145 Fun Facts About Automobile

Which German engineer is widely credited with patenting the first gasoline-powered automobile in 1886?

Karl Benz patented his three-wheeled Motorwagen in January 1886; about 60 miles away, Gottlieb Daimler built a motor carriage of his own that same year, each man working independently of the other.

Ford's moving assembly line borrowed its idea from the overhead trolley lines of which Chicago industry?

Meatpacking: Chicago's packers ran a 'disassembly line', hanging each carcass from a trolley that carried it past butchers who did one task apiece; Ford reversed the idea, adding parts at every station.

What ignites the air-fuel mixture in a gasoline engine but is missing from a diesel?

Spark plug: it fires an electric spark inside the cylinder to light the fuel; a diesel carries glow plugs instead, but those only warm the engine to help it start in cold weather.

What does the acronym ABS stand for in the context of automotive safety systems?

An Anti-lock Braking System stops the wheels locking under hard braking so the driver keeps steering control; it is fitted to cars, motorcycles, trucks and aircraft.

Which exhaust-system device turns toxic pollutants into less harmful gases?

A catalytic converter uses platinum, palladium and rhodium to turn carbon monoxide, unburned fuel and nitrogen oxides into carbon dioxide, water and nitrogen; those precious metals are why thieves cut converters off parked cars.

Why did Jaguar drop its Leaper mascot from cars sold in Europe?

Pedestrian safety: European rules required bonnet ornaments to fold or snap off in a collision, yet American buyers still wanted the leaping cat, so Jaguar kept fitting it to cars bound for the US.

Which car body style has a three-box layout with separate engine, passenger and cargo compartments?

A sedan, called a saloon in Britain, keeps engine, passengers and luggage in three separate boxes; the name was borrowed from the sedan chair, a covered seat that porters carried on poles.

What type of internal combustion engine uses an eccentric rotary design with a triangular rotor instead of traditional reciprocating pistons?

The Wankel engine, named after Felix Wankel, first reached buyers in Germany's NSU Spider; Mazda then spent years curing its scored housings and oil thirst before making it a sports-car trademark.

Which Swedish manufacturer made the modern three-point seat belt standard equipment in 1959?

Volvo engineer Nils Bohlin, who had designed ejector seats for Saab aircraft, devised the three-point belt, and Volvo then opened the patent so that rival carmakers could use it free.

Which German engineer, born in 1858, gave his name to the compression-ignition engine?

Rudolf Diesel invented the compression-ignition engine that burns the fuel named after him; in 1913 he vanished from the deck of a steamer bound for England, and his death was never explained.

Which component lets a car's two driven wheels turn at unequal speeds through a corner?

The differential splits engine torque between the two driven wheels while letting them rotate at different speeds; the outer wheel covers a longer arc in every corner.

A supercharger is driven mechanically by the engine, but what spins a turbocharger's turbine?

Exhaust gases spin the turbine, which is why a turbocharger suffers turbo lag: at low revs the exhaust flow is too weak to spin it up, so the boost arrives a moment late.

Which engineer led the design team behind the Volkswagen Type 1 in the 1930s?

Ferdinand Porsche signed the development contract in June 1934, and the first prototypes were hand-built over the next two years at his own home rather than in a factory.

Which French inventor built the first steam-powered vehicle capable of carrying people, in 1769?

Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot's fardier à vapeur of 1769 was a three-wheeled steam tractor built to haul artillery for the French army; it proved too slow and unwieldy to develop further.

Jesuit missionary Ferdinand Verbiest designed a 1670s toy steam cart for which ruler?

The Kangxi Emperor: Verbiest, a Flemish Jesuit astronomer at the Qing court, described the steam-driven cart in his Astronomia Europea, but no other account confirms that it was ever actually built.

Which 1901 vehicle is generally regarded as the first mass-produced automobile?

The Oldsmobile Curved Dash sold 425 in 1901 and 2,500 the next year; Ransom Olds said a factory fire that spared only this little runabout had made the choice of model for him.

What was the Ford Model T's popular nickname?

The Tin Lizzie worked off the road too: farmers took off a wheel, fastened a pulley to the hub and ran a belt from it to drive saws, pumps and threshers.

Despite Ford's famous line, what colours was the Model T actually sold in from 1908 to 1913?

Grey, green, blue and red came first, and by 1912 every car left the works in midnight blue; the famous black-only rule held just from 1914 to 1925, and colours returned for the final years.

