I briefly had a new Porsche 718 Boxster GTS 4.0 in white for the weekend and I was reminded that Porsche still has the one feature that I rarely see on any car. A feature so great and so useful that it should honestly be the norm on every vehicle offered for sale. Why is that? I’m not sure, maybe Porsche has a patent on it, but it seems unlikely.

Part of being an automotive journalist is that you get cars to borrow and, admittedly, some of the features can kind of blur together. Every car has some sort of wireless charging mat these days, for instance, and the ones that stand out usually only do so because they’re truly awful or inspired (The Cadillac Escalade has a little pocket your phone goes into, which is obviously a great solution).

When it comes to seats, the highly optioned cars we usually get come in one of three flavors, usually:

• Seats that neither heat your body nor cool it.
• Seats that heat your body but refuse to cool it, due to a lack of ventilation.
• Seats that will either heat your body OR cool it, but not both at the same time.

Being from Texas, I do sometimes get passengers who are shocked that I drive with the seat heaters on basically full-time in every car I drive, including my own. I’m just as likely to do this in the frigid, snot-frozen-to-my-nose January mornings as I am on sweltering, crack-flowing-like-the-Mississippi June afternoons. I am an extremely poor athlete, and my sport of choice is Ultimate Frisbee, so I spend a decent amount of time with pain somewhere in my body. Because I get this pain playing a sport that people often confuse with Frisbee Golf, it’s not like you can garner any sympathy by complaining about it, so I use the heater as a kind of back relaxer.

Seat cooling, I’m less interested in. The most powerful ones make it feel like a powerful, icy gale being shot straight into the South Pole, if you get my meaning. I’m not averse to this sensation, and no judgment if that’s your thing, but it’s not something I usually find pleasurable. If I’m particularly overheated for a few minutes, I will turn on the seat coolers to chill the chair, but I can’t leave them on for long.

I think it was a 997.2 Carrera S back in 2010 that I first experienced something truly remarkable. Life-affirming even. I was on a trip with my wife, and I instinctively turned on the seat heater and she, being less inclined towards warm weather in spite of our similar upbringing, immediately turned on the seat cooling. As a joke, I turned on my seat cooler as well, not expecting it to work.

It did. Both worked!

This shouldn’t be a shock, right? As reported here previously, the seats in a car are heated via conductive wire.

The cooling in seats, typically, is done via ventilation. Basically, the car pushes your car’s air-conditioned air (if it’s on) via the seats themselves. In the Porsche, the car itself actually sucks air into the holes, not out.

Photo: authorSince one is heated via a coil and one is cooled via ventilation, there’s no reason why both of these things can’t work in concert, right? It’s not like a thunderstorm is going to form over your abdomen as the two air masses clash. I studied meteorology in college, and I’m at least 45% sure that’s not how that works.

And, yet, most automakers don’t allow you to run both at the same time. It’s either/or. You get to be hot or you get to be cold. This makes a sort of sense. Why would you want to be both?

I’ll tell you my friends. The downside of running the seat heater all the time is that I’m a human, and I sweat. On a warm day, it can get swampy rather quickly. No one likes getting out of a car looking like the runner-up on Wipeout. Even on a cooler day, if the heater is running and you’re doing it long enough, a little sweat may form in a non-ideal place (like the back of a VW?).

By running the heater and the air through the seats, you get both the benefits of heat and the ability to keep yourself from getting sweaty. But don’t run them both full tilt like a Peterbilt. Here’s what that looks like:

This is absolutely GOAT mode. This should just be one button for when you want to feel the warm embrace of a chair and keep it as dry as Dorothy Parker.

And in a convertible? Life doesn’t get much better.

A full review of the car is coming, but from two people who have a way better sense of the car than I ever will. Will they talk about the seats? I hope so. It’s not the best part of the car, but it’s the best feature that every car could have (not every car can get a mid-mounted flat-six, though I’d also support that).

The post Porsche Still Offers The Single Greatest And Possibly Most Excessive Feature In All Of Automobiles appeared first on The Autopian.

