Intellect PlusCars
764 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 9 of 13.
Chrysler's modern Cobra had no door handles, no airbags and a V10 shaped by LamborghiniIn 1989 Bob Lutz asked Chrysler's designers what a modern AC Cobra might look like. The answer was a two-seater with zip-up vinyl windows, no exterior door handles and an eight-li…
Dongfeng began as a truck works hidden among forty valleys, safe from air raidsChina's planners wanted a military truck factory that bombers could not easily find. In 1969 they settled on a village of 100 people in Hubei, tucked among more than 40 shallow va…
Daimler Truck builds more heavy commercial vehicles than any rivalFreightliner rigs on American highways, FUSO trucks in Japan, BharatBenz in India and Thomas Built school buses all answer to one German headquarters in Leinfelden-Echterdingen. D…
Car dashboards are named after boards that stopped mud splashing carriage driversDrive a gig through a puddle and the horse's hooves fling muck straight at you. Carriage builders fitted a splash-board to stop it, a term recorded from 1826, and Americans soon c…
Decatur, Illinois, once processed a third of the world's soybeansFor much of the 20th century a mid-sized city on the Sangamon River proudly called itself the Soybean Capital of the World. The grain processor A. E. Staley popularised soy oil, m…
Deloitte grew from one London accountant into the world's largest professional services networkWhen the Great Western Railway needed someone to check its books, William Welch Deloitte became the first person appointed as an independent auditor of a public company. He had op…
Humid air weighs less than dry air, despite how muggy days feelA cubic metre of air at sea level and 15 °C has a mass of about 1.225 kilograms under the International Standard Atmosphere, roughly one eight-hundredth of the same volume of wate…
Denza began as a BYD and Daimler partnership before BYD took full controlIn 2010 a Chinese battery specialist and a German carmaker with more than 125 years of history set up an equal joint venture to build electric cars. Sales disappointed for years. …
London's Pall Mall hosted the first reliably dated department store in 1796Behind glazed partitions on Pall Mall, shoppers in 1809 could move from furs and fans to silks and lace, then jewellery, French clocks, perfume and finally dresses. Harding, Howel…
Depleted uranium is the dense leftover from enriching nuclear fuelMaking one kilogram of reactor fuel enriched to 5 per cent uranium-235 takes 11.8 kilograms of natural uranium and leaves around 10.8 kilograms behind. That residue, depleted uran…
The Daily Mail once paid aviators to cross the Channel and the AtlanticPunch thought the offer was absurd and mocked it with a £10,000 prize for flying to Mars. Yet by 1910 both of the Daily Mail's early aviation prizes, for London to Manchester and …
Britain's Daimler began in a disused Coventry cotton millAn engineer building a cableway at the 1889 Bremen Exhibition spotted tiny railcars driven by Gottlieb Daimler's motors. Frederick Simms befriended the German inventor, secured Br…
Citroën began with a cheap patent for fishbone-shaped gears spotted in PolandShortly after graduating in 1900, André Citroën travelled to Poland, his late mother's homeland, and watched a carpenter cutting gears with a fishbone pattern that ran quieter and…- The Citroën DS drew 12,000 orders on its first day in 1955Citroën spent 18 years secretly developing a successor to the Traction Avant. When the DS 19 appeared at the Paris Motor Show on 6 October 1955, buyers placed 743 orders within 15…
Class action lawsuits descend from medieval English villages suing as oneFrom about 1200, English courts routinely let whole villages, parishes and guilds sue or be sued as a single body, and nobody questioned it. Roads, messengers and royal officials …
How deep a coal seam lies decides whether miners dig a pit or a tunnelCoal lying less than about 61 metres down is usually stripped from the surface, while seams below 90 metres generally mean going underground. Thickness can override depth, though:…
A British bid for red dye left Australia smothered in prickly pearIn 1788 Captain Arthur Phillip picked up cactus plants crawling with cochineal insects in Brazil, hoping to break the Spanish and Portuguese grip on red dye for British uniforms. …
Mussels anchor themselves with glue threads and can starve attackers in themA marine mussel squeezes a liquid into a groove on its foot that hardens in seawater into tough, elastic threads. Those threads, the beard cooks pull off, hold it on wave-battered…
The Chevrolet Vega won Car of the Year and then became a cautionary taleMotor Trend named the Chevrolet Vega its 1971 Car of the Year. Within a few years the same subcompact was notorious for rust, overheating engines and a stream of recalls, all trac…
The Chevrolet Volt used only half its battery so the battery would lastEngineers at General Motors gave the first Volt a 16 kWh battery and then deliberately locked away half of it, never charging above 80% or draining below 30%. The sacrifice was me…
