While it seems like BMW is struggling a bit with its polar bear saving "i" sub-brand, it is worth knowing that they started experimenting with electric power around the same time Subaru introduced it's first all-wheel drive car.

That's right, BMW has been in the electric car game for way longer than you might think. Here is how they got to where they are today.

The story began at the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich. While BMW stole the show with Paul Bracq's wonderful Turbo Concept supercar, they also prepared two electric coupes converted from BMW 1602s. These served as a means of transport for the members of the organizing committee, with some occasional camera-car duties as well.

Still, electric vehicles with lead batteries weighing 772 pounds and providing a range of only 37 miles were not something the Bavarians would have put into production. On the other hand, forty years on, the i3 is something they are, so let's see how they got to this 170 hp electric milestone.

BMW 1602 Electric (1972)

BMW started the development of two electric cars in 1969. They wanted to see if an electric drive unit was suitable for the demands of everyday driving. In these special 1602s, the four-speed manual transmissions were replaced by a single Bosch DC shunt-wound motor with a peak output of 32 kW (while continuous power was a much more conservative 12 kW).

Intermediate gearing was used, while the traditional rear-wheel drive set up remained. The electric motor itself was 187 pounds, but that was nothing compared to the twelve standard Varta lead-acid batteries in the engine bay, weighting 772 lbs. With a top speed of 62 mph and an urban range of 19 miles even with the clever usage of regenerative braking, the 1602 Electric was far from being perfect.

BMW soon realized that an advance in battery technology was needed for future success.

BMW LS Electric (1975)

In the summer of 1975, BMW secretly launched a new development prototype.

They used a discarded BMW 700 (LS) as a base, powered by a new DC series motor from Bosch. 10 Varta lead-acid batteries went to the engine bay, which were using centralized water topping up and degassing technology for easier maintenance. While weight was still an issue, this car also featured a brand new charger system, meaning that it could be plugged into household (230V) sockets that would charge it fully in 14 hours.

The car's drum brakes had an easy job as regenerative braking was used as standard, with the regular brakes only acting as backups. With the top speed of 40 mph, the range was less than 19 miles. On the plus side, it had a heated windshield and rear window.

BMW 325iX (1987–1990)

In 1981, BMW started its "Electric car with high-energy battery" research project, which led to eight BMW 325iXs being converted from all-wheel drive to front-wheel drive. Their main objective was to test the brand new (and maintenance-free) sodium-sulphur (NaS) batteries, which had been purpose-developed by Asea Brown Boveri with electric vehicles in mind.

Since these had three times greater energy density than the conventional lead-acid batteries, this was a big step towards neutralizing the disadvantages of normal electric drive systems. BMW also started using electronic drive management software in order to monitor the power charging from the mains socket, the energy flow between motor and battery, and most importantly: the massive heat.

The first ever external trials were carried out by the German postal services, after BMW gave them 3 Series Tourings. With the range of 93 miles, they just about did the job.

BMW E1 and E2 (1991–1993)

With the promising results provided by the NaS batteries, BMW Technik GmbH was commissioned to design an electric vehicle from scratch. The new model had to be comfortable for four adults, with reasonable range and practicality for the urban environment. A high level of safety was also on the list, while engineers had to save weight in order to balance out the batteries as well.

It only took them 10 months to finish, and the E1 prototype was presented at the 1991 Frankfurt Motor Show. The chassis and some panels were made of high-strength aluminium, while the body was mostly of recyclable plastic. The battery pack was secured at a safety frame underneath the rear seats, while the electric motor — which was developed in-house — was integrated in the rear axle together with the transmission. With a range of 93 miles and a top speed of 75 mph, the E1 has proven itself as a full on city car.

Next year, the E2 was unveiled at the Los Angeles Auto Show. It was basically an E1 redesigned with the American market in mind. However by 1993, a more advanced prototype was ready using sodium-nickel chloride batteries, further boosting performance.

BMW 325 / BMW electric (1992–1997)

New technologies emerging in the early nineties meant that the new 3 Series could be turned into a proper electric car without too much of a hassle, as the electric motor now weighed just 65 kilograms including the transmission.

BMW made 25 experimental vehicles, eight of which took part in the world's largest ever public field trial staged on the German island of Rügen. The German Federal Ministry of Research and Technology was also supporting the project, while six cars went into the fleet of the Bavarian State Government. The cars were powered by rotating-field AC motors producing 32-45 kW. Since there were some issues with the sodium-sulphur batteries, BMW switched back to the sodium-nickel chloride technology which was used in the E1.

One car even got nickel-cadmium batteries, just to keep things exciting. With the range of 93 miles, and the top speed of 84 mph, these 3 Series models were almost there...

Mini E (2008-)

A massive fleet of electric Minis were given to select private and corporate customers in 2008, who probably enjoyed the benefits of zero emissions in the large cities of the United States and Europe. These compacts were powered by 150 kW asynchronous motors getting the juice from lithium-ion battery packs.

That was good for a very green 8.5 sec sprint to 62 mph, while the top speed went up to 94 mph. Range was not an issue in the cities, as the Mini E could do 155 miles with a full charge. Special chargers also came with the cars, which could top it up using standard sockets in two-and-a-half hours. That is something they would call trendigen. With this project, BMW's fleet of fully electric cars went past 600 members.

BMW ActiveE (2010-)

The BMW Concept ActiveE is a test bed for the brands future Megacity Vehicle, which we now can simply call the i3. More than a thousand electric cars were put into service based on the 1 Series, delivering an output of 125 kW and maximum torque of 184 lb-ft.

A brand new lithium-ion battery pack gave these cars a hundred mile range, while the 90 mph top speed meant that drivers could use the passing lane on a highway as well. Technical progress in the last five years was mind blowing, with the forthcoming BMW i3's electric drive system using 40% less space than the Mini E's, while delivering superior performance. Still, when it goes to production, the i3 will also have a range-extending diesel engine, just to be safe.

Photo Credit: BMW AG

General Motors' new full size pickup trucks have arrived. Unlike pickups of the past, these are high tech machines using efficient engines with cylinder-deactivation to make sure those mpg figures stay as high as possible, even if they do have the aerodynamic profile of a brick on wheels.

And since we think the GMC Sierra is the classier one of the two new GM truck models, let's take a look at its long journey. It all began in 1902, the year America's first movie theater opened in a dusty backwater called Los Angeles.

Photo Credit: Gaensler

Grabowsky A Go-Go

Max and Morris Grabowsky built their first prototype in 1901 in Pontiac, Michigan. A year later, they founded Rapid Motor Vehicle Company, building the truck you see here. It wasn't much more than a frame with wheels and a bench seat (literally, a bench), but it did the job.

What's My Mothaf@&%in' Name

The truck the brothers Grabowsky had built attracted the attention of General Motors, which bought them out in 1909. The name "GMC Trucks" first appeared in 1912 at the New York Auto Show, and was patented eight month later.

Shiny Things

In 1927, a handful of improvements more groundbreaking than the new one's LED lights appeared on GMC trucks. The headlights were attached to the radiator, the fenders got curvier, and the radiator trim panel was chrome-plated. The year before, a 2-ton GMC truck had been driven from New York to San Francisco in five days and 30 minutes.

Wind-Cheating Bricks

The 1930s was the decade of streamlining and style, which meant sloping grilles, swooping fenders, and more paint color options. Customers rejoiced over the new trucks' more and more car-like interiors, and GMCs began to sell like hotcakes.

Americaaa, Truck Yeah!

During World War II, GMC produced 600,000 trucks for the U.S. Armed Forces. When the war's dust had settled, GMC improved its lineup, offering trucks with integrated headlamps as well as wider, lower, bolder grilles. The styling of this vintage has held up well; they make great hotrods.

GMC B. Goode

During the '50s, car design influenced trucks even more, which resulted in better comfort, performance, and safety. Capable work horses, the trucks' hooded headlights, panoramic glass, and wood trim made GMCs sexy enough for weekend cruising, too. General Motors also enjoyed success as a bus manufacturer.

Long Haired Freaky People Need Not Apply

The 1960s saw the advent of full width hoods and funky "jet pod" grilles. But while hippies bought Volkswagen vans and people who wanted to kill hippies bought pickups, there was another revolution of sorts going down in Detroit: Muscle cars. Good times all around, even if all you had was a truck with a V8.

Git Yew A Dually

Padded interiors usurped bare metal inside '70s-vintage GMC trucks, and the appearance of the Crew Cab model meant you could actually carry passengers other than your two hunting buddies. The dual rear axle was also offered for the first time in heavy duty trucks, making GMCs of the '70s and early '80s burly indeed.

A Wind Swindling Brick

In 1987, GM finally introduced an updated pickup after 14 years of predictable goodness from the old design. It sported a more aerodynamic body style, and for GMC, a permanent name change to "Sierra." The name that had been used only as a trim level previously. Also in that momentous year of Ferrari F40 advent (c'mon, what's more important than that?!), GM withdrew from the bus market.

It's Hydro, Maaaan

GMC introduced a redesigned pickup at the end of the twentieth century. Frame hydroforming meant the trucks were built upon a stronger, lighter, more rigid platform. Rear-hinged three-door extended cab models were also a new option, and a darling of contractors and divorced dads with kid duty on the weekend.

Chug-A-Lug A Little Less

The last version of GMC's trucks before this year's new model featured a host of improvements, including Duramax diesel engines, a steeply raked windshield, and tighter body panel gaps. Although they're still massive compared to most passenger vehicles, efficiency had come a long way since the trucks reached full size in the '60s.

Big Truck Is Watching

Here it is in all of its new truck glory: The redesigned GMC Sierra. Jesus, this thing's so beefy you could make a thick stew out of it. But after staring at its scary killer robot eyes for a few minutes, see if your heart doesn't melt, making you realize its true beauty. Then you'll croak, sobbing, "I love Big Truck!"

The Petersen Museum is a gem for car lovers, preserving and displaying some of the world's most important and interesting cars. Below the museum is "the vault" a.k.a. the Fort Knox of the automotive world. It's where they hide the collection's fascinating mobile artifacts in between exhibits and store cars they don't know what to do with. Now you can access what only a select few have ever seen.

To be fair, if you're a journalist or well-connected you can get into the basement. I've done it, and came back with the story of Elvis and his fatly Pantera. Our own Jason Torchinsky went there on a date, but that was before they fixed the locks.

For the next moth, approximately, you simple and unimportant citizen can get in there without knowing someone or having a magical old Volvo P1800 key. For an additional ticket purchase of $25 they're offering a guided tour of the vault between December 15th and January 6th.

The 150-or-so cars on display include a Ferrari given to Henry Ford II by Enzo Ferrari, Steve McQueen's Jaguar XKSS, and more vintage Bugattis than you'll see outside of a Concours. They may also have Saddam Hussein's personal car.

The price is steep but it's entirely worth it.

