The hundreds of suppliers spread across many thousands of miles and multiple countries? I doubt that they’d want to incur that sort of expense.. I’ve worked in these facilities, and each of them is very specialized and generally not conducive to showing off. Going to the assembly plant works best for a low-overhead…

This is very true. I try to tell people about what I do at work, and always end up just trying to redirect the conversation to something else. It’s interesting if you have my background, but without that it’s really not very interesting at all. They do a good job for the most part, but I sometimes cringe at the…

That’s mostly done at outside parts suppliers or other plants. The actual factory mostly just assembles all the parts together into the final product. An all-inclusive, vertically integrated facility would be the size of a moderately large city, and would use an unsustainable amount of resources for any single…

Eh, mostly it’s just work after a while. I actually watched an episode that I recognized, halfway through, as the propane cylinder plant where I had interned under the metallurgist in college. I then went back and rewatched it and kept hearing “facts” that were “incorrect” or “horrifically oversimplified”. Still cool…

Try and get a ride in an Elise/Exige sometime. The shell seat is 6" below the super side side sill, and you’re ass is 2-3" off of the pavement. I’m built like a rail and it was a struggle getting out of the car after 5 minutes of gridding and one autocross run. I want one so badly, but just for the purpose of driving…

I’ll spot them the tires, as those are crazy easy to change out and you should choose the proper tire for how you’re using the car. Motorcycle mags always swap tires for track comparisons to keep the grip consistent between bikes.

They need to let you map out your own route and upload it to the Maps app directly. Some of us enjoy interesting, winding roads that aren’t the fastest route from point to point, but also like turn by turn navigation in our cars. You can build routes in the desktop version of Maps (My Maps specifically), but instead…

That sounds about right. Safety first only works if you’re keeping your head above water.

Rule #1: Don’t lift.

Everything Alissa posts pisses all of Jalopnik off. She’s against the entire concept of the site at a very fundamental level. That said, my 1986 Toyota passed the shit out of Smog in California, so no complaints from me.

My AW11 has almost this exact wheel and it’s horrible.

Learning that casting contains a lot of shit work is not nothing as far as lessons go. I’ve been there a few times since getting out of school and I find it really helps keep things in perspective.

Get a hotter Kiln is not nothing. Aluminum melts at ~1220F and has a fairly low heat capacity. Cast Iron, on the other hand, melts at ~2200F and has a much higher heat capacity. You’d need at least 2-3x the power to melt cast iron, as well as much heavier duty handling and safety equipment. In my lab work when I was…

If this were amazing it might apply. This is not amazing, this is technology we’ve had for decades.

So, they’ve figured out the easy part then. Not impressed. Let me know when they’ve figured out the manufacture and operation of a full sized sealed tube at a near vacuum, and then I’ll be interested. Until then it’s just a dog and pony show to get people that don’t know what they’re looking at to send more money.

No comment on the Naming, but as an AW11 owner I would tell you that it’s an excellent car and you should get it. It’s easy enough to fix, and at the end of the day it’s a Toyota so it’ll keep going for a long time.

Pre-check is still worth it, in that you and your fellow passengers don’t have to shed shoes, belts, liquids, and laptops which speeds up overall throughput.

Hopefully they move towards an actual racecar, rather than whatever it is I just saw.

This sort of car is the perfect first car.