In 1914 Henry Ford more than doubled his factory workers' pay to which famous daily wage?

$5 a day, up from $2.34, with the shift cut from nine hours to eight: Ford wanted to stop workers quitting the monotonous line, and skilled mechanics soon flocked to him.

Which control shifted a Ford Model T between low and high gear?

A foot pedal: pressing the left pedal down gave low gear and letting it up gave high, the middle pedal was reverse, and the throttle was not a pedal at all but a hand lever.

By 1918, roughly what fraction of all cars in the United States were Model Ts?

Half: Ford kept cutting the price as production climbed, and by the mid-1920s a new Model T cost about a third of its launch price.

The word 'automobile' combines Latin 'mobilis' with 'autós', meaning 'self', from which language?

Ancient Greek: autós, 'self', was joined to Latin mobilis, 'movable', in French; modern Greeks avoid the hybrid and call a car an autokineto, 'moved of itself', built from Greek alone.

Which gas fuelled the first internal-combustion vehicle, built by Swiss inventor François Isaac de Rivaz around 1807?

Hydrogen: de Rivaz mixed it with oxygen in a cylinder and fired it with an electric spark, and in 1807 the blasts drove a carriage a short distance, nearly 80 years before the petrol car.

The last of 21.5 million original Volkswagen Beetles left the line in 2003 in which country?

Mexico: the final car, number 21,529,464, left the Puebla plant on 30 July 2003, a quarter-century after the last German-built saloon, and went straight to a Volkswagen museum.

Which German city was founded in 1938 to house the workers building the Volkswagen Beetle?

Wolfsburg began as 'Stadt des KdF-Wagens', the City of the Strength-through-Joy Car, and took its present name from a nearby castle only in 1945; the car was not officially called the Beetle until 1968.

Hitler insisted the Volkswagen be air-cooled because, he said, not every country doctor had his own what?

A garage: an air-cooled engine has no radiator water to freeze in a car left outdoors all winter; at the same 1934 meeting he capped fuel use at seven litres per 100 km.

Ray Harroun won the first Indianapolis 500 in 1911 in a Marmon Wasp fitted with which novel device?

A rear-view mirror: Harroun raced without the usual riding mechanic who watched for cars behind, so he mounted a mirror instead; he later said the brick track shook it so badly it was useless.

Which Japanese carmaker's name is the Japanese word for the Pleiades star cluster?

Subaru is Japanese for the Pleiades; its six-star badge stands for the five companies that merged in 1953 to form Fuji Heavy Industries, plus the parent.

The world's first compulsory seat belt law was passed in 1970 in which place?

Victoria, Australia made wearing a fitted belt compulsory in 1970; New South Wales copied the law the next year, and every other Australian state had followed within three years.

Which American carmaker sold the first passenger airbags to the public, as its 1970s 'Air Cushion Restraint System'?

General Motors offered the bags from the 1973 Oldsmobile Toronado on, but so few buyers paid extra for them that the option was dropped after the 1976 model year.

Which chemical did airbags of the 1970s to 1990s ignite to fill the bag with nitrogen in milliseconds?

Sodium azide breaks down into nitrogen gas within milliseconds of an electric trigger; because the compound is highly toxic, newer airbags burn other propellants such as guanidine nitrate.

In 1981, which European carmaker began offering an airbag as an option on its flagship saloon?

Mercedes-Benz sold the bag on its 1981 S-Class together with belts that tightened in a crash, presenting the airbag as a supplement to the seat belt rather than a replacement for it.

In August 1888, Bertha Benz made the first long-distance car journey from Mannheim to where?

Pforzheim, her home town, about 100 km from Mannheim; on the way she cleared a blocked fuel line with a hatpin and had a cobbler nail leather onto the brake blocks.

On her 1888 drive, Bertha Benz bought fuel in Wiesloch because the solvent her car burned was sold only where?

At apothecary shops: ligroin, the petroleum solvent the Patent-Motorwagen burned, was sold as a cleaning fluid by chemists, so Wiesloch's Stadt-Apotheke became the world's first filling station.

Which nameplate overtook the Volkswagen Beetle in 1997 to become the best-selling car of all time?

Toyota Corolla sales passed 50 million in 2021, though across twelve very different generations; the Beetle it overtook still holds the record for a car built on a single platform.