It's starting to feel like the main reason publications indulge in Car Of The Year awards is so the winning automaker will put their name in a bunch of advertisements, making the publication feel like a big shot. At Jalopnik, we don't buy in to this. We receive hand jobs from our partners, not from the automakers.

Instead, we've been asking the contributors here at Jalopnik to pick the best (and worst) cars they've driven in 2012 and explain why. When I was asked for my choices, the best car was a no-brainer: the 1971/72 Trans-Am championship winning Datsun BRE 510, driven by John Morton.

News, apparently, spreads fast, and we received an email conversation between Peter Brock himself (BRE) and the legendary Mr. K (i.e. Yutaka Katayama, the first president of Nissan USA and the father of the 510, the Z-Car, and a sense of auto joy in general).

Mr. K, one of the most celebrated auto executives of our time, is now 103 years old, and yet he and Peter Brock have been reading Jalopnik and giving each other virtual fist bumps on their incredible BRE 510 being named "the best car I have driven in 2012." Thoughtfully, someone forwarded the exchange to us.

Notes like these will probably never appear in an automaker's commercial, or be advertised in print as a "guess what Jalopnik said," to boost our own self-importance. Personally, I think the fact that Mr. K read an article on Jalopnik is way more valuable than any of that.

Henry Ford famously said that "auto racing began 5 minutes after the second car was built". While he was probably right, it definitely started before he build his second Quadricycle in 1898, featuring chain drive and a whopping 20 mph top speed.

It was in Europe where all the fun began, but the United States was not far behind, with the first race held in Chicago in 1895. Six cars entered this Chicago Times-Herald sponsored event, and a Duryea motorized wagon took the victory.

In the first forty years, motor racing went from steam powered death traps to even bigger ones with a thousand horsepower thanks to some aircraft engines. There was a lot to see...

The first is always special

The first officially organized race was on April 28, 1887. It was set up by Monsieur Fossier, the chief editor of Paris publication Le Vélocipède. At that time, even these big wheeled bicycles were pretty modern, since they were only invented in the 1860s. The race ran from Neuilly to Versailles, a distance of only 1.2 miles. The winner was Georges Bouton of the De Dion-Bouton company with his steam quadricycle, but since him and his partner, Count de Dion were the only contenders, it was hardly a glorious victory.

The death of Monsieur Renault

The first race with real competition was held on July 23, 1894 between Paris and Rouen. Sixty-nine cars lined up for this 31 mile challenge, with manufacturers like Peugeot, Panhard and De Dion. 3 horsepower and a bit of reliability was all they needed, and Albert Lemaître took the trophy with his Peugeot. America joined the party in 1895, and by the end of the century, intercity races became very popular all over the western world. The fun lasted until 1903, when Marcel Renault ended up in a ditch with his aerodynamic machine. He died of his injuries, but since eight more fatalities were already on the list, the government banned these competitions.

The British built a track

This photo of a group of workers taking a coffee tea break was taken in October, 1906 at the construction site of the Brooklands racetrack in Surrey. The banked oval was the brainchild of Sir Hugh Fortescue Locke-King, an entrepreneur who founded and financed the project on his own. In the following year, only eleven days after the circuit was opened, the world's first 24 hour motor event was held, with Selwyn Edge entering in three specially converted Napiers. His own was called the "804", with which he covered 1,581 miles at an average speed of 65.9 mph. Over 300 red railway lamps were used to light the track during the night...

Welcome to Indianapolis

The Indianapolis Motor Speedway was opened in 1909, after a local businessman by the name of Carl G. Fisher got fed up with the dangerous street races America had at the time. Seeing how it's done in France, and also taking a trip to Brooklands, he proclaimed in front of investors and manufacturers that "Indianapolis is going to be the world's greatest center of horseless carriage manufacturers, what could be more logical than building the world's greatest racetrack right here?" It took quite a lot of manpower to reshape the land for the oval, but it has paid off pretty soon. The first day of car racing resulted in four finishes and two land speed records, and the death of Wilfred Bourque and his mechanic, Harry Halcomb, who flipped their car thanks to a rear-axle failure. Around twenty thousand spectators showed up, paying at the most $1 for a ticket to see the first show.

Death was in the corner

This gentleman is J B Marquis overturning his 1913 GP Sunbeam racing car at the 'Death Curve' during the 35th lap of the International Grand Prix at Santa Monica on the 16th of March, 1914. This 8.4-mile course in California had its start/finish straight along the Pacific Ocean, which was a really nice touch. The track also had a tricky 90 degree left hander onto Wilshire, which the press liked to call the "Death Curve". Since only a few Grand Prize races were held in Santa Monica, in reality, nobody managed to kill him/herself in that specific spot at the time. On the other hand, let's not forget that a spectator did fall 20 feet to the ground from a tall palm tree, breaking his left arm after George Clark's Cutting smacked the tree in 1910...

Need for speed

Malcolm Campbell, or "the Captain," was the son of a diamond merchant, which comes handy when someone is into very fast cars. From the age of 21, he won all three London to Lakes End Trials with his motorbike. Switching to cars in 1910, he christened his first to Blue Bird, after seeing the play with the same title by Maurice Maeterlinck at the Haymarket Theatre. After spending the 1st World War with the Regiment and the RAF, he went on to break the land speed record for the first time in 1924 at 146.16 mph. He improved that eight times. He also won the French Grand Prix twice with a Bugatti Type 37A. The then knighted Captain was averaging 301.337 mph at the Bonneville Salt Flats in 1935, then set the water speed record four times before even thinking about retirement. Three years after his third marriage, a series of strokes killed him in 1948.

A tiny punch

The Jappic was advertised as the "world's smallest racecar". Designed by H.M.Walters, it was built by the coachbuilders Jarvis of Wimbledon. First entered at Brooklands in 1925, this two seater cyclecar featured a 344cc JAP motorcycle engine, and the numberplate MH3995. Rolling on motorcycle tires, this ash-framed deathtrap didn't have front brakes, meanwhile it was good for 70.33 mph. Talk about balls...

Later, a 495cc engine was fitted, but when Mrs. Gwenda Hawkes, Britain's famous ambulance driver and speed record holder obtained the car, she put the original back. She also renamed it to Hawkes-Stewart. It didn't bring luck as in 1932, the pocket rocket burnt to crisp in a garage fire at Autodrome de Linas-Montlhéry.

Early WRC

Hill climbing is something we would mostly do on tarmac today, but back in the day, you needed long wheel travel at those speeds if you wanted to get to the top in one piece. The London to Lands End Trial is something the British still organize every year, and as its name suggest, the land ends pretty soon after you crossed the start line. One of the difficult parts of the course is the Beggars Roost hill, where that Riley Redwing you see in the picture was fighting for victory in January, 1925 at the Easter Races. During the thirties, over 500 competitors entered this muddy challenge.

I love you, but I'm driving

Previously, Miss Ivy Cummins had her mother next to her, as she was also her mechanic. While women were not allowed to race at the very beginning of the 20th century, the sexist oppression didn't last for too long. Especially in England, where Dorothy Levitt broke the land speed record in the female class in 1906 at Blackpool, using a six-cylinder Napier with a hundred horses. Ivy Cummin, the daughter of Sidney Cummings of the Essex Motor Club was more of a Brookland girl, using a Type 23 Bugatti that had originally been the UK agents' demonstrator. After a few years of successful racing, she said yes to a lucky chap called Stanley Simpson in the summer of 1925. No, he wasn't allowed to drive.

Your Veyron, Sir!

Sir Henry Segrave was born on September 22, 1896 in Baltimore, Maryland to an American mother and an Irish father. As a British national, he served as a fighter pilot during the war. After he had to resign his commission due to his previous wounds, he turned his attention to racing, starting at Brooklands. The 200-Mile race was almost too easy for him behind the wheel of a Talbot-Darracq, just like the French and Spanish Grand Prix in 1923 and '24. He retired from racing to focus on speed records, making history first with a 4-litre Sunbeam Tiger called Ladybird in 1926. Since the 152.33 mph record lasted for just over a month, he came back the next year with a 1000 hp Sunbeam nicknamed "the Slug". At Daytona Beach, that was enough for 203.79 mph. His final land speed record was set on March 11, 1929. The Golden Arrow did 231.45 mph. Segrave died four years later, while trying to set the water speed record as well on England's largest natural lake. He regained consciousness at the hospital only to be informed that he succeeded. His lungs collapsed moments later.

Photo Credit: Getty Images/Hulton Archive

The British screwed up their automotive industry like no other. The endless badge-engineering meant that their once great cars become as outdated as the fish and chips kiosk just outside the factories, while the long-lasting strikes made sure that the workers went back to do their shifts with just the right attitude. Quality control? In the seventies, even the Romanians cared more about their Dacias than Leyland employees about whatever they built.

Lucky survivors like Jaguar, Land Rover or Aston Martin are now owned by entrepreneurs from previous colonies like India, or a bunch of Italians. Less fortunate ones like MG ended up in Chinese hands, which is funny because their new cars just hit the showrooms of Great Britain. If they prove to sell well, it will only show that the Chinese can build a better cheap British car than the Brits themselves.

Here's a list of the final cars from once proud, British-owned and operated car companies.

Armstrong Siddeley Star Sapphire

Armstrong Siddeley was an engineering group making everything from gearboxes to rockets and aircraft engines named after various snakes. They started building luxury cars with the Sphinx logo in the 1920s, while also keeping the aircraft business, and designing air-cooled diesel engines for marine use during their lunch breaks.

The Star Sapphire saloon was introduced in 1958, and won the four-door coachwork class at the Earls Court Motor Show straight away. It's four-litre six-cylinder engine made 167 horses thanks to the twin Stromberg carburettors, while servo-assisted disc brakes (only in the front) and power steering helped in keeping the car on track. As you would expect from an executive car, a BorgWarner automatic transmission made sure you never got more then 13 miles from a gallon of petrol. While the Star Sapphire was more expensive than a Daimler Majestic or a Jaguar Mark IX, it was still a bargain compared to a Rolls-Royce or a Bentley, and 980 were sold in two years, including 77 long-wheelbase cars. The Mark 2 was supposed to be the first British car with twin headlamps, but Armstrong Siddeley's merger with Bristol (and later Roll-Royce Limited) meant that only one was built before the automotive section was shut down. The brand's patents and rights are now owned by the Armstrong Siddeley Owners Club.

Jensen GT

Jensen Motors Ltd was established in 1934 by two brothers from Birmingham who were previously working at a body shop. After customising Morrises, Singers, Standards, and Wolseleys, they went on building a car for Clark Gable on a Ford chassis. That got so much attention that Ford itself commissioned them to build a limited production model, which become the Jensen-Ford. In 1936, they introduced the Jensen S-type, again using bits from Ford GB's factory. Thirty years later, Jensen gave the world its first all-wheel drive shooting break, the Jensen FF. Yes, that is where Ferrari got the idea from...

