The first rendition would be clay, the second a show car mostly made from fiberglass. There will likely not be an "actual car" until well after it is determined what the car will look like. I doubt he saw pieces, in fact he probably said "sheetmetal" to get the scent off the "clay model at the studio" trail. Read more

Further reading on the safety of Lithium Ion batteries in vehicles: [webarchive.teslamotors.com] Read more

Does anyone know what safety GM has in their batteries to prevent this. Tesla has a paper that talks about thermal runaway prevention of their batteries; I wonder if GM uses a similar approach. Read more

I remember when I was in High School. Read more

With respect to cars, when people talk about torque they are usually talking about low RPM horsepower (probably because peak torque happens at a relatively low RPM). Torque doesn't actually do anything, so I usually just always like to talk about power. Read more

Yes, but that's not technically "work". Work is force through a distance. Torque is force at a distance around an axis. Think of it this way: if you put a torque wrench on a center lock nut of a car, while it is in park, you can put 100 lb-ft of torque into the center nut, but since the car isn't going anywhere,… Read more

300 lb ft would be 300 pounds at 1 foot, or 1 pound at 300 feet; they are exactly the same. Read more

I tried to resist the urge, but I can't... Read more

Carbon doesn't yield, it is a catastrophic brittle failure, then a milliseconds later all the normal load goes into the other tire which overloads that suspension and bam! 'splosion#2. This happens with regularity at the brake tech in Formula SAE. It's hilariously sad. Read more

Heart click. You should be a writer. Possibly for Jalopnik. Look into that. Read more

Yea, I'm guessing there are two sides to this story. Read more

Loti, Lotuses, Team Lotus, and the new competitor for 2012, Team Losi

Yea, I know they always bake in understeer, and I know why they do it. Of course a front bias will make it oversteer more, but they're going to fix that with ARBs and suspension kinematics. I'm just pointing out the BS in the spec sheet. It should say "After numerous trials, we decided to trade performance for… Read more

This whole weight bias thing seems like horse hockey to me. I think the marketing department just ran with what they were given. For the best track performance you should obviously have more rear bias on a RWD car, and I can't imagine a "sense of driver control" being better on a 53% front bias car. Read more

I'm going to go with the airbox Read more

Soooo... Next NEXT Top Car Blogger? Read more

Your fancy "scientific method" and "peer reviewed articles" have no place here on the internet. Go back to Yale, hippie. Read more

May I also recommend Grammarly, lest your November novel turn into a December proofreading nightmare. Read more

I'm not even remotely a Porsche fanboy (in fact I always say i'd buy a Porsche if I wasn't so afraid of becoming a Porsche owner), but I always have more fun with rear weight bias cars (~65%), so I can see the 911 being a more enjoyable car because of it. Bad idea for track times, maybe, but you'd have to say the… Read more

The seven seats have been planned for a lot longer than the bet, and an extra two passengers in a giant metal car aren't going to reduce the range any more noticeably than two extra passengers in a minivan reduces that range. Read more