Intellect PlusCars
764 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 12 of 13.
The Jaguar E-Type brought Le Mans racing engineering to the open roadWhen Jaguar unveiled the E-Type on 15 March 1961, it offered a claimed 150 mph and 0 to 60 in under seven seconds at a competitive price. Enzo Ferrari supposedly called it the mos…
Jaguar needed three decades and two cancelled projects to build a new E-TypeJaguar first tried to build a modern successor to the E-Type in 1980. That effort was killed in 1990, and a retro speedster shown in Detroit in 2000 was cancelled two years later.…
Twelve Jaguar volunteers built a supercar on weekends, and it went 217 mphOver Christmas 1987, Jaguar's engineering director made a cardboard model of a dream racing car. With no official backing, twelve colleagues built it in their evenings and weekend…
Jaywalking was a word invented to blame pedestrians for carsA jay was once slang for a country bumpkin. In 1905 Kansas, jay drivers were people steering carriages or cars on the wrong side of the road. Within a few years the insult shifted…
Paddington Bear toys paid Jeremy Clarkson's school fees before Top Gear fameJeremy Clarkson's parents sold tea cosies and had no idea how they would pay for private school. Then they sewed two Paddington Bears for their children, started selling copies wi…
The first company to sell ordinary people internet access opened in 1989Until the late 1980s the internet belonged to government labs and universities. Then, in November 1989, a small company called The World in Brookline, Massachusetts signed up its …- A billion people belong to businesses where every member gets one voteAbout one billion people in 96 countries belonged to at least one cooperative in 2012. The idea is simple: a business owned and run by its members, each with one vote, whether the…
Why comparing the cost of solar, wind and nuclear power is so hardComparing the price of power from a nuclear plant, a wind farm and a solar park is harder than it sounds. Sun and wind cost nothing to fuel but cannot run on demand, and build cos…
The coupé got its name from carriages that were literally cut shortThe word coupé means cut. It first described shortened horse-drawn carriages with no rear-facing seat, then passed to cars with a sloping or clipped roofline, usually with two doo…- Crossovers went from niche to nearly half the American car marketIn 2000 crossovers made up under 4% of the US market; by 2018 nearly 40%. These car-based SUVs are built on a unibody platform rather than a truck frame, trading off-road toughnes…
The first lab-grown burger took two years and cost over $325,000In 2013 a hamburger grown from cow cells outside any animal was cooked and tasted on live television in London. It had taken 2 years to make and cost more than $325,000, and it tu…
Cummins bet on the young diesel engine and waited years to winCummins began in 1919 in Columbus, Indiana, pairing a banker's money with a mechanic's faith in the diesel engine, invented just 20 years before. Real commercial success did not c…
A farm tractor engine became the diesel heart of Dodge pickupsIntroduced in 1984 as an engine for Case farm equipment, the Cummins B Series went on to power bread vans, British buses, almost every new American school bus and Dodge Ram pickup…
Why early London coffeehouses earned the nickname penny universitiesFor about a penny at the door, a seventeenth-century Londoner could sit among merchants and scholars, read the latest news and argue about anything. Coffeehouses ignored rank, so …- The word compact was invented to make small American cars sound respectableIn 1950 Nash had a problem: Americans associated small cars with cheapness. So an executive coined a gentler label for anything with a wheelbase of 110 inches or less. He called i…
Even your shampoo bottle was shaped by software that remembers whyPerfume bottles and shampoo dispensers today are shaped with methods engineers in the 1960s never imagined. Computer-aided design began as a faster drawing board and became someth…
Your computer's memory is a ladder trading speed for size at every rungMain memory answers the processor in nanoseconds, while a disk takes milliseconds, roughly a million times longer. A robot arm fetching an archive tape can take a full minute. Eve…
The first electronic digital computer was scrapped, then rebuilt for 350,000 dollarsIn 1939 a physics teacher at Iowa State and his graduate student set out to build an electronic digital computer. It took them five years. In the 1940s the machine was taken apart…
How 1960s conglomerates manufactured growth out of accounting arithmeticIn the 1960s a company could appear to grow fast without making anything better. It bought firms whose shares were cheap relative to their profits, paid in paper instead of cash, …
A gearbox with no gears lets the engine hum at one steady speedMost gearboxes offer a handful of fixed steps. A continuously variable transmission has no steps at all: it slides smoothly through every ratio in between. That lets a car's engin…- The Smithsonian turned down America's last factory convertible of 1976When Cadillac built what it billed as the final American convertible in 1976, the last one was offered to the Smithsonian. The trustees politely declined: it was not yet historic,…
