to how carmakers name their cars. Luckily, I took some expired medication that lets me know which ways are the best. Even more lucky is that I’m now going to share this wisdom with you, because you know I love you best. Here we go.

I have a list, right here on my computer, of a bunch of interesting and important stories I need to be working on. And yet I know, deep down, that I’m not going to be able to do jack feces on anything until I get this insanely unimportant, painfully geeky, incredibly minor observation about one particular Jaguar XJ…

I know leaked images are always pretty exciting, but, to be fair, this car has already proven to be leakier than the radiators in any liquid-cooled car I seem to own. First we got a big hint at the look of the resurrected 8 Series via the concept, we’ve seen the test mules, and at the beginning of the year, we saw…

Do you often wish you could watch your own car driving around from the outside, but just don’t trust any of your friends to drive it? I can’t say that’s exactly why Bjorn Harms of Urmond, Netherlands modified his C6 Corvette to be remote controlled, but he did, and it’s pretty amazing.

Who here likes planets? I know I do—hell, I even live on one! I suspect there’s many fellow planet-enthusiasts out there, which is why I decided to do this: try and find cars named for every planet in our solar system, including our disrespected pal, the dwarf planet Pluto. Aside from a couple of well-known examples,…

I’ve talked about headrests in the context of one of these Quick Questions before, but it was in a biting context, not a use-it-for-its-stated-purpose context. So I feel like I owe headrests some real consideration. Now that I’ve considered headrests, I realized I’m not really sure I’ve ever actually used one while…

Look at this amazing Škoda race car, the 1100 OHC. It’s got a 1.1-liter engine. That’s tiny! This thing made 92 horsepower out of those meager 1089cc, back in 1957. Damn! Plus it looks amazing, even if the windshield is only useful for your knuckles.

I know that the specs listed about trucks are just long columns of boring numbers, but those numbers actually do have some meaning in the messy real world. The amount of weight you can comfortably place in the bed of the truck, the payload, that’s one of those numbers. Even though neither that boulder or that Ranger…

Sometimes you’ll see an image of a vehicle that’s so wildly appealing and enticing that its very image grabs you and launches your mind into imagining all of the possibilities such a vehicle could allow you. This 1991 Toyota LiteAce 4x4 van does just that, a fact I know to be true because I haven’t stopped daydreaming…

Saab always built unusual and perhaps even idiosyncratic cars, but it was also anchored by a sense of rationality. Sure, it put keys in weird places and used unconventional drivetrains (two-stroke threes, V4s, and longitudinal front-drivers) but it always had good, rational reasons for doing so. That’s what makes this…

Recently, on the advice of someone online who claimed to be a doctor (I later found out it was a nine-year-old and a dog, working together) I attempted to microwave an elixir made from Propecia, Red Bull, and mildly used cat litter. Lacking cover to prevent boil-over, I used an old Hayes 300 baud modem I had laying…

There’s something really amazing about advertising your small Proton pickup truck with a picture of it fully laden with boxes and touting its “Handling by Lotus.” That’s what Lotus handling has always been about: moving lots of boxes, really fast.

Some cars are so powerfully meh that it’s almost like they have a supernatural ability to disappear from human awareness entirely. This week’s meh car seems to have that power, because even though it went through two names, I have trouble remembering it ever existed in either form. I try to picture one, and my mind…

This feels like something from a William Gibson cyberpunk dystopia novel, where the government has become so weak and useless, private corporations have been taking over the basic upkeep of the nation. But it’s not a William Gibson novel, there’s no plucky protagonist with some sort of cybernetic implant, it’s just…

Want to know an interesting factwich about Tesla’s self-driving Autopilot system? Here it is: it’s not really a self-driving system! It’s a start, sure, but it’s a Level 2 autonomous system, which means a moist, fuzzy human being has to be ready to take over at a moment’s notice if the system fails to perform like it…

Come on, Elon, try to keep up. I know you’re busy running all those companies and spending some quality Grimes-times, but if you took a minute or two to do a quick Google search, you’d have noticed that I wrote about incorporating small rockets into a car just like you proposed in your tweet. This was back in 2012! I…

Sometimes—not that often, but sometimes—I’ll encounter a car I haven’t seen for years and suddenly see it in a new light, or, maybe more accurately, the light it was originally intended to be seen in, minus all the buildup of my own prejudices and ideas. This happened to me just the other day, when I saw a mid-to-late…