From 1985, rebadged Toyota Sprinters were sold in the US under which Chevrolet name?

The Chevrolet Nova name was revived for a Toyota twin built at NUMMI, the GM-Toyota joint venture in Fremont, California; after the venture closed in 2010, Tesla bought the plant and reopened it as its own.

Which driving aid did blind engineer Ralph Teetor patent in 1950?

Cruise control: the story goes that Teetor, blind since childhood, was driven to it by his lawyer's driving, which sped up or slowed down depending on who was talking; he called his device the Speedostat.

Which carmaker's 1958 Imperial offered 'Auto-Pilot', a dashboard dial that held a set speed?

Chrysler put the device on sale before any rival, on its luxury Imperial; Cadillac then re-christened it, and Cadillac's name is the one drivers still use.

Which American is credited with the first working windscreen wiper, patented in 1903?

Mary Anderson, of Birmingham, Alabama, patented a hand-worked wiper in 1903 after a snowy New York streetcar ride; firms she offered it to saw no commercial value, and she never profited from it.

Which carmaker's trident badge was taken from the Fountain of Neptune in Bologna?

Maserati's trident was drawn by Mario, the one Maserati brother who chose art over engines, from the Neptune statue in Bologna, the city where his brothers had founded the firm in 1914.

Citroën's double-chevron badge copies the tooth pattern of which products André Citroën once made?

Gears: on a visit to Poland in 1900 he came across gears cut with V-shaped herringbone teeth, bought the rights and built a gear-making business years before he made cars.

Which brothers are widely credited with America's first successful petrol car, tested in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1893?

The Duryea brothers, Charles and Frank, first ran their Motor Wagon in September 1893, though John Lambert of Ohio had driven a petrol car in 1891; Frank Duryea went on to win America's first motor race.

Maybach's Daimler-Mercedes engine of 1900 was built to the specifications of which businessman, whose daughter gave the marque its name?

Emil Jellinek raced under the alias 'Monsieur Mercedes', promised to buy 36 of the new cars if Maybach built them his way, and in 1903 changed his own surname to Jellinek-Mercedes.

Which engineer gave Cadillac electric ignition and the electric self-starter in 1910-11?

Charles Kettering's Delco supplied Cadillac's electric ignition in 1910 and the electric self-starter launched on the 1912 Cadillac, ending the hand crank that could break an arm on kickback.

Which country's automotive industry produced by far the most cars in 2020, at around 20 million?

China built about 20 million cars in 2020, nearly three times second-placed Japan's seven million; yet as recently as 2000 its whole motor industry had made only about two million vehicles.

In 1891 an early Peugeot car covered about 2,000 km by following which kind of race from Paris to Brest and back?

A bicycle race: Peugeot's Doriot and Rigoulot shadowed the first Paris–Brest–Paris at under 15 km/h, reaching Brest only after winner Charles Terront had already pedalled back to Paris.

Which New York patent lawyer collected royalties from American carmakers on an 1895 patent for a car he had not built?

George Selden filed in 1879, kept the application pending for sixteen years, then took a cut of American car sales until Henry Ford beat the patent in court in 1911.

Daimler and Maybach founded their motor company in 1890 at Cannstatt, now a district of which German city?

Stuttgart has since absorbed Cannstatt, where Daimler and Maybach first worked so secretively in a garden summer house that neighbours reported them as counterfeiters and police raided it, finding only engines.

Which designer drew up the original 1959 Mini for BMC?

Alec Issigonis turned the engine sideways and drove the front wheels, which left most of the Mini's tiny floorpan free for four people and their luggage.

A fuel shortage caused by which 1956 event led directly to the creation of the Mini?

The Suez Crisis of late 1956 brought petrol rationing to Britain, and BMC chairman Leonard Lord ordered a tiny, frugal four-seater; the Mini went on sale in August 1959.

Said aloud in French, the name of the 1955 Citroën DS sounds like which word?

Déesse means goddess, while the cheaper ID model sounded like idée, or idea.

How many orders did Citroën take for the DS on its first day at the 1955 Paris Motor Show?

12,000 orders came on the opening day, 743 of them in the first quarter of an hour; the philosopher Roland Barthes wrote that the car looked as if it had fallen from the sky.

Partly chosen for luck, 'Toyota' takes how many brush strokes to write in Japanese?

