Volkswagen Beetle

The Volkswagen Beetle (officially the Volkswagen Typ 1, informally in Germany the Volkswagen Käfer and in the U.S. as Volkswagen Bug) is a two-door, four passenger, rear-engine economy car manufactured and marketed by German automaker Volkswagen (VW) from 1938 until 2003.

The need for this kind of car, and its functional objectives, were formulated by Adolf Hitler, leader of Nazi Germany, wishing for a cheap, simple car to be mass-produced for the new road network of his country. He contracted Ferdinand Porsche in 1934 to design and build it, after telling him in 1933 "This is the car for my roads" of the extremely similar Tatra V570. Porsche and his team took until 1938 to finalise the design, and said of the Tatra influence "sometimes I looked over his shoulder and sometimes he looked over mine". In 1965, a payment of one million Marks was made to Tatra-Ringhoffer for numerous patent infringements by the Beetle design. The result is one of the first rear-engined cars since the Brass Era. With 21,529,464 produced, the Beetle is the longest-running and most-manufactured car of a single platform ever made.

Jay Leno

James Douglas Muir "Jay" Leno (/ˈlɛnoʊ/; born April 28, 1950) is an American comedian, actor, writer, producer, voice actor, and television host. He was the host of NBC's The Tonight Show with Jay Leno from 1992 to 2009. Beginning in September 2009, Leno started a primetime talk show, titled The Jay Leno Show, which aired weeknights at 10:00 p.m. ET, also on NBC.

After The Jay Leno Show was canceled in January 2010 amid a host controversy, Leno returned to host The Tonight Show with Jay Leno on March 1, 2010. He hosted his last episode of The Tonight Show on February 6, 2014. That year, he was inducted into the Television Hall of Fame.

Early life

Leno was born in New Rochelle, New York. His homemaker mother, Catherine (née Muir; 1911–1993), was born in Greenock, Scotland, and came to the United States at age 11. His father, Angelo (1910–1994), was an insurance salesman who was born in New York, to immigrants from Flumeri, Italy. Leno grew up in Andover, Massachusetts, and obtained a bachelor's degree in speech therapy from Emerson College, where he started a comedy club in 1973. His older brother, Patrick (May 12, 1940 – October 6, 2002), was a Vietnam War veteran who worked as an attorney.

Beetle

Beetles are a group of insects that form the order Coleoptera /koʊliːˈɒptərə/. The word "coleoptera" is from the Greek κολεός, koleos, meaning "sheath"; and πτερόν, pteron, meaning "wing", thus "sheathed wing", because most beetles have two pairs of wings, the front pair, the "elytra", being hardened and thickened into a shell-like protection for the rear pair and the beetle's abdomen.

Taxonomy and evolution

The Coleopterans include more species than any other order, constituting almost 25% of all known types of animal life forms. About 450,000 species of beetles occur – representing about 40% of all known insects. Some estimates put the total number of species, described and undescribed, at as high as 100 million, but a figure of one million is more widely accepted. Such a large number of species poses special problems for classification, with some families consisting of thousands of species and needing further division into subfamilies and tribes. This immense number of species allegedly led evolutionary biologist J. B. S. Haldane to quip, when some theologians asked him what could be inferred about the mind of the Creator from the works of His Creation, that God displayed "an inordinate fondness for beetles".

Jay Leno's Garage

Jay Leno's Garage is an American web and television series about motor vehicles, primarily cars and motorbikes starring Jay Leno, the former host of The Tonight Show. Formerly a web series for NBC.com, Jay Leno's Garage morphed into a special that aired on CNBC in August 2014 and the show became a weekly prime time series on the channel in 2015.

Leno does car and motorcycle reviews on classic cars, super cars like the McLaren P1, restored cars, vintage and sports cars. Jay Leno's Big Dog Garage is located in Burbank, California, near Bob Hope Airport. In 2011 the show won a Primetime Emmy Award for "Outstanding Special Class — Short-Format Nonfiction Program".

Episodes

CNBC season 1 (2015)

Broadcast

Internationally, the series premiered in Australia on Discovery Turbo on February 1, 2016.

References

External links

Test Drive

Test drive is a trial use of a car. It may also refer to: