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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BOULDER — The man accused of throwing Molotov cocktails Sunday into a group that had gathered in downtown Boulder in support of Israeli hostages in Gaza told authorities he had planned the attack for a year.

Mohamed Soliman, 45, who lives near Colorado Springs, has been charged with a federal hate crime in the attack that injured at least 12 people — an allegation that carries a maximum penalty of life in prison when accompanied by an attempted murder. He is being held at the Boulder County jail. 

During a brief hearing in a courtroom at the jail Monday afternoon, Soliman wore an orange jumpsuit with a bandage on his head. He softly answered “yes,” when District Court Judge Nancy Salomone asked if he could hear the monitor used for the proceedings, and again when she asked if he understood an order prohibiting him from contacting the victims.

An attorney for Soliman waived a reading of the state charges he is facing, and the judge ordered him to appear at the Boulder County Courthouse at 3:30 p.m. Thursday for the formal filing of charges against him. 

As many as a dozen law enforcement officers provided security for the four-minute hearing, including four who stood with rifles on top of the roof. Several Boulder County sheriff’s deputy cars were posted at entrances to the parking lot.  

Victims of the attack ranged in age from 52 to 88 and included a Holocaust survivor. At least one of them was in critical condition Sunday evening, police said. 

Two victims remained in the hospital Monday afternoon.

The FBI, which is investigating the attack alongside Boulder police, said Soliman yelled “free Palestine” as he attacked the group of people walking on Boulder’s Pearl Street Mall to raise awareness of the hostages kidnapped during Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. 

Soliman confessed to the attack and told police he would do it again, the Associated Press reported.

At the scene, police found 16 unlit Molotov cocktails. They were made out of glass wine carafes or Ball jars with gasoline inside and had red rags hanging out of them, according to a federal arrest affidavit. Authorities also found a makeshift flamethrower fashioned from a backpack-style weed sprayer filled with a flammable liquid.

Inside his car, police found paperwork with the words “Palestine,” “Israel,” and “USAID,” court documents said. Soliman told investigators that he researched how to make Molotov cocktails on YouTube and picked up the gasoline on his drive to Boulder from Colorado Springs.

“He stated that he wanted to kill all Zionist people and wished they were all dead,” the affidavit said.

J. Bishop Grewell, the acting U.S. attorney in Colorado, said Soliman tried to purchase a firearm to carry out the attack but resorted to Molotov cocktails when he was barred from buying a firearm because he was not living in the U.S. legally.

“He had no regrets,” Grewell said, speaking to reporters at a news conference Monday afternoon.

Soliman told authorities that he targeted the group demonstrating in Boulder after learning about their gathering during an internet search. 

“Soliman stated that he hated the Zionist group and did this because he hated this group and needed to stop them from taking over ‘our land,’ which he explained to be Palestine,” the affidavit said.

Soliman told authorities he lives  with his wife and five children and that he waited to carry out the attack until after his daughter had graduated from school, the affidavit says.

An arrest warrant signed by a federal magistrate was filed in federal court Monday. U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a statement that Soliman will be prosecuted “to the fullest extent of the law.”

“We will never tolerate this kind of hatred,” she said.

On the state level, Soliman faces 16 counts of attempted murder, carrying a maximum penalty of 384 years in state prison. He’s also facing charges of using an incendiary device and attempted use of an incendiary device.

Soliman’s bond is $10 million.

The attack targeted members of the group Run for their Lives, which has been peacefully gathering on the Pearl Street Mall for nearly two years. The group of demonstrators had stopped at the Boulder County Courthouse near the intersection of Pearl and 13th streets when they were set on fire. 

The attack happened on the beginning of the Jewish holiday of Shavuot, which is marked with the reading of the Torah. The Boulder incident came 11 days after a man who also yelled “free Palestine” as he allegedly shot two Israeli embassy staffers outside of a Jewish museum in Washington.

Mark D. Michalek, special agent in charge of the FBI in Denver, said Sunday evening that authorities are investigating the attack as an act of terrorism. 

Soliman came to the U.S. in August 2022 on a B-2 visa that expired in February 2023, Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary of the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement. B-2 visas are used by people entering the U.S. temporarily for things like vacations or to get medical care. 

Soliman filed for asylum in September 2022. McLaughlin did not answer The Colorado Sun’s question on the status of his petition. 

McLaughlin said Soliman is living in the U.S. illegally.

Public records listed Soliman as living in a rented townhouse near Colorado Springs, where local media outlets reported federal law enforcement agents were on the scene Sunday. Authorities say Soliman’s family cooperated during a search of his home.

An X account under the suspect’s name and with a profile photo that appeared to match the man arrested was created in 2022 and had never made a post. He followed only 18 other accounts, including Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, the mayor of Colorado Springs, the local police department and several area news outlets.