8 strokes, a number thought lucky in Japan: the switch from the founding family's name, Toyoda, also shed its literal meaning, 'fertile rice paddies', an image too rustic for a carmaker.

Which Italian supercar maker was founded in the 1960s by a wealthy tractor manufacturer?

Lamborghini: Ferruccio Lamborghini built his first tractors in 1948 from surplus military vehicles, grew rich on them, and then set up his own car company to take on Ferrari.

Ferrari's prancing-horse emblem was originally painted on the aircraft of which flying ace?

Francesco Baracca, Italy's top World War I ace, flew with the black horse on his aircraft; his mother, Countess Paolina, urged Ferrari to adopt it after his 1923 win at the Circuito del Savio in Ravenna.

The Porsche 911 was first marketed as the 901 until which carmaker protested over the name?

Peugeot claimed exclusive French rights to three-digit names with a zero in the middle; only 82 cars wore the 901 badge.

Volkswagen bought the Rolls-Royce car factory in 1998, but which carmaker won the rights to the Rolls-Royce name?

BMW paid just £40 million for the name and logo, licensed by aero-engine maker Rolls-Royce plc, after Volkswagen had bid £430 million for the factory; VW was left with Bentley.

Which hypercar, launched in 2005, had an official top speed of 407 km/h (253 mph)?

The Bugatti Veyron reached 407 km/h only after the driver turned a separate 'top speed key' that ran a safety checklist; James May then matched the figure on Volkswagen's test track for Top Gear.

Which two engineers incorporated Tesla Motors in July 2003, months before Elon Musk invested?

Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning incorporated Tesla on 1 July 2003; Elon Musk led the first funding round in 2004, and a 2009 lawsuit settlement lets five people call themselves co-founders.

Tesla's first car, the 2008 Roadster, was built on the chassis of which British sports car?

The Lotus Elise: Tesla's contract with Lotus covered 2,500 partly assembled 'gliders' built at Hethel, and Roadster production ended in January 2012 when the supply ran out.

The name Prius comes from a Latin word meaning what?

'First': prius is Latin for 'before' or 'first', chosen because the car came ahead of the shift to hybrids; the Prius sold in Japan from December 1997 and worldwide from 2000.

Which was the world's best-selling electric car until Tesla's Model 3 passed it in 2020?

Nissan Leaf: on sale since 2010, it had a seven-year head start, yet the Model 3, which arrived only in 2017, overtook its lifetime sales in under three years.

In the name of Ford's wartime GPW jeep, the 'W' stood for which company, whose design Ford built under licence?

Willys: the Army standardised on the Willys-Overland jeep and had Ford build the same design; 'G' marked a government contract and 'P' was Ford's code for an 80-inch wheelbase.

The Chevrolet Corvette of 1953 took its name from what kind of vessel?

A small warship: a corvette is a fast, manoeuvrable escort, and the name was suggested by Myron Scott, the Chevrolet publicist who had earlier created the Soap Box Derby.

Which American car was sold in Germany as the 'T-5' because a truck maker already owned its name there?

Mustang: Krupp had registered the name for its trucks and Ford refused to pay for it, so until the late 1970s German cars wore the Mustang's pre-production project name, T-5.

The gull-winged DeLorean was built at a factory in Dunmurry, on the edge of which city?

Belfast: the British government put up most of the start-up money, hoping factory jobs would ease Northern Ireland's sectarian violence; about 9,000 cars were built before the firm collapsed in 1982.

Which Italian designer styled the stainless-steel DeLorean DMC-12?

Giorgetto Giugiaro of Italdesign styled it, first shown as the 1976 DMC-12 prototype; Colin Chapman's Lotus later re-engineered the chassis with a fibreglass underbody beneath the stainless panels.

The East German Trabant's body panels were made of what material?

Duroplast, a hard thermoset of phenolic resin reinforced with recycled cotton waste, was pressed into panels for the Trabant because East Germany was short of sheet steel.

The Citroën 2CV was designed to cross a ploughed field without breaking what?

A basket of eggs: Pierre-Jules Boulanger's brief asked for a car to carry farmers and a 50 kg load, hence its soft, long-travel suspension.

The canvas-roofed Citroën 2CV was often called what?

The umbrella on wheels: Boulanger is said to have asked for 'four wheels under an umbrella', and on early cars the canvas ran right down to the rear bumper in place of a boot lid.

Which rival is rumoured to have called the 1961 Jaguar E-Type 'the most beautiful car ever made'?

