The facelift really did wreck the lines of the car. The styling was what actually sold them at first, people wanted something different. For an economy car, most of the early production was actually loaded up higher trim ones that cost as much as larger cars, and they were a genuine success for the first year or two.

A decent coefficient of drag, even by modern standards, and they didn’t have to make it look like a misshapen egg with a stubby hood, high beltline, and no deck in order to achieve it. 

East Germany was the richest and most developed country in the Eastern Bloc at the time, North Korea is a 3rd world basket case in comparison. The vast majority of the population outside central Pyongyang lacks electricity and running water, and only 3% of their road system is paved, for example. Aside from a few…

How would that be better? The point is the South can't afford to rebuild the North, and is not in a position to care for the millions of refugees that would stream south over the border looking for jobs and housing. His idea was a $175 million fund to pay off the other top leaders to do the job for us, an internal…

A professor at Inha University proposed that the world set up a large fund to basically bribe senior officials of the North Korean military and government to overthrow the Kim family, and guarantee them immunity from any crimes they committed under the regime. The idea was to install a more moderate dictatorship in…

Unfortunately, Governor Hastings was no longer in office in the 1930s, as there are several alcohol-related laws in Pennsylvania that could have used his voice of reason. 

T-tops on a hardtop is such a good combination, you keep the structural rigidity of a coupe, but get the wide open space of a convertible. 

Serial killers can change their MO, though - look at the Golden State Killer, he made several changes over the years, intentionally, to throw law enforcement off his trail.

Yeah, but most of what Christine did was either self defense or a crime of passion. She wasn’t really evil, more misunderstood. 

The Corvair was relatively expensive to build, given lack of commonality with any other GM product, and the fact that it was also a fairly cheap car didn’t help things from a profit margin perspective. GM had to resort to selling it as a sporty car in order to make decent money on it, since they couldn’t as a bare…

Yes, it was a good reminder that eyewitnesses are not necessarily reliable witnesses. There were checkpoints set up all over the place looking for a white cargo van, which a blue Caprice could just slip right through. 

North Korea permitted a team of South Korean engineers to survey and inspect most of their rail system during 2018, as part of that railway community proposal, and found them to be in bad enough condition to make the US look like Japan in comparison. Trains can’t operate above about 18mph on some of the DPRK’s main…

Its crazy how much better these kits blend in with the lines of the donor cars than about 90% of the fiberglass restyling kits sold in the US in the past 50 years. 

Reliant introduced these Scooter Skis in the UK in 1969, built in the old Bond Cars factory

AMC and British Leyland used very similar flush door handles. American Motors debuted theirs in 1970, and used them on basically every AMC model and some Jeeps well into the ‘80s. In BL’s case, they were introduced on the Austin Allegro in 1973 and then carried on with the Range Rover into the late ‘90s. 

So did Chrysler for a number of years, and more successfully, since they were mounted in a more easily serviceable installation in the dash, instead of encased in a complicated gyroscope assembly in the middle of the steering column. 

Ford and GM already thought of that - the passenger side is extra wide to cover the center seat on the B-body and Panther cars.

I’m not a fan of screens, but I’ve resigned myself to the idea that they’re here to stay, since so many people like them. I do think it would be nice if they could retract into the dash, or be hidden behind a panel when not in use, since they do tend to spoil the lines of the dash in certain cars more than others. 

This is true, or at least do push buttons or something. I get that they don’t want to give us bench seats anymore, because of how much storage and power ports and what not they put in the center console, but you could add even more storage in the console without the shifter in the way. Since most people only touch it…

They started using the Nissan brand on selected car models, off and on, on the Japanese market during the 1960s. If not for the US market, they would have killed Datsun sooner than they did. In the ‘50s and ‘60s, it was seen as advantageous to have a different name on the cars to separate them from the parent company,…