The El Paso County Sheriff’s Office said Monday that its deputies had four contacts with Soliman since December 2022, all of which were traffic stops. Records also show that three noncriminal calls of service were made from a residence tied to Soliman in unincorporated El Paso County — once from a juvenile and two hang-up calls to 911, the sheriff’s office said.

An online resume under Soliman’s name said he was employed by a Denver-area health care company working in accounting and inventory control, with prior employers listed as companies in Egypt. Under education, the resume listed Al-Azhar University, a historic center for Islamic and Arabic learning located in Cairo.

Investigators said Monday morning that no one injured in the attack had died despite online jail records showing that Soliman was being held on suspicion of first-degree murder. That’s an “arrest-only” charge that will be modified as prosecutors firm up their case. 

It can be days, if not weeks, before Colorado prosecutors file formal charges against suspects in crimes as complex as the attack Sunday in Boulder.

Authorities initially said Sunday just six people were injured in the attack, but updated that number to eight and then 12 on Monday. The latest change came after investigators encountered more people with injuries, albeit minor, while tracking down witnesses.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued a statement Monday saying he, his wife and the entire nation of Israel were praying for the full recovery of the people wounded in the “vicious terror attack” in Colorado.

“This attack was aimed against peaceful people who wished to express their solidarity with the hostages held by Hamas, simply because they were Jews,” Netanyahu said.

The Islamic Center of Boulder condemned the targeted violence in a statement Monday.

“We call on all Coloradans to reaffirm our unwavering support for the First Amendment rights and protections of all people. Every individual and every community has the constitutional right to peaceful assembly and free expression. These fundamental freedoms must be respected and safeguarded for everyone, regardless of their views or background,” the center said.

Alex Osante of San Diego said he was having lunch on a restaurant patio across the pedestrian mall when he heard the crash of a bottle breaking on the ground and a “boom” sound followed by people yelling and screaming.

In a video of the scene captured by Osante, people could be seen pouring water on a woman lying on the ground who Osante said had caught on fire during the attack. A man, who later identified himself as an Israeli visiting Boulder who decided to join the group that day, ran up to Osante on the video asking for some water to help.

After the initial attack, Osante said the suspect went behind some bushes and then reemerged and threw a Molotov cocktail but apparently accidentally caught himself on fire as he threw it. The man then took off his shirt and what appeared to be a bulletproof vest before the police arrived. The man dropped to the ground and was arrested without any apparent resistance in the video that Osante filmed.

Aaron Brooks, a Jewish Boulder resident, arrived at the Run for their Lives demonstration late Sunday — just moments after the attack. He found a grisly scene.

“I saw smoke on the ground. I saw blood on the ground. I saw smoke coming from a person — literally a human being burning,” he said.

The attacker was still standing there and was holding bottles in his hands. Brooks said he had never seen the man before. 

Brooks heard the man say something to the effect of “you burn my people” or “you’re burning my people.”

Brooks began tending to the injured, including an older woman who he said had survived the Holocaust. 

“There is no question that the first responders saved lives and prevented further victims from being injured,” Mark Michalek, special agent in charge of the FBI’s office in Denver, said at the news conference Monday.

Michalek said while authorities believe Soliman acted alone, they are investigating whether others may have been involved. Soliman was not known to police in Boulder before the attack.

At the scene of the attack on Monday, a makeshift memorial was starting to form on a security barrier  as people dropped off flower bouquets. Otherwise, visitors strolled along the Pearl Street Mall, some of whom paused to take pictures and video of the row of journalists lined up along 14th Street near the courthouse where the attack occurred.

This is a developing story that will be updated. 

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

With the federal hiring freeze lifting in mid-July, the Trump administration has rolled out a controversial federal hiring plan that critics warn will politicize and likely slow down the process rather than increase government efficiency.

De-emphasizing degree requirements and banning DEI initiatives—as well as any census tracking of gender, race, ethnicity, or religion to assess the composition of government—the plan requires every new hire to submit essays explaining which executive orders or policy initiatives they will help advance.

These essays must be limited to 200 words and cannot be generated by a chatbot, the guidance noted. While some applicants may point to policies enacted by prior presidents under their guidance, the president appears to be seeking to ensure that only Trump supporters are hired and that anyone who becomes disillusioned with Trump is weeded out over time. In addition to asking for a show of loyalty during the interview process, all federal workers will also be continuously vetted and must agree to submit to "checks for post-appointment conduct that may impact their continued trustworthiness," the guidance noted, referencing required patriotism repeatedly.

According to the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the official plan is to hire only workers "dedicated to serving the American people effectively and faithfully." It also requires essays on applicants' commitment to upholding the Constitution, furthering government efficiency, and maintaining a strong work ethic.

Although the elimination of DEI initiatives is clearly a core Trump objective, the plan is "a hodgepodge of bipartisan reforms developed under both Trump and former President Biden to accelerate and improve the hiring process, alongside plans to eradicate longstanding efforts to make the federal workforce more reflective of the American populace," the government news site Government Executive (GovExec) reported.