Enzo Ferrari is widely quoted as saying so at the car's 1961 debut, though the line is unconfirmed; New York's Museum of Modern Art added an E-Type roadster to its design collection in 1996.

The 'DB' in Aston Martin DB5 stands for the initials of which man?

David Brown, a Yorkshire gear and tractor maker, answered a classified advert in The Times offering a 'High Class Motor Business' in 1946 and found that the business was Aston Martin.

In 2000, Guinness named which car the best-selling two-seat sports car in history?

The Mazda MX-5 had sold 531,890 by the time Guinness counted in 2000; launched in 1989, it revived the simple British-style roadster after the MGB and Triumph Spitfire had gone out of production.

Which Ford model became America's best-selling vehicle in 1981 and held the title for the next four decades?

F-Series: the pickup had led American truck sales since 1977; in 2015 Ford gambled on its best-seller by swapping the steel body panels for aluminium, cutting hundreds of pounds.

Only 51 Tucker 48s were built before Preston Tucker stood trial, and was acquitted, on which charge?

Fraud: prosecutors argued that Tucker had taken investors' money without meaning to build the car; the jury cleared him of every count in January 1950, but his factory had already closed.

The Tucker 48's central third headlight was designed to do what?

Turn with the steering: the lamp came on once the wheel passed about 10 degrees and lit the way round the bend, even though 17 states at the time outlawed a third headlight.

Which Ford subcompact became notorious for fuel-tank fires after rear-end collisions?

The Ford Pinto, sold from 1971 to 1980, carried its fuel tank behind the rear axle; a 1978 recall of 1.5 million cars followed lawsuits over rear-impact fires.

Which consumer advocate wrote the 1965 book 'Unsafe at Any Speed'?

Ralph Nader's 'Unsafe at Any Speed' (1965) opened with 'The Sporty Corvair: The One-Car Accident'; GM's surveillance of him led to a public apology and the 1966 federal auto-safety act.

Which tyre company developed and commercialised the radial tyre, starting with a car tyre designed in 1946?

Michelin: Marius Mignol, an accountant turned researcher, developed the Michelin X, and because Michelin owned Citroën the new tyre quickly reached the road on the 2CV.

Disc brakes famously proved their superiority at which race in 1953?

Jaguar's C-Types won the 1953 24 Hours of Le Mans as the first cars to race there with disc brakes, which let them brake later and harder than their drum-braked rivals lap after lap.

For 1940, Oldsmobile offered the first mass-produced version of which feature?

Automatic transmission: the four-speed unit shifted by itself with no clutch to work, and during the Second World War the same gearbox went into American light tanks.

Chrysler sold the first production-car power steering in 1951 under what name?

Hydraguide used Francis Davis's hydraulic patents after they expired; GM, which had judged Davis's system too costly to build when he worked for it, followed a year later on its Cadillac.

Engineer Béla Barényi is best known for inventing which car safety feature?

Crumple zone: Barényi overturned the belief that a safe car must be rigid, designing the nose and tail to crush and soak up a crash while the passenger cell stays intact.

Where were the electric motors mounted on the pioneering Lohner-Porsche electric and hybrid cars of around 1900?

In the wheel hubs: with a motor inside each driven wheel the cars needed no transmission to carry the power, and adding a petrol engine purely to generate current made the first hybrid.

Which RAF pilot drove ThrustSSC through the sound barrier in October 1997?

Andy Green, an RAF pilot, drove the car for project leader Richard Noble, who had held the record himself since 1983 with Thrust2 and this time stayed out of the cockpit.

What material lines the engine bay of the McLaren F1 as a heat reflector?

Gold foil: about 16 grams line each engine bay, because gold reflects heat superbly and Gordon Murray had to shield the carbon-fibre body from the engine.

The blue and white quarters of BMW's badge take their colours from the flag of which German state?

Bavaria: the 1917 badge set the state's blue and white inside the old Rapp company's black ring; the idea that it shows a spinning propeller grew out of a 1929 BMW advertisement.

'Volvo' is Latin for what?

'I roll', from the Latin volvere: bearing maker SKF first registered the name for a line of ball bearings, shelved it, then revived it for the cars it began building in 1927.

Which 1975 model was the first mass-produced car developed in South Korea?

The Hyundai Pony was Korean in name but international in the making: styled by Italy's Italdesign, powered by Mitsubishi and engineered under George Turnbull, a former British Leyland boss.

