Cars

Three of the World’s Prettiest Parking Garages Are In One Small City

Parking garages are ugly by their very nature: They’re metal cages that take up valuable space in our cities to house our automobiles for a few high-priced hours. But not all garages have to be ugly. In fact, three of the most beautiful are located within a few blocks of each other, in the city…

Missouri Will Scare Speeders With Ear-Piercing Sound Cannons

What would deter you from speeding? How about a loud, jarring, and utterly annoying noise emanating somewhere from outside your vehicle? The LRAD sound cannon, a “directed-sound communication device” that can blast sound waves over long distances, has been used everywhere from the war in Afghanistan to Occupy Wall Street. Now it’s being deployed by…

Stripped car transforms into exotic sports car with magic foam

Reddit user Geeky_ shows how a scrap car can be magically transformed into an exotic sports car with expanding foam. The car, which is pretty much just a stripped metal body, gets fattened up with luxurious curves and looks like it costs a million bucks. Slick. Painted blob never looked so good. Granted the car…

The Obscure Loophole That Explains Why Thieves Prefer Old, Junky Cars

Who wants to steal crappy old cars better suited for the junkyard than the road? Car thieves with a fine understanding of New York law, of course. While car thefts have gone way down in New York, thefts of junky old cars has gone up—all because a quirk in the state’s laws makes it easier…

That Beeping Sound You Hear Is The Future

Today’s modern automobile often comes with high-tech crash-avoidance systems. Parallel parking is a breeze when your car beeps to let you know when you’re about to hit something. The people of yesteryear couldn’t have imagined something like that, right? Think again. In today’s edition of There’s Nothing New Under the Sun, we have a Jazz…

An Augmented Reality Transparent Hood Could Keep You Out of Potholes

Aside from the sleek body designs and supercharged engines, part of the appeal of a sports car is feeling close to the ground, hurtling along with such close proximity to the roads as to feel a tangible connection to the street or circuit beneath you. But as Jaguar Land Rover’s Transparent Bonnet concept shows, augmented…

The Porsche 911 Targa hardtop convertible is as cool as any Transformer

Jalopnik says that the top of the Porsche 911 Targa is completely bonkers. I think I agree. Instead of the entire hard top roof disappearing into the car like other hardtop convertibles, the 911 Targa gets to keep the slick curved glass back while in topless mode. Awesome. SPLOID is a new blog about awesome…

Those Ugly Surface Parking Lots Are Actually Costing Cities Money

Parking lots are already one of the worst things ever invented by humans—acres of buckling, blighted fields of concrete that often sit completely empty. But now a new study shows that parking is not only ugly, it’s actually making cities lose revenue. Conventional wisdom—or at least the argument from business owners whenever a city tries…

Suck It, Robots: Toyota Is Giving Jobs Back to Humans

My, my, my how the tables have turned. The past few years have seen countless human jobs filled with our less-whiny robot counterparts. But it turns out that, at least for Toyota, the pros of total automation haven’t outweighed the cons. Meaning human factory workers are back in business. It’s certainly an unconventional move—intentionally taking…

Silent But Deadly: The EU Wants Electric Cars to Add Sounds for Safety

Last week, the European Parliament ruled that all electric and hybrid cars must add artificial engine noise so that pedestrians can hear them coming. While the mandate is mostly to protect visually impaired pedestrians, the noise will also benefit anyone on the street who’s ever had a near-miss with a Prius. The fear that a…

This Typeface Makes You a More Alert Driver By Distracting You Less

Despite the grim PSAs and massive fines, plenty of us still end up reading our in-dash displays on the road, whether to navigate or change the song. Today, the type design giant Monotype unveiled a typeface designed to help you read faster and more accurately while driving. How? With a few design tweaks. The typeface…

Here’s What Happens When Nike Helps Design a Car

“Shoe companies are full of people who wanted to design cars,” explains Jalopnik’s Jason Torchinsky in a post about this slick 1971 DeTomaso Pantera today. Nike’s own skunkworks design team had very different plans for this aging Pantera—check out their work below.

Which State Will Get Tesla’s Gargantuan Battery Factory?

Electric car maker Tesla wants a cheaper, faster way to produce the lithium ion batteries that power its cars, and the company has settled on a gargantuan solution: the so-called “gigafactory” that, if all goes as planned, will crank out more lithium ion batteries than the entire world produced in 2013. The location for the…

Hackers Can Now Create Fake Traffic Jams

A couple of Israeli students figured out a way to create fake traffic jams using the popular, Google-owned Waze GPS app. And while it sounds silly at first, these kinds of infrastructure hacks could have serious consequences as we depend more and more on data to help us get around town. The Waze hack is…

Tesla’s Model S Lock Can Be Opened With a Basic Hack

Tesla’s Model S is supposed to be the safest car on the road—at least where the physical realm is concerned. But apparently, the crazy expensive car’s six-character password is vulnerable to some pretty basic hacking techniques, leaving you and your car’s data at the mercy of a tech-savvy stranger. http://jalopnik.com/the-tesla-model-s-is-the-safest-car-ever-produced-1171606291/all The vulnerability was revealed by…

28 rare cutaway illustrations of classic cars

Without a doubt, cars are the most popular of all cutaway illustrations, so they couldn’t be absent from our cutaway series. Here you have a collection of 28 rare vintage drawings, some of them crafted by some of the greatest cutaway artists in the business. Martini Porsche 935, 1976, Image: Bonhams Martini Porsche 936 Sportwagenweltmeister…

Text While Driving In The Bay Area And You Might End Up On A Billboard

This month, some residents of San Francisco could discover photographs of themselves engaging in rather embarrassing behavior. A website has been collecting photos of people texting while driving, and some of those photos have now found their way onto billboards throughout the region. The project, called Texting While in Traffic (TWIT) is the brainchild of…

How The Corvette Museum Rescued Its Cars From A Giant Sinkhole

In a story that united geologists with rare car enthusiasts last month, a massive sinkhole opened up beneath the National Corvette Museums’s Skydome, swallowing eight rare cars into its cavernous depths. Since then, the museum has worked tirelessly to recover the cars and fill in the sinkhole so that the Skydome can open anew. But…

5 Big New Projects Remaking Cities into Havens for Pedestrians

Driving in the city sucks. There are other cars and buses and bikes and people—god, so many people. And cars—being heavy metal machines capable of moving at great speed—are also highly dangerous. Instead of trying to accommodate everyone in an unhappy medium, cities are increasingly designing streets for pedestrians over cars. Check these ambitious projects…

German engineering firm EDAG’s concept Genesis gives a peek at the sweeping, sci-fi future of car design, where entire vehicle bodies are 3D printed in one piece rather than being assembled from thousands of components. Our gearhead friends at Jalopnik took a closer look during the Geneva Motor Show. [EDAG]