Intellect PlusCars
764 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 7 of 13.
How a Geneva business professor's management seminar became the Davos summitIn 1971 Klaus Schwab invited 450 European executives to a Swiss ski resort to learn American management methods. Within two decades the gathering had become a place where rival le…
Four-wheel drive and a reckless power era shaped the World Rally ChampionshipWhen rallying's governing body allowed all-wheel drive in 1979, most carmakers shrugged it off as too complicated. Then Audi's Quattro started winning almost at once. What followe…
Philosophers still disagree about what it means for life to go wellWell-being sounds simple: how well someone's life is going for them. Yet thinkers split over whether it comes down to pleasure, to getting what you want, or to a checklist of good…
Wolverhampton grew from a noblewoman's land grant into a Midlands industrial cityIn 985 a king handed land to a woman called Wulfrun, and the settlement that grew there still carries her name. Wolverhampton went on to trade wool, forge locks, build more than 2…
Why Ford once made its own steel: the logic of vertical integrationIn the 1920s Ford's River Rouge complex stopped buying much of its steel and started making it. Owning more links in the chain from raw material to customer can cut costs and guar…
In 1982 arcade quarters out-earned pop music and Hollywood combinedAt the peak of the arcade craze, Americans fed $8 billion in coins into video game cabinets in a single year, more than pop music and Hollywood films earned put together. Then cam…
New car smell, forest haze and bitter coffee share one chemical familyThat pleasant new car smell is a cloud of volatile organic compounds, chemicals that evaporate readily at room temperature. People release plenty of them from paint, fuel and aero…
The Volkswagen Beetle's tangled origins, from Nazi propaganda to 21.5 million carsBuilt for 65 years, longer than any other single generation of car, the Beetle began as a Nazi propaganda promise that every German would own one. Hardly any civilians got theirs …
Dieselgate: how Volkswagen taught its engines to recognise a test and behaveVolkswagen's diesel cars were clean only when they knew someone was watching. Software sensed a laboratory test and switched on full pollution controls, then let nitrogen oxides p…- The Volkswagen ID.3, the hatchback that launched VW's electric reinventionWithin 24 hours of opening pre-orders, Volkswagen had 10,000 reservations for a car nobody had yet seen in final form. The ID.3 was the first passenger model on the group's dedica…
Volkswagen ID.4, the electric SUV pitched at the millions, not millionairesVolkswagen advertised its first fully electric crossover as a car for the millions rather than the millionaires, and one American executive claimed it drove like a GTI with the pu…
The Volkswagen Passat, a trade wind that blew through half a century of namesNamed after the German word for trade winds, Volkswagen's family car has also been sold as the Dasher, Santana, Quantum, Corsar and Carat. With 34 million built since 1973, it ran…
The Volkswagen Scirocco, the sporty coupe that tested the Golf's parts firstVolkswagen launched its sleek Scirocco coupe six months ahead of the Golf, partly so any teething problems would surface on the smaller-volume car first. It also beat the famous G…
Reading the 17-character code that tells a car's whole backstoryStamped on every modern car is a string of 17 letters and digits that quietly records who built it, where, when and in what order. It never contains the letters I, O or Q, and one…
From homemade signs to soybean plates, the odd history of number platesThe first registration plates were so fragile that few survive, and early American drivers often had to make their own. Wartime shortages pushed makers to try copper and even pres…
The V12 engine was born in a London workshop to power racing boatsThe first V12 was not built for a car at all. In 1904 Putney Motor Works in London made one for racing boats, a hefty 18.4 litre design whose camshaft could slide to run the engin…
Every V6 engine hides two unbalanced three-cylinder engines inside itSplit a V6 down the middle and each half is effectively a three-cylinder engine, and an odd number of cylinders in a row can never be perfectly balanced. So no matter how the bank…- The V8's famous burble comes from lopsided firing in each cylinder bankThat deep, rumbling V8 soundtrack is a side effect of geometry. In a typical road-car V8, the cylinders fire in an order that jumps unevenly between the two banks, so each bank's …
Vallejo was California's capital until lawmakers found no capitol buildingIn 1851 the new state of California named Vallejo its capital, and legislators arrived the following year. There was one problem: the promised capitol building had never been buil…