The first Lada, the 1970 VAZ-2101, was a ruggedised version of which Italian car?

The Fiat 124, 1967's European Car of the Year; under a 1966 agreement Fiat helped build the AvtoVAZ plant at Tolyatti on the Volga, and the 2101 gained a stronger body and higher ground clearance.

Which tiny rear-engined Italian car of 1957, designed by Dante Giacosa, succeeded the pre-war 'Topolino'?

The Fiat 500 was an engineer's car, under three metres long with an air-cooled twin in the tail, yet in 1959 it won Giacosa the Compasso d'Oro design prize, never before given to a carmaker.

Cadillac is named after a French explorer who founded which American city?

Detroit: Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac founded Fort Pontchartrain du Détroit in 1701, and the car brand created in Detroit in 1902 from Henry Ford's second company took his name.

Audi's name is the Latin translation of founder August Horch's surname, which means what?

'Listen': horch is the German imperative 'hark', and audi its Latin equivalent, suggested in 1910 by the Latin-student son of Horch's partner Fikentscher; the four rings mark the Auto Union partners.

What do the three points of Daimler's 1909 star stand for?

Land, sea, air: Daimler built engines for all three, and after his death his sons Paul and Adolf had the star registered as the company's trademark in 1909.

Which Honda model of 1990 was the first production car with an all-aluminium monocoque?

The Honda NSX saved nearly 200 kg with its aluminium body; after Ayrton Senna tried a prototype at Suzuka he pressed Honda to make the chassis stiffer, and the engineers did.

La Jamais Contente, the first road vehicle to pass 100 km/h in 1899, was powered by what?

Electricity drove the torpedo-shaped Belgian racer, which Camille Jenatzy steered to the record near Paris. Its French name means 'The Never Contented'.

Before motoring, a 'dashboard' stopped mud splashing the driver at the front of which kind of vehicle?

A horse carriage needed the board because hooves 'dashed' mud up at whoever held the reins. The name outlived the horse and passed to the panel that now carries a car's gauges.

Lamborghini named the Miura and Islero sports cars in honour of which animal, also shown on its badge?

Bulls bred for the ring fascinated Ferruccio Lamborghini after he visited Eduardo Miura's Seville ranch in 1962. Islero was the Miura animal that killed the famed matador Manolete in 1947.

Which name does Rolls-Royce give its bonnet mascot, sculpted by Charles Sykes with Eleanor Thornton as model?

Spirit of Ecstasy grew out of a private mascot made for Lord Montagu, whose secret lover Eleanor Thornton posed for it. That first figurine held a finger to her lips.

Which styling flourish did Cadillac introduce in 1948, inspired by the Lockheed P-38 fighter plane?

Tailfins reached GM after designer Franklin Hershey saw an early P-38 at Selfridge Air Base and pictured its rudders on a car. Credit usually goes to his boss, Harley Earl.

Which colour did Britain's Napier racing cars wear for the 1903 Gordon Bennett Cup, held in Ireland?

Green was a salute to the Irish hosts: racing on public roads was illegal in Great Britain, so the race crossed the sea and the Napier cars were painted shamrock.

Stock car racing in the American South grew out of drivers outrunning police while hauling which illegal cargo?

Moonshine runners of the Prohibition era souped up their cars while leaving them looking ordinary, so as not to attract attention. Racing one another came next.

Piaggio's Vespa scooter, launched soon after World War II, takes its name from the Italian word for which insect?

Wasp is what Enrico Piaggio saw in the prototype's thick tail and narrow waist. 'Sembra una vespa!' he exclaimed, naming the scooter on the spot.

Which Scottish engineer adopted the term 'horsepower' to compare his steam engines with draft horses?

James Watt used the comparison to help market his improved steam engine as a replacement for working horses. The metric unit of power now carries his surname.

Mitsubishi's name joins the Japanese words 'mitsu' and 'hishi', which together describe what on its badge?

Three diamonds is the usual translation: 'hishi' is a water caltrop, a plant whose name doubles as the Japanese word for a rhombus. The firm took the name in 1873.

Fiat's name began as an acronym in which the letter T stands for which Italian city?

Turin, or Torino in Italian, closes out Fabbrica Italiana Automobili Torino. Giovanni Agnelli was among the group that founded the firm there in July 1899.

