You Can't Make This Stuff Up!

[Lee Stewart]

Long Island resident Irvin Gordon bought a Volvo P1800S in 1966 and didn't stop driving it. The school teacher, who died in 2018 at age 77, paid $4,150 for the car and put more than 3 million miles on it, a Guinness World Record. Over the years, Gordon rebuilt the engine twice, got 857 oil changes, 30 drive belts, and 120 bottles of transmission fluid. Gordon's Facebook page put the vehicle’s mileage at 3,250,257, in May 2018.

[Lee Stewart]

In 1885, German inventor and engineer Karl Benz, who co-founded Mercedes-Benz, built the Benz Patent-Motorwagen, which was powered by an internal combustion engine and is considered to be the world’s first production car. Benz’s company built its first four-wheel automobile in 1893 and developed the first of a series of racing cars six years later.

[Lee Stewart]

In Denmark, where new car purchases come with a 150% tax hit, it is a requirement that a driver checks underneath his or her vehicle to make sure that there is no body—dead or alive— underneath.

[Lee Stewart]

Here’s an option that not even gadget genius Q from the James Bond movies could have dreamed up: BMW in South Africa offered a flamethrower option called the Blaster to prevent carjackings, which had soared in South Africa in the 1990s. The flamethrower was a liquified petroleum gas installed along the sides of the vehicle under its doors. If the driver felt threatened, he or she could flip a switch to shoot flames from the vehicle at the intruder. Because of the steep price of the Blaster, relatively few drivers opted for it.

[Lee Stewart]

The Swedish word for ouch! is “aj!” A Swedish man probably said that and other, more colorful expletives after he was fined $1.15 million for speeding while driving his Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG at 186 miles an hour in Switzerland, twice the legal limit, in 2010. In Switzerland, speeding fines are tied proportionately to one's income.

[Lee Stewart]

In 1938, the Mercedes-Benz W125 reached a top speed of 268.8 miles per hour, a record for the fastest land-speed vehicle on a public road that stood for 80 years until it was broken by the Koenigsegg Agera RS in 2018. The W125 had been modified and was driven by Rudolf Caracciola, the 1935, 1937, and 1938 European Drivers' Champion. The vehicle is now housed at the Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart, Germany.

[Lee Stewart]

The first built car, known as the De Dion Bouton et Trepardoux Dos-a-Dos Steam Runabout, was constructed in 1884 and sold at an auction in Hershey, Pennsylvania, for $4.62 million in 2011.

[Lee Stewart]

Car logos are among the most distinct emblems in commerce, and Audi’s rings are among the most famous. The four overlapping rings of Audi represent the four manufacturers of Auto Union: Audi, Horch, DKW, and Wanderer.

[Lee Stewart]

Elon Musk’s Tesla is popularizing the electric car today, but electric cars are hardly new. In fact, electric as well as steam-powered vehicles were more popular than gas-powered cars at the start of the 20th century. In 1900, 38% of all cars were electric. Electric cars were quiet and didn’t spew smelly gas pollutants. Thomas Edison believed electric cars were the future of transportation and tried to develop a better car battery, while Ferdinand Porsche, founder of the eponymous sports car, built the world's first hybrid electric car in 1901.

[Lee Stewart]

From 1909 to 1927, Ford built more than 15 million cars. At first it took 12 hours to assemble a Model T, but more efficient assembly line technology sped up the process, cutting the time to eight minutes for each car in 1913. By 1927, during the last years of the production of the Model T, the factory could produce a completely assembled car in 24 seconds. The Model T cost around $850 in 1908, but because of production efficiencies, the price was lowered to $260 in 1925.