It sounds kind of magical, or at least alchmical, the idea of making gasoline out of air. I suppose making anything out of air conjures up images of old men with long beards in conical hats and robes spangled with stars and comets and yodas and whatever, but in the case of gasoline, it can actually be done. In fact, it’s not even all that complicated, at least in theory. Machines that do this have actually been around for quite a while now, though so far they haven’t really made enough sense from an efficiency standpoint, and there has yet to be a real breakthrough in the size/complexity/affordability/efficiency matrix to push these systems mainstream.

There is a company called Aircela that seems hopeful, and just a bit ago they gave a demonstration in NYC of a machine, maybe about the size of a sit-down arcade driving video game machine, that should be able to make about a gallon of gas a day from just the surrounding air. Aircela is targeting to sell this machine for between $15,000 to $20,000 initially, though they claim that eventual volume production should drop that price a bit.

Here’s some video of their rooftop NYC demonstration, which feels like a weird place to show off a machine that makes gasoline, unless they were planning to make everyone some gasoline-based cocktails, like a G&T, but, you know, the G doesn’t stand for gin. Anyway, here’s the video:

That dude sure is a sloppy gas-filler! Still, it’s impressive and seems magical, but it’s really pretty straightforward. After all, chemically, gasoline is a hydrocarbon, which means it’s pretty much just hydrogen and carbon. It’s a little more complicated than that, but octane, one of the crucial components of what we call gasoline, is just carbon and hydrogen:

C8H18

That’s the formula for octane: eight carbon atoms, 18 hydrogen. It’s often used as a close-enough formula for gasoline. There are other hydrocarbons in gas, but for the level we’re talking about, that’ll work. Now, in the air we breathe, we have an awful lot of carbon dioxide, because you and I and your weird college roommate and your hamster and other notable mammals, like famed Mets pitcher Dock Ellis, all exhale carbon dioxide into the air, which is used by plants and also a key component of climate change.

There’s also water vapor in the air, and water is partly hydrogen (H2O, remember), so between those two things, we have all the parts we need to make gasoline! We just need to put them together, in the right way, as this little video explains:

As the video said, the big issues with pulling hydrogen and carbon out of the air and combining it into a hydrocarbon fuel is that it takes a lot of energy. Most systems that perform this electrochemical alchemy require about twice as much energy going in as is contained in the gasoline coming out. I asked Aircela for some details about what they do, and that’s effectively the same ratio they’re getting for energy in to energy out:

In short, gasoline (or any hydrocarbon) is made up of carbon and hydrogen molecules. Aircela gets the carbon building blocks by pulling CO2 from ambient air (Direct Air Capture) and its hydrogen from splitting water (H2O) into hydrogen and oxygen. The CO2 and H2 gas is mixed, compressed to a high pressure, heated, and then passed over a catalyst that stimulate the production of methanol. The methanol is subsequently turned into gasoline in a second reactor train.

Aircela is targeting >50% end to end power efficiency. Since there is about 37kWh of energy in a gallon of gasoline we will require about 75kWh to make it. When we power our machines with standalone, off-grid, photovoltaic panels this will correspond to less than $1.50/gallon in energy cost.

If we watch this CNN report about a British company doing this same thing about 12 years ago, we see essentially the same sorts of results:

Now, this isn’t to downplay what Aircela seems to have accomplished here: that report from a dozen years ago is showing machines that were built into shipping containers; Aircela’s machine could sit comfortably in the corner of a small parking lot, taking up about the same amount of space as one of those automated pay-to-park kiosks. They’ve done a hell of a lot of miniaturization work.

And, their point about powering the machines with solar panels or other sources of renewable energy – wind, geothermal, hydro, connecting every treadmill and stationary bike at a gym, and so son – then things start to make a lot more sense. Plus, there are benefits like how the machine can capture and recycle up to 22 pounds of CO2 from the air per day, though all of these benefits are really, really dependent on where the electricity to drive it all comes from.

If you’re running a coal plant to make gasoline, this probably makes no sense. But if you’re using some sort of “free” energy like solar or wind, especially if it’s excess, then I think there’s a real place for this sort of thing. In some ways, I can see machines like these becoming valuable to our very specific niche of hardcore gearheads who may still want to drive combustion cars even after the world has transitioned to electric cars.

