Latest Posts Under: Trivia
In a tale that drives through history, we rev up with the Michelin brothers who inflated our journeys in 1891 with their pneumatic tire. Fast forward to 1902, where Kenosha, Wisconsin, gave birth to the Rambler, while by 1972, cars had multiplied to 224 million, with the USA hogging half. Ralph Nader threw a wrench in the works with “Unsafe At Any Speed” in 1965. Meanwhile, Toyota parked itself in Kentucky in 1986, and by 2006, GM and Chrysler were on a bailout joyride. Buckle up for an automotive rollercoaster!
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.
Are you a fan of the classic curves of a ’57 Chevy or does the sleek silhouette of a ’67 Mustang make your heart race? Maybe you’re more into the futuristic lines of a Tesla Model S? We’re curious to know which year and model revs your engine! Whether your favorite ride is a vintage beauty or a modern marvel, cast your vote in our fun poll. After all, who doesn’t love a little friendly debate over horsepower and hubcaps? Join in and let’s see which car takes the checkered flag for the favorite year and model!
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 are much smaller than the marketing suggests for everyday cars. It can still make sense for high-performance or fleet use — just don’t expect it to replace monthly pressure checks.
Buick’s 1956 Centurion concept skipped the rearview mirror entirely, replacing it with a six-pound TV camera in the tail feeding a dash-mounted screen, decades before backup cameras existed anywhere else. It also debuted a full bubble roof and bucket seats, all under GM stylist Charles M. Jordan’s first major design credit. The camera wouldn’t reach a production car until 1991, and it took until 2018 for U.S. law to require one on every new vehicle.
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 existed on paper decades before most muscle cars ever left the factory floor. German engineer Walter Linderer patented a version in 1951, followed by American John Hetrick in 1953, but neither design worked reliably enough for production. Mercedes-Benz finally cracked it in 1981, pairing airbags with seatbelt tensioners on its S-Class, and dual front airbags didn’t become mandatory in the U.S. until 1998. That timeline means virtually every classic muscle car from the genre’s golden age was built without any form of supplemental restraint at all.
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.