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There’s a lot of trash in the sea of subcompact crossovers, vehicles that offer no more usable space than their hatchback equivalents despite being less efficient and more costly. However, the Kia Seltos is a little bit different. For starters, it’s one of the few crossovers that lets its driver manually lock the torque split to 50:50 front-to-rear. Then there’s the fact that it’s available with a reasonably pokey turbocharged engine as an option, an uncommon thing in this segment....

I want to begin this article by stating that I’m not qualified to write about lowrider culture — like, at all. I’m writing this as someone who is, frankly, completely ignorant but at the same time highly appreciative of what I consider a consistently underrated subculture largely under-covered by mainstream automotive media. This is going to change, and The Autopian’s first step in fixing this egregious oversight is to bring you this small video from the LA Auto Show Floor:...

At the Autopian, we embrace all forms of transportation, and with the surge of interest in recreational vehicle we’ve been sure to post daily on the latest and greatest models available. Sadly, for most of us, reading about one of these new motorhomes is akin to looking at articles about some hypercar; we’re learning about something that is essentially unobtainable to us. New motorhomes were never cheap, and they are now getting stratospheric....

The Mitsubishi Delica nameplate turns 55 years old next year, and instead of going big, Mitsubishi has gone small. The Delica Mini is a “lightweight super height wagon” which I suspect is a sort of kei car. More specifically, I suspect it’s a re-worked Mitsubishi eK X Space as the tail lamps, door tracks, hatch panel, and greenhouse all look identical between the two models. Still, I definitely think that the Delica Mini looks a bit better than the eK X Space....

If you live and breathe the seven-slot grille, you likely remember the Gladiator Farout concept from the 2021 Moab Easter Jeep Safari. This one-off overlanding special packed a ton of off-road hardware, but four big highlights were special grey paint, a black hood graphic, a black grille, and the EcoDiesel engine. While Jeep is showing off the Wrangler Rubicon FarOut in a different shade of grey, that special grey, the diesel engine, Rubicon base, black grille, and concept of a black hood graphic all carry over from that Gladiator concept....

Part of GM’s Chapter 11 Bankruptcy in 2009 involved killing some brands and taking government bailout money. One of those brands was Pontiac, and by the end of that year, the brand had sold just 178,300 cars. The last car to wear Pontiac’s red badge is a 2010 G6 that was built at the Orion Township Assembly Line in January 2010. It was once believed that the last Pontiac was a G3 Wave that was built in Mexico in December 2009, but the G6 beat it by ever so little....

On the outside, the new Honda Accord is very minimalist and refined, definitely punching above its price grade. Honda’s done away with the beluga-style fivehead introduced on the current Civic, and the Accord’s all the better-looking for it. Around back, a heckblende-style tail lamp treatment ties the rear together nicely, while the rear emblem is a sensible size for once. Job well done, Honda. As for powertrains, the big two-liter turbocharged motor shared with the Acura RDX is gone for 2023....

A little history is important. Colin Chapman, the man behind Lotus, is now infamous for his “simplify and add lightness philosophy.” The phrase has been repeated so many times it’s almost meaningless and it would be contradictory to weigh it down with too much explanation. Essentially, the less you have to add (in weight or complexity) to a car to make it perform the better that car will be....

The first thing we need to find out is just how many cars there are on Earth. The number that I’ve found most commonly referenced between a large number of sources and outlets seems to be 1,446,000,000 cars, or, if you hate reading all those zeroes, about 1.45 billion cars. That’s a lot of cars, but it’s significantly less than the number of people. Here’s how that number breaks down by region: Even though the number of cars is a lot less than the number of people, this is fine!...

Let’s go through each Winner of the Losers, one by one! Hot damn, right? The Tree-Shaped Air Freshener Scent air freshener likely failed because it was just too confusingly meta: It was an air freshener scent based on the scent of another air freshener, the famous “Little Tree” type. But while the original Little Trees are based on scents from trees or fruits or other root-source smells, nobody wanted a synthetic smell based on a synthetic smell....