While the FF and its rear-wheel drive twin, the V8 Interceptor were awesome in many ways, the Oil Crisis was hitting the company hard. The Jensen-Healey was quickly introduced in 1972 with Lotus's brand new DOHC four-cylinder featuring 16 valves and an all alloy construction, and while sales were improving, strikes, component shortages and inflation made Jensen lose even more. When the roadster needed some refreshing, Jensen answered with the shooting break version, spending a fortune on the development. Since it was heavier and less powerful thanks to new emission regulations, the GT was nowhere near as popular as the roadster (509 were made compared to the 10,000 roadsters), and Jensen had to pull the plug in 1976.

Jowett Jupiter

Jowett started in the light car and light commercial vehicle business in 1906. Five years earlier, the two brothers started their company by building motorcycles and V-engines for various applications. After the second world war, they came out with the Javelin, which was a full-sized saloon with 50 horses from its 1.5-litre flat four. More than 23,000 were sold, and while it proved itself at the 1952 Monte Carlo Rally, Jowett also kept on building light vans in vast numbers.

The Jupiter was launched at London Motor Show in October 1949, with a tuned engine making 60 horsepower, giving the two-seater a 85 mph top speed. While reaching sixty took 18 seconds if you were good with the four-speed stick, mileage was only 20.9 mpg. These numbers might seem unimpressive, but while it's hard to see while anyone bought a Jupiter instead of a Jaguar XK120 which was only 20 percent more expensive at the time, let's not forget that the little roadster won it's class at the Le Mans 24 Hour race in both 1950 and 1951, and also scored a class 1+2 at the Monte Carlo Rally the same year. To further improve performance, a prototype was built with a light fibreglass body, but since first Ford, then BMC bought the company supplying Jowett with their bodies, shortages started to shadow the production, and when negotiating proved unsuccessful, the shareholders closed up the shop.

Marcos TSO

Jem Marsh and Frank Costin started their company in 1959. Costin was working on the de Havilland Mosquito fighter-bombers before, and thought using plywood in car construction was a good idea. The first Marcos was the Xylon, a car built purely for racing. It was also ugly as sin. The company built weird and wonderful speed machines using various power plants in the following decades, including a miniature GT which was only big in Japan. One example came last at the 1966 Le Mans race, although it was also the only British car which was able to finish it. Marcos first went out of business in 1971, and than again in 2000 and 2007. Bad habit.

While the Marcos Mantis XP is something we all want secretly, the TSO seemed like the product that could turn the company around. The rally legends from Prodrive did its chassis, while the engines came from the Corvette. It went like a TVR, but the styling was more moderate this time, so on paper, things were looking good. Unfortunately, only six were completed before the company went bust again. Shame, since it's always nice to see a Marcos at a racetrack, especially with almost 500 horses on tap...

Hillman Avenger

The Hillman Motor Car Company started building cars in 1907, after getting enough practice from making bicycles. Independence was never high on their priority list, as they merged with Sunbeam two years after the foundation, only to be bought up first by Humbler, then by the Rootes Group in 1931. Hillman remained the dominant brand of the company, until the whole thing was taken over by Chrysler. After some talbotization, the British marque ended up in the hands of Peugeot. It is one of the greatest badge-engineering achievements of all time.

The Avenger was the first Hillman to be developed using American money. Chrysler wanted to squeeze out every penny from the car. Introduced in 1970, the Avenger came with saloon, estate or hatchback bodies, using a 4-cylinder 1.2 or 1.5-liter all-iron overhead valve engine driving a coil spring suspended live axle at the rear wheel. The press thought it was better than the Morris Marina, so Chrysler got greedy. They sold the Avenger also as a Sunbeam in Europe, while the US got it as the Plymouth Cricket. South-Africans could hoon in a Dodge Avenger, while Argentina got it with a VW badge as the Volkswagen 1500. The worst came when Chrysler Europe went bankrupt and was taken over by Peugeot. If you ever come across a Talbot Avenger, there are two things to remember: First, just look away! Second, think about how great the word "talbotization" is. It makes me smile every time.

Lagonda Rapide

Lagonda was founded by an American opera singer called Wilbur Gunn in 1906. His first car, the 20 horsepower Torpedo won him the Moscow–St. Petersburg trial of 1910 with its reliable six-cylinder. The company built great touring cars as well as smaller saloons, while also participating in both world wars. During the first, they only shifted to building shells, but when Hitler came to the picture, Lagonda replied with a bunch of massive flamethrowers. David Brown bought the firestarters in 1947, just like Aston Martin. The Lagonda 2.6 was put back into production with its Bentley-designed six cylinder, but a brand new chassis.

The following car, the new Rapide was David Brown's attempt to revive the Lagonda marque. Using an Aston Martin DB4 as a base, with Superleggera contruction and the engine from the DB5, it also had a horse collar grille, just like Ford's failed Edsels. The 4-litre straight six was mated to a three speed automatic, and servo assisted disc brakes made sure that the VIPs stayed alive while enjoying the leather and walnut interior. Because it was rather expensive, only 55 were built in the three years of production. Since then, Aston Martin only used the Lagonda name once more, and that didn't work out either...

MG TF

MG got its name from its founder, as Cecil Kimber was working at Morris Garages at the time. He started his business in 1924, and the brand soon become synonymous with small two-seater sports cars. MG also built saloons and coupes, and was bought up by Morris in 1935. The new parents cut back on motorsports, and when BMC took over the whole company in 1952, most of MG's lineup become a badge-engineered mess as well. The seventies were tough, therefore British Leyland decided to shut down the MG brand after the production of the MGB was finished. The rights to the name went to British Aerospace in 1988 and then to BMW in 1994. Badge-engineering went on with the Rover models, until the MG F came to the rescue. While sales were strong, it wasn't enough to save the Rover group, so the whole operation was sold to the Chinese.

The MG TF was an improved version of the successful, but also aging F roadster. The new two seater had traditional coil springs instead of the Hydrolastic system from before, while the chassis become 20 percent more rigid than the F's. The 1.6 base engine disappeared, and only the K-series 1.8 was available, with improved reliability and 160 horsepower. That was enough for a sub 7 second 0-60 run, and while the MG couldn't beat the Mazda MX-5 on a racetrack, the British were buying until a certain point. After Rover collapsed, the first thing the Chinese did was put the improved TF back to production. Unfortunately for them, demand was so low they could only build 906...

Triumph 2000

The company started with bicycles in 1886. From 1906, they fitted engines on their bikes, and while the army was kicking German asses from the backs of Triumph bikes in 1918, they become Britain's largest manufacturer of motorcycles. After getting the Dawson Car Company, the first Triumph car arrived in 1924 featuring a 1.4-litre engine. Three years later, the Super 7 was introduced, and it soon generated massive sales for the company. While the sale to Standard Motor Company was probably not a bad move in 1944, what followed in the sixties was basically like digging a grave. Yes, it was British Leyland, all over again. The last Triumph was a shamefully rebadged Honda, but after the company went bust, BMW bought the whole package. Since then, they sold it, but insisted on keeping the Triumph brand. A revival in the future? Well, unlikely if the spend more on their i sub-brand.

While the last Triumph was a Honda, let's forget about that, and focus on a real one. The 2000 was built from 1967 to 1977, with the latter ones getting 2.5-litre engines. Since even the smaller engines were six-cylinders, Triumph could make the Rover P6 run for its money until 1968, when the latter was fitted with a Buick V8. This wasn't the only problem the Triumph 2000 had, because while most people liked the Michelotti designed body, nobody was a fan of massive overheating. The problem can be described with two words: Lucas electronics. The electric fuel pump commonly overheated causing fuel to vaporise. That's never good, but not surprising when a pump is adapted from what was originally a windscreen wiper motor. Another funny fact you should know about is that the estate version of the Mark II cars was 5 inches shorter than the saloon, because the rear bodywork of the car was carried over unchanged from the MkI version. You lazy bastards...

TVR Sagaris

Trevor Wilkinson was too cool for school, so he left it at the age of 14, only to learn about engineering in a garage. He built his first car on an Alvis chassis in 1947. Two years later, the first official TVR was built with an alloy body wrapping a two seater tubular chassis. In 1953, the aluminium was replaced by glass fibre, and the fantastic Grantura was born. The sixties and seventies were uncertain times, with all sorts of engines making TVRs go fast as hell. Thankfully, Peter Wheeler arrived in the eighties, and immediately started using massive Rover V8s instead of turbocharged six-cylinders. He also managed to get Holden V8s from Tom Walkinshaw, the brain behind that other TWR. Just to make it more challenging, Wheeler also started the development of TVR's own V8, which become a straight six they modestly called "the Speed Six". And you don't want to know what happens when you use two of those...

My love for the TVR Sagaris knows no boundaries. It's a 385 horsepower rear-wheel drive sports car weighting no more than a large kitchen table with a top speed of 185 mph. It also has insane styling, but no ABS or any other piece of German assistance. Next to the possibility of sudden death, it also attracted customers with remarkable build quality compared to previous TVRs, or in fact anything coming from British boutique manufacturers. Just look at its exhaust! It's either your kind of thing or not. But the one thing we can certainly agree on is that when they give the pride of the great city of Blackpool to the son of a Russian oligarch, serious amounts of Detroit's rock 'n' roll is needed to deal with the pain.

Photo credit: Wikipedia, Chris Sampson, Gareth Williams, daveoflogic, Matt Buck, Brian Snelson

I'm only about 120 years late to the party on this one, which really isn't too bad, since I wasn't alive for most of that time. Now that I am (more or less) alive, I don't have that excuse anymore, so I need to do what I can to right this wrong: the front-engine/rear-drive layout that is named after René Panhard should really be named after Amédée Bollée. This is important.

I'm sure by now at least half of you have flung your laptops at the wall in unrestrained rage. I'm just asking you to hear me out. I know the front engine/rear-drive layout pioneered by the firm Panhard et Lavassor in 1891 is a favorite of many of us. Hell, it was the dominant automotive architecture for decades, dominating until the mass-advent of FWD in the 80s. Even today, a front-mounted engine driving the rear wheels is still the preferred sports car layout. And it's been called the Système Panhard for over a century.

But it's time to change that. And this isn't change for the sake of change, it's about righting a wrong. It's about justice, and giving credit where credit is due. See, Panhard et Levassor were not the first ones to develop a car with the front engine/rear drive layout. I believe that honor should go to Amédee Bollée, way back in 1878.

Bollée's car was called La Mancelle (named after Le Mans) and was likely the first automobile to enter series production, with 50 built. This was Bollée's second car, after L'Obeissante which, while similar, did not quite employ a true front-engine transmitting power to a rear drive layout. La Mancelle did, having its three-cylinder steam engine up front, and power transmitted by shaft to the rear wheels. The car also had independent suspension (via leaf springs) and rack-and-pinion steering!