The administration says the plan will "drastically" speed up hiring while cutting costs. The plan said that efficiencies would be created by cutting down resumes to a maximum of two pages (cutting review time) while creating a pool of resumes that can be returned to so that new jobs won't even need to be announced. Even hiring for jobs requiring top secret clearances will be expedited, the plan said.

Critics highlight pain points of hiring plan

A federal HR official speaking anonymously told GovExec that "this plan will make life harder for hiring managers and applicants alike." That official noted that Trump's plan to pivot away from using self-assessments—where applicants can explain their relevant skills—removes a shortcut for HR workers who will now need to devote time to independently assess every candidate.

Using various Trump-approved technical and alternative assessments would require candidates to participate in live exercises, evaluate work-related scenarios, submit a work sample, solve problems related to skill competencies, or submit additional writing samples that would need to be reviewed. The amount of manual labor involved in the new policies, the HR official warned, is "insane."

"Everything in it will make it more difficult to hire, not less," the HR official said. "How the f--- do you define if someone is patriotic?"

Jenny Mattingley, a vice president of government affairs at the Partnership for Public Service, told Politico that she agreed that requiring a loyalty test would make federal recruiting harder.

"Many federal employees are air traffic controllers, national park rangers, food safety inspectors, and firefighters who carry out the missions of agencies that are authorized by Congress," Mattingley said. "These public servants, who deliver services directly to the public, should not be forced to answer politicized questions that fail to evaluate the skills they need to do their jobs effectively."

Don Kettl, a professor emeritus of public policy at the University of Maryland, told GovExec that the decision to stop collecting census data on government workers could also present setbacks for hiring managers.

"I’m concerned about it, not because it would make it harder to pursue DEI goals as a matter of policy but that in general, it’s important not to throw out information about what it is that you’re doing," Kettl said. "It would be important to know whether or not you’re hiring 90 percent men for certain occupations... You don’t want to blind yourself to the implications of what you’re doing."

So far, Trump has prioritized slashing the government workforce through the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), with The New York Times estimating in March that 59,000 workers were fired and 76,000 accepted buyouts. Axios noted that 150,000 additional cuts are planned, and DOGE recently supercharged the mass-layoff software that could make it easier to pursue further cuts.

Once the hiring freeze lifts on July 15, the White House has specified that it will allow agencies to hire "no more than one employee for every four employees that depart from federal service (with appropriate immigration, law enforcement, and public safety exceptions."

Among those to be recruited, the federal hiring plan noted, are HR professionals who will align with Trump's plan to end DEI initiatives and prioritize hiring "American patriots."

"There is an urgent need to upgrade the skills and capabilities of Federal HR professionals to implement President Trump’s long-overdue plans to reform the Federal workforce," the hiring plan said, confirming that "OPM will take a greater role in overseeing" and training the HR workforce.

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AUSTIN, Texas—By just my third lap in the top-spec 2025 Chevrolet Corvette ZR1, I glanced down at the speedometer toward the end of the Circuit of the Americas' long back straight and spied 181 mph (291 km/h) displayed for a split second. Not bad for Chevy’s newest flagship sports car, especially given that the $174,995 ZR1’s twin-turbocharged V8 pumps all 1,064 horsepower to the rear wheels only.

The US’s only purpose-built F1 track made for an excellent setting to taste Corvette’s latest; the ZR1 also commanded your attention while conquering the steep uphill toward the first corner, then winding through a series of challenging corners with plenty of elevation change. Luckily, the car itself is an engineering marvel, and Chevy brought along a team of engineers to explain exactly how the total package comes together to enable such a breathtaking pace, as well as how Chevy can responsibly sell such a powerful car to the general public at all.

The entire point of switching the Corvette’s eighth generation to a mid-engine layout was to improve weight distribution and allow the Corvette to compete against much more exotic competition from European OEMs like Ferrari. The front-engined car's engine bay also lacked the width to add a pair of turbos, due to the suspension and tire orientation, which dictated the use of a supercharger that kept peak power to “just” 755 hp (563 kW) in the last Corvette to wear the ZR1 badge.

COTA reveals the ZR1's excellent balance, especially when specced with the optional aero package, carbon fiber wheels, and Michelin’s Cup 2 R tires. The tires—in effect, grooved slicks—allow for improved lateral acceleration but also the ability to consistently put the four-figure horsepower down to the asphalt. Yet Chevy’s engineers readily admitted the original target for ZR1 was just 850 hp (634 kW), until 1,000 came into sight and required some serious creativity to reach reliably.

Biggest turbos ever

The ZR1’s engine, dubbed LT7, shares much with the 5.5 L naturally aspirated LT6 engine in the less-powerful, cheaper Z06. It’s still a flat-plane crank with dry-sump oiling, even if clever eyes inspecting an LT6 might have noticed that the dry-sump oil tank allowed for the placement of turbos all along.

