Tag: jalopnik.com

In the perfect scenario, your engine operates with an air-fuel mixture – or stoichiometric ratio – that is exactly 14.7 parts air for every one part gasoline. This is the goldilocks zone where internal combustion chemistry is just right, and your emissions drop significantly. When that 14.7:1 ratio tips over, you end up in the land of lean…

Rivian, the electric automaker known for a cool outdoors-focused electric trucks and SUVs (and Amazon delivery vans), is a fairly new kid on the block. Founded in 2011 by Robert Scaringe, the company offers an SUV called the R1S and a truck, called the R1T, along with two smaller SUVs, the R2 that just went on sale, and the…

Little else is more frustrating as a driver than watching the highway grind to a halt behind a long line of semi trucks. These rolling steel roadblocks can seemingly pop up out of nowhere, trapping commuters for hours with nowhere to pass. There are stretches of highway across America that have earned a reputation as brutal…

Wind the clock back a decade, and asking why the LS remained the default swap choice would have been a pointless question. The answer was obvious — engines were cheap, plentiful, aftermarket support was huge, and detailed build threads were out there for DIYers to follow. For reliable V8 power on a realistic budget, the…

When Mercedes-AMG announced that the C63 would go from housing eight rowdy cylinders wedged beneath its hood to just four with a plug-in-hybrid system attached in the new W206 generation, car enthusiasts raised a collective eyebrow and made a pretty big fuss. Now, I drove that car, and when it was in the right mode…

Welcome back from your long weekend off to this Second Monday (simply known as Tuesday). Wherever your travels may have taken you, I hope the journey was more entertaining or at least more exciting than my road trip of enlightenment in finding out how many more gas stations are now along 31 on my travels…

Suicide doors, also known as rear-hinged, clamshell, coach or a whole host of proprietary names, are a holdover from a different era. Car doors that swing open from opposite sides are borrowed from the pre-automotive days of horse-and-carriage coach building, hence the “coach doors” term used by automakers like Rolls-Royce. The style was all the rage…

Lotus has never been a car company to shy away from the weird, but the Emira has largely stood as the brand’s classic recipe: Lightweight, small but relatively powerful engine in the back, lots of fun. Clearly that was too normal for the Lotus of today, though, because the company just added two kinda-weird new things…

Honda is no stranger to cranking out stupid-popular SUVs. The CR-V alone has racked up over 15 million sales globally since its 1995 debut. Today, they’re about as commonplace on U.S. interstates as shredded semi-truck tires and wild stories of road-rage buffoonery. Comparatively, the Honda Passport and Honda Pilot have stayed under the radar. They’ve…

The muscle car era was already in its final days in 1973, but Pontiac wasn’t quite done pushing the performance envelope. Backed by its new 455-cubic-inch Super Duty V-8, the brand was showing off a new variant of the 1973 Pontiac GTO that garnered the title of Performance Car of the Year from Hi-Performance Cars magazine.…