Before cocoa became chocolate, its beans bought rabbit dinners in MesoamericaIn Mesoamerica before the Spanish arrived, you could pay for a tamale or a rabbit dinner with cocoa beans, and a turkey hen cost a larger pile. The same seeds, fermented under ban…
Chert is rock built from the glassy skeletons of microscopic sea lifeFlint, the stone of prehistoric blades, is one form of chert, a hard rock made of quartz crystals too small to see. Most of it began as ooze on the deep ocean floor, piled up from…
Chery began by copying other carmakers and became China's biggest car exporterChery's first car, in 1999, was an unlicensed copy of a SEAT Toledo body powered by an engine made on equipment bought from Ford's Dagenham plant. For years it could not legally s…
The Chevrolet Bel Air slid from glamour hardtop to fleet sedan over three decadesIn 1950 the Bel Air was Chevrolet's stylish two-door hardtop, named after a wealthy Los Angeles neighbourhood. By the time American production stopped in 1975, the name was stuck …
Chevrolet said a Camaro was a small, vicious animal that eats MustangsIn June 1966, about 200 motoring journalists received a baffling telegram inviting them to help scratch a cat at a meeting of a society devoted to eradicating panthers. Panther wa…
The Corvette was a slow-selling show car before a V8 made it America's sports carThe first Corvettes, hand-built in 1953, were all white convertibles with a six-cylinder engine and bodies of hand-laid fibreglass. Sales were poor enough that GM capped 1955 prod…- After seven generations with the engine up front, the Corvette moved it behind the driverEvery Corvette since 1953 had carried its engine ahead of the cockpit. The eighth generation, the C8, finally put it behind the seats, a layout GM had not used in a sports car sin…
- The Chevrolet Suburban is the oldest car name still on sale, dating back to 1934Chevrolet first put the Suburban name on an all-steel carryall in 1934, making it the longest-running automobile nameplate anywhere. It began as a station wagon body on a truck ch…
China's Changan builds electric cars, but it started as a 19th-century gun factoryLong before it made family cars and electric SUVs, Changan was an arsenal. Its roots go back to 1862, when the statesman Li Hongzhang set up a weapons workshop in Shanghai. The fa…
The 1957 Eldorado Brougham cost more than a Rolls-Royce and came with perfumeCadillac's hand-built 1957 Eldorado Brougham sold for $13,074, double an ordinary Eldorado and more than a Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud. Buyers got memory power seats, air suspension,…- In America, a compact car is defined by cubic feet of interior spaceWhat makes a car compact? In the United States the answer is a number: the Environmental Protection Agency counts combined passenger and cargo volume, and anything between 100 and…
Carbon fibre's wonder strength once helped push Rolls-Royce into nationalisationIn the late 1960s Rolls-Royce bet on a new British material, carbon fibre, to win American airliner business with compressor blades for its RB-211 engine. The blades turned out to…
Cartels raise prices well, but their members can rarely resist cheatingAcross two centuries of cases, cartels pushed prices up by a median of about 23 percent, and fewer than one in ten failed to lift prices at all. Yet most are fragile. Every member…
Philips gave the cassette away, and that is how it conquered the worldWhen Philips unveiled its Compact Cassette in Berlin in August 1963, rival formats were vying to become the standard. Under pressure from Sony, Philips licensed its design free of…
Catalytic converters forced lead out of American petrolLead is a catalyst poison: it coats the precious metals inside a catalytic converter and stops them working. So when American rules put converters on most petrol cars from the 197…
BYD's founder smashed its first car prototype before building a best-selling brandBYD's first car design, codenamed 316, looked so poor that dealers refused it, and founder Wang Chuanfu destroyed the prototype himself, writing off 100 million yuan. Two decades …
BYD's name means nothing, and its early edge came from hand labourThe letters BYD have no meaning. The firm began as Yadi Electronics, named after a road in Shenzhen, and an extra character was added at registration partly to put it earlier in t…
BYD's tiny Seagull hatchback goes by four names around the worldIn China it is the Seagull, in much of Latin America the Dolphin Mini, in Europe the Dolphin Surf and across Asia and Australia the Atto 1. The same small electric hatchback drew …- Cadillac grew out of the ruins of a car company Henry Ford walked away fromWhen Henry Ford quit his company in 1902, its backers called in the engineer Henry Leland to value the equipment for sale. Leland talked them into building cars with his own singl…