The dual 76-millimeter turbos, the largest ever fitted to a production car, required new intake routing, and computer control of the wastegate actuation maintains an anti-lag boost of 6 to 7 psi even under a closed throttle. Turbo speed sensors allow the turbines to spin closer to maximum speed before the vanes physically break apart—a mechanical system typically needs to maintain a 7 percent margin of error, but the ZR1’s is more like 2–3 percent.

The eventual power output actually wound up breaking two of Chevrolet’s dynos during early testing, we're told. So the C8’s eight-speed dual-clutch transmission also needed beefing up with physically wider gears that were shot-peened for additional strength, plus a revised lubrication system. The engine, meanwhile, creates enormous cooling demands when running at full throttle, which plays hand in hand with the downforce requirements of hitting such high speeds.

Consequently, the ZR1 sacrifices its usable frunk in favor of a massive radiator, while the hood’s heat extractor also releases trapped air and feeds it over the roofline. This freed up more space for additional cooling via the front fascia, which further benefits from canard spat dive planes. On the sides, an additional inlet on the side strakes complements the enormously wide scoops that debuted on the Z06. Coupes then get a split rear window—which harks back to Corvettes of old, while releasing hot air from the engine bay—plus new shoulder NACA intakes that directly feed the air box with cooler oxygen that even creates a ram air effect akin to mild supercharging.

Cooling for the ZR1 became an even higher priority, because the LT6 and LT7 employ extremely tight tolerances between the crankshaft and connecting rods, which mandates keeping the 5W-50 oil below 120° C (248° F) at all times. And the system simply works, as even on a hot and humid Texas day, I only noticed oil temperatures cresting above 104° C (220° F) occasionally.

The hardtop convertible ZR1 lacks the split-engine venting and shoulder intakes, while cutting into headroom so much that I skipped out while wearing a helmet. Other journalists noticed a drop-off in performance for the convertibles, and probably more so than the mild weight gains of just about 100 lbs (45 kg) might suggest. Instead, temperatures probably came into play, as the ECU drew back timing and instead allowed mild overboost of 24–25 psi to compensate for the Texas day. Even so, an engineer admitted he thought the engine was probably down 5–10 percent on power.

The fact that I hit my highest-ever top speed despite the ZR1 potentially giving up somewhere between 53 to 106 hp (40–80 kW) only makes this Corvettes sound even more insane. But I essentially wound up driving the turbos, since the DCT’s gear ratios carry over from the Stingray and therefore drop out of peak power when shifting from second to third and third to fourth.

I suspect nothing short of an F1 racecar feels this fast on a circuit of this size. A track designed for corner exit speeds double my pace in the ZR1 helps explain why Chevrolet declined to set us loose on public roads behind the wheel.

That’s a concern for potential buyers, though, and why the ZR1’s electronics undoubtedly ratchet back the insanity. Chevy still uses Bosch’s ninth-generation traction control, which debuted on C7 and operates on a 10-millisecond loop, even if the ABS runs at 5 milliseconds—while the ESC is at 20 milliseconds. I suspect this computerized nannying slowed me down a fair amount, in addition to the torque-by-gear restrictions in first and second that purposefully protect driveline components.

We’ve probably reached peak internal-combustion Corvette, which is something of a hint about the all-too-real question of where Chevy can go from here. If so, this car reaches a new level of unfathomable American ingenuity, combined with a newfound level of refinement and traction management that attempts to belie the undeniable absurdity to a minimal, arguably necessary, extent.

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While subscription-based features on cars are deeply unpopular, some of them have their fans. Some people enjoy the convenience of telematics, but because these services are subscriptions, they can be taken away at any time. Acura is discontinuing telematics for previous-generation models, some of which are only three model years old. As you’d expect, some owners aren’t terribly happy with the news, and it’s hard to blame them.

According to an email posted on Reddit and issued as a memo on an official Honda webpage, AcuraLink telematic will be cancelled in roughly two months for the following models: The 2014 to 2020 RLX, the 2014 to 2020 MDX, the 2015 to 2020 TLX, the 2016 to 2018 RDX, the 2016 to 2022 ILX, and the 2017 to 2022 NSX supercar. It’s worth noting that most pre-2018 models were affected by the 3G network sunset some years back, but hardware updates were available to continue connectivity. Now it sounds like vehicles that received the hardware updates are impacted by this latest move.

As the email states, “Effective July 21, 2025, all AcuraLink services for the above-listed vehicles will be deactivated.” So what services will Acura drivers lose out on? On the list of available subscription-based services, you’ll find stuff like stolen vehicle tracking, being able to lock and unlock a car remotely if you leave the keys in it, security alarm alerts, and automatic collision notification.

