Eric Peters is an automotive columnist and author of Automotive Atrocities: The Cars You Love to Hate (Motor Books International) and a new book, Road Hogs.
The death of the perpetually tardy Model 3 may ultimately have less to do with it being an overpriced electric car than with something even more lethal to its chances… It’s a too-small sedan. Electric or not, they aren’t selling. Even the Toyota Camry and Honda Accord — both of them just redesigned — are […]
Five years or so from now, there may be no more cop cars. Vehicles used by cops, certainly. But not cars. These are being retired — in the Blade Runner taking-care-of-the-Replicants sense. Ford just announced it won’t be making the Taurus — which is the basis for the Taurus cop car — for much longer. So […]
The Corvette now reigns as America’s only supercar. But there used to be two American supercars — the second one being the Dodge Viper. It was, arguably, more super. More outrageous, certainly. An 8.4 liter V10 (and 600 horsepower) rather than a 6.2 liter V8 (and 460 hp) paired only with a manual transmission. Not just anyone […]
Mandates and subsidies have not only distorted the market for electric cars, they’ve distorted the design of electric cars. Instead of being designed to emphasize their natural strengths vs. IC-engined cars — which we’ll get into shortly — they’ve been offered up as cost-no-object economic and functional absurdities whose limitations and failings everyone is supposed to […]
VW’s new truck — if they build it, which hopefully they will — won’t be the first one. For a couple of years back in the early ’80s, you could buy a pick-up version of the Rabbit. It was even available with a diesel engine. Of course, neither of these vehicles are pick-ups, even though […]
If automated cars ever do become technically feasible — and that’s a long way off, despite the trendy imminence we read about every day — it will certainly mean the end of personal vehicle ownership, at least as far as new cars. Not because the government mandates it. Because — why bother with it? Take […]
An interesting unasked question has been raised by Ford’s announcement that it is developing a cop-less cop car. That is, an automated and AI cop car that would sneak itself behind the bushes and use license plate scanners, facial recognition, and other such revenue-raising technologies to automatically issue paying’ paper. All the time. Everywhere. For […]
Lots of advice goes out every year about how to drive in the snow. But the single most important piece of advice about snow-day driving is almost never mentioned — probably because the cardinal rule of modern advice-giving is to never tell people the truth when it might cause discomfort or offense. It is, simply: […]
The War on Drugs has seen many casualties — among them the rule of law. Cops have been empowered to simply seize people’s property on the mere assertion of connection to “drug activity.” This is done prior to conviction of any crime — and in many cases, without the person even being charged with one. Another casualty-in-the-works […]
More than 40 years ago, Japan flooded the U.S. market with inexpensive small cars — their manufacture directly subsidized by the government of Japan, their manufacturers working in close concert with the government of Japan. Meanwhile, American cars were effectively locked out of the Japanese market via stiff import tariffs, a type of tax designed […]
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