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1,389 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 13 of 24.

  1. 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…
  2. 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,…
  3. 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…
  4. 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…
  5. Pressing a carburetted car's pedal lets in air, and the air fetches the fuelIn an old carburetted car, flooring the accelerator does not squirt in more petrol directly. It opens a valve that lets more air rush through, and faster air has lower pressure, w…
  6. 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…
  7. 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…
  8. 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…
  9. The business jet was born from a French trainer and a US Air Force shopping listThe first small civilian jet looked like a fighter, seating four people in two rows under a sliding canopy. It flopped commercially, and its failure scared off Cessna and Douglas.…
  10. 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 …
  11. 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…
  12. 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 …
  13. 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…
  14. From Swiss stilt houses to a two-kilometre span, bridges track engineering historyA single railway locomotive can weigh 197 tonnes, which is one reason train lines shy away from graceful curving or cable-hung crossings and stick to stiff straight beams and trus…
  15. 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…
  16. 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…
  17. 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…
  18. 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…
  19. 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…
  20. 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…
  21. 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 …
  22. 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…
  23. 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…
  24. 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…
  25. 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…
  26. 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…
  27. 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…
  28. 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…
  29. 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…
  30. 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…
  31. 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, …
  32. 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…
  33. 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…
  34. 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 …
  35. China's car industry grew from four state giants to roughly 150 brandsAround 150 car brands are active in China today, 97 of them homegrown, in the largest automotive industry anywhere. For decades foreign carmakers could only enter through partners…
  36. BAIC went from copying a Soviet saloon to owning part of MercedesIn December 2021 a Beijing state carmaker became the single biggest shareholder in the company behind Mercedes-Benz, holding 9.98 percent. BAIC started out in 1958 building a car …
  37. Banknotes evolved from promises of silver into plastic and hologramsA banknote began as a bank's written promise to hand over gold or silver coin on demand. The Bank of Scotland started issuing its own in 1696 and has never stopped, the longest un…
  38. Carl Benz's three-wheeled Motorwagen changed shape several times before saleCarl Benz filed his patent for a motor carriage on 29 January 1886, but the machine in the drawings had already moved on. His three-wheeler kept evolving through at least three st…
  39. The Audi A4 set Volkswagen's quality benchmark across five generationsWhen the first Audi A4 appeared in 1994, parent company Volkswagen declared it the build quality yardstick for every model it made. Over the next three decades the compact executi…
  40. Audi's R8 supercar was hand-built at Neckarsulm and driven by Iron ManSeventy workers fitted 5,000 parts by hand to build each Audi R8, and ninety-five lasers then checked the finished car in five seconds. The mid-engined two-seater, launched in 200…
  41. The Audi TT borrowed a motorcycle race name and a Bauhaus shapeAudi's rounded little sports car took its initials from the Isle of Man Tourist Trophy, a motorcycle race where its predecessor NSU first competed in 1907. Sketched in California …
  42. A Wisconsin paper town switched on America's first central hydroelectric stationOn September 30, 1882, a plant on the Fox River began sending hydroelectric power from a central station, a first for the nation. Its customers were Appleton's paper mills and a m…
  43. Earth is farthest from the Sun in July, yet northern summers run warmerEvery early July our planet swings out to its most distant point from the Sun, catching only about 93.55 per cent of the sunlight it gets in January. Northern summer happens anywa…
  44. Arcologies promised whole cities in a single building, and mostly stayed fictionPaolo Soleri fused architecture and ecology in 1969 into one word for a dream: a single towering structure holding homes, shops and farms, needing little from outside. Half a cent…
  45. How a Tyneside shipyard helped turn weapon-making into a global tradeIn 1884 William Armstrong opened a yard at Elswick that, for a time, was the only factory anywhere able to build a battleship and fit every gun aboard it. Cruisers from that works…
  46. Five rival New York papers pooled costs to cover a war, creating APSending dispatches from the Mexican-American War was expensive, so in May 1846 five competing New York dailies agreed to split the bill. That thrifty arrangement became the Associ…
  47. Aston Martin survived seven bankruptcies, once changing hands for just 101 poundsJames Bond's DB5 made Aston Martin a symbol of British glamour, but the balance sheet rarely matched the image. The firm has gone bust seven times. In 1972 David Brown cleared deb…
  48. A Victorian patent dodge now helps hybrid cars squeeze more miles from fuelJames Atkinson built odd engines in the 1880s partly to sidestep patents protecting Nikolaus Otto's four-stroke design. His real insight lay elsewhere: let the piston expand farth…
  49. American Motors, the small carmaker that fought Detroit's giants with compactsWhile Ford, General Motors and Chrysler kept building bigger cars in the 1950s, American Motors bet on small ones. Its boss called it a dinosaur-fighter strategy, and the compact …
  50. The ancient Near East, where farming, writing, money and the wheel beganA strip of land from Egypt to the Iranian plateau gave humanity a startling list of firsts. Year-round intensive farming started there, and with it came the earliest dense cities,…
  51. Refrigerated railcars turned a failing St. Louis brewery into Budweiser countryAdolphus Busch borrowed the name Budweiser from a Bohemian town his beer had nothing to do with. What made it America's first national brand was logistics: pasteurisation, mechani…
  52. Anthracite, the smokeless hard coal that blockade runners and railways prizedMost coal smokes and stains; anthracite does neither. This dense, glossy fuel burns with a short blue flame and almost no soot, which is why Confederate blockade runners fed it to…
  53. Anti-lock brakes began on aircraft and railways long before they reached carsSkilled drivers once pumped the brake pedal to stop a skid. Anti-lock brakes automate that trick, easing pressure on any wheel about to lock many times faster than a human could, …
  54. How apocrypha went from secret sacred books to a word for dubious storiesCall a tale apocryphal today and you mean it is probably untrue. The word once implied almost the opposite: texts kept hidden because they held knowledge judged too deep or holy f…
  55. The Liberty Bell spent nine months hidden under an Allentown church floorWhen the British were about to take Philadelphia in 1777, patriots feared the State House bell would be melted into ammunition. Two farmers hauled it north by wagon to a small tow…
  56. Alpine's revived A110 sold out its launch run in one weekendAlpine limited its launch edition of the reborn A110 to 1,955 cars, a nod to the year the brand was founded. Buyers had to put down 2,000 euros through an app before seeing the fi…
  57. Aluminium is everywhere in Earth's crust, yet almost never found as metalAluminium ranks third among elements in Earth's crust, behind only oxygen and silicon, but nature almost never leaves it lying around as a bare metal. It clings to oxygen so fierc…
  58. The AMC Gremlin was reportedly sketched on an airline sick bagAMC design chief Dick Teague said the idea came to him mid-flight: take a car and simply chop off its tail. He claimed he drew it on an air sickness bag. The result, named after a…
  59. AMC's Javelin adverts showed a Ford Mustang being smashed with sledgehammersCar advertising in the 1960s politely ignored the competition. American Motors did the opposite. Its campaign for the new Javelin put the car side by side with the Ford Mustang, a…
  60. Akron, Ohio gave America tyres, clay marbles and the K–12 school systemA canal town named after the Greek word for summit ended up shaping everyday American life in odd ways. Akron pioneered the graded school system used in every state, mass-produced…

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