AcuraLink being discontinued on older cars
byu/orange9035 inAcura

This is far from the first time telematics features for cars have been discontinued, as the 3G network sunset in 2022 led to loads of connected cars with 3G modems going offline, but this latest move is odd considering that LTE networks aren’t going anywhere soon.

Granted, it’s not like Acura is taking the money from these subscriptions and running. As the brand states, “If customers have a current a subscription plan set to expire after July 21, 2025, they will be issued a pro-rated refund for the unused portion of their paid subscription services.” However, this end of support seems premature. In an extreme case, a 2022 NSX Type-S is a three-year-old supercar that carried a price tag of $171,495 including freight. That’s one seriously expensive car to only effectively get three years of telematics compatibility.

Naturally, owners don’t seem particularly happy about paid connectivity features disappearing on relatively recent cars with only about two months’ warning. As Reddit user SlowerThanTurtleInPB so eloquently commented:

The whole appeal of buying an Acura, at least for many of us, is the long-term reliability. I don’t buy these cars planning to ditch them in three years. I keep them for 8–10 years because historically, they hold up well with proper maintenance.

But if Acura is going to treat 3-year-old models like they’re obsolete and stop supporting key features like AcuraLink, then what’s the point? It completely undercuts the value proposition for people like me who buy into the brand for the long haul. If I wanted a car that only lasts a few years before functionality drops off, I’d lease something flashier and cheaper.

Indeed, an image of longevity is a big part of Acura’s appeal. Honda enjoys a good reputation for making durable cars that owners can keep for hundreds of thousands of miles. Acura benefits by extension. Discontinuing features while first owners still have the vehicles they bought brand new can shake the confidence of those who wish to keep their cars longer than the duration of a typical lease.

Granted, AcuraLink has also caught plenty of flak for not being as easy to use as apps from some other automakers, but for users who’ve had positive experiences, the decision to sunset previous-generation cars seems like a bit of a heartbreaker. Reddit user einsteinsdrms wrote that they were involved in a crash where AcuraLink automatically dialled the emergency services, and now says it’s “something I don’t see being able to do without now.” Unfortunately, the rapid sunset is giving this person second thoughts about buying another Acura, although it’s worth noting that some modern phones can automatically call 911 if they experience a high-G impact.

We’ve reached out to Acura for additional insight on why AcuraLink telematics are being discontinued for these previous-generation models, and will update you as soon as we hear more. In the meantime, let this serve as a reminder that you don’t own anything you subscribe to, especially digital features dependent on further support.

Top graphic credit: Acura

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One of the most fuel-efficient cars ever sold in America is the first-generation Honda Insight. When it launched in December 1999, the Environmental Protection Agency slapped it with an incredible 70 mpg highway rating. Sadly, only some people in real life hit that lofty number, and then the EPA later revised its methods, knocking the Insight down to a still impressive 61 mpg rating. As it turns out, there’s a super weird way to get 70 mpg out of an Insight, and it’s by tearing out the hybrid system and installing a cute 20 HP diesel engine meant for a mini excavator.

This wild project comes from the madman behind the Robot Cantina YouTube channel. The charismatic host, who calls himself Jimbo, loves creating silly things just for the fun of it. Jimbo is the mastermind behind such projects as making a hybrid golf cart, giving a Saturn ‘Cylinder Deactivation’ through deleting its engine’s valvetrain, and powering a first-generation Honda Insight with a Harbor Freight Predator 212cc engine. If you’re not in the know, that’s an engine commonly used in go-karts and minibike builds.

Jimbo is pretty upfront when he says that these projects aren’t done for real practicality. He doesn’t seriously expect you to gut your car to replace its engine with a Predator mill. Jimbo also doesn’t expect you to do what he did in the video below, and fill your former hybrid car with a 20HP 719cc Kubota D722 diesel engine, which normally goes into mini excavators and other things that aren’t cars.

We’ve been fans of Robot Cantina for a while, and I’ve been periodically writing stories about Jimbo’s videos since 2021. His projects are just that alluring!

Before Jimbo begins explaining how he squeezed 70 mpg out of this thing, he talks about why he put Predator engines and then a Kubota engine in an Insight in the first place. As I noted above, even with the EPA’s corrected numbers, the Insight gets epic fuel economy. It took Toyota until 2015 to finally unseat the Insight as the mpg champion, and even then, the Prius only beat the Insight’s post-2008 revised fuel economy numbers.

To some, the first-generation Insight remains the holy grail of hybrids. It was designed with a lightweight aluminum structure, was originally equipped with a manual transmission, and its drag coefficient of 0.25 made it the most slippery car on the market at the time. The original Insight is even DIY-friendly, and something I like is that due to Honda’s design of the hybrid system, the car can still start and drive even after a battery failure. It’s no surprise that there’s no shortage of Insights with well over 300,000 miles.