The safe refrigerant gas that turned out to be eating the ozone layerIn 1930 Thomas Midgley Jr. inhaled a lungful of his new refrigerant gas before the American Chemical Society and blew out a candle with it, proving it was neither toxic nor flamma…- Chrysler once handed its entire European business to Peugeot for a single dollarWalter Chrysler built his company in 1925 from a failing carmaker, and within about a decade it was America's second-biggest seller. Since then it has pioneered hydraulic brakes a…
Studebaker built wagons for decades before it trusted the carIn 1937 Studebaker planted 5,000 pine trees on its Indiana test track so that pilots overhead could read the company name. By then the firm had spent most of a century making hors…
Why the Subaru badge shows six stars of the Seven SistersSubaru is the Japanese name for the Pleiades, the cluster also called the Seven Sisters. Tradition holds that one sister cannot be seen, which is why the badge carries six stars. …
The carmaker behind Subaru also builds the middle of Boeing's wingsSubaru Corporation is known for cars, yet its aerospace arm makes the centre wing sections of Boeing 777 and 787 airliners, plus military helicopters and trainer aircraft for Japa…
The gas behind the smell of a burnt match also guards wineStrike a match and the sharp whiff that follows is sulfur dioxide. Volcanoes pour it out by the million tons, it fills the thin air of Jupiter's moon Io, and Roman winemakers burn…
An online diary site invented the comment box and friends-only postsTwo features now baked into every social network, the reader comment and posts visible only to friends, were first dreamed up by Open Diary, a late-1990s community of people keepi…
Every speck of soot hides tiny grains of diamond and graphiteThe black grime from a candle flame or a diesel exhaust carries a surprise: soot always contains nanoparticles of graphite and diamond, a quirk chemists call gemmy soot. It forms …
Springfield, Massachusetts gave America basketball and its first dictionaryIn 1891 a Canadian teacher named James Naismith invented basketball in Springfield, Massachusetts, which is why the city calls itself Hoop City. It has another nickname too, the C…- A Scottish clergyman's 1816 engine now runs silent submarinesIn 1816 a Scottish minister, Robert Stirling, patented an engine meant to rival steam. It needed no boiler, burned nothing inside and made almost no noise. For a century it mostly…
Stoichiometry is chemistry's bookkeeping, and atoms never go missingA chemical reaction can rearrange atoms but never create, destroy or transform them. Every atom of carbon, hydrogen or oxygen that goes in must come out. That strict accounting, c…
Stone once raised twelve-storey homes, and builders are teaching it new tricksIn the 1690s people lived in stone apartment blocks twelve storeys high. Today stone mostly hangs as a thin decorative skin on concrete frames, even though many kinds outperform c…
Sintering fuses powders into solid parts without ever melting themSqueeze loose snow into a hard snowball and you have performed sintering. The same principle, where particles bond under heat or pressure while staying solid, lets factories shape…
The Smart car began as a Swatch boss's dream of a watch on wheelsIn 1982 Nicolas Hayek, head of the company behind Swatch, imagined a tiny, stylish two-seater that buyers could personalise like his watches. Volkswagen signed up and then backed …
The word scientist was invented in 1833 and met a cool receptionNewton, Galileo and Galvani never called themselves scientists, because the word did not exist. William Whewell coined it in 1833, modelled on artist, after members of a British s…
A self-driving car can change its automation level mid-journeyOne car might count as Level 3 while keeping its lane on a highway below 100 km/h, then drop to Level 2 as it speeds up. SAE's widely used scale rates who carries responsibility i…
Chip sales hit a record 791.7 billion dollars in 2025Bell Labs licensed the transistor for just 25,000 dollars after its 1948 invention. By 2025 global chip sales had reached a record 791.7 billion dollars, up 25.6 percent in a year…
A heart condition ended Carroll Shelby's driving and launched the CobraCarroll Shelby won Le Mans in 1959, then angina from a congenital heart defect forced him out of the cockpit after 1960. Within two years he was fitting Ford V8 engines into light…- Old 78 rpm records were pressed from a resin made by insectsBetween 1921 and 1928, Europe's record industry used 18,000 tons of shellac to press 260 million discs. That resin comes from a tiny female insect, the lac bug, which leaves it on…
Sikkim climbs from 280 metres to the world's third-highest summitIndia's second-smallest state rises from 280 metres on its southern border to 8,586 metres at the top of Kangchenjunga, the third-highest mountain on Earth. Sikkim packs 28 peaks,…