Only about two percent of Britons actually speak the accent foreigners are taughtLearners of English around the world are often drilled in Received Pronunciation, the so-called King's English. Yet only about one Briton in fifty speaks it. Everyone else talks w…
The Bugatti Veyron needed a special key before it would reach full speedDriving a Veyron at its absolute limit meant stopping the car, turning a dedicated key beside the seat and waiting for a checklist to confirm the machine was ready. Only then woul…
BMW's M2 made its world debut inside a video game, not at a motor showBefore it appeared at Detroit's auto show in January 2016, the BMW M2 was revealed in November 2015 in the racing game Need for Speed. Players could drive the compact coupé virtua…- The first BMW M3 was a racing homologation special with four cylindersBMW built the original M3 so it could go touring car racing, and the rules demanded thousands of road versions. The result, a boxy E30 coupe with a high-revving four-cylinder engi…
- James Bond's BMW Z3 never fired a missile, and fans noticedThe Z3 roadster was the first BMW built only outside Germany, in South Carolina, and it launched alongside GoldenEye as Bond's new car. The film gave it hidden missiles and an eje…
A snowmobile maker's engine purchase accidentally launched a global train giantBombardier bought an Austrian firm in 1970 for the engines it made for Ski-Doo snowmobiles, and got a tram business thrown in. Five decades of acquisitions later, that side ventur…
A pinch of boron lets lab glass survive shocks that shatter ordinary glassPour boiling water into an ordinary glass dish and set it on ice, and it may crack. Borosilicate glass shrugs off temperature swings about four times larger, because adding boron …- Boston Consulting Group started life as a department inside a Boston bankIn 1963 Bruce Henderson left Arthur D. Little to set up a consulting arm within the Boston Safe Deposit and Trust Company, at first advising only the bank's own clients. That smal…
- BMW's futuristic i8 supercar ran on a small three-cylinder engine plus electricityWith butterfly doors and a spaceship profile, the BMW i8 looked like a supercar, and it reached 100 km/h in 4.4 seconds. Under the rear sat a 1.5-litre three-cylinder petrol engin…
- BMW's first mid-engined supercar was meant to be built by LamborghiniBMW wanted a purpose-built racer to take on Porsche, and rules demanded hundreds of road versions first. It hired Lamborghini to build them, watched the Italian firm's finances cr…
- BMW's i3 electric car had a carbon-fibre cabin and door panels made from hempWhen BMW built its first mass-produced zero-emissions car, it started from a blank sheet. The i3's passenger cell was carbon-fibre plastic glued, not welded, by 173 robots in Leip…
Bananas and pumpkins are berries, but strawberries and raspberries are notTo a botanist, a berry is a fleshy fruit grown from the ovary of a single flower, and that rule produces some surprising results. Tomatoes, grapes, aubergines, bananas and even wa…
How Detroit's Big Three dominated carmaking and then watched Japan catch upGeneral Motors, Ford and Chrysler, all based around Detroit, were once the three biggest carmakers on Earth. Then Toyota passed GM worldwide in 2006, overtook Chrysler in American…- The black goo under your tyres is not tar, and never really wasRoads are glued together with bitumen, a thick residue of petroleum so viscous it can seem solid while slowly flowing over long spans of time. People call it tar, and the word tar…
- Two BMW engineers secretly built the same hot rod, and the 2002 was bornBMW's product planning chief and the designer of its M10 engine each dropped a two-litre motor into a small 1600-2 for their own use, without telling the other. When they discover…
- BMW's first 2 Series coupé found its biggest fan base in AmericaBuilt in Leipzig from late 2013 to 2021, the first 2 Series coupé and convertible replaced the 1 Series two-doors with a slightly bigger, sleeker car. Despite its German roots, th…
Generation after generation, the BMW 3 Series kept piling up firstsSince May 1975, the 3 Series has been the car that pays BMW's bills, making up around 30% of the brand's yearly sales. It began as a single two-door saloon and grew into estates, …- BMW's 6 Series changed shape with almost every generation it lived throughBMW's grand tourer began in 1976 as a sleek two-door coupé, disappeared for 14 years, came back with a convertible, gained a four-door Gran Coupé, and finally reinvented itself as…
- The humble tuk tuk grew from a 1931 Japanese truck into a global taxiBangladesh may now run the biggest informal electric vehicle fleet on Earth: roughly 4 million unregistered battery-powered auto rickshaws by 2025, up from 200,000 in 2016. The th…
- How the automatic gearbox won America first and Europe much laterBy 1957, more than 80 percent of new American cars shifted their own gears, yet as late as 1997 only about one European car in ten did. Cheap fuel explains part of the gap, since …