Imagine a good ways into the future, assuming EVs become the default, and gas stations begin to fade away. In that case, having a small machine at your house or communally owned by your combustion-car enthusiast club would be incredibly valuable. And, think about this: what if AI continues to grow and expand as it seems to be on track to do? AI demands a vast amount of electricity, so we may see a boom in electricity generation soon, with new nuclear plant designs or more solar arrays or orbiting solar platforms or who knows what else.

These will likely all be used by AI in the near term, but with the quite likely end game of AI Model Collapse on the horizon as AI large language models start to ingest more and more crap, leading to the xerox-of-a-xerox problem, eventually all this AI bullshit will die down and we’ll find ourselves with massive surpluses of electrical generation capacity.

What do we do then? Make “carbon-neutral” gasoline! And put it in ridiculous old cars with big V8s and noisy flat-fours and smoky straight-sixes and then capture all of their stinky exhausts and turn it back into gas again, all in a never-ending cycle of combustion car fun!

See? With machines like this Aircela thing in our back pocket, all this AI bullshit may have an upside!

The post A Company Wants To Sell You A Small Machine To Make Gasoline Out Of Air appeared first on The Autopian.

Apparently, Jake Tapper claimed recently that Joe Biden’s attempts to spin his declining capacity – attempts, remember, that included insisting on an early debate with Donald Trump – might have been “worse than Watergate.”

This is, as many have pointed out, silly. But I was pleased to see that “Is it worse than Watergate?” is still a thing. It shouldn’t be, really, since as bad as Watergate was – and it was probably worse than you think – it was easily outdone by Donald Trump’s collected first term scandals. However, as something of an internet Watergate maven, I’m always happy to see that Richard Nixon’s scandal still gets people’s attention.

Anyway, I’m not so interested in Tapper/Biden, but I am interested in the current president. And it occurred to me that what Trump is up to and what he’s done isn’t just worse than Watergate. He’s come close to surpassing all the major presidential scandals on their own terms. Check it out:

Watergate I For shorthand we can break this one down into two parts: The original crimes and the cover-up. The original crimes, broadly speaking, involved improperly using the government for personal and especially political advantage. Things such as trying to get the IRS to audit Nixon’s enemies, or using White House staff to spy on his enemies, and eventually having campaign staff under White House supervision spy on and attempt to manipulate Democratic campaigns. Trump has done most of this publicly, which makes it worse, not better. Think his attempt to bully law firms, universities, and media organizations, or his frequent public requests for his enemies to be audited or jailed. Watergate was bad; this is worse.. And while Trump hasn’t (as far as we know) illegally spied on Democrats, he doesn’t really have to – he simply makes up stuff about them and any other opponents and uses his office to spread those lies, with the cooperation of Republican-aligned media.

Watergate II Watergate took months to really break into a major story. What really did it were the revelations that the White House (including Nixon himself) interfered with the FBI investigation and the Justice Department prosecution of the Watergate break-in. Trump at least matched that in his first term by obstructing justice in the Russia scandal, and now in his second term Trump has made it clear that the Justice Department, including the FBI, work directly for him with no separation at all, making it impossible to imagine even a compromised investigation of anything Trump has done, no matter how much it might look like a crime. And not just Trump; no one right now could possibly expect federal criminal action against any Trump ally.1

Iran-Contra The Ronald Reagan scandal is I think mostly forgotten today, but it was a big deal at the time, with multiple cabinet-level indictments, an end to Reagan’s popularity for over a year, and massive media attention. It’s also not easy to explain. Reagan agreed to sell arms to Iran (at that point even more of a major US enemy than it is now) in exchange for US hostages being held by Iranian allies in Lebanon, and then the administration used the profits from those sales to fund anticommunist rebels in Nicaragua (the “contras”) despite US law prohibiting aid to that group. Is Trump worse? Easily. At its core, Iran-Contra was an attempt to evade congressionally-passed spending directives; in fact, some administration folks envisioned a long-term plan to evade congressional involvement entirely through similar sales. That’s really bad! And yet it’s nothing compared to the Trump administration’s embrace of across-the-board attempts to spend and not spend money regardless of the law.2

Teapot Dome This Warren Harding administration scandal, which came to light after Harding had died, was generally considered the biggest in US history until Watergate. It involved a cabinet official caught taking bribes from oil companies, but it didn’t directly involve the president. Trump’s various attempts to personally profit from his office during his first term almost certainly exceeded anything Interior Secretary Albert Fall did in the 1920s, and he’s ramped that up on a massive scale in his second term. (fn The linked New York Times story notes that there are no “official investigations” but that’s mainly because Trump allies at Justice won’t allow those investigations. It also claims there’s no outrage. I’m outraged! I think others are as well; some of these stories may help to explain why Trump is once again unpopular).

