The Hydrogen Honda CR-V Fuel Cell Could Be A Future Honda had a big press conference earlier today in Japan and the company announced its plan for the hydrogen fuel-cell Honda CR-V. You can read a press release about the plan right here, but the highlight is that Honda’s going to use a next-gen hydrogen fuel-cell system it developed with GM and toss it into the utterly non-threatening CR-V small SUV....
The Demand Is Much Higher That Expected Believe it or not, Ford didn’t expect the Lightning to be massively successful, initially expecting production to be a small sliver of current demand. As CEO Jim Farley said, “We started with, I think, 40 [thousand units], then we went to 80, now we’re breaking one side of the whole building down to expand the final assembly space that we can get to 150....
Check the tires out! They were dirt cheap at under $40 a pop: The reason why I’m putting time into getting the Tracker looking nice is that, after having AAA tow the broken vehicle to my place, I headed to Autozone and bought this “bolt-in cartridge fuse” for a little over five bucks: The previous owner had fried this main fuse while trying to demonstrate how well the Suzuki ran....
We hear so much about vehicles like David’s Golden Eagle and the Changli of Jason, but look in the background of some recent pictures. Notice a white first generation Scion xB with bold AUTOPIAN logos on it? source: The Autopian That’s what purports to be the site’s ‘test car’, though what these ‘test’ encompass I am completely unaware of. The only thing I am told is that there ‘are videos coming’ which one might guess will be of a highly intellectual level....
RV manufacturers have been joining automotive manufacturers in trying to find ways to electrify the future. Airstream has a concept for a travel trailer with EV gear that assists its tow vehicle. Thor has an electric Transit camper concept. Bowlus has a camper that’s all-electric, and we’ve even seen plenty of concepts for trucks like the Rivian R1T or the Tesla Cybertruck. Last year, Winnebago presented its own concept for an electric camper van....
“Huh. Those holes are missing.” I say to myself, with furrowed brow, pointing my headlamp at the location this crossmember should have bolted right into. Something was wrong. Maybe I need to cross reference my 1984 and 1991 Ford E-350s and see where the frame holes are on those. [Editor’s Note: Meet Charles. He’s a Battlebots geek, MIT enginerd, and van dork. These are all compliments, of course, and the reasons why I want him to contribute here at The Autopian....
To put it another way: I find it super weird that automakers are building the cars I have begged for and that the cars I once said were good and under-appreciated are now super popular and expensive. [Editor’s Note: Before Matt continues this article of obscure pop culture references and various somewhat car-related musings, allow me to do what he should be doing in this introduction: Everyone, please welcome former Jalopnik boss and Tangent Vector video guru Matt Hardigree....
Look at this interior! All those hounds’ teeth! That rich liver-y color of the vinyl, all the curvy shapes and piping and moldings and that peculiar gray dashboard! Look at that spindly, incredibly delicate gearshift! It looks like a conductors’ baton or a Q-Tip jammed in the floor. This interior is basically this woman …just, you know, as a car interior. I want more Dauphine. Give it to me, me:...
Wow, lots of brave souls out there, choosing British charm over Japanese reliability. Honestly, with both of these cars in front of me, it would be a coin toss for me. I’ve always liked Jags, but something about the weirdness of that Sigma speaks to me. But now, let’s talk trucks. Everybody loves beat-up old trucks, right? OK, what about beat-up old little trucks? How about beat-up old little work trucks?...
(Welcome to Member Rides. This is the weekly feature where we look at people who became members of the site by signing up here and parting with a little of their hard-earned dough to keep The Autopian going. Our plan is to do these every week! Credit to 98z28, who volunteered to be our guinea pig for the first ever installment). Autopian: Hey, thanks for doing this! Tell us a little about yourself: where do you live and what you do?...