Jimbo acknowledges all of that as true. However, he chose the Honda Insight because the same traits that make it a great hybrid also make it a great platform for stupid engine swaps. The low weight and slippery aero are great if you’re trying to fit a lawnmower engine into a car and have any sort of expectation of hitting the speed limit. Amazingly, Jimbo found out that a stock Predator 212 is good for 39 mph in an Insight.

In previous episodes, Jimbo worked through a bunch of experiments involving the three-cylinder Kubota D722 engine. This is an interesting little powerplant. It comes from Kubota’s Super Mini engine family, which launched in 1983. Kubota says it was the world’s smallest multi-cylinder diesel engine series with a 62.2mm stroke and around 200cc per cylinder, depending on configuration.

At first, the engine was bolted into a Saturn, but that car was so worn out that it had to be scrapped before the project was finished. Then, Jimbo tried to fit a Volkswagen 1.6-liter diesel into the Insight shell, but found that the engine was so big that it was a tight fit.

Jimbo says that fitting the Kubota into the Insight was a difficult task.

The big hurdle was with the transmission, as the Insight’s manual transmission ratios were incompatible with the low-power diesel. But that’s where the earlier attempted Saturn swap comes in, because the Saturn MP3 five-speed close-ratio manual transmission is a good fit for the diesel. Mounting the engine and transmission wasn’t hard, either, as Jimbo just made custom mounts that bolted into the Insight’s existing structure without modification. Click here to watch those videos.

Last summer, Jimbo added an AMR500 supercharger to the Kubota, and he targeted an output of 30 HP to 35 HP. That was good for a 55 mph sprint in about 20 seconds. Viewers have been begging Jimbo to go with a turbo, so this year, he tossed the AMR500 out and replaced it with an RHB31 turbocharger. This turbo slowed the car down and made it take around 10 seconds longer to reach 55 mph.

Jimbo is correcting some of those faults in this video. First, there’s a loose bolt that needs to be tightened. He also needs to fix a pinhole in his welding work, both of which appeared to cause a massive boost leak. Some welding and some sanding fixed the holes created from the original welding job.

Next, Jimbo notes that the engine was getting way too much fuel during the initial turbo testing. This is bad, and not just because of the black, dirty smoke. Exhaust gas temperatures (EGT) were dangerously high. In extreme instances, super high EGT values can lead to melted pistons or even a catastrophic engine failure, followed by an instant unscheduled roadside disassembly. Fixing this on the Kubota was as easy as adjusting the fuel rack limiter screw.

With that out of the way, Jimbo takes the car out onto the road. I was a bit impressed that this little engine was powerful enough to allow the Insight to maintain 64 mph on level ground. Jimbo noted that EGTs were about 750 degrees during this, which was safe for the engine.

Next, Jimbo settles into a cruise of 55 mph for the mpg run. The car’s doing great in this setting with EGTs down to about 560 degrees. Sadly, the turbo isn’t doing so hot here as it’s putting out only 2.5 PSI. Worse, Jimbo notes, is that fifth gear is so tall in the Saturn MP3 transmission that the engine loses all boost and has to spend a bunch of time rebuilding it.

Despite this, Jimbo completes his mileage test. To measure fuel economy, he measured the weight of the diesel at the beginning of the run and at the end of the run. The Insight carried about 12.8 kilograms (about 28.2 pounds) of diesel at the start of the run. Once Jimbo got home, he measured again, finding that the car burned through roughly 2.8 kilos (6.1 pounds) of diesel.

Before revealing the final score, Jimbo then hopped into a stock Honda Insight and took that on a 60-mile loop of rural Kansas. During the drive, he notes that his car’s hybrid battery is bad, so it’s not performing as well as it could. Still, after 60 miles of driving the speed limit, the car returned to home base with a score of 62.7 mpg.

The diesel returned a great 70.1 mpg. For reference, my 2006 Smart Fortwo diesel will get 70 mpg all day. Amusingly, the 800cc three-cylinder turbodiesel in my Smart is only slightly larger than the Kubota engine and makes only 40 HP. So this turbodiesel Insight is not far off!

Yet, as Jimbo notes, the current turbo is so inefficient at its job that the supercharger did better, scoring 78.6 mpg with far better performance. Jimbo says he’s not done yet, as he’s currently looking into using a snail from a Smart Fortwo diesel or one from a Volkswagen Lupo TDI. So, maybe there’s still a chance for a better turbo to beat the supercharger.

Again, none of this is really all that practical. It’s all in the name of fun, and I dig it. Everyone’s into K20 swaps and lithium conversions, yet here’s Jimbo over here slinging the dumbest, yet seemingly most fun swaps on the Internet. Click here to watch more of Jimbo’s madness.

H/T to the Drive!

The post The Weirdest Honda Insight On The Internet Gets 70 MPG With A 20 HP Mini Excavator Diesel Engine appeared first on The Autopian.

