The Rise and Fall of John DeLorean
This story by Suzanne Snider—which details the fantastical rise and fall of John DeLorean, a former titan of the American automotive industry—first appeared in the June/July 2006 issue of Tokion.
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Get PocketThis story by Suzanne Snider—which details the fantastical rise and fall of John DeLorean, a former titan of the American automotive industry—first appeared in the June/July 2006 issue of Tokion.
For journalists at the North American International Auto Show (NAIAS) in Detroit on Monday, it was a perilously short weekend. Many, if not most, were in the desert just a couple days ago.
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.—The first rule of riding in Google's self-driving car, says Dmitri Dolgov, is not to compliment Google's self-driving car. We've been cruising the streets of Mountain View for about ten minutes. Dolgov, the car's software lead, is sitting shotgun.
I grew up in Los Angeles, the city by the freeway by the sea. And if there’s one thing I’ve known ever since I could sit up in my car seat, it’s that you should expect to run into traffic at any point of the day.
McCabe sat down and breezed through his first three runs. He was nervous, but his calls, he thought, were solid. Surely it was a done deed now? For the session’s final run, O’Connor asked McCabe to take him from the Sun and Doves to Emirates Stadium. McCabe closed his eyes.
Speaking about self-driving cars last September, Elon Musk preached caution. The man who wants to send us all to space and shuttle us between cities at outrageous speeds told the FT that "my opinion is it's a bridge too far to go to fully autonomous cars."
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Humans might be the one problem Google can’t solve. For the past four years, Google has been working on self-driving cars with a mechanism to return control of the steering wheel to the driver in case of emergency.
It's called the Model S P85D. It comfortably seats four, more if you're willing to squeeze in a kid or two. If your frame of reference for automobiles ended somewhere around the year 2000, the performance of Elon Musk's hottest all-electric sedan yet would be outright difficult to comprehend.
About an hour from Munich, Audi basically runs a city. Its headquarters are situated in Ingolstadt, a city of around 125,000 people.
As the sun was setting on a stormy Georgia day, Brooke Melton was 30 miles outside of Atlanta in her Chevy Cobalt. It was March 10, 2010, her birthday, and the 29-year-old pediatric nurse was on her way to her boyfriend’s to celebrate.
There's a difference between being cheap and treasuring value per dollar spent. One is knowing where the best burger joint is, and the other is going up to other tables and asking for unwanted leftovers and spare ketchup packets.
EVEN with their high-tech gadgets and computerized machinery, most cars still do a pretty poor job of providing helpful information about things like mechanical problems and fuel use — and of connecting to the devices we use the most, our phones. Improvements are on the horizon.
The very earliest automobiles used tillers to control their steering, but by the turn of the century the nascent car industry settled on using a wheel to control the steering, perhaps taking inspiration from boats.
One of the hottest clashes in technology pits two pathmakers in the new era of electric cars—Tesla and General Motors. Both are developing pure electrics that cost roughly $35,000, travel 200 miles on a single charge, and appeal to the mass luxury market. The stakes are enormous.