Autos

Who doesn’t need a little help with all those daily chores? Mowing the lawn is the quintessential dreaded chore, especially when it comes to super huge lawns. Introducing the Ron Beer, the long-lost neglected cousin of the successful John Deere lawn tractor. You won’t see it on a showroom floor anytime soon, and it has little chance of making mom proud or securing a date for the night—but you have to admit that it’s slightly genius. Is it a car? Yes. Is it a lawnmower? Yes. It’s a Ford Festiva-based lawnmower car, perhaps the greatest, most noble thing that’s ever happened to an old Festiva, especially one with its rear hatch hacked off so it looks like a super tiny truck. See all 7 photos The shirtless Daisy Dukes-wearing YouTuber Ginger Billy toutes the mult...

It’s a similar strategy to what Audi plans to apply to its A6 midsize sedan line, which will offer both ICE- and EV-powered options, each built around completely different platforms. S it’s no surprise that the electric Macan rides on the same Premium Platform Electric (PPE) underpinnings as the electric A6 E-Tron concept car that previews an upcoming production sedan bearing the same name.  See all 11 photos While Porsche’s eager to share details about the development process of the electric Macan, which includes digital testing using computer models to simulate real vehicles and external properties, the brand’s currently keeping the SUV’s performance and powertrain specifics closer to the chest. Nevertheless, Michael Steiner, a member of Porsche’s...

In case you hadn’t heard, Tesla CEO Elon Musk is hosting Saturday Night Live May 8. The billionaire cryptocurrency peddler and electric car boundary pusher has riled up some big reactions online among SNL fans and his own fans alike—so, whatever you think of Musk’s appearance on the weekly live sketch comedy show, we can all appreciate the unexpected adversarial advertising that broke out during the episode. We’re talking, of course, about Lucid Motors‘ sharply timed ad for the upcoming Air luxury EV—the 500-mile sedan it is hoping can take down Tesla’s Model S. Lucid must have figured viewership for SNL would be high, given all the buzz surrounding the Tesla CEO’s appearance on it. (Aided by Musk himself, who tweeted out this week in the run-up to ...

Ford is gearing up to kick off sales of its electric E-Transit van, a full-size delivery vehicle that in its longest and tallest format can swallow almost two of Citroën’s My Ami Cargo delivery vehicles. We are making this apples-to-elephants comparison because of the delightful contrast in recent EV cargo vehicle news. The Ami (in high-capacity passenger format, with room for two!) is about to make its debut in the United States as a rideshare rental in Washington D.C. and Portland, Oregon; the massive E-Transit begins public testing later this summer. Meanwhile, in France, the ridiculously tiny Ami is being pressed into delivery duty. See all 15 photos The My Ami Cargo offers a surprisingly capacious 14.0 cubic feet of cargo space in the place where the passenger seat used to be—ro...

Chevy’s NASCAR entrant wears a newly symmetrical body (previously, NASCAR racers’ bodies were asymmetrical, optimized for a life spent turning left), and rides on more modern chassis bits. The rear suspension is now an independent design, and the steering is handled by a rack and pinion setup; you’ll also notice the wheels are much larger than before—they’ve jumped in diameter from 15 inches to 18 and wear less chubby looking (thus more normal-appearing) tires—and are now made from lighter aluminum, not steel. See all 14 photos As much as Chevy touts these improvements as more closely tying the NASCAR racer to the production Camaro ZL1, the bow-tie brand’s NASCAR entry really shares the majority of its important bits with other Next Gen racers, including those...

Imagine waking up, downing your coffee, and stumbling out to your Chevrolet Equinox or Malibu only to find that the entire steering wheel is missing. According to a report from Detroit TV station WJBK-FOX2, that’s precisely what happened to a couple of dozen residents of the Detroit suburb of Eastleigh. (The missing steering wheels, that is—we’re speculating about the coffee and the early-morning stumbling.) Apparently, this is a new twist on the classic old crime of airbag theft. The National Insurance Crime Bureau notes that approximately 50,000 airbags go walking every year. Thieves sell the stolen airbags to less-than-scrupulous shops who prefer to pay $250-$300 to the villains rather than a $1,000 or more to a dealer. Pandemic-related shortages have made airbags scarce, he...

Top Gear America is back from the midseason break, but the guys are missing a place to call home—their own race track. They don’t even have a dirt track to play on. The oldest permanent road course in the United States—Willow Springs International Raceway—has been a great homebase for now, but the guys want a place of their own. Trouble is, world-class racing facilities like Laguna Seca, Spa-Francorchamps, and Fuji Speedway can cost in excess of hundreds of millions of dollars to build. Fear not, this is Top Gear America—Dougy, Jet, and Bobby (heavy Boston inflection, please) know how to build a dirt track. Dougy (Dax Shepard), Jet (Jethro Bovingdon), and Bahwbee (spelled phonetically for Mr. Rob Corddry) are the tough-guy-builder names our noble hosts assign themselves to give more ...

There’s a new trailer for F9, the upcoming release in the Fast and Furious saga that was previously delayed, and it has a lot of what you expect: Pounding music, Vin Diesel looking cool while perpetually shifting gears, and crashes, crashes, and more crashes. But there are a couple of other elements in this behind-the-scenes-ish trailer that are worthy of note: Cameras, dollies, car-cannons, ramps, and other stunt rigs. We imagine that is very deliberate, because one of the (very legitimate) criticisms of the FnF movies (particularly 2004’s 2 Fast 2 Furious) was that there were too many computer-generated stunts. Maybe the public night be fooled, and maybe they wouldn’t be, but car fanatics like us know how a car should move, and it was pretty obvious that a lot of t...

Created in collaboration with Porsche Design, a newly developed performance roof box from Porsche Tequipment is now available for customers to purchase at Porsche dealers. How can a roof box find itself categorized as “high performance?” Well, it is tested at speeds up to 200 kph, or approximately 125 mph, meaning it has a high-speed designation that should be perfect for dry lakebed runs, autobahn blasts, or flagrantly illegal speeding here in America. See all 30 photos Based on the “form follows function” design principle, the curvy roof box features a Porsche logo at the rear, two side blades, and has customizable options. The side blades are available in high gloss black and three additional popular colors from the Porsche model range, including Dolomite Silver ...