Pardons A number of presidents have used the pardon power in ways that drew heavy criticism: Gerald Ford’s pardon of Nixon; George H.W. Bush’s pardon of several officials caught up in the Iran-Contra scandal; Bill Clinton’s pardon of Marc Rich; Joe Biden’s pardon of his own son. Trump’s pardons have been off-the-scale worse, Even if you take the worst possible interpretation of all those other controversial pardons (which I think is way to harsh in each of those cases). Note that the clemency power in the Constitution is unlimited, so this is all legal for presidents to do. However, it can be (and is) both legal and violation of his oath of office.

Clinton/Lewinsky The president had an affair with a White House intern, lied about it, and was accused of trying to buy her off by getting her a job, although the last part convinced very few other than partisans.3 I think it’s fair to say that Trump — who has been sued successfully for sexual assault, accused of multiple other cases of sexual harassment, and was convicted in a case involving pay-offs to keep an affair quiet — has topped this one as well. Although to be fair all of that preceded his current term of office, unlike each of the cases above. As far as we know.4

Drinking Trump has been a sober president, and many of his predecessors were not. That said, Trump’s cable news habit (especially considering that he refuses to be briefed by experts) is probably a lot more damaging than a drug or alcohol addition would be. So…I’m not going to give him this one.

Trump’s First Term Scandals Finally, we get to some things that Trump does not appear to have topped yet in his second term! As far as we know, he has not tried to bully any foreign nations into manufacturing dirt on his political opponents, and while he pardoned the January 6 criminals and continues to lie about what he did to attempt to overturn the 2020 election, he hasn’t actually topped that yet in this term.

Look: Trump’s real current “scandal” adds up to a sustained attack on the Constitution and democracy, and that’s the worst thing any president has every done. But just for the record: He’s also managed to top pretty much every previous scandal on its own terms. Amazing.

Gov. Jared Polis, a member of Boulder’s Jewish community, has personal relationships with two of the dozen people injured Sunday in the attack on a group that had gathered in downtown Boulder in support of Israeli hostages in Gaza. 

Polis said Monday afternoon that he’s spoken with the victims he knows. He said they suffered second-degree burns when a man yelling “free Palestine” threw Molotov cocktails at the demonstrators. 

“We’re just hoping and praying for their recovery,” Polis said. “But having second- and third-degree burns is no walk in the park. And, obviously, when you’re in your 60s, 70s, 80s, it makes it even harder. It’s going to be a tough recovery for these folks. These are very serious burns.”

Of the 12 people injured in the attack, one was a Holocaust survivor. Two remained hospitalized Monday afternoon.

Polis is Colorado’s first Jewish governor. He lives in Boulder with his family just a few blocks from where the attack happened on the Pearl Street Mall. 

Polis said he has seen and greeted members of Run for their Lives, the group targeted Sunday, on their weekly walks, which have peacefully happened for nearly two years. 

“This is obviously a particular blow to the Jewish community — to see several elders who many of us know in the community who were brutally burnt by a terrorist act,” he said. 

The attack happened as members of Run for their Lives stopped at the Boulder County Courthouse near the intersection of Pearl and 13th streets. The alleged attacker, 45-year-old Mohamed Soliman, has been charged with a federal hate crime and faces up to life in prison if convicted of that offense. 

Soliman told authorities he had been planning the attack for a year.

Polis said the debate about the Israel-Hamas war has been robust in Colorado and in Boulder. On Friday, he attended an event at the Dairy Arts Center on the conflict. The Jerusalem Youth Chorus performed in Boulder on Saturday.

“There’s a lot going on in the dialog front and, unfortunately, this kind of terrorist act detracts from that,” said Polis, who himself has been the target of anti-Israel protesters. “It’s very important to have these conversations. It’s OK and it’s fine to disagree. But you need to do it in a civil and thoughtful and respectful manner to try to learn from other people.”

