The Tweet comes courtesy of the nice folks at the Canal & River Trust West Midlands, who are responsible for maintaining the network of canals that weave through this part of England. As they explain on their website: Wow! Depending on how you measure it, Birmingham alone has more canals than Venice. If you’d have asked me how deep these were I’d have guessed about six-to-eight feet and I’d have been wrong by about half....
While the full version of PCCM may sound like a business seminar, it’s actually a line of infotainment systems that’s been around for a minute. Previously, these factory-looking upgrades added some very modern flourishes to various classic P-cars. Now, these new head units will also bolt right up to your 2005 to 2008 911, 2005 to 2008 Boxster, or 2003 to 2008 Cayenne and look properly OEM. From carefully-chosen fonts to physical volume knobs, these units are carefully crafted to blend in while offering all the latest tech....
Right now, our David is slowly making his way across the country. With the help of Jason and the awesome Otto, he’s planting his stakes in California. But just getting out of Detroit appears to be a monumental effort. Our dear leader is a man who uses a truck bed as a refrigerator, eats spaghetti in the shower, and peppers his yard with tools and car parts. It’s through him that I recently learned that an impact will still work even after you’ve left it just sitting in some wet grass for who knows how long....
While the first two generations of Honda Fit were solid warriors in the subcompact space, the third-generation model pictured above is a bit of a rare sight on North American roads. Its MSRP was fairly close to that of the old Civic, and cheap financing plus the presence of a Civic hatchback and an HR-V meant Honda dealerships had a difficult time moving the marque’s smallest model. When the fourth-generation Fit debuted in 2020, Honda made it clear that it wasn’t coming to America....
Again, the major caveat here is that the U.S. version of this car has not been revealed so we’re having to go off what’s been released globally and for Europe. Here are the global specs for the plug-in hybrid (called Prime in the United States), straight from Toyota’s global press release: A 2.0-liter plug-in hybrid with 220 horsepower! A 0-62 mph time of 6.7 seconds! A 50% increase in pure-EV mode to maybe 50 miles!...
While Subaru is no stranger to controversial styling as of late, the new Impreza feels like a breath of fresh air as it doesn’t look ugly. In fact, it’s more than just inoffensive, it’s handsome. What a shock considering the hectares of plastic cladding affixed to the WRX. Subaru wanted the new Impreza to emphasize practicality, so it’ll only be available as a hatchback and feature built-in roof rack mounts like what you’d see on certain German cars....
Sometimes it doesn’t even seem like they were trying to show how big the trunk was, just showing that, hey, a couple of women could sit in here, if they want. Like that Tatra 603 photo up there. Those women aren’t crammed in there, there’s room for more people, so what exactly are they demonstrating? I mean, it’s kinda fun to cram into a trunk and see what it’s like in that space....
While a risky gamble, the foundations of solidity were there. New tech’s silver luster had tarnished to reveal a thin undercurrent of dread, pop music had lost its pop, the Blade Runner aesthetics of the ‘80s were back in fashion, and the world was starting to hold a mood of unease. Thankfully, Hyundai rolled with it, and we’re seeing the result in the latest series of Hyundai products. The Hyundai Tucson Plug-in is a cyberpunk-influenced, smartly-electrified departure from anything else on the market, and I’m really glad Hyundai made it that way....
Doctor, My Polestar Hertz Not content with an all-Tesla EV fleet, Hertz has struck up a deal with Polestar for up to 65,000 Polestar 2s. While that’s more than twice as many cars as Polestar delivered worldwide last year, deliveries are expected to be spread out over five years so production capacity shouldn’t be a problem. Speaking with Automotive News, Polestar CEO Thomas Ingenlath seemed excited about the brand exposure possible from this deal....
A common theme that ran through quite a few emails was: “Is there a difference between the suspensions for an EV and an internal combustion engine (ICE) car?” As you might expect, the answer is “Yes, and No.” Due to the differences in performance and size between an electric motor and an ICE, EV’s present unique challenges but also provide unique opportunities for a chassis engineer. The Steering Implications Of Ditching The Internal Combustion Engine Since electric motors are so much smaller than ICEs, there is far more space in a vehicle where the ICE used to be....