Welcome back to Comment Of The Day! Every day, we read every single comment posted on our site and pick the one that made us laugh, get informed, or feel warm inside. You don’t have to go into our comments sections and write thousand-word stories about why you love a car so much, but a lot of you do, and that means a lot to us. So we’re highlighting some of the most excellent bits of thought that you’ve formed into words and digitized onto our website....
Here, you can watch it yourself: I really like the sight gag of the complex dashboard, because holy crap is it complicated. Even though the Monsters, Inc. fictional universe uses the same Roman alphabet (and English language) we’re used to, the presumably international-market car relies instead on a library of graphic symbols, which gleefully lives just on the edges of comprehension. Those 3×3 grids of buttons, of which there’s at least two sets, remind me a bit of buttons on old video mixer boards:...
Welcome to The Morning Dump, bite-sized stories corralled into a single article for your morning perusal. If your morning coffee’s working a little too well, pull up a throne and have a gander at the best of the rest of yesterday. Vroom Is In Some Shit Online used car sales startups, am I right? Regardless of brand, they all sit there gnashing their teeth, chanting cries of “Disrupt! Disrupt! Disrupt!...
Looks like it’s a dead man’s party up in here. I don’t know what it is about hearses, but folks who love them really love them. Someday, I need to show you all my friend Eric’s custom ’66 Cadillac hearse; it’s a sight to behold. But for now, we have more pressing matters, in the form of two uncommon trucks (or near-trucks) that both need some work. But both of them come with extra parts to help you on your way....
Good heavens, what’s happening here? That isn’t fine British leather, that’s glued mouse fur from a 1990s GM product. It seems that someone has scythed away the bodywork of a fourth-generation Camaro and plunked an XJS shell on top. What should we even call this thing? A Jagulet? A Chevuar? A Camuar? A Jagmaro? Fair play to the builder of this Anglo-American creation, it does seem to be packed with some pretty good stuff....
The joint company is known as Sony Honda Mobility (SHM), has yet to release any details on what the EVs themselves may be like, if they will be built on existing Honda platforms (I’d bet so) or pricing or how they’ll be branded or anything like that, but they have talked a bit about the sorts of interesting contributions from the Sony side, which will include software systems and sensors and other related technology for the automated driving systems for the car, which are said to include both Level 2 semi-automated driving and the highly confusing Level 3 conditional automated driving....
You can see some of these proto-Beetle designs up there, with Edmund Rumper’s Tropfenauto from 1921 at the center, and then going clockwise we have Josef Ganz’ Standard Superior from 1933, then Ledwinka’s Tatra V570 prototype from 1931, then DKW’s rear-engined streamliner prototype of 1933, then Josef Ganz again there in the 1930 Ardie-Ganz car, and, of course there were some others, all around the early-to-mid 1930s and having some basic traits like a rear-mounted engine and a curvy, beetle-ish body....
Ford first teased the Transit Trail last month. The company’s teaser confirmed rumors that the van, already for sale in the United Kingdom from 2020, will be sold in the United States. I wondered how close this van would be to its counterpart overseas, and now I know. At least on paper, it’s even better than what you can get across the Atlantic. (Full Disclosure: Ford invited me out to a lake out near Detroit to see the new Transit Trail van....
[Editor’s note: We realize we’re late on this story, but our site launched after the GR Corolla’s debut. And since we’re going to be writing quite a bit about this hot hatch, we need an intro post. So if you’ve been living under a rock, we’ve got your back! -DT] The Specs Let’s start with the engine. The rumormill knew that the GR Corolla would get a bump in output over the GR Yaris, but I don’t think anyone expected a full 300 horsepower from its G16E-GTS 1....
Hold on, I’m getting a message. Ah. It appears we’re not in Frankfurt, it’s not 2001 and we’re not even covering the 2002 7-Series. That’s a bit of a shame. Still, the parallels between the 2002 BMW 745i and the all-new 2023 BMW 7-Series are strong enough to hang a cable car from. Twenty years since the infamous Bangle Butt broke cover, an all-new 7-Series is here with controversial styling and enough tech to make your head spin....