Polis said he’s been heartened to see leaders of all political and religious beliefs condemn the attack.

The straight truck is a critical component of logistics. These trucks are champions at hauling short-haul freight, moving families across the town or the country, and doing any kind of work that you don’t need a big tractor-trailer for. But these trucks also tend to be smaller than their heavy hauler counterparts. In 1950, the Fageol Twin Coach company tried to create the best of both worlds with the CargoLiner. This weird vehicle was essentially a self-propelled semi-truck trailer, offering the high capacity of a highway truck with the maneuverability and potential cost savings of a straight truck.

A straight truck is generally defined as a truck where the cargo area and cab are a single unit. A U-Haul box truck is a straight truck, as is a concrete mixer truck, a fire engine, a flatbed truck, a refrigerated truck, and more. Straight trucks are great for short-haul freight loads, moving companies, furniture delivery, utility services, construction, or really any other situation where having a tractor and a trailer would either be overkill or implausible. The smallest straight trucks are also great for maneuvering around a city.

Today’s largest straight trucks also get pretty wild. You can buy semis like the Freightliner Cascadia as a big and beefy straight truck. FedEx Custom Critical trucks are often Class 8 tractors complete with sleepers and the capability that comes with a heavy-duty platform. These trucks are sometimes called Expeditor Trucks as they’re often used by operators who may need to haul a time-sensitive load long distance.

The major downside to the straight truck is that jurisdictions limit how long they can be. For example, my home state of Illinois says that the maximum overall length of a straight truck cannot be longer than 42 feet. That’s the total length, including cab and box.

Back in 1950, Twin Coach produced something wild. The CargoLiner wanted to be the best of both worlds. This was a commercial vehicle with the capacity of a tractor-trailer, but with the length, maneuverability, and single-unit construction of a straight truck.

Decades Of Innovation

Twin Coach was known for inventive ideas like this. This was the company that built a bread van that replicated how a horse worked. Twin Coach was also famous for its buses, which achieved higher passenger capacities than the competition through a clever use of two engines. The Twin Coach story started with a different company, the Fageol Motor Company, and here’s what you need to know from a previous piece:

The Twin Coach concern begins with brothers William B. and Frank R. Fageol, which you would pronounce as “fadjl.” Per coachbuilt.com, they were born in the Midwest in the late 19th century and apparently took a liking to buses early on. William was only 19 when in 1899 he joined forces with one of his other brothers, Rollie, in owning and operating a steam-powered bus at a fairground. Later that same year, the two brothers would build their first gas-powered car.

[…]

Fageol Motors claim to fame was the 1922 Safety Coach, a vehicle sometimes credited as being the first purpose-built bus. Most buses in the early days of motoring were coach bodies on top of a truck chassis. The Fageol brothers saw this as a bad thing as trucks rode high and had particularly jarring suspensions. The Fageol had a custom frame and an aluminum body with a low floor, which was optimized for use as a bus. The Safety Coach had wide all-weather tires, air brakes, and interior heating via water heated by the engine. The Safety Coach was so advanced for its day that some in the bus world claim that it changed the bus technology forever.

Eventually, Fageol Motor was sold to the American Car and Foundry Company of Ohio in 1925, but the Fageol brothers weren’t done yet. In 1927, William and Frank split off on their own adventure as they came up with their next big idea, the Twin Coach, and formed a company of the same name to produce it.

The Twin Coach was a huge deal. Not only did this transit bus feature a body and chassis integrated into one, but the dual-engine buses were instrumental in helping urban transit operations fill out practical bus fleets. Twin Coach was so proficient at building great buses that it spent two lucrative decades as America’s second-largest producer of transit buses.

Unfortunately, as the Old Motor writes, Twin Coach became a victim of the dominance of General Motors. As transit authorities overwhelmingly purchased GM buses, players like Twin Coach and Flxible were left fighting for the scraps, leading to sales declines. But this is Twin Coach and the Fageols we’re talking about here. Twin Coach decided to diversify and grab the attention of truckers.

In late 1950, Twin Coach announced the Fageol Super Freighter, a truck that was unlike anything else. The Super Freighter was pretty much just a trailer with its own drivetrain and a small cab plastered onto its front end. In November 1950, Louis J. Fageol, Frank’s son, had filed for a design patent on the Fageol TC CargoLiner. At the time, Louis had been at the helm of the family company since 1943. Louis had that Fageol family spirit in him and was known for being a successful speedboat racer and racecar builder.