Which Italian carmaker's badge pairs Milan's red cross with a serpent that has a human figure in its mouth?

Alfa Romeo borrowed the snake, called the biscione, from the House of Visconti, who ruled Milan in the 14th century. One of the badge's designers had seen it on the gates of Castello Sforzesco.

In which Steve McQueen film does a Ford Mustang chase a Dodge Charger through the streets of San Francisco?

Bullitt's chase is regarded as one of the most influential in film history. It ends outside the city at Brisbane, where the Dodge leaves the road in a fiery explosion.

Which American brand built the Firebird Trans Am that played KITT, the talking car of TV's Knight Rider?

Pontiac supplied the 1982 model that customiser Michael Scheffe turned into KITT, whose initials stand for Knight Industries Two Thousand.

Which US highway, nicknamed the 'Mother Road', once ran from Chicago to Santa Monica on the Pacific coast?

Route 66 got its 'Mother Road' nickname from John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, which followed Dust Bowl migrants west along it. The full route ran 2,448 miles.

Which mission was the first to carry NASA's battery-powered Lunar Roving Vehicle to the Moon's surface?

Apollo 15 commander David Scott took the first drive in 1971. Two more rovers followed on the final pair of landings, and all three are parked up there to this day.

Which device mixed air and fuel in most petrol cars until fuel injection replaced it around the 1990s?

Carburetor-fed engines were the norm in US-made cars until the late 1980s. The device lives on in lawnmowers, generators and many motorcycles.

Ford's 1960s endurance racer, built to beat Ferrari, was called the GT40 because 40 inches measured which dimension?

Roof height was a mere 40 inches, measured at the top of the windscreen. The low-slung racer went on to win Le Mans four years running, from 1966 to 1969.

A V8 engine gets the 'V' in its name from the angled arrangement of which eight parts?

Cylinders sit in two banks of four that share one common crankshaft, and the banks lean apart to form the letter.

In which of these Southeast Asian countries, never ruled by Britain, do motorists nonetheless drive on the left?

Thailand keeps left although it was never part of the British Empire, a trait it shares with Japan. Its neighbours in former French Indochina keep right.

Which Ford division, launched for 1958, became a byword for commercial failure within three model years?

Edsel honoured the son of the company's founder, and it lost more than $250 million before being quietly dropped in November 1959.

Which British luxury carmaker, founded in Cricklewood in 1919, was bought out of receivership by Rolls-Royce in 1931?

Bentley stayed tied to its buyer for decades. The two marques only went their separate ways after the Volkswagen Group acquired the firm in 1998.

Which 1984 Ferrari supercar revived a 1950s racing name that refers to its engine's painted cam covers?

Testarossa means 'red head' in Italian, after the red-painted cam covers it shared with Ferrari's 250 Testa Rossa sports racers of the 1950s. The road car premiered at the 1984 Paris Auto Show.

Which small town near Modena is known worldwide as the home of Ferrari and its Formula One team?

Maranello also houses the Museo Ferrari, a public museum filled with the marque's sports cars, racing cars and trophies.

Which British 4x4 did Maurice Wilks devise on his Anglesey farm in 1947, using a Jeep chassis for the prototype?

Land Rover's prototype was later nicknamed Centre Steer, and the name itself was coined the following year for the production off-roader.

Garrett Morgan, who rescued trapped tunnel workers in 1916 using his own smoke hood, invented a three-way type of what?

Traffic signal rights earned him $40,000 when he sold his 1923 design to General Electric. He also ran a company selling hair-care products.

Which US president signed the 1956 bill authorising the Interstate Highway System, which now bears his name?

Dwight D. Eisenhower had seen the problem first-hand: as a 28-year-old officer he joined a 1919 army convoy that needed 62 days to cross the country.

The world's first parking meter, nicknamed the Black Maria, was installed in 1935 in which US state capital?

Oklahoma City owed its meters to local newspaper publisher Carl Magee, who had asked two engineers to start work on the idea in 1933.

Škoda began in the 1890s as Laurin & Klement, a bicycle maker in Mladá Boleslav, in which present-day country?

Czechia has only one older carmaker, Tatra: Laurin & Klement moved from velocipedes to automobiles by 1905.

Which Romanian carmaker, named after the ancient region it comes from, was sold to Renault of France in 1999?

Dacia had belonged to the Romanian government for 33 years before the sale. Its name recalls the historical land that makes up the present-day country.

