The Autopian

You know what’s a fun thing to think about? For a good number of years, encompassing pretty much all of the 1990s and even into the early 2000s, the cheapest, most capable hand-held computer you could buy was a Nintendo Game Boy. Remember, this was an era before there were ubiquitous smartphones in everyone’s pocket. Personal Digital Assistants like the Apple Newton and Palm Pilot didn’t come out until 1993 and 1996, respectively, and those cost way, way more than the Game Boy’s $89.

The wonderful thing about doing an Autopian event is that a bunch of Autopians from other parts of the country pipe up and request one in their own backyard. While I’d love to do a meetup simultaneously with everyone, everywhere, pretty much all the time (which, virtually, is basically our Discord), there are some physical restrictions. Hearing the pleas after our Lime Rock track day, though, I had the idea to tack on a couple of meetups to a press trip I have next week.

You owe us a solid, Volkswagen. No, I’m not talking about making up for Dieselgate; I’m referring to the current rather lackluster model lineup and the unqualified disaster that the revived Type 2 “bus” turned into. Honestly, VW needs to do themselves a favor and atone for these missteps. Thankfully, I can see a product that would likely be a true attention-getting hit for them and give the market a product we’ve been begging for but just haven’t gotten.

We as a species have a certain love affair with complexity. An iPhone tells the time just as well as an automatic watch, yet some of us still pay thousands to put tiny Swiss-made springs and gears on our wrists. We go slack-jawed at concerts adorned with moving set pieces and pyrotechnics, feel a certain satisfaction from videos showing hundreds of dominoes falling perfectly into place, and marvel at tens of thousands of dots coming together to form a perfectly pointillistic picture.

It sometimes feels like we’re entering the ‘soft bigotry of low expectations’ phase when it comes to the non-hybrid EV market. There has been a lot of bad news lately and the market has softened a lot. I look at it the other way, and see that EVs were victim of a somewhat opposite effect: the hard bias of high expectations. Yes, EV sales dropped this quarter, and politics is partially to blame, but prospects aren’t all that terrible.

New two-stroke roadgoing motorcycles are nearly extinct. You can’t even buy a street bike with a two-stroke engine from any manufacturer in America today. Sadly, that leaves you only with boutiques few people have ever heard of, but one of these companies has found a creative way to get its name out there.

Good morning! For this week’s Showdowns, I’m conducting my searches with exactly three criteria: 2010 or newer, five grand or less, and manual transmissions only. I’m finding some interesting stuff, and quite a bit more variety than you might guess. I’m sure I can find eight good ones for you to check out, and narrow down to four, and then to one. Our first pair looks promising to me, with a few caveats. Friday’s final was a four-way contest between some unlikely competitors.

Citroën is known, as I think I’ve made abundantly clear, for making some pretty idiosyncratic cars. That’s why I’m so fond of them. Well, maybe this goes more for Citroën past as opposed to modern Stellantis-run Citroën, but you get the idea. Still, for all of their weirdness, there’s really one weird-car hallmark that Citiroën hasn’t really touched: rear engines. Well, I guess that’s not entirely true.

The gasoline engine has taken so many different shapes and forms over history, from familiar inline-fours and V8s to beautiful radials. But someone has to maintain these things, and more elaborate engines may be equipped with dozens of spark plugs. Chrysler once made a tank engine that had 60 of them! The Bishop wrote about the glorious Ford GAA, but he really only scratched the surface of tank engines. Hoser68: This wasn’t even the weird engine for the Sherman.

His name is Billy, and his business, “Pasadena Motor Vehicle Registration & Transfer Service,” shares a nondescript building with his small used-car dealership off of Pasadena’s busy Foothill Boulevard. A few months ago I walked in with two huge problems: I had a car with zero paperwork, and I had another car that the world didn’t know existed.