Louis is credited as the inventor and designer of the CargoLiner in both the patent and period reporting. What’s wild is that one demonstrator was built and was used in an effort to score a U.S. Army contract for 1,650 vehicles. However, as a patent filing in 1953 shows, Louis had ambitions beyond military use, from the patent:

Heretofore a long-felt unfilled need and demand has existed in the trucking industry for low-cost high-capacity single unit vehicles. However, this need has not been met by prior vehicle designs, except for specially designed and manufactured units which high costs have rendered commercially impractical. Hence, this unfilled need of the trucking industry has continued to exist largely because of the fact that the potential commercial market for such vehicles is too limited to achieve sufficiently low production costs.

As a result of the failure of heavy-duty truck manufacturers to furnish vehicles to meet this need, the trucking industry has turned to extensive use of tractor-drawn semi-trailers and uses them in applications where straight, single unit vehicles of sufficient capacity are better adapted. The reason for this is that the practical market for semitrailers is very broad as compared to markets for straight trucks. Semi-trailers are therefore produced in large volume at low unit production cost thereby giving them a competitive advantage over straight trucks of comparable capacity, prior to the present novel method of manufacture disclosed herein.

Due to high volume manufacture of trailers, trailer manufacturers have been able to devote considerable development work to improvement of trailer bodies. As a result, they have succeeded in engineering a considerable amount of weight out of trailer body units, thereby increasing pay load without sacrificing strength. However, this increased pay load capacity is largely offset by the weight of the tractor required to pull the trailer. Moreover, the use of such trailers results in lower payload capacity under most state laws regulating total gross.

Louis goes on to note that the semi-trailers of the 1950s were prone to jackknifing during sudden stops, a problem Twin Coach’s design was said to fix – and more. The TC CargoLiner starts with a body, and if you think that this thing looks like a converted truck trailer, you aren’t far off. The Fruehauf Trailer Corporation built a stainless steel body for the rig. According to the Canadian Transportation magazine in December 1950, the CargoLiner, which was still being called the Super Freighter then, was built around Fruehauf’s standard trailer design. The truck looks and functions like a typical trailer, too, until you get to the front. That’s where you’ll find the cab.

Under the body sat a unique chassis. According to a 1950 issue of Commercial Car Journal, the Super Freighter was supposed to use Fageol underfloor inline engines, making between 162 HP and 250 HP. These would have been the same engines found in Twin Coach buses. In this application, they could have been made to run on gasoline or propane.

The demonstrator used a propane engine from a Twin Coach bus, and a later version was supposed to use a Leyland diesel engine. The truck was to be stopped using Bendix-Westinghouse air brakes and shifted through a choice of Brownies, Clark, and Spicer transmissions. The production truck was supposed to have a rear axle from either Clark, Eaton, or Timken.

The Commercial Car Journal article went pretty deep, noting that the production truck would have used an Exide battery, a 106-gallon fuel tank, and either a 25-amp Delco generator or a Leece-Neville alternator. Up front, the driver got an extremely basic cab with only the basics needed to safely command the rig. The controls were hydraulically actuated and what was unique up front was the dual wheel steer axle, which sat on a bogie.

In most vehicles, steering is achieved through turning the front wheels using Vickers power steering and Gemmer steering gear. The TC CargoLiner worked like a more complicated version of the red Radio Flyer wagon you had as a kid, and the hydraulics actually turned the entire bogey rather than the wheels.

This was great for maneuverability as a driver could technically jackknife the CargoLiner into a dock or space with greater ease than any typical truck.

According to Fleet Owner magazine, using the rigid front axle and steering bogie meant that the Super Freighter, which measured 35 feet, had a turn radius of just 39 feet and 6 inches. Period newspaper articles also claimed that going with the bogey meant that Twin Coach could go with a burly dual front wheel setup. Twin Coach was also said to offer a version of the CargoLiner with a typical front axle.