On Sunday, independent AI researcher Simon Willison published a detailed analysis of Anthropic's newly released system prompts for Claude 4's Opus 4 and Sonnet 4 models, offering insights into how Anthropic controls the models' "behavior" through their outputs. Willison examined both the published prompts and leaked internal tool instructions to reveal what he calls "a sort of unofficial manual for how best to use these tools."

To understand what Willison is talking about, we'll need to explain what system prompts are. Large language models (LLMs) like the AI models that run Claude and ChatGPT process an input called a "prompt" and return an output that is the most likely continuation of that prompt. System prompts are instructions that AI companies feed to the models before each conversation to establish how they should respond.

Unlike the messages users see from the chatbot, system prompts typically remain hidden from the user and tell the model its identity, behavioral guidelines, and specific rules to follow. Each time a user sends a message, the AI model receives the full conversation history along with the system prompt, allowing it to maintain context while following its instructions.

While Anthropic publishes portions of its system prompts in its release notes, Willison's analysis reveals these published versions are incomplete. The full system prompts, which include detailed instructions for tools like web search and code generation, must be extracted through techniques like prompt injection—methods that trick the model into revealing its hidden instructions. Willison relied on leaked prompts gathered by researchers who used such techniques to obtain the complete picture of how Claude 4 operates.

For example, even though LLMs aren't people, they can reproduce human-like outputs due to their training data that includes many examples of emotional interactions. Willison shows that Anthropic includes instructions for the models to provide emotional support while avoiding encouragement for self-destructive behavior. Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4 receive identical instructions to "care about people's wellbeing and avoid encouraging or facilitating self-destructive behaviors such as addiction, disordered or unhealthy approaches to eating or exercise."

Willison, who coined the term "prompt injection" in 2022, is always on the lookout for LLM vulnerabilities. In his post, he notes that reading system prompts reminds him of warning signs in the real world that hint at past problems. "A system prompt can often be interpreted as a detailed list of all of the things the model used to do before it was told not to do them," he writes.

Fighting the flattery problem

Credit: alashi via Getty Images

Willison's analysis comes as AI companies grapple with sycophantic behavior in their models. As we reported in April, ChatGPT users have complained about GPT-4o's "relentlessly positive tone" and excessive flattery since OpenAI's March update. Users described feeling "buttered up" by responses like "Good question! You're very astute to ask that," with software engineer Craig Weiss tweeting that "ChatGPT is suddenly the biggest suckup I've ever met."

The issue stems from how companies collect user feedback during training—people tend to prefer responses that make them feel good, creating a feedback loop where models learn that enthusiasm leads to higher ratings from humans. As a response to the feedback, OpenAI later rolled back ChatGPT's 4o model and altered the system prompt as well, something we reported on and Willison also analyzed at the time.

One of Willison's most interesting findings about Claude 4 relates to how Anthropic has guided both Claude models to avoid sycophantic behavior. "Claude never starts its response by saying a question or idea or observation was good, great, fascinating, profound, excellent, or any other positive adjective," Anthropic writes in the prompt. "It skips the flattery and responds directly."

Other system prompt highlights

The Claude 4 system prompt also includes extensive instructions on when Claude should or shouldn't use bullet points and lists, with multiple paragraphs dedicated to discouraging frequent list-making in casual conversation. "Claude should not use bullet points or numbered lists for reports, documents, explanations, or unless the user explicitly asks for a list or ranking," the prompt states.

Willison discovered discrepancies in Claude's stated knowledge cutoff date, noting that while Anthropic's comparison table lists March 2025 as the training data cutoff, the system prompt states January 2025 as the model's "reliable knowledge cutoff date." He speculates this might help avoid situations where Claude confidently answers questions based on incomplete information from later months.

Willison also emphasizes the extensive copyright "protections" built into Claude's search capabilities. Both models receive repeated instructions to use only one short quote (under 15 words) from web sources per response and to avoid creating what the prompt calls "displacive summaries." The instructions specify that Claude should use only one short quote per response and explicitly refuse requests to reproduce song lyrics "in ANY form."

The full post includes more analysis. Willison concludes that these system prompts serve as valuable documentation for understanding how to maximize these tools' capabilities. "If you're an LLM power-user, the above system prompts are solid gold for figuring out how to best take advantage of these tools," he writes.

Willison also calls on Anthropic and others to be more transparent about their system prompts, beyond publishing excerpts as Anthropic currently does: "I wish Anthropic would take the next step and officially publish the prompts for their tools to accompany their open system prompts," he writes. "I’d love to see other vendors follow the same path as well."

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Last month, I wrote an article about how schools were not prepared for ChatGPT and other generative AI tools, based on thousands of pages of public records I obtained from when ChatGPT was first released. As part of that article, I asked teachers to tell me how AI has changed how they teach.

The response from teachers and university professors was overwhelming. In my entire career, I’ve rarely gotten so many email responses to a single article, and I have never gotten so many thoughtful and comprehensive responses. 