Yes, the boiler was still mounted at the rear, but in some ways one can argue that's closer to a gasoline car's fuel tank than strictly part of the engine. Still, in every way that matters, La Mancelle developed the template that all FR cars would follow for well over a century— from a 1902 Rolls Royce Silver Ghost to the Subaru BRZ someone just lied about their income to get today.

And yet for all this time, the credit for this wildly influential vehicle architecture has been given to Mssrs. Panhard and Lavassor. Sure P&L were extremely influential and pioneering auto makers, but the facts are the facts. If we're going to name the FR layout after the first to develop and produce it, Bollée's 1878 La Mancelle beats Panhard's 1891 offering by any kind of kooky math you want to try.

Maybe some people will try to defend the Panhard claim by saying that Bollée doesn't count because it's a steam car. To that, I'd cleverly and delicately retort that that's horseshit. The term refers to the layout, the general architecture of the car, not what sort of fuel is powering it. The type of engine just doesn't matter— a front engine-rear drive layout is just that no matter if that engine is steam, gasoline, electric, or a glowing orb of pulsing orgone energy. So there.

So, one of my personal new years' goals is to popularize the term "Système Bollée" to refer to front engine-rear drive cars, and to right an injustice that's been perpetrated for a century and a half.

And maybe if I do, the ghost of Amédée Bollée will finally stop making the walls bleed in my house.

On New Years' Day I decided to ask the Jaloposphere for a name for the goofy little car I've been drawing for a number of articles. Commenter 62ImperialCrown suggested "Utopian Turtletop," which was a rejected name created by poet Marianne Moore for the Ford Edsel.

A poet was asked to come up with names for one of the most legendary flops of all time? How had I not heard about this? It has all my favorite things: cars, failure, weird ideas, turtles — so I did a bit of looking.

The story's reasonably well-known, and while that makes me feel a bit like an idiot, there's no reason any of you have to. So here's the whole story.

Back in 1955, when the Edsel line (it was originally intended to be an entire sub-brand) was in development, there was lots of confusion as to what to name the car. The ad agency Foote, Cone and Belding was retained to come up with names, and boy did they, cranking out a list of six freaking thousand of them. Those names, interestingly, included a number that the Edsel would use on model types and would also go on to be names for other cars, both Ford and other brands. Names like Pacer, Ranger, and Citation.

Still, nothing in this huge list was getting anyone really excited, so, not entirely officially, members of the marketing team reached out to modernist poet Marianne Moore, who was known for her wit and unorthodox thinking. She even wrote (later on) the liner notes for Muhammad Ali's spoken word album!

They sent the poet a letter that said, in part:

We should like this name to be more than a label. Specifically, we should like it to have a compelling quality in itself and by itself. To convey, through association or other conjuration, some visceral feeling of elegance, fleetness, advanced features and design. A name, in short, that flashes a dramatically desirable picture in people's minds.

So, based on these instructions, Moore came up with a pretty incredible list. Now, it's not really a list of car names that you could ever imagine actually being used, but there's a number in there I think would have been pretty incredible. The Ford Silver Sword has a really great rhythm to it and is just fun to say — go ahead, try it out. Plus, Resilient Bullet? That's pretty tough. Thunderblender? Evokes a really dangerous appliance too much, maybe. Astranaut is pretty fun, though Pastelogram is just weird and Varsity Stroke sounds like some advanced masturbation technique.

I've got the full list below, thanks to the good data-hoarders at Lists of Note.

Of course, in the end, they went with "Edsel," after Henry Ford's late son. And it was a colossal flop, of course, partially due to the name, which no one outside of Ford insiders really understood or gave a crap about. Oh, and just to make things nice and confusing, around this same time there was a poet named Edsel Ford, completely unrelated to any of this, even though his name and occupation are a perfect combination of this entire event.

Here's the entire list. Enjoy!

• The Ford Silver Sword
• Hirundo
• Aerundo
• Hurricane Hirundo (swallow)
• Hurricane Aquila (eagle)
• Hurricane Accipter (hawk)
• The Impeccable
• Symmechromatic
• Thunderblender
• The Resilient Bullet
• Intelligent Bullet
• Bullet Cloisoné
• Bullet Lavolta
• The Intelligent Whale
• The Ford Fabergé (That there is also a perfume Fabergé seems to me to do no harm, for here allusion is to the original silversmith)
• The Arc-en-Ciel (the rainbow)
• Arcenciel
• Mongoose Civique
• Anticipator
• Regna Racer (couronne a couronne) sovereign to sovereign
• Aeroterre
• Fée Rapide (Aerofee, Aero Faire, Fee Aiglette, Magi-faire) Comme Il Faire
• Tonnere Alifère (winged thunder)
• Aliforme Alifère (wing-slender a-wing)
• Turbotorc (used as an adjective by Plymouth)
• Thunderbird Allié (Cousin Thunderbird)
• Thunder Crester
• Dearborn Diamanté
• Magigravure
• Pastelogram
• Regina-Rex
• Taper Racer
• Varsity Stroke
• Angelastro
• Astranaut
• Chaparral
• Tir á l'arc (bull's eye)
• Cresta Lark
• Triskelion (three legs running)
• Pluma Piluma (hairfine, feather-foot)
• Adante con Moto (description of a good motor?)
• Turcotinga (turqoise cotinga-the cotinga being a South-American finch or sparrow) solid indigo.
• Utopian Turtletop

Generally, we think of dashcam footage is a relatively recent phenomenon. Recent and overwhelmingly Russian. But the reality is, technically, dashboard cameras could have been at least possible from some of the earliest days of motoring. And at least one example has surfaced: an incredible bit of footage from the dashboard of a fire truck, in 1926.

This Manhattan-area footage is remarkable for many reasons, not the least of which is the title card at 47 seconds in that reads BAD TRAFFIC JAMS FORCE USE OF SIDEWALKS. And boy do they use those sidewalks. The traffic is insane, and the driver seems to have genitals made of tempered steel, the way they're weaving and snaking through that traffic on those tall, skinny tires. Plus, that bell — was that manually operated? It appears to have a control lever that leads into the cabin, so maybe.

And almost exactly one minute in, what's with that guy? A freaking 1920s Fire engine barrels up behind you, clanging a huge brass bell, and Mr.Derbyhat doesn't even notice? Dude, iPods won't be invented for 70 years, what the hell are you doing?

The speed is also a bit deceptive here. Early movie cameras, like this one often didn't have mechanisms for regulating the frames-per-second speed, especially if they were hand-cranked. So, early silent-era movies tended to run anywhere between 16-20 frames per second or so. When played on a later, standardized 24 FPS projector, they look sped up. Which I believe is happening here, since, while this fire truck driver is clearly iron-balled and nuts, I don't think he's that nuts. Or at least the car isn't fast enough to enable that degree of nuttery.

This video is fascinating. Especially when you think about the sheer size of the equipment needed to shoot it. It was likely more of a middle-of-the-seat camera than a strict dash-cam, what with the big housing, film reel magazines, probably some sort of tripod mount? I'd love to see it.

(Thanks, Jeff!)

Occasionally, after a day immersed in reading about cars, writing about cars, driving in cars, sobbing in cars so no one can see my shame, and generally having my brain defined by cars, I'll have to step back and remind myself just why we even have cars at all. To get our asses and our information from one point to another.

That's it. And, for the most part, that's what they all do. We're so used to it that we forget there was a time when the notion of being able to move that quickly was science fiction, but travel maps for the early part of the century indicate just how amazing modern travel is and just how quickly information moves these days.

Whether it's a brand-new Porsche 911 or a 1985 Dodge Ares K car with two temporary spares it does the same damn thing, essentially the same way. It's pretty safe to say that thanks to cars (and other transportation machines, like airplanes) we take the way we move around for granted. Like, really, really for granted, bordering on yelling-at-your-mom-because-your-waffles-aren't-just-so ungrateful child territory.

This fact smacked me, hard and wetly, when I saw the scanned pages of 1932's wild best-seller (note: not true at all) Atlas of the historical geography of the United States, by Charles O. Paullin, which Patrick noticed a few weeks ago.

This fascinating old tome has a transportation section crammed with creamy-colored old maps, a number of which are labeled Rates Of Travel. What these maps show is the amount of travel time it would take to go from New York City to various locations in the United States for various years.

Let's look at 1800 first. In 1800, travel in the US would be limited to mammalian power, either your own, higher-primate foot power or the considerably greater power of a willing horse. Steam-powered rail travel was still, at best, experimental concepts, with the first commercial rail line in the US not appearing until 1826.

So how long did it take to get anywhere in this era? For our examples, let's use a trip from NYC to Detroit, since I'm heading to Detroit for the Auto Show in a day or so and it's on my mind already. In 1800, a trip to Detroit from NYC (to see the International Horse-and-Buggy Show, perhaps) would have taken four weeks. That's four weeks for about 489 miles, as the crow flies. The actual distance would likely be greater, as a straight line from NYC to Motown would cut across a lake some would consider "great."

On a modern aircraft, that same trip takes about an hour and a half, accounting for takeoff and landing time. So, let's do some comparative math here. Four weeks comes out to 672 hours, which is a tidy 670 hours and 30 minutes longer than flying in a 757. That means flying is right about 448 times faster than how you could get there in 1800.

But maybe that's unfair, comparing flying to travel on rough terrain and poor roads averaging well under 1 mile per hour. So let's compare driving. Driving from NYC to Detroit, a distance of 614.6 miles, takes 9 hours and 22 minutes. That's averaging about 65 MPH, which seems entirely reasonable. That makes a modern car trip around 663 hours less than the 1800 time, which is around 72 times faster than the 1800 trip.

That's a hell of a lot faster.

Now, things did improve pretty dramatically; by 1830, you could have made the trip to Detroit in half the time, about two weeks. This improvement is largely due to railroads, which for the first time in human history, gave people an accessible way to travel at sustained high speeds (high being above 15 MPH or so) for long distances. By 1857, the rail network was so developed that our NYC-Detroit jaunt could be accomplished in two days, and by 1930 rail standards, one day. That's a pretty remarkable improvement for something that could happen within a person's lifespan.

We've seen similar levels of development in other fields since then. Air travel went from a short hop on a Carolina beach to routine transoceanic flights in less than 50 years, and we've seen absurd developments in computing technology that let us carry in our pockets little shiny slabs that have more computing power than whole nations had 40 years ago. But, this incredible speeding up of human travel had to be one of the first great rapid technological booms.

There's another set of maps in here that caught my eye that relates to the whole business of getting around the US: a road map. Road maps are probably the most common maps we encounter, and this one is interesting because it's both familiar and alien at the same time.

It's a map of Post Roads, roads built and maintained for the primary purpose of giving mail carriers access to the country, as required by the constitution. This map is from 1804, and shows a surprisingly well-developed network of roads. What we're really looking at here, aside from being the great-grandfather of our national highway system, is the Internet of the early 1800s.

The post road network was how almost all information was exchanged in the US at the time. Like today, you could send an email, though the "e" then stood for "equine" and it was just mail and I've exhausted the possibilities of that stupid bit of wordplay. But you get the idea.