A turboprop is a jet engine that spends almost all its power turning a propellerInside a turboprop, air is squeezed, mixed with jet fuel and burned just as in a jet. But instead of blasting the hot gas out the back for thrust, the turbine squeezes nearly ever…- Chainsaws run on two-stroke engines because they work upside downA four-stroke car engine keeps its oil in a sump and depends on gravity. A two-stroke engine mixes its lubricating oil straight into the fuel, typically about one part oil to 32 o…
America's Department of Energy spends much of its time on nuclear weaponsThe name suggests power plants and petrol prices, but the US Department of Energy also runs the military's nuclear weapons programme and builds reactors for the Navy. It funds mor…
A burning river and a book on pesticides helped create America's EPAIn 1969 the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland caught fire, provoking a national outcry and criminal charges against big steel firms. Seven years earlier, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring h…
How cheap mortgages and motorways helped hollow out city centresAfter the Second World War, American policy nudged families out of cities. Government-backed home loans let returning veterans buy detached houses in the suburbs, and the private …
The Australian ute began with a farm wife's letter about church and pigsIn 1932 a farmer's wife wrote to Ford Australia asking for a vehicle she could drive to church on Sunday and use to take the pigs to market on Monday. The designer Lew Bandt answe…
Most of the air through a jetliner's engine never gets burnedIn the engines on most passenger jets, the bulk of the air sucked in at the front never reaches the combustion chamber. It is pushed around the hot core by a big ducted fan. With …
The first jet engine to run refused to stop when its fuel was cutOn 12 April 1937, Frank Whittle's team started the Power Jets WU, the first turbojet ever to run. It promptly sped up out of control, even after the fuel was shut off. Near panic …- The Toyota GR Supra was built in Austria around a BMW engineAfter a 17-year gap, Toyota revived its famous Supra in 2019, but the new car was hardly pure Toyota. It shared a platform with the BMW Z4, used BMW turbocharged engines and was a…
- Why Toyota's MR2 sports car lost its number in French-speaking countriesSay "MR2" aloud in French and it comes out sounding like "merde". So in French-speaking markets Toyota quietly sold its little mid-engined sports car as simply the MR. The name el…
Toyota asked Americans for the plural of Prius, and they chose PriiIn February 2011, Toyota's American arm let the public vote on the plural of Prius. The options were Prien, Prii, Prium, Prius and Priuses, and "Prii" won. The strictly correct La…- The Toyota Supra began as a stretched Celica built to rival DatsunAmerican Toyota dealers in the late 1970s kept losing buyers to the hugely popular Datsun 280Z, so they asked for a rival. Toyota's answer was to take its Celica liftback, lengthe…
Why petrol cars need a gearbox and most electric cars barely doA typical petrol engine spins somewhere between about 600 and 7,000 revolutions per minute, yet a car's wheels only need to turn from standstill up to around 1,800. An engine also…
Why a trolleybus needs two overhead wires when a tram needs only oneA tram sends its electric current back through the steel rails beneath it, so one overhead wire does the job. A trolleybus runs on rubber tyres with no rail to complete the circui…- A half-ton pickup truck has not carried just half a ton for decadesAmerican pickups are still sold as half-ton, three-quarter-ton and one-ton trucks, labels that once meant payloads of 1,000, 1,500 and 2,000 pounds. Capacities kept rising while t…
Leaded petrol worked brilliantly in engines, and spread lead across the planetOut of some 33,000 substances tested, a lead compound proved the best at stopping engine knock: one part per 1,300 of petrol was enough. Tetraethyllead let engines run hotter and …
Thermodynamics starts by drawing a boundary and asking what can cross itBefore physicists can apply the laws of heat and energy to anything, from a car engine to a star, they must decide what counts as the system and what counts as everything else. Th…- Why the world's electricity travels in three waves offset by a third of a cycleAlmost every power grid on Earth sends electricity as three alternating currents, each peaking a third of a cycle after the last. That arrangement, worked out by several inventors…
Toluene, named after a Colombian tree balsam, flavours petrol fumes and makes TNTPart of that sweet smell at the petrol pump and in fresh paint is toluene, a benzene ring carrying one extra methyl group. Its name traces to balsam of Tolu, a resin from a tropic…- The Toyota 86 was a Subaru-built tribute to a humble 1980s CorollaToyota's 86 sports coupé is named for the AE86, a small rear-drive Corolla from the 1980s beloved by drifters and club racers. Oddly, the car is built in a Subaru factory around a…
