Latest Posts Under: Trivia
Decades before muscle cars ruled American roads, Cleveland engine builder Alexander Winton set out in 1897 to prove a car could survive an 800-mile trip from Ohio to New York City, and did it in nine days over roads barely fit for a horse and buggy. His stubborn pursuit of reliability didn’t stop there, eventually paving the way for the first successful cross-country automobile drive in 1903. Here’s the story of the record-setting trip that helped convince America cars were here to stay.
Long before muscle cars ruled the streets, an electric car with no engine roar at all set the record for fastest vehicle on earth. Camille Jenatzy’s La Jamais Contente broke 100 km/h in 1899 using nothing but two electric motors and a featherweight aluminum shell. This trivia roundup also covers the Chevy Vega’s ill-fated Car of the Year win and the shifting balance of global car manufacturing power.
Steam power was a genuine rival to internal combustion in the earliest days of the automobile, and Leon Serpollet’s flash boiler was central to that fight. His design generated usable steam almost instantly instead of requiring a long warm-up, and in 1902 it helped him set a 75 mph land speed record. His death in 1907 left flash-boiler technology as one of the automobile’s more fascinating dead ends.
Nitrogen tire fills promise longer-lasting pressure and better mileage, but independent testing from Consumer Reports and NHTSA found the real-world gains on everyday cars are far smaller than the marketing suggests. Ordinary air is already about 78 percent nitrogen, and mixing the two does no harm at all. Read on for what nitrogen actually changes, where it makes sense, and why it will never replace a monthly pressure check.
The 1956 Buick Centurion replaced its rearview mirror with a television camera in the tail and a screen in the dashboard, at a time when television itself was still new in most American homes. It worked, and then nothing happened for thirty-five years. The gap between that Motorama show car and the backup camera in every new vehicle sold today is one of the longest idea-to-adoption stretches in automotive history.
Long before the Hemi, Dodge started as a bicycle-parts patent and a Detroit machine shop making stove parts. Horace and John Dodge built their fortune as Henry Ford’s exclusive parts supplier, sometimes paid in stock instead of cash, before striking out to build cars under their own name in 1914. Their story ends almost as fast as it began.
A nineteenth-century French physicist’s glass jar of lead and acid still powers every muscle car on the road today. Gaston Plante’s 1859 lead-acid battery set the template that Delco and Detroit’s big-block engines would come to depend on for reliable starts. Here is how a decades-old invention quietly shaped the cars in this trivia list.
The airbag was patented in the early 1950s, yet not one classic muscle car ever left the factory with one. General Motors tried offering it in the 1970s, Mercedes-Benz finally made it work on the 1981 S-Class, and dual front airbags did not become mandatory in the United States until 1998. Read on to find out why an idea that existed before the GTO took nearly three decades to reach a dashboard, and what that means for anyone driving a classic today.
A lime-green Cougar so radically reworked that showgoers assumed it was a new model altogether — that was Mercury’s 1970 El Gato concept, unveiled at back-to-back auto shows before vanishing for good. It borrowed its fastback roofline from a Mustang, swapped its back seat for a European-style cargo shelf, and tested run-flat tire technology that failed spectacularly. Ford’s standard practice of destroying show cars means no one has documented seeing it since 1970. Here’s the story behind Mercury’s strangest concept car.
Long before Detroit’s muscle car wars, two Indiana blacksmiths built a company that would eventually produce one of the era’s most overlooked performance machines. The Studebaker brothers started with horseshoes, survived a Civil War wagon contract, and only reluctantly entered the automobile business decades later. Their company’s final act included a supercharged V8 capable of matching contemporaries from Detroit’s Big Three. It simply ran out of time to prove it.
Nearly two decades before airbags became mandatory, General Motors quietly built and sold them, first on government fleet cars, then as a factory option across four full-size luxury nameplates. Here is the surprisingly early and short-lived story of GM’s Air Cushion Restraint System, and why the technology vanished from showrooms for almost twenty years.
A Hemi ‘Cuda driver from 1970 would lose an argument about which car is actually safer to drive fast against a modern owner, and it has nothing to do with horsepower. Muscle car engineers spent a decade chasing bigger displacement while ignoring the thing that actually kills people on the road: drifting out of your lane unnoticed. It took nearly forty years for an automaker to build a system that watches the white lines for you, and it started on a car nobody would call a muscle car. Read on to find out how it got there.
From 1973 through 1977, Chevrolet let Chevelle Laguna buyers order front seats that rotated ninety degrees toward the open door — a genuine comfort feature bolted into a car built to chase GTOs and Road Runners on the street. Original Madrid grain vinyl upholstery has become so scarce that even rough, worn covers sell for hundreds of dollars, pushing reproduction manufacturers to start building exact replacements. Read on to find out why this once-overlooked option has become one of the most sought-after details on the entire car.