If we go along with the now/then speed computations I did with travel with information, and really, we may as well, the numbers get nice and ridiculous. Let's say a fresh, well-trained postal horse could run at 20 MPH, which means that's how fast one page of information (say, a one-kilobyte letter) could travel. A one kilobyte email travels at, oh, the speed of light, basically, so that's close to 670 million MPH.

So, that means information now travels at 33,480,000 times as fast. I hope everyone now appreciates just how damn quick we are now.

Yesterday night, General Motors made sure to keep everybody as excited about the new Corvette Stingray as the people involved in the project were. The countdown on Youtube looked like we were about to send somebody to Mars, but it worked: even I stayed up here in Budapest (what's 7:00 pm for you is 1:00 am for me) to watch the car being unveiled.

(Warning: it gets NSFW Below)

What I saw was a few blokes standing next to a rather attractive red car:

What I would expect from the premier of a V8 powered plastic car looks more like this:

It was in October 1971 when TVR decided (again) to shake things up a bit. They arrived at the British Motor Show with a V8 Tuscan, a Tasmin 280i powered by a Cologne V6 (which you might get as it was the last TVR that made it to the States), and a good old Vixen with its Kent four banger. They also brought two naked glamour models.

Helen Jones (36-24-36) made it to the cover of Parade Magazine after this performance, while Susan Shaw (35-24-35) reportedly was a bit terrified by all those people surrounding them while posing at Earls Court. Later on, she forgot about her shyness to become the cover girl of Penthouse and Girl Illustrated under the fake name of Karen McCook. She also met F1 Champion James Hunt for a brief advertising (and who knows what else) session.

Blackpool: 1, Detroit: 0.

(Hat tip to Lost In The Seventies. We're a bit lost in it ourselves.)

Britain has given the world more Formula-1 World Champions than any other nation. The list includes Jackie Stewart (3), Jim Clark (2), Graham Hill (2), Mike Hawthorn (1), John Surtees (1), James Hunt (1), Nigel Mansell (1), Damon Hill (1), Lewis Hamilton (1) and Jenson Button (1).

Stirling Moss is not on it, even though he was easily one of the greatest. He came second four times in a row with four different makes between 1955-58, but his racing career came to a brutal halt in 1962, after a horrific crash with an experimental Lotus-Climax V8 at Goodwood.

But that wasn't the end for Sir Moss. Ferrari built him what has become the most expensive car in the world, and while in the end he couldn't race this particular machine, he never got too far from the tracks. In the meantime, he also built a house that's so full of gadgets that even James Bond's Q would need some time to understand the system, for which the Williams
F1 team made him a carbon fibre elevator. When that broke his ankle, he had this to say.

Mercedes-Benz and McLaren named their racecar inspired special SLRs after him, while Moss himself only retired from racing three years ago, after crashing a $1.7M Porsche RS 61 Spyder during the warm up laps of the Monterey Reunion. He was almost 80 at the time. Also, an absolute chick magnet.

Sir Moss, we love you, so here comes a reminder of all the cool things you've done between 1948-78!

Photo credit: Getty Images

18th September, 1948

The young Stirling Moss winning the race for midget racing cars on the Goodwood Estate in his first year of motor racing. Ha was driving a British Cooper, just like nine years later, when he finished second in the World Championship with a Cooper T43.

Photo credit: Jimmy Sime/Central Press/Getty Images

1952

A bit of a publicity stunt as Stirling Moss drives a Jaguar XK120 fixhead coupe on the ramp of a Silver City cargo plane. The roadster version went in production in 1948, with the coupe following in 1951, and the drophead in 1953. The 120 stood for its maximum speed in mph (while you could go even faster after removing the roadster's windshield). The Bristol Type 170 Freighter was badass too.

Photo credit: Evening Standard/Getty Images

May, 1955

Stirling Moss and his co-driver Dennis Jenkinson (the journalist who pretty much came up with the idea of pacenotes used in modern rallying) surrounded by Italian police after they won the Italian Mille Miglia behind the wheel of the legendary Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR. The car had around 310 horsepower at 8,500 rpm thanks to its straight-eight engine, which was fed by a mixture of gasoline and benzene (65/35). Moss and Jenkinson started the race with 70 gallons of fuel on board. Juan Manuel Fangio finished second in the sister car.

Photo credit: Keystone/Getty Images

2nd September, 1956

World champion Argentinian racing driver Juan Manuel Fangio (right) in action in a Ferrari leading Stirling Moss in a Maserati at the 1956 Italian Grand Prix at Monza. At the end of the fifty-lap race, Fangio once again finished second behind Moss, but retained his world title after switching cars with team mate Peter Collins following a steering-arm failure. Collins's selfless act resulted in him becoming third in the Championship instead of winning it.

Photo credit: Keystone/Getty Images

29th May, 1957

Mr. Moss in his custom built MG EX181 at the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah, where he attempted to break the International Class F speed record. The class ruled that the engine had to be between 1.1 and 1.5 litres, so the MG was using a supercharged twin cam good for 290bhp at 7,300rpm. The streamlined MG and Stirling Moss did a record-breaking 245.64mph. Today, you can find this special MG in the English Midlands.

Photo credit: Central Press/Getty Images

19th January, 1958

England's star driver crosses the finishing line in a Cooper-Climax T43 to win the Argentine Grand Prix in Buenos Aires. His car was entered privately by Rob Walker's team. This was not only the first win for Cooper, but also for a private team or a rear-engined car in Formula One. Juan Manuel Fangio got the pole and scored the fastest lap, but came only forth in the end. The 1958 Championship was won by another Brit, Mike Hawthorn, despite winning only one race throughout the season. Moss was beaten by a single point.

Photo credit: Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

June, 1959

Stirling Moss enjoying a cup of tea in the cockpit of his Vanwall racing car. Vanwall was about to leave motor racing as founder Tony Vandervell's health started to fade, while their cars had no real chance against the new mid-engined Coopers. This was Team Lotus's second year in the Championship, following Colin Chapman's departure from Vanwall. Moss continued back at Cooper-Climax. Vanwall's last race was the 1960 French Grand Prix.

(Photo by Stanley Sherman/Express/Getty Images)

14th May, 1961

1961 was the first year of the new 1.5 litre engine regulations, and Stirling Moss found himself in a Lotus-Climax 18 with the side panels taken out. That's the "simplify, then add lightness" idea turned to eleven. Moss went on to win the race with his underpowered Lotus, with Ferrari's Richie Ginther finishing just 3.6 seconds behind him. The side panels were taken out "to keep him cool." Cool he was.

Photo credit: Central Press/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

17th July, 1961

That young chap in the pedal car is future British Formula One World Champion Damon Hill at his christening, surrounded by racing legends (left to right) Bruce McLaren, Stirling Moss, Tony Brooks, his father Graham Hill, Jo Bonnier and Wolfgang vin Trips. We hope this photo is on his wall somewhere, because it's fantastic. No wonder, it was the sixties.

Photo credit: Keystone/Getty Images

20th April, 1962

Team officials and St John's Ambulance members gather round Stirling Moss while trying to extricate him from the wreckage. Moss was driving an experimental Lotus-Climax V8 in the Glover Trophy at Goodwood when he crashed. He survived, but it left him in a coma for a month. He recovered, but decided to retire from top-class racing after a private test session in a Lotus 19 the next year. He lapped a few tenths slower than before, and did not feel he had the command of the car to which he was accustomed. Many racing and medical observers have speculated that Moss simply tried to return too soon. We will never know.

Photo credit: Victor Blackman/Express/Getty Images

12th June, 1962

Stirling Moss watches the motor racing on television while recuperating in hospital after waking up from the coma. He was luckier than most from his era, and not just because of the toys he got while recovering...

Photo credit: Keystone/Getty Images

20th September, 1978

Sixteen years later, he was as active as ever. In this picture, he is about to start up his Austin Seven before a 10,000 mile international endurance attempt. While I don't know how that ended, his commitment to the sport and friendly attitude resulted in him getting better women at the age of 79 than most of us at any age. Well done Sir!

Photo credit: David Ashdown/Keystone/Getty Images

It's always a tricky thing to try and pinpoint the first of anything. The first working automobile, the first powered flight, the first beer of the night — all these things are usually surrounded by an impenetrable haze of uncertainty and occasionally, vomit. Often we can make some pretty decent guesses, but this time I feel pretty confident in making an out-and-out statement of what I think is fact:

The first vehicles with on-board electrical communication systems were Civil War Telegraph Wagons.

That means those battery-crammed wooden wagons are the direct ancestor of cars with radios, radiophones, car phones, all the way down to you sitting in your car with your iPhone or whatever in your hand.

Let that sink in.

Now, I hadn't heard about Civil War telegraph wagons at all until a few days ago. And know that I can practically hear the chorus of spit-takes from here. "You're a functioning adult who hasn't thought about Civil War mobile telegraphy until a few days ago? How are you even alive?" is what I'm sure all of you are shrieking at your laptops, flecks of partially-masticated Croissan'Wich dappling your screen.

I know, I know. But I've made up for lost time, and what I've learned is quite fascinating. What makes these mobile telegraph wagons so interesting is that they're one of those rare technological artifacts that exist well before the technology was really ready for them, because the need certainly was ready. See, both the North and South had a great need to be able to communicate while in the field. Telegraphy allowed for nearly instantaneous communication, but in the 1860s the telegraph network, while well-developed, did not extend into every battlefield and rural wilderness that armies found themselves in.

This is, of course, the perfect use of radio/wireless technology. Sadly, wires were still the only game in town for another several decades, but when the need is strong enough, you can overlook certain inconvenient details. Details like having to use a mule with a spool of copper wire to lay down thousands of miles of telegraph wire so the mobile telegraph wagons could connect to the larger telegraph network, or to another telegraph wagon at the other end.

The actual vehicles that are the ancestors of all our on-line cars were called Telegraph Battery Wagons. Just like the cell phone of today, most of the internal volume was consumed by battery needs. Open your cell phone and you'll find that most of the interior is packed with a form-fitting rechargeable battery. Open one of these telegraph wagons, and you'll find the same thing is true, essentially. Almost all of the wagon was packed with batteries.

Now, keep in mind these aren't the nice, clean, not-scar-you-with-acids batteries we enjoy today. These were likely something closer to a crapload of acid-filled jars. Common telegraph batteries of the era were Daniell Cells, which were, too keep things exciting in a moving wagon, open-topped jars. Closed-jar lead-acid Leclanché batteries, one of the first rechargable battery cells, didn't come around until after the war in 1866.

These Daniell Cell batteries made about 1.1 V each, and the number of batteries needed to send a signal a given distance varied on the type of wire it was sending over. Some estimates give 2V per 20 miles, some much more. Even if we estimate 1V per 10 miles, that's a lot of bulky, leaky batteries to get a useful distance. An average load of batteries for a telegraph battery wagon seems to have been about 100 cells.