Put it all together, and Twin Coach said that buying a Super Freighter/TC CargoLiner meant getting a truck that had the same payload as a typical tractor-trailer setup, but was on average 8 feet to 10 feet shorter, thanks to not having a tractor up front. Twin Coach also noted that you’d save about 8,000 pounds of weight compared to a typical travel trailer, too. As Business Week noted in 1950, states were also restricting the total length of trucks, so the Super Freighter was also supposed to be a bit of a cheat code there, too. The best part is that according to the patent, a truck like this could be sold for 20 percent cheaper than a typical semi.

According to Bus Transportation magazine in 1951, Twin Coach delayed the production of the TC CargoLiner due to the Korean War. This idea did not die with the sole Super Freighter that was built. Twin Coach also introduced the Fageol Twin Coach Convertible during the same time period. This looked somewhat similar to a Twin Coach bus, but had the Fruehauf body of the Super Freighter, a 477 Fageol gasoline bus engine, and an interior that could be quickly converted between passenger and freight roles. The Army liked this idea and ordered nearly 1,600 “F-32-F” coaches for over $20 million. Other examples of this design became highway post offices.

As for the Super Freighter, Twin Coach took the patent from that and created the Fageol Van, which entered production in the early 1950s. These trucks followed the same formula of being almost all cargo body with only a tiny cab slapped on the front. Twin Coach sold them in 20-foot to 35-foot lengths. Like the Super Freighter, the Fageol Van was marketed with the promise of providing more cargo volume in the same space that you’d get in other trucks.

Advertisements for the Fageol Van showed a 20-foot Fageol Van next to a typical 20-foot cabover truck. The marketing claimed that a 20-foot Fageol Van had 16 feet of cargo room compared to just 14 feet of cargo room for the typical cabover truck with the same overall length. Twin Coach also said that a Fageol Van, which carried up to 33,000 pounds, had a better payload rating than the competition. In case you’re curious, these things had top speeds of around just 45 mph.

Notably missing from Fageol Vans was the weird steering bogie from the demonstrator. But the production trucks did come with drivetrains and chassis from International Harvester. Advertisements said that the IH running gear meant that Fageol Vans technically had a service network of over 7,000 dealers, which is where the Fageol Vans were also sold.

In 1952, Flxible purchased Twin Coach’s bus business, and Twin Coach continued to march forward on the sales of Fageol Vans and Pony Express postal trucks. The Fageol Vans turned out to be especially popular with moving companies. Sadly, in 1956, production of the Fageol Van and the Pony Express ceased when the factory in Kent, Ohio, closed.

Twin Coach would then see its subsidiaries closed and sold off, with the company itself changing its name to Twin Industries in 1962, only to get absorbed into Bell Aircraft in 1963. Flxible stopped using the Twin Coach name on buses in 1962 and the last time the Twin Coach name was used on a vehicle was on some light-duty buses built by an unrelated company operating out of Twin Coach’s old Kent factory.

Ultimately, the idea of an all-in-one integrated truck and trailer never really caught on in the long run. Today, straight trucks are still largely conventional trucks with cubes bolted to them. If you need a truck that’s smaller, you’ll get something like an Isuzu NPR, and if you need the full capability of a highway tractor, then you’ll just go that route.

The TC CargoLiner was properly wild. It was little more than a trailer with a seat, a couple of windows, and an engine, but this weird design had a lot of promise. But it’s also a bit of a product of its day when truckers had fewer choices in the marketplace. There’s not really anyone racing to make a modern Super Freighter. Still, it’s such an awesome part of trucking history that, sadly, is fading into the pages of history. It’s a shame, because I’d love to know how this thing drove.

The post Seven Decades Ago, One Man Tried Making Trucking More Efficient By Eliminating The Truck appeared first on The Autopian.

On May 23, President Trump issued an executive order entitled "Restoring Gold Standard Science." And, in news that may surprise our readers, it sounds remarkably good, focusing on issues like reproducibility and conflicts of interest. While there were a few things that could be phrased better, when it comes to basic scientific practices, the language was remarkably reasonable.

So, why didn't we report on what appeared to be a rare bit of good news? I'd considered doing so, but the situation is complicated by the fact that the order is structured in a way that makes it very sensitive to who's responsible for implementing it, a situation that's subtle enough that I couldn't figure out how to handle it well. Fortunately, I only had to wait a week for a member of the Trump administration to show just how dangerous it could be and highlight its biggest problem.