Under which animal name was the first-generation Volkswagen Golf sold in the United States and Canada?

Rabbit badges went on US and Canadian cars, while Mexican buyers knew the same hatchback as the Caribe.

Under which brand name did Nissan sell its exported cars until phasing the badge out in March 1986?

Datsun began life as 'Datson', but 'son' can also mean 'loss' in Japanese, so the ending was swapped for the sun of the national flag.

Which famous American race is held at a track nicknamed the 'Brickyard' after its 1909 paving?

Indy 500 cars still cross a strip of brick at the start-finish line, a reminder of the racing surface first laid in the fall of 1909.

Which rating on a petrol pump measures a fuel's ability to resist engine knock under compression?

Octane numbers matter most in higher-compression engines, which squeeze the mixture harder and can turn the sturdier fuel into extra power.

Which metal was added to petrol for decades as an anti-knock agent before being phased out worldwide in 2021?

Lead won out in 1921, after General Motors researcher Thomas Midgley had spent years screening thousands of substances. Algeria was the last country to stop selling the fuel for cars.

Which Swedish carmaker began in 1945 as a small-car project of an aerospace company and went bankrupt in 2011?

Saab petitioned for bankruptcy after its former owner GM blocked a rescue purchase, unwilling to see its technology change hands.

In which James Bond film does a Lotus Esprit from Q Branch convert into a submarine?

The Spy Who Loved Me sends Bond and KGB agent Anya Amasova beneath the waves in the car while they hunt for two vanished nuclear submarines.

The Bonneville Salt Flats, known since 1914 for land speed record runs, lie in which US state?

Utah's densely packed salt pan saw its first record in 1914, set by Teddy Tetzlaff, and the thickness of the crust is critical to racing there.

Which tyre maker's annual trade calendar, trade-marked as 'The Cal', is famed for its photographers and models?

Pirelli has issued it through a UK subsidiary since 1964, and its pages featured glamour photography from the 1980s until the 2010s.

Which Indian carmaker unveiled the Nano in 2008 with a promised price of one lakh rupees, about US$2,500?

Tata Motors pitched the tiny economy model at families riding motorcycles and scooters, but the response was underwhelming and production ended in 2018.

Which safety glass, invented after a French chemist dropped a plastic-coated flask in 1903, is used for windscreens?

Laminated glass cracks into a 'spider web' yet holds together, just as Édouard Bénédictus's coated flask shattered without breaking into pieces.

The letters GT on fast road cars abbreviate which Italian phrase, popular in English since the 1950s?

Gran Turismo cars took shape in Europe in the early 1950s, especially with the 1951 introduction of the Lancia Aurelia B20 GT.

The two-door car body style 'coupé' takes its name from a French verb with which meaning?

'To cut' fits because 18th-century coachbuilders made a shortened version of the berline carriage, with no rear-facing seat.

Which German city, founded in 1938 to house car-factory workers, is home to Volkswagen's headquarters?

Wolfsburg began as the 'City of the Strength Through Joy Car at Fallersleben' and only took its present name in May 1945.

Which rear-engined, air-cooled Chevrolet compact had its handling attacked in the 1965 book 'Unsafe at Any Speed'?

Corvair models with rear swing axles drew the criticism, yet Chevrolet kept building the car through the 1969 model year.

Which British speed-record holder christened his cars Blue Bird after seeing a Maurice Maeterlinck play in London?

Malcolm Campbell held world speed records on land and on water at various times, and his son Donald carried on the family tradition on both.

Which Italian design house, founded in 1930, counts Ferrari, Fiat and Lancia among its long-established customers?

Pininfarina takes its name from founder Battista Farina's nickname, 'Pinin', and its client list later stretched as far as Honda and Daewoo.

The arms of which German city, home to Porsche's headquarters, sit at the centre of the carmaker's crest?

Stuttgart's arms sit inside those of Württemberg, the former state it served as capital, whose old design lives on in the badge.

The three-wheeled Peel P50, listed by Guinness as the smallest production car ever made, was built on which island?

Isle of Man engineers gave the original no reverse gear: a handle at the rear lets the driver haul the very lightweight microcar around by hand.

Customiser George Barris built the 1960s TV Batmobile from which Lincoln concept car of 1955?

Futura bodywork needed only superficial changes: Barris owned the one-off show car, and his shop turned it into Adam West's ride.