In addition to being packed with battery cells, these wagons also had a small area with a telegraph key and a place for a person, very often a civilian contractor, to operate it. This is the key part that makes these clunky wagons so significant. Telegraphs were the first commercial/mainstream use of anything electrical at all, and the placement of a telegraph set in a wagon makes this combination the first electric component in any vehicle, ever. Unless someone finds evidence of a mobile electroplating setup in an ancient Persian chariot, at least.

Since I'm already pretty wildly diverging from our usual motor-driven fare, I may as well keep going, because there's some interesting stuff here. These mobile telegraph wagons would link one another with miles and miles of wire, and then at other points link into the larger established telegraph network. This would allow both inter-camp instant communication and also communication with Washington (or a bit less commonly, Richmond).

Since telegraphs use just one wire with simple coded pulses sent over them, it was very easy to connect these lines — when you have only one wire to connect, it's tricky to get it wrong. That also means the Civil was was the birth of the first cyberwarfare, cyberespionage, and hacking. I'm taking some liberties on the use of "cyber" but you can argue that a virtual electrical, Morse-coded world was made by the telegraph network, and that's roughly analogous to the internet.

Hacking/eavesdropping lines was pretty easy. You'd send some soldier/telegrapher out to a quiet section of telegraph line, and they'd splice in their own wire linking to their own telegraph sounder. That's it. To help combat this, the Union and Confederate armies used two tactics: shoot anyone they saw doing this, and codes.

These codes are especially interesting. According to the Civil War Signals site, an effective Union cipher was to use nonsense words mixed in the real message, and key words would signal a matrix layout for the words, and the order the words were to be read and/or ignored. The resulting encoded messages sound like hilarious dada-poetry:

Washington, D.C.,July 15,1863
A.H. Caldwell, Cipher-operator, General Mead's Headquarters:

Blonde bless of who no optic to get an impression I madison-square Brown cammer Toby ax the have turnip me Harry bitch rustle silk adrian counsel locust you another only of children serenade flea Knox country for wood that awl ties get hound who was war him suicide on for was please village large bat Bunyan give sigh incubus heavy Norris on trammeled cat knit striven without Madrid quail upright martyr Stewart man much bear since ass skeleton tell the oppressing Tyler monkey.

Bates.

"Ass skeleton?" "Tell the oppressing Tyler Monkey?" That's gold. Aside from providing pre-written content for the 1863 Manassas Poetry Slam, this code remained undeciphered by the end of the war.

So the next time you're driving and you fling your phone to the floor after seeing a cop drive past, take a moment and reflect how stunningly easy it is to communicate with anyone, anywhere, instantly. Pause and be grateful you're not driving a wooden-wheeled box crammed full of open glass jars of acid, trailing 100+ miles of uninsulated copper wire just so you can tell your mom that you can't talk now because you're driving.

What's the craziest thing you've ever done on a bet? Shaved your head? Snuck into a party when you weren't on the guest list? Played Russian Roulette with some enforcers from a Mexican drug cartel? (I would advise against the last one, personally. Things tend to go south a lot faster than you might expect.)

Whatever you've done on a bet, it's not as awesome as what Dr. Horatio Nelson Jackson did 110 years ago. On a whim and the desire to win $50, Jackson wagered that he could drive from one coast to another in an automobile, a feat that had never been done before and was largely considered impossible by many.

With the help of a 20 horsepower Winton touring car, a mechanic friend and a bulldog in racing goggles, Jackson made the impossible possible. Here's how he did it.

Before we get into Jackson's journey, let's talk about what America was like in 1903. Teddy Roosevelt was president, the first transatlantic radio broadcast had just been made, and the "horseless carriage" was still in its infancy. This was five years before Henry Ford's Model T brought motoring to the American masses, so cars were essentially still just playthings for the very wealthy. At the time of Jackson's trip, very few Americans had ever even seen an automobile before. (Motorsports were also in their infancy; that same year, the Paris-Madrid Race was held, killing eight people in the process.)

So the odds were definitely against Jackson, a wealthy gentleman and physician from Vermont who made this money the good old fashioned American way. No, not suing people! The other one — he married rich.

But Jackson was our kind of people, make no mistake about it. If Jalopnik had existed in the early 1900s, he probably would have been a contributor. He had this extremely optimistic, can-do attitude about everything and was more than willing to face the hardships involved with driving across the country.

As PBS tells it, Jackson was 31 at the time of the drive, and while he gave up practicing medicine in 1900 after a bout of tuberculosis, he wasn't hurting for money as his wife Bertha was their heiress to a cure-all tonic empire. The beverage, if you're curious, was called "Payne's Celery Compound" and it was 20 percent grain alcohol. (Regardless of what ailed you, I have no doubt that "compound" would make you feel a lot better.)

The story goes that Jackson undertook his journey after making a bet with a group of men in a San Francisco bar. History says that the other men argued that the automobile was a passing fad, and that it would be impossible to travel in one from there to New York in less than 90 days. Jackson said he could pull it off, and then someone bet him $50 he couldn't.

With the modern equivalent of about ONE MILLION DOLLARS $1,250 on the line, Jackson set out to prove them wrong. But while he was already an automotive enthusiast, he needed a special kind of car to get the job done.

His mechanic (and later co-driver) Sewall K. Crocker suggested a Winton. Back then, Cleveland's Winton Motor Carriage Company made cars that had a reputation for being tough and reliable. They bought a slightly used Winton Touring Car for $3,000 from a local Wells Fargo executive with a two-cylinder, 20 horsepower engine. (PBS says that Winton made 850 of them in 1903, bringing the nation's total registered cars to just 33,000.) Their rig included sleeping bags, rain coats, tools, a shotgun and a rifle, and a small camera to record the trip.

And with that, on May 23, Jackson and Crocker were off. They went north from San Francisco into Oregon and then east through the northern United States, passing through Wyoming, Nebraska, and Chicago along the way. Keep in mind that a journey like this one was was made even harder because roads were essentially nonexistent compared to what they're like today.

The encountered floods. They ran out of cash. They fixed or replaced nearly every part on the Winton. Local blacksmiths helped them weld on new parts. They crashed the car at least once, but thankfully, it wasn't serious.

The National Museum of American History says the two men used a block and tackle pulley system to extract the car when it got stuck in the mud. When it broke down, they wrote or telegraphed the factory asking for more parts and waited for them to be delivered by train.

Along the way, they acquired Bud, a bulldog who became their racing goggles-wearing companion and possibly the first dog to experience the joys of car travel — at least, in America, maybe.

As they traveled Jackson and Crocker found themselves making headlines in newspapers and magazines, not to mention generating a massive amount of publicity for Winton. No one had ever done what they were doing before, and many people along their route came out to get their first look at an actual automobile. Sometimes, other early automobile owners would come out and join them for a spell along their route.

In addition, Packard and Oldsmobile also dispatched their own teams to try and complete the trip as well, although they left after Jackson and Crocker did.

After a journey that was long and extremely arduous, and caused Jackson to lose 20 pounds along the way, the duo (and canine) made it into New York in the early morning hours of July 26. I'll let that article from PBS take it here:

It was 4:30 in the morning on Sunday, July 26th, when Jackson, Crocker and Bud crossed the Harlem River into Manhattan, drove down the city's deserted streets, and finally honked their horn to awaken the night porter at the Holland House hotel on 30th Street and 5th Avenue.

Jackson had made it from San Francisco in 63 days, 12 hours, and 30 minutes - well within his wager of 90 days. And having become the first to drive a car across the nation, within hours of their entrance into New York, he and Crocker and Bud were the toast of the town.

In total, Jackson spent about $8,000 on the trip, which is close to $200,000 today. He never collected his winnings from the guys at the bar in San Francisco.

As cars became more common in the 1910s and 1920s, Winton had a lot of trouble keeping up with the competition. They eventually ceased production and became a subsidiary of General Motors, where they made engines for boats.

As for Jackson, his life of derring-do continued well after the drive ended. He retired to Vermont with Bud and his wife for a time. Then he enlisted in the Army when World War I broke out and came back a decorated hero, despite being well into his 40s when he entered the service. He donated his Winton to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington and would regale anyone who would listen about the drive that made history, according to PBS. (Bud's racing goggles are on display there too.)

To celebrate the 100th anniversary of Jackson and Crocker's drive, documentary filmmaker Ken Burns directed the film Horatio's Drive: America's First Road Trip for PBS in 2003. Much of what you read here comes from PBS' fantastic website about the drive, which goes into far more detail than I can. I'd encourage you to watch the film next time it's on as well.

Also, antique auto owners repeated this feat in 2003. Maybe we'll see some people do it again this year on the 110th anniversary.

One last thing about Jackson. He died in 1955 at the age of 82, and the world had changed tremendously in his lifetime. By then cars had transformed from a novelty into a global industry. Once, they were slow-moving horseless carriages; now, they were sleek and colorful rocket-shaped rides that represented all the optimism that postwar America had to offer. And they would only continue to get faster as the decades went on. In 2006, Alex Roy did it in just 32 hours.

I have a feeling that if Jackson were still alive, he'd be the first to try and beat that.

Photos credit Getty Images, AP, Public Domain

Hat tip to reader "I'd walk for my car," whose comment on the "Tell Us Something We Don't Know" story inspired this feature!

It seems that today we, as a country, will be inaugurating a President. It's the same President we had before, so it should go pretty easily, seeing as how he already has all his stuff in the White House and all the radios preset with his chosen stations. Still, it's a big deal, since we only do this once every leap year or something like that, so it's worth taking the time to see how cars fit into the whole thing.

It turns out much of the inauguration takes place in a car's natural habitat, a road! The President will be travelling in a car on a road as he travels from the White House to the Capitol building, where he'll go in the sealed chamber of the Inaugurotron to be re-saturated with Presidential gamma-rays or whatever it is they do to re-Presidential him. I'm sure it'll be very exciting.

So, to commemorate this historic day, I've got a list here of ten Presidential Inaugural Facts About Cars, and half of these facts are the kind of facts that aren't true. You know, like what Creationists use to prove science things.

See if you can ID the fake ones in the comments! We'll have the answers tomorrow. Have fun!

1. The easiest way to drive a car that uses the same chassis as the current Presidential limo is to rent a GMC box truck from U-Haul.

2. A deal with the well-known taxi making company, Checker, to build the Presidential limo was scuttled by President Nixon in 1969 for fear of reminding the public of the scandal that prompted his famous Checkers speech.

3. President Warren G. Harding was the third president to have an official, government-owned car, and the first to ride to his inauguration in a car.

4. That car that Harding used for his inauguration was a Packard Twin-Six.

5. Assuming Presidential inaugural cars had to be American-built, it would have been possible for President Harding to have selected a Rolls-Royce instead.