One thing is clear: teachers are not OK. 

They describe trying to grade “hybrid essays half written by students and half written by robots,” trying to teach Spanish to kids who don’t know the meaning of the words they’re trying to teach them in English, and students who use AI in the middle of conversation. They describe spending hours grading papers that took their students seconds to generate: “I've been thinking more and more about how much time I am almost certainly spending grading and writing feedback for papers that were not even written by the student,” one teacher told me. “That sure feels like bullshit.”

Below, I have compiled some of the responses I got. Some of the teachers were comfortable with their responses being used on the record along with their names. Others asked that I keep them anonymous because their school or school district forbids them from speaking to the press. The responses have been edited by 404 Media for length and clarity, but they are still really long. These are teachers, after all. 

Robert W. Gehl, Ontario Research Chair of Digital Governance for Social Justice at York University in Toronto

Simply put, AI tools are ubiquitous. I am on academic honesty committees and the number of cases where students have admitted to using these tools to cheat on their work has exploded.

I think generative AI is incredibly destructive to our teaching of university students. We ask them to read, reflect upon, write about, and discuss ideas. That's all in service of our goal to help train them to be critical citizens. GenAI can simulate all of the steps: it can summarize readings, pull out key concepts, draft text, and even generate ideas for discussion. But that would be like going to the gym and asking a robot to lift weights for you. 

"Honestly, if we ejected all the genAI tools into the sun, I would be quite pleased."

We need to rethink higher ed, grading, the whole thing. I think part of the problem is that we've been inconsistent in rules about genAI use. Some profs ban it altogether, while others attempt to carve out acceptable uses. The problem is the line between acceptable and unacceptable use. For example, some profs say students can use genAI for "idea generation" but then prohibit using it for writing text. Where's the line between those? In addition, universities are contracting with companies like Microsoft, Adobe, and Google for digital services, and those companies are constantly pushing their AI tools. So a student might hear "don't use generative AI" from a prof but then log on to the university's Microsoft suite, which then suggests using Copilot to sum up readings or help draft writing. It's inconsistent and confusing.

I've been working on ways to increase the amount of in-class discussion we do in classes. But that's tricky because it's hard to grade in-class discussions—it's much easier to manage digital files. Another option would be to do hand-written in-class essays, but I have a hard time asking that of students. I hardly write by hand anymore, so why would I demand they do so? 

I am sick to my stomach as I write this because I've spent 20 years developing a pedagogy that's about wrestling with big ideas through writing and discussion, and that whole project has been evaporated by for-profit corporations who built their systems on stolen work. It's demoralizing.

It has made my job much, much harder. I do not allow genAI in my classes. However, because genAI is so good at producing plausible-sounding text, that ban puts me in a really awkward spot. If I want to enforce my ban, I would have to do hours of detective work (since there are no reliable ways to detect genAI use), call students into my office to confront them, fill out paperwork, and attend many disciplinary hearings. All of that work is done to ferret out cheating students, so we have less time to spend helping honest ones who are there to learn and grow. And I would only be able to find a small percentage of the cases, anyway.

Honestly, if we ejected all the genAI tools into the sun, I would be quite pleased.

Kaci Juge, high school English teacher

I personally haven't incorporated AI into my teaching yet. It has, however, added some stress to my workload as an English teacher. How do I remain ethical in creating policies? How do I begin to teach students how to use AI ethically? How do I even use it myself ethically considering the consequences of the energy it apparently takes? I understand that I absolutely have to come to terms with using it in order to remain sane in my profession at this point.

Ben Prytherch, Statistics professor

LLM use is rampant, but I don't think it's ubiquitous. While I can never know with certainty if someone used AI, it's pretty easy to tell when they didn't, unless they're devious enough to intentionally add in grammatical and spelling errors or awkward phrasings. There are plenty of students who don't use it, and plenty who do. 

LLMs have changed how I give assignments, but I haven't adapted as quickly as I'd like and I know some students are able to cheat. The most obvious change is that I've moved to in-class writing for assignments that are strictly writing-based. Now the essays are written in-class, and treated like mid-term exams. My quizzes are also in-class. This requires more grading work, but I'm glad I did it, and a bit embarrassed that it took ChatGPT to force me into what I now consider a positive change. Reasons I consider it positive:

• I am much more motivated to write detailed personal feedback for students when I know with certainty that I'm responding to something they wrote themselves.
• It turns out most of them can write after all. For all the talk about how kids can't write anymore, I don't see it. This is totally subjective on my part, of course. But I've been pleasantly surprised with the quality of what they write in-class. 

Switching to in-class writing has got me contemplating giving oral examinations, something I've never done. It would be a big step, but likely a positive and humanizing one. 

There's also the problem of academic integrity and fairness. I don't want students who don't use LLMs to be placed