The Toyota Corona was the modest sedan that finally won Toyota a foothold in AmericaToyota's first try at selling cars in North America flopped, and it pulled out in 1961. It came back in 1964 with the third-generation Corona, a well-equipped small sedan named af…- Tesla's Model X was defined, and delayed, by its upward-swinging falcon wing doorsThe Model X's party trick, rear doors hinged twice so they lift up rather than swing out, helped push its launch back repeatedly and even led Tesla to sue its door supplier. Built…
The Model Y became the first electric car to top global salesIn 2023 the Tesla Model Y outsold the Toyota Corolla to become the world's best-selling vehicle, the first electric car ever to do so. More than 2.16 million have been sold, makin…
Tesla's first car was a Lotus-based roadster built in the thousands, not millionsLong before Tesla sold millions of cars, it built about 2,450 two-seat sports cars on a Lotus Elise chassis. The first Roadster, delivered in 2008 to its own chairman, Elon Musk, …
Tanning turns perishable skin into leather by rewiring its proteinsRaw hide rots. Tanning changes the structure of its collagen for good, locking the protein chains together so the material resists decay. For most of history that meant tree bark,…- Tata Motors began with Daimler lorries and now builds India's trucks and busesTata's vehicle business started in 1954 with a German partner, turning out Daimler lorry chassis in Jamshedpur. Seventy years on the group split in two: since October 2025 the Tat…
The Technical University of Munich grew from a polytechnic founded by Ludwig IIKing Ludwig II of Bavaria founded it in 1868 as a polytechnic school with about 350 students. Today the Technical University of Munich teaches nearly 52,000, counts 19 Nobel laure…
The Tesla Model 3 set a car reservation record before anyone had driven oneIn 1955 the Citroën DS gathered 80,000 deposits over ten days at the Paris show. The Tesla Model 3 took 232,000 reservations in two. A week after its March 2016 unveiling the tall…- The Tesla Model S began life inside a gutted MercedesBefore the Model S had a body of its own, Tesla engineers bought a Mercedes CLS, cut out its floor and bolted in a modified Roadster battery. The mule managed 120 miles per charge…
- Superchargers squeeze extra air into engines, powered by the crankshaft itselfForce more air into an engine and it makes more power for its size. A supercharger does exactly that, driven usually by a belt off the crankshaft. That costs some fuel economy, bu…
- A supply chain is really a sprawling network, not a neat lineBehind any product sits a hierarchy of firms: direct suppliers, their own suppliers, and so on down. In chemicals there are typically nine such tiers. Each layer can add its own p…
Nobody can quite define the SUV, yet it now dominates car salesIn 1975, truck-based SUVs made up under 2 per cent of new light vehicles built for the American market. By 2024 the figure was almost half. Worldwide, SUVs took 45.9 per cent of p…
An Australian magazine gave the Skyline GT-R its famous monster nicknameThe Skyline GT-R was never built outside Japan and was officially exported to only a handful of countries, yet the name Godzilla came from Australia. The motoring magazine Wheels …
Eight million people sent in names before Nissan chose SunnyIn December 1965 Nissan asked the Japanese public to name its new small car by post. More than eight million entries arrived. Sunny had been suggested 3,105 times, and the company…
The sports car Nissan abandoned became Toyota's 2000GT insteadBefore the first Z car, Nissan worked with Yamaha on a sports prototype, the YX-30 of 1961. By 1964 Nissan had lost faith in Yamaha's twin-cam 2.0-litre engine and scrapped the pr…- Nissan's newest Z looks back half a century and skips Europe entirelyThe seventh-generation Nissan Z borrows its overall shape and round running lights from the 1969 240Z, and a 2026 facelift added a front bumper inspired by that original car. Yet …
A spill wiped up with a kitchen apron led to guncottonAround 1846 the chemist Christian Friedrich Schönbein spilled nitric and sulfuric acid on his kitchen table in Basel. He mopped it with a cotton apron and hung it on the stove doo…
Datsun was renamed because 'son' sounded like the Japanese word for lossThe small cars that led to the Nissan Bluebird were first sold as the Datson, meaning son of DAT. The trouble was that son sounds close to the Japanese word for loss, hardly ideal…- The racing Z432R shed its heater, radio and clock to lose 100 kilogramsNissan's Z432R was built to race, and it showed. Its body panels used thinner steel, the bonnet was fibreglass, and every window except the windscreen was acrylic. There was no he…
- Nissan's GT-R engineer wanted calm conversation at 300 kilometres an hourKazutoshi Mizuno, known inside Nissan as Mr. GT-R, set himself an unusual target for the car that became the R35 GT-R. Besides a Nürburgring lap under eight minutes, he wanted dri…
- The Nissan Leaf's name secretly stands for a whole sales pitchLEAF looks like a simple nature word, but Nissan made it a backronym: leading, environmentally friendly, affordable family car. Unveiled on 1 August 2009 as the first mass-market …