6. If the Presidential car was a Bugatti Veyron, driven at top speed for the length of the parade route, the distance could be covered in right about 0.0079 seconds. That's not counting acceleration or braking time.

7. As a nod to the energy crisis, President Carter's inaugural ride was to have been a Florida-built electric Citicar, painted glossy black and specially prepared for the event. Unfortunately, a worker had neglected to recharge the car after practice runs, forcing Carter to take his now-famous walk from the Capitol to the White House.

8. Cars that have driven Presidents in inaugurations have been nicknamed The Beast, Sunshine Special, and The Flapjack Flyer.

9. Taft was the President that converted the White House stables into a garage, and the first to allocate an amount for the purchase of motor vehicles. Today, that amount would be just a couple hundred short of being able to buy a new Scion FR-S.

10. For Ronald Reagan's second inauguration in 1985, the plan was to use a ZIL limousine that had been presented as a gift to the President by Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. Using the ZIL would have demonstrated the President's support of Gorbachev's Glasnost policies of openness, but a last-minute plea by White House Chief of Staff Howard Baker convinced the President to use the normal American-made Presidential limo.

UPDATE: I realized I made an error in one of the "true" ones, so now 60% are lies. Sorry, but, you know, carry on!

In the summer of 2011, I was having a breakfast with my English friends at a posh restaurant on the bank of the Danube, and we started an argument about cars. That wasn't surprising, since after finishing our coffees, we were about to go on short road trip to Etyek, a wine region not far from Budapest. Two cars were waiting for us at the parking lot: a Maserati Coupé, and a 1974 Aston Martin V8 S3 which I was about to drive.

The English side claimed that the Mini was a bigger engineering achievement than the Trabant, while my vote went to the communists. Hear me out on this one!

While I love the original Mini and find everything about Sir Alexander Issigonis's design brilliant, I can't forget the fact that in East-Germany, engineers had to come up with a family car from post-war scraps.

You see, steel was not an option, so they used Duroplast, which is basically a cheap version of fiberglass, made out of recycled cotton which came from other East-German factories. It's stronger than steel (but that doesn't make the Trabant less deadly in case of an accident), and can also be pressed just like metal. The car also had to seat four with their luggage in the back, weigh less than 650 kilos and have front-wheel drive, while the only engine option was the already outdated 600 cc two-stroke with a little more than 20 horsepower. Meanwhile, the communist party denied every plan the engineers came up with to make the car more attractive, and since they didn't like the idea of a German car damaging Russian sales in the first place, the final product could only reach production after the suits have seen the massive demand from the East-German public.

The 601 could take a lot of abuse, then be fixed with a hammer. It also had good acceleration at low speeds, and you could take it off-road thanks it's front-wheel drive and lightweight body. Lots of noise and smoke came as standard, but the Trabant was a fun (and available) car for the masses behind the Iron Curtain, where it was needed the most. More than 3 million were made from 1963 until not much after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

But while it was pretty good from a planned economy, export sales never really got on even with this movie getting the word out. One could only wonder why...

Photo credit: sludgegulper. That blue Trabant lives in central London. Hat tip to Stipistop!

It's been six years since Ford stopped making the GT, and forty four since they last won at Le Mans with a car so low most of us wouldn't even fit in it. The original British-American GT40 racecar was good enough to kick Ferrari's ass thanks to Carroll Shelby's ideas, while the modern version was not only a brave answer to the question of an American supercar, but had also proven itself on the racetracks in GT1 and GT3 tunes. Carroll Shelby helped Ford with that as well.

Let's go from 1963 'till last year, or Lola to Hennessey, if you will.

Lola Mk6

Developed by Lola at their new factory in Slough, the Mk6 wasn't Lola's most successful racer. It made it on foot to Le Mans in 1963 where it revved out due to low-gearing on the Mulsanne Straight, then crashed. But since it was using a Ford V8, that was good enough for the Americans to contract them for their urgent Le Mans project instead of the declining Cooper team.

That was especially helpful after Colin Chapman's polite refusal. Lotus was way over its head at the time, while Henry Ford II really wanted to get back at Enzo Ferrari for cutting off a deal he already had spent millions on to take over Ferrari, which was dominating in Le Mans between 1960-65.

Photo credit: Lola Heritage

Ford GT40 Mk1

Since Lola had its own Le Mans team, Eric Broadley only agreed on a short-term collaboration, which meant only two Mk6 chassis were given to Ford. They hired Aston Martin's ex-team manager John Wyer, and sent Roy Lunn to England as well, as he was the only engineer at the company who had any experience with mid-engined cars, after making the Mustang I concept in 1962. Ford then established Ford Advanced Vehicles Ltd. After the first chassis was finished at Abbey Panels of Coventry, the GT/101 (the "40" was only a nickname at the time due to its height) was exhibited in New York, before being taken to the Nürburgring 1000 km in May, 1964. You can see Bruce McLaren and Phil Hill standing next to it in the pits. It retired with suspension failure.

Photo Credit: Ford Motor Company

Shelby Ford GT40

After all three GT40s retired at the 1964 24 Hours of Le Mans, Ford decided to let John Wyer go just after the Nassau race. The team was handed over to Carroll Shelby, with the cars being shipped to Texas without being cleaned from the dirt of the race. Shelby wasn't happy about that, but he got Ford a win at the car's maiden race: Ken Miles and Lloyd Ruby drove the Shelby to victory at the Daytona Continental 2000 km. Finally, Henry Ford II had a very good reason to smile. Back at home, the new Mustang wasn't doing bad either...

Photo credit: Ford Motor Company

MkII: Hammertime

The rest of 1965 was a disaster, but the experience they gained led to success the next year. The GT40 MkII was ready with its crazy exhaust pipes connected to a 7 litre V8. It was so powerful that it turned team mates into dangerous kamikazes, so the boss had to interfere with a hammer at the Sebring 12 Hour Race. Four people died there that day, but the race didn't stop for a second. The MkII scored Ford its first Le Mans 1-2-3 victory, but happiness was overshadowed. Bruce McLaren and Chris Amon were so close to the leading car driven by Ken Miles and Denny Hulme that Ford asked them to play it safe and cross the finish line at the same time instead of crashing into each other. But since the McLaren car started 18 meters behind Miles's GT40, it would have covered more distance, making the photo finish useless. Since Miles was very dedicated to the program, he felt so bad about Ford's decision that he slowed down just before the finish. He died two month later while testing the experimental "J-car" which later become the MkIV.

Photo credit: Ford Motor Company

The champagne wasters

After Miles's death, the J-car was completely redesigned. The flat-topped "bread van" idea was ditched since the car needed more downforce in order to stay stable at the much higher (almost 220 mph) top speed. At 2,660 lb, the new MkIV weighted 300 lb less than the MkII (the MkIII was a road car only). Ten GT40s arrived at Le Mans, four of which were MkIVs. The 7 litre engine from the Ford Galaxie remained, and together with the low-drag body, Ford took the trophy once again, making Ferrari very angry indeed. A. J. Foyt and Dan Gurney won the race in front of two Ferrari 330 P4s, making them the first (and so far only) Americans to do so. Gurney needed a special bubble roof in order to fit in the car, which he thanked not only by winning, but also by inventing the whole champagne-spraying ritual. The show must go on, right?

Photo credit: Getty Images

Back to the roots

The high speeds achieved in 1967 resulted in new rules for the next year, so the size of the engines was limited to three litres, just like in Formula-1. This took out the Ferrari 330P, but an exception was made for cars of which at least fifty were made. Enzo Ferrari decided not to race in 1968 even with a 3-litre F1 engine in his garage, while Ford had to use the old MkI. Shelby stepped down to give space to John Wyer once again, who used some tricks from his Mirage M1 race car on the GT40 as well. They bored the 4.7 to 4.9 litres, and installed o-rings between the deck and head to prevent head gasket failure, which was a common problem with the original engine. The race was close, with only one Mk1 standing in the end out of the four starters. But that was the winning car with Pedro Rodriguez and Lucien Bianchi behind the wheel, who beat Porsche's 907 and 908 racers by only one lap.

Photo credit: Ford Motor Company

394 feet

Ferrari was back in 1969, while Porsche spent almost all if its cash on the development of the 917, which came with the firm's first twelve-cylinder engine, and all the titanium, magnesium and exotic alloys they could find around Stuttgart. During the race, the two factory 917s were stopped by clutch bell housing problems, but the third car's private driver wasn't that lucky. John Woolfe crashed and died on lap one at Maison Blanche. He didn't use his seat belt, probably due to the traditional Le Mans start, when drivers had to run and start their cars as fast as they could in order to pull away from the grid. The later winner, Jacky Ickx protested against this habit by walking slowly to his car at the start. That was a pretty generous gesture, considering that he could only beat the flat-eight powered Porsche 908 of Hans Herrmann by 394 feet. He got lucky, since the Porsche had brake problems, but at that point, it became clear that the GT40 was outdated forever. Porsche was unbeatable in the seventies.

Photo credit: Ford Motor Company

Replicas

Building a GT40 wasn't rocket science, so privateers continued after Ford left the scene. British Safir Engineering got the rights and the blueprints, while in America, Superformance built a continuation of the MkII under license. They updated the interior with a hidden air conditioner and put modern brakes on, but the core of the design remained the same. Several other companies made kit cars and replicas, and while the quality of these cars varied quite a lot, some were probably better than the original. Seeing one on the street is quite an experience.

GT90

Ford spent $3 million on the development of the GT90, but it was worth it, as it became the shining star of the 1995 Detroit Auto Show. Ford described it as a technological test bed for future products, and while the show car had tires with "GT90" carved directly into the tread and remote controlled doors, it was also a fully functional prototype. Power came from a 48-valve six-liter V12 with four Garrett T2 turbochargers (two Lincoln V8s with the last cylinders cut off, then welded together), producing 720 horsepower. The all around double wishbone suspension and the FFD-Ricardo five-speed manual came from the mighty Jaguar XJ220, while the body was made of carbon fiber, using Ford's brand new "Edge" design language. They needed space shuttle style tiles to protect it from the heat of the engine...

Photo credit: Supercars.net

Workhorse 1

In 2002, Ford unveiled the GT40 Concept. The public and the press loved it, so there was no question about going forward. Ford continued "Project Petunia", now with the help of Carroll Shelby himself. The first prototype was called Workforce 1, and legend has it that "several of the Ford GT engineering team members led by Kip Ewing and Rich Rinke took the flat black fiberglass body panels home and for several nights sanded and painted it until the early morning hours." The result is an exterior that pays homage to the 1967 GT40 Shelby all-American team victory at Le Mans by champagne wasters Dan Gurney and A.J. Foyt.

