I don’t know about a joke, but I do know that the Zafira suddenly jumped from “ignored” to “infamous” in Norway. An old diesel Zafira caught fire inside the parking structure at Stavanger airport, wiping out hundreds of cars and causing a partial collapse of the structure.

We’ve had it a couple of years, and we’ve already had court cases for illegal searches, where the cop grabs the phone and goes through messages/photos to find probably cause for further searches. Sure, nice to have, but I’m keeping my plastic card too.

Right outside our high school a tiny car passed me at an entirely reasonable speed for a school zone, then T-boned a Jeep Grand Cherokee also going a reasonable speed, I’d say neither was going much more than 20 mph, but it still ended with the Jeep rolling on its side.

Designers are intelligent, adaptive people who will have no problem listening to the ergonomics folks given the right incentives. I mean, once we’ve publicly dieselboarded to death a couple of high-profile designers on a live 4K stream for all to see, the surviving members of the designer population will be properly…

I wish car makers would do like the US Navy. They had touchscreen controls on destroyers, but after the collision involving the USS John S. McCain was found to be directly related to the use of touchscreen controls on the bridge, they started replacing them with mechanical controls.

I bought an Audi on 19" with sports suspension and it was plainly terrible to drive on normal city roads. Took it down to 17", and that utterly transformed the comfort while still providing good enough handling for even my spirited driving.

There’s a very interesting autonomous project happening at Herøya in Norway:

At least that place clearly has more space than needed.

The Russians put Wankel engines in Ladas used by the police and security forces, making them far faster than regular Ladas available to the common criminals, and at least in terms of acceleration, a match for the expensive German cars favored by successful mobsters. However, not one calorie was wasted on upgrading the…

They’ll go 100 % electric as soon as they find a way to make electric motors with self-destructing timing chains.

“If someone is disassembling your Tesla in your driveway, you have bigger privacy concerns”

This is pretty much the logic behind one of our most commonly used devices at work having a physical button on the front panel to simply bypass the admin password. If the attacker has physical access to this device, you’ve lost…

Indeed, just get an A8L and be done with it.

Strange to see the same company that makes beauties like the S90 and S60 come up with this hideous lump.

It was dark when I walked past a parked one on Thursday, which may have reduced the perceived gravitas. It’s big, but appears somewhat shorter than it actually is because of the grating lack of a proper front and rear. The sloping roofline extends, and extends... and then the car just stops, instead of there being a…

Well, as much as I enjoyed my test drive of the e-tron GT, there’s no headroom for adults in the rear, and the trunk is a joke. I haven’t yet been inside an EQS, I only saw one in the flesh on Thursday night, but it does appear to fit undecapitated adults in the back, and I expect it to have a more usable trunk.

Reminds me of a Citroën enthusiast at work. He’s had exclusively Citroëns for close to 40 years, and he’s firmly convinced they’ll come up with cheap, reliable antigravity or teleportation technology before they’ll manage reliable door handles and tail lights.

Due to military vehicles being required to run on F-34 without making a mess of themselves, armies do in fact get a pass on emissions.

We’re getting new Volkswagen Amaroks here with engines only rated for Euro 3. For civilian customers cars with such engines haven’t been possible to register in Europe for ~20 years,…

Well, Norway is an extremely comfortable, safe (as this is Jalopnik, I guess I should mention that Norway is the reigning world champion in lowest road fatality rate for something like the fifth year straight) and secure (despite a population slightly greater than that of Alabama, in 2021 we made it to April 13…

Yes, I’ve worked in a couple of Gulf states and seen how they rely on foreigners pretty much completely, while some locals are employed in for example police and customs positions, where the ones I’ve encountered have been profoundly incompetent. I’ve not encountered any corruption there though, I guess they don’t…

Similar to what we had in Norway. Thanks to our oil wealth and exceedingly generous welfare system, we’ve over time become entirely reliant on foreigners in several fields, with Norwegians pretty much demanding a comfortable office job, or we won’t work at all. A lot of nurses and nurse assistants are from Sweden,…