The Morris Minor was sawn in half lengthways and widened by four inchesIn late 1947, with the factory already tooling up, Alec Issigonis decided his new small Morris looked wrong. He had the prototype cut down the middle and the halves pushed apart u…
The world now has over 1.5 billion motor vehicles, up from 250 million in 1970In 1970 the world had about 250 million motor vehicles. By 1986 the count topped 500 million, and by 2023 it had reached around 1.55 billion, with growth now driven by rising owne…- The Oldsmobile Rocket 88 set the muscle car formula back in 1949The idea was simple: drop a maker's biggest engine into a smaller, lighter, cheaper car. Oldsmobile did it in 1949, fitting the 303-cubic-inch Rocket V8 from its luxury 98 into th…
Saab named its first car after the aircraft that came before itSaab's first car was called the 92 because the company's previous product, the Saab 91, was a single-engine training aircraft. Founded in 1937 to build warplanes for neutral Swede…
SAIC's Volkswagen Santana went from three local parts to over 90 percentIn 1987 the only Shanghai-made parts in a Volkswagen Santana were the tyres, radio and antenna. By 1998 more than 90 percent of its components came from local suppliers. That tran…
Salar de Uyuni is flat enough to calibrate satellites from spaceAcross roughly 10,582 square kilometres, the surface of Bolivia's Salar de Uyuni varies in height by less than a metre. That extreme flatness, a bright surface and clear skies mak…- Scania began as a bicycle maker, and its griffin logo sat on a chainsetScania's griffin comes from the coat of arms of the Swedish province of Skåne, and it once sat at the centre of a three-spoke bicycle chainset, a nod to the Malmö firm's beginning…
- Was the Mitsubishi Starion named after a star, a horse, or a mispronounced stallion?Mitsubishi insisted Starion joined star and Arion, the horse of Greek myth linked to Hercules. Others claimed Japanese engineers simply stumbled over the word stallion, and an ear…
Why the Montreal Protocol won ratification from all 198 partiesAgreed on 16 September 1987, the Montreal Protocol set out to phase out the chemicals eating away at the ozone layer. Every one of its 198 parties, 197 states plus the European Un…- The word moped came from a Swedish journalist, not motor-velocipedeIn 1952 the Swedish journalist Harald Nielsen blended motor and pedaler into moped. The popular story that it comes from motor-velocipede is wrong. Early mopeds genuinely needed t…
The same cheap oil fills transformers, glosses Swedish Fish and ages poker chipsMineral oil is a clear, odourless by-product of refining crude oil into petrol. Because it neither conducts electricity nor absorbs water and has almost no taste, it turns up in s…
Minerva sprang fully armed from a split skullRoman myth says Jupiter swallowed the Titaness Metis to stop a prophesied child from overthrowing him. Inside him she gave birth and forged armour, and the hammering gave him such…
Early minivans were deliberately sized to fit through a garage doorIn the late 1970s Chrysler set out to build a small, affordable van that drove like a car. Its 1984 Plymouth Voyager and Dodge Caravan stood six feet tall or less so they would fi…
Mitsubishi's 3000GT came with spoilers that moved by themselvesAt speed, the 1990s Mitsubishi 3000GT automatically extended its front and rear spoilers, part of a package that also included four-wheel steering, all-wheel drive, adjustable sus…- The MGB hid a 1947 engine inside a thoroughly modern bodyWhen MG unveiled the MGB in September 1962, its body was built as a single stressed shell rather than bolted to a separate chassis, a modern approach its Triumph rivals had not ad…
- Michael Dukakis rode the subway to work as governor of MassachusettsThroughout his second spell as governor of Massachusetts, Michael Dukakis took the subway to his office every day, and Bostonians still credit him with renovating the city's train…
Car tyres, fleece jackets and tea bags all shed microplasticsMicroplastics are plastic particles between a thousandth of a millimetre and 5 millimetres across. Some are made small on purpose, like the microbeads in face scrubs. Most come fr…- The Mercedes 300 SL got gullwing doors because ordinary ones would not fitThe famous upward-swinging doors of the Mercedes-Benz 300 SL were not a styling gimmick. Its lightweight tubular frame ran so high along the cabin that the top tube sat level with…
The Mercedes S-Class letter simply meant special, and the meaning kept driftingBefore Mercedes-Benz ranked its cars into tidy classes, an S after a model number just meant special, from the German Sonderklasse. It was stuck on whatever seemed upmarket at the…
The Mercedes W124's single wiper stretched to reach the windscreen's cornersA normal wiper sweeps a simple arc and misses the top corners of the glass. The Mercedes W124, built from 1984 to 1997, used one blade on an off-centre mechanism that pushed it ou…