On Sunday, Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary appeared on one of the weekend news programs, where he was asked about the decision to limit pregnant people's access to the COVID-19 vaccines. The host mentioned that aggregation of studies involving a total of over 1.8 million women had shown the vaccine was safe and effective.

Makary dismissed all that data because it wasn't "gold standard science," perfectly illustrating how the phrase can be used as a tool to mislead the public.

Setting standards

The executive order defines gold standard science in various ways that have already been discussed and promoted by the scientific community itself, including groups like the open science movement. It mentions things such as reproducibility and the use of hypotheses you can show are wrong, the open communication of results and uncertainties, and a focus on collaborative work. It also includes a few obvious rules, such as forbidding federal employees from engaging in research misconduct.

Overall, when it comes to scientific practice, the elements of gold standard science appear to range from obvious and innocuous to highly positive.

But even the principles themselves are open enough to interpretation that their implementation will matter. It's more than slightly ironic to call for more reproducibility at a time when budgets for even original research are being slashed severely, meaning that any money that goes to reproducing prior results will need to be met using a vanishing research budget. And, in the first Trump administration, "transparency" was used as a way to avoid using unpublished company data as part of considerations regarding whether the company's products needed to be regulated.

The executive order also calls for agencies to form policies that "provide for consideration of different or dissenting viewpoints" and "protect employees from efforts to prevent or deter consideration of alternative scientific opinions." Which again, don't sound problematic but are coming from an administration filled with people like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who wouldn't accept scientific evidence unless it were delivered in the corpse of a bear. It's notable that many non-scientific arguments about topics ranging from climate change to pandemic responses have been presented as simply "alternative scientific opinions." So this is definitely subject to potential abuse as well.

Finally, there's the enforcement of these rules—and thus final say on what actually constitutes gold standard science—which involves each agency naming a single political appointee to make the decisions. There's the potential for honest misunderstandings; how could any one individual understand everything going on at a place like the National Science Foundation, which funds everything from evolutionary biology to high-energy physics? But there's also the potential for abuse along the lines of what we've seen in authoritarian governments. That potential has already been widely recognized. And this weekend, we got a clear example of what it might look like in practice.

Concrete fears

Makary appeared on the news program Face the Nation over the weekend and showed exactly how this emphasis on gold standard science can be abused. The host, Margaret Brennan, challenged Makary on his recent participation in an announcement that would make it harder to get COVID vaccines during pregnancy, even though he had earlier helped pen an editorial that placed pregnant people in a high-risk category. Brennan also highlighted a meta-analysis of 67 different studies of COVID vaccines given during pregnancy. Collectively, these studies included over 1.8 million women, a large enough population to enable even rare side effects to emerge from the statistical murk.

"COVID-19 vaccines are effective in preventing SARS-CoV-2 infection and related complications in pregnant women," the authors of the meta-analysis conclude. "Unvaccinated pregnant women are more likely to experience hypertensive disorders and caesarean sections, and their neonates are more likely to be admitted to a neonatal unit."

That seems pretty clear. But Makary dismisses all of that data with a single short sentence: "There's no randomized control trial, that's the gold standard."

In this, Makary is following a strategy adopted earlier by congressional Republicans, who desired to conclude that SARS-CoV-2 had been the product of a lab leak. So, they switched standards of evidence as needed, tightening the rules to exclude inconvenient information, while accepting studies without relevant empirical data in others. That congressional report now serves as the primary source for the Trump administration's covid.gov website, in case there was any doubt that this strategy is appreciated by the people running the government.

The reality of science is that there are different qualities of evidence; some approaches produce data that can speak more definitively than others. When scientists talk about things like the weight of the evidence, they take these uncertainties into account. A sufficiently large and diverse collection of uncertain evidence can often outweigh a single result that appears definitive. In fact, the executive order at issue prominently describes how important it is to communicate scientific uncertainties clearly, one of its positive aspects.

Makary is not at all interested in discussing uncertainties. Instead, he's using uncertainty as a tool, one that allows him to dismiss any evidence that runs against his preferred narrative. And there's no reason to think that he'll be the last member of this administration to use "gold standard science" in this way.

The only favors Makary is doing for the public is making it easier to see how the fine-sounding principles of gold standard science can so easily be abused.

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