Photo credit: Ford Motor Company

Ford GT

Built to celebrate the 100th Anniversary of Ford Motor Company and the 40th Anniversary of Ford's legendary GT40 winning streak at the 24 Hours of Le Mans, the new car was 3 inches taller compared to the original, so the GT43 name was also under consideration, especially after Ford couldn't buy back the GT40 trademark from Safir Engineering. While the assembly started at Mayflower Vehicle Systems in Norwalk, the cars were painted by Saleen in Troy, with the engine and manual transmission along with interior finishing being done in the SVT building at Ford's Wixom plant. Retired Microsoft Executive Jon Shirley got the first car after outbidding other suitors at the Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance. 4,038 GTs were produced between 2004 and 2006.

Photo credit: Ford Motor Company

The GT is cool

It looked great, and had a 550 hp supercharged V8, but Jeremy Clarkson still didn't like his GT. On the other hand, Jay Leno approved. We trust Jay on this one...

Photo credit: Ford Motor Company

The GTX1 is even cooler

Ford made two roadster prototypes of the original car, one of which won the 12 Hours of Sebring in 1966, so it was only natural to do something similar with the new kid. The GTX1 was made for SEMA 2005 from the #2 coupe by Kip Ewing, and could be configured as a coupe, t-top, or full convertible. It was also lowered, and got 150 extra horsepower. While Ford didn't put it into production, they directed any GT owners lusting for the open top experience to Genaddi for the official roadster conversion. As always, the orange prototype remains the most valuable.

Lower, wider and faster

While the critics main point was that the modern GT is nothing but a bloated shadow of the original, I respectfully disagree. In my eyes, the GT was a road car as close to the original as possible, which could also be turned into a serious racer in no time in the right hands. Ford GTs were all over the tracks is both GT1 and GT3 forms, and even made it to the Japanese Super GT class, powered by a 3.5-litre Cosworth engine straight out of a 90s F1 car. That was pretty badass.

Photo credit: Wikipedia

Insane in the membrane

During the development of the car that does 0-to-186 mph in 13.63 seconds, John Hennessey also had time to make Ford GTs do 263.3 miles per hour. That doesn't only prove that the Texan is probably a bit on the crazy side, but also shows how bulletproof the GT's design is.

Ford really should wait another hundred years for a new version, especially since petrol will most likely disappear by then. And no, an electric GT won't cut it. We like this beast as the heavy drinker it is...

This is the O.S.I. Silver Fox from 1967. The Italians wanted to go to Le Mans to score a speed record with it. Sadly, they didn't, but their attempt is worth noting for its pure batshittery.

Officine Stampaggi Industriali was a coachbuilding company founded in Turin in 1960 by former Ghia boss Luigi Segre and Arrigo Olivetti, the head of wheelmakers Fergat. They made custom bodies for Alfa Romeo, Fiat and Ford models, and also got Sergio Sartorelli on the payroll. He designed classics such as the second generation of Karmann-Ghias (Type 34), the Ghia 1500 GT, and the series of concepts for Renault with their backs in the front. At O.S.I., he created what many consider to be the most beautiful Ford ever (made out of a Taunus), the 20M TS Coupé:

The Silver Fox was also his child, but a less successful one, to say the least. Powered by an Alpine engine located behind the navigator, the spare wheel went behind the driver to balance it out. This weird race car was unveiled at the Turin Motor Show in '67, but couldn't make it to Le Mans after O.S.I. ran into some financial difficulties the next year. Shame, as the moment of its takeoff could have been a great moment of Le Mans history... or a terribly tragic one.

The Woods Motor Vehicle Company was dead and gone by the end of WWI, but they were oddly prescient with many of their ideas. For example, they had a gasoline/electric hybrid vehicle way back in 1914, the Dual Power Model 44. This wasn't the first hybrid ever, but it does show that they were seriously experimenting with the technology.

Now, at the time gasoline was still too cheap and people had yet to develop the ability to be really self-satisfied based on their fuel choices, so the car never took off, and the company didn't survive. But, during Woods' brief, innovative life, they did come up with one especially interesting prototype: the Woods Interurban.

The Interurban was an electric car, but only sometimes. Sometimes it was a gasoline car. It achieved this act of automotive schizophrenia not by being any sort of dual-motored hybrid monster, but rather by letting the driver choose to transplant one engine type for the other based on the trip: if it was local, stick with the electric. Going on a long trip? Pop in the gas motor.

See? The first car with intentionally swappable engines. It was a failure, and like almost all good failures (gum-filled Combos, rocket boots), I think it's worth another go.

In the case of the Interurban prototype, the electric motor could be swapped for an 8 HP two-cylinder gasoline engine, and the process was said to take about 15 minutes, which, for the era, was impressive. There's only one picture that seems to be the Woods Interurban, and looking at it shows a car with what appears to be a large, removable hood, and a design and layout very similar to Renaults of the era. Like the French cars, the Interurban looks to have its radiator mounted behind the engine, which may have made engine removal/replacement easier.

There's not much information available, but I suspect the reason the car was never developed further was because of the logistical difficulties in keeping around an extra motor to swap, and the mechanics of the swap itself.

Back in 1914, these problems must have seemed pretty insurmountable. But, nearly 100 years later, this is a very different story. Technology's changed a lot. Back then, if you wanted to play Angry Birds you had to hike on down to an aviary with your own rocks and pigs and slingshot. Today, the same activities can be had with something in your pocket. With the automotive industry, the changes are equally dramatic.

1914 and 2013 share one key thing when it comes to electric cars: nobody's really happy with batteries. Yes, battery technology has improved dramatically, but despite a century of work, we're still stuck with heavy, relatively inefficent batteries that make 100 mile+ ranged electric cars a rarity. The Nissan Leaf, currently the most popular pure-electric car, can go between 47-105 miles per charge, according to Nissan. In town, that's fine. But it just doesn't cut it for long trips.

Sure, some companies are pushing range-extending gas-powered trailers as an option, but those are clunky and heavy solutions, and driving a car with any kind of trailer is a pain in the ass, especially when it comes to backing up. There's got to be a better way.

And there is: revisiting the 1914 Woods Interurban engine-swap solution. By having separate, swappable drivetrains for our hypothetical New Interurban, a more limited set of batteries with a 40-50 mile range would be fine for city use, and a variety of gas motors could take the place of the electric motor/battery pack when needed.

The way I think this could best be done today is by having the whole drivetrain, with wheels and axles, swappable. As applied to a front-driver car (the most likely configuration) the entire front assembly would be swappable, including the front subframe with wheels, transaxle, gasoline engine with tank or electric motor with battery pack. The front fascia of the car may be a part of the unit as well, as the gas motor will require a more substantial radiator and cooling system.

Modern drive-by-wire controls would make interfacing brake, throttle, steering, and other functions vastly easier, with only electrical connections needed to and from the engine unit and the rest of the car.

To make this a viable proposition, the engine swap has to be as easy and painless as possible. Ideally, it will resemble nothing like a conventional engine swap, even a really, really fast one. No lifting, no grease and oil, no exertion of any kind. Ideally, the drivetrains should be able to be swapped in five minutes or so.

How? Well, it'll take some special infrastructure. Thats okay, since I'm just imagining this, and in my imagination I was approved for an imaginary loan with a surprisingly brutal interest rate that lets me spend whatever I need to make this happen. I like to keep my imagination a bit grounded. Also, in this scenario I'm imagining I have a jetpack, but my license for it was suspended.

The way to swap these drivetrains is to, essentially, roll them in and out,. To do that we'll need special swapping bays that are like regular parking spaces, but with a central guide rail. This rail both supports the front of the car when the power pack is rolled out, and the non-wheeled part of the power pack itself. You'd pull into a bay, tell your car you were ready for a swap via some manner of dash control, which would cause the car to unplug is electrical connections to the power pack.

Then, and these steps would be either automated or with actual, huggable humans, the front bumper assembly would be released and moved, the few physical mounts and connections would be released (ideally via tool-less means) and the whole power pack/front wheel assembly would be rolled away. In is place the other power pack (gas or electric) would be rolled into position, connected electrically and physically, and off you go.

The electric pack would include a central spine of batteries; in the gas version this volume would contain the gas tank, which would likely need to mate with a filler tube/cap assembly on the car. Once out of the car, the power pack would be recharged (in the case of an electric one) or serviced, and then stored to await the next car that needed it.

You could just swap depleted electrical power packs for charged electrical units, if wanted as well. Or, a variety of performance levels and sizes of gasoline engines could be offered as well.

I like this solution because it takes a bold, harsh look at the problem of battery range and bravely turns and runs away, into the welcoming arms of good old gasoline. Or diesel, for that matter. Or biofuel or CNG or whatever. Having a power-and-fuel agnostic car design means the job dictates the best choice to power your car, instead of having to try and cram one solution for everything.

So what do you think? How viable is this century-old idea I'm stealing?

CLARIFICATION UPDATE: Some people have been saying, wisely, that people wouldn't want to have to store an extra drivetrain. I agree. I was picturing this as something where a dealer or service facility keeps the engine you're not using. You don't really "own" it, when you buy your car you have a contract that you get whatever drivetrain you want from any authorized service center. So, you drive in, drop off your electric drivetrain, pick up your gas motor, take your trip, come back, and on your way to work the next day have another electric drivetrain popped in.

This also means no service is ever needed on your engine, since you're getting serviced units every time you swap. In theory, you could never swap, but part of the purchase may stipulate some mandatory maintenance swaps, for some period of time. Make sense?

Seventy horsepower is considered to be such a low figure nowadays that in some cases, mechanically identical engines can make 70 more or 70 less horsepower depending on how the engine management software is setup. But back in the seventies, cars in Europe were light as a feather, and 70 horsepower could indeed make them fly.

The second series of the Fiat 127, which arrived in 1977, was much less attractive that first one the Pio Manzù designed, but the Sport edition that came out the next year made everybody forget about that rather quickly. In 1978, the VW Golf GTI was already three years old, so the idea of a hot hatch was nothing new, but the 127 Sport gave power to the people in the form of a smaller and much cheaper package. This was no more an economy car, but rather something that could kill you. Its top speed was a hundred miles an hour.

Fiat was so proud of the fact that they got 70 horses out of the Brazilian-made 1049 cc engine with the help of a two-barrel carburetor and a rev-happy camshaft that they put a shiny "70 HP" badge right on the mesh-patterned black radiator grille. The Sport could only be ordered with the three door body, while color options were limited to orange (with black stripes), black (with orange stripes) or metallic gray (with black stripes). It also got 155/70 tyres on a special set of alloys, extra spoilers and air intake, and a dual exhaust pipe to complete the looks.

Inside, you were looking at the tachometer through a small and fat two-spoke aluminum steering wheel, your right hand was on a five-speed stick, while the seats had contrasting colours to compliment the stripes outside. The top of the line model also had velvet seats, tinted windows and a sunroof, while the rear window was heated and had a wiper for those rainy days.

Most of these cars rusted away in the last three decades, and there is only an orange one for sale in Hungary at the moment with a widened rear track and black Abarth wheel arch extensions. The price tag is $1800 and it looks like about another $900 is needed to get it back on the road. I know I shouldn't, but if it's still there before summer, I just might...