This year marks 175 years since passenger rail services began in Switzerland. As the Museum of Transport notes, Swiss passenger rail transport began in 1847. Switzerland’s first railway, the Swiss Northern Railway (also known as the Spanish-Brötli Railway), operated the Zürich–Baden line. The Switzerland Times explains what this very first rail line was like: A Huge Train Celebration Switzerland is very proud of its railway history and has been celebrating this 175-year mark all year with different festivities....
I was alerted to this by a reader named Nick who saw this interesting Reddit post, which showed an oil pressure gauge (in what I think is an old Alfa Romeo or maybe Fiat) that looked like this: Do you see what’s going on there? Oil pressure is measured in terms of a unit of force per a given surface area. That’s because the oil in your engine is under pressure, which helps to force it through all those channels and the pressure helps the oil get between all of those spinning metal parts, forming a sort of fluid bearing so the metal bits can’t rub up against one another, in much the same way you or I are encouraged not to rub up against one another in, say, the checkout line at Target....
Welcome to The Morning Dump, bite-sized stories corralled into a single article for your morning perusal. If your morning coffee’s working a little too well, pull up a throne and have a gander at the best of the rest of yesterday. The Toyota Sequoia Is Reportedly The King of Lifespan The prevailing wisdom around The Autopian is that the most reliable car is the one built with cheap, easy-to-source parts that you can work on yourself....
You know what I like about the name “Valvoline?” It reminds me of “Vaseline,” but with “valves” in it, conjuring up images of Vaseline-slathered valves, which really isn’t such a bad image for a company that makes motor lubricants. Anyway, Valvoline invited me out to their top-secret New Product Development Lab located on a small private island off the coast of Kentucky, where I worked with two of Valvoline’s finest scientists, Dr....
Do you need to be reminded about Knight Rider? Probably not, but it can’t hurt, right? Here you go: The first fact feels like one of those ideas you’d have that seems so obvious, but you also half expect that there’s likely a reason why you could never actually do it. Like the old cliché about making the whole airplane out of whatever the black box flight recorder is made from: doing so would be far too heavy and expensive, and you know the deal....
Welcome to The Morning Dump, bite-sized stories corralled into a single article for your morning perusal. If your morning coffee’s working a little too well, pull up a throne and have a gander at the best of the rest of yesterday. Toyota Expects One More Year Of Tight New Car Supply So much for predictions that shortages would ease towards the end of 2022, huh? Automotive News reports that Toyota USA sales chief Jack Hollis expects the new car supply shortage to last well into 2023....
Speaking of yesterday, let’s see where we ended up: Looks like the Lincoln has it. Personally, I think I’d go for the Olds between these two, just for a little bit better gas mileage and a little bit less rear overhang, but as many commenters said, either one would do. Two nice cars that are actually worth the trouble; imagine that. Today’s choices aren’t quite as nice, but they both run just fine, and they have both had a lot of recent work done....
While we don’t see the circumstances that led up to this series of shunts, it’s possible these embarrassing and expensive videos could’ve been avoided if a few winter driving tips were followed. Take it from someone who daily drove a rear-wheel-drive crapcan in British Columbia’s Rocky Mountains, commuting in similar conditions on similar roads to what’s seen in these videos. Slow Down As in any situation where you don’t have the grip afforded by dry asphalt, it’s best to kick things down a notch or two in the snow....
Welcome back to Comment Of The Day! Every day, we read every single comment posted on our site and pick the one that made us laugh, get informed, or feel warm inside. You don’t have to go into our comments sections and write thousand-word stories about why you love a car so much, but a lot of you do, and that means a lot to us. So we’re highlighting some of the most excellent bits of thought that you’ve formed into words and digitized onto our website....
A lot of readers have been flooding our tips line with different RVs that are out there in the wild. We’ve gotten bus conversion projects, fantastic vintage VW Bus campers, and what appears to be a hearse turned into a camper. Some of these campers have actually been pretty cheap, and it’s seemingly sent your favorite Autopian writers looking for inexpensive and cool RVs. We have a stack of these things, and let’s take a look at a few of our favorites....
