A thought on disability and transportation infrastructure

Every now and then, I see an argument against road diets and the like that goes something like this: “Disabled people need cars to get where they’re going, so removing car lanes and street parking to make room for bike lanes and sidewalks is being ableist!” While I am able-bodied, I feel like I’m able to debunk this argument adequately, and as I see it often enough, I felt it worth making a blog post, covering this from a few different angles.

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Ideas to make electrification work in endurance racing

With the impending climate crisis, it’s more important than ever that we develop and deploy transportation technologies that minimize the impact of our daily transportation, including electric cars. Automakers have traditionally used motorsport as a venue for marketing their cars and their new technologies, and endurance racing has been one of the most road-relevant venues in the past. Electric cars, however, present a problem with that.

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More evidence towards the hypothesis that the sedan is alive and well… it’s just called a pickup truck

This post was originally written for Oppositelock, but with the impending death of Kinja user blogs, I’m reposting it here.

2013 Ford F-150 King Ranch interior

Last week, I saw a comment over on Jalopnik that I think really captured the nature of the American automotive market.

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My thoughts on the future of LMP1-H, after the 2017 24 Hours of Le Mans

It’s been a day since the 24 Hours of Le Mans, and I’ve finally put my thoughts together on it. It was something else, nothing like I’ve ever seen before.

Before the 24 Hours of Le Mans, predictions were that Toyota would walk away with the race on both pace and reliability. Predictions were that the all-new and huge LMP2 field would have failures en masse, having shown mediocre reliability in the lead-up to Le Mans. And, fears were that the GTE-Pro field would have poor balance of performance, allowing someone to run away with it. Continue reading “My thoughts on the future of LMP1-H, after the 2017 24 Hours of Le Mans”




Holy shit, 41% thermal efficiency out of a gasoline engine

This post was originally written for Oppositelock, but with the impending death of Kinja user blogs, I’m reposting it here.

Last week, Toyota detailed their next-generation powertrains for vehicles on their new architecture. In addition to several new transmissions, they announced a new modular engine family supporting varying cylinder displacements (much like Mazda’s SkyActiv-G family) and cylinder count, and detailed the first variant of that, the 2.5 liter Dynamic Force (what an awful marketing name) engine, which is almost certainly destined for the new Camry.

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