Every day, I get wonderful emails from you, our lovely readers. The contents vary wildly from tips and bus finds to stories of how our little day-to-day automotive, aviation, and motorcycle musings have brightened your day. Thank you very much and we’re happy to have made an impact. This bus was sent to me by Josh, and I’ve been sitting on it for a couple of months just trying to find out more about it....

There’s something about a European coming to the U.S., seeing a car that many of us find boring/perhaps take for granted, and lamenting its doomed fate. In some ways, Jonathan is appreciating a car that hasn’t received enough appreciation over its lifetime, and I respect the heck out of that. “I thought this was a bit too sad not to share,” Jonathan says in his email titled “Pristine Buick Lesabre I found in a junkyard....

Also, this brochure is one of the only ones I’ve ever seen to actually feature and illustrate one of my favorite bits of lighting equipment: the bi-color parking lamp: Look how nicely that explains what these things are for: to keep your car from getting smacked into when it’s alone in the dark. Isn’t that something we all want, deep down? (In reply to eggsalad, I’ve often wondered this myself....

sources: Wikimedia, Apple This fact was made know to me in recent comments pertaining to eighties and nineties design. A reader asked rhetorically ‘where his translucent purple car was’ that he had expected to see in the future (which is now). Our own Mercedes Streeter then stepped in with this comment: So..did she want me to design a car inspired by or based on the G3? Here response to me was that she was ‘half joking’, but that infers there’s at least one half of her that wants to see that....

Whoo! This one’s tighter than an Arizona Senate race. But as of this writing, the Sky has the win by four votes. Personally, I’d prefer the Sebring. I have a fun sports car; a relaxed cruiser sounds nice, and not boring at all. Anyway, moving on: Despite how it may seem, there is very little art and almost no science involved in choosing the cars for this feature. I find one car that catches my fancy, then go looking for a mate for it....

Back in August, the California Air Resources Board voted to ban the sales of new internal combustion cars by 2035. As we reported, the impact of this will be huge. Currently about 16 percent of California’s new vehicle sales are emissions-free vehicles. But for the period between now and 2035, CARB is setting goals for phasing out sales of new ICE-powered cars. In 2026, the number of emissions-free vehicle sales are expected to rise to 35 percent....

First, the criteria: Aspiration and fuel type don’t count, only number of cylinders and the way they’re arranged. That would complicate things even more, and we want to keep things simple. That being said, I’m still going to run through aspiration and fuel type because it makes the W463 seem even more astounding. Oh, and it has to be a single generation of car that wasn’t dramatically changed in the period of time between its launch and its final year on the market....

The press release chronicles the early development of Honda’s electric vehicle program, and makes it very clear that not only did Honda lack the expertise to build an EV, but the company was one of the last to the game, too: Honda put together a team, led by Large Project Leader (LPL) Junichi Araki, and work began on an EV prototype. Using an off-the-shelf motor and lead-acid batteries, the team converted a three-door Civic and demonstrated the working proof-of-concept car to Araki in July of 1991....

I can’t put my finger exactly on what it is, perhaps just my relative unfamiliarity with this model that never came to America, but it looks to me like a late ’70s version of one of those generalized composite cars you see in insurance ads. It doesn’t look bad, it just looks like someone took some Accords and Bluebirds and B210s and Crowns and Coronas and GLCs and a lot of other Japanese cars of the era, gave it to a magic giant dog to masticate, and spit out this....

Yes, a crapton, which in this case, is equal to 14. And that’s with the turn indicator dash light being just one that served both arrows. That’s so many idiot lights, all arranged there in a huge grid. Other inexpensive peoples’ cars had at most a handful of idiot lights; the VW Beetle, for example, had, normally, just four instrument cluster lights: oil, generator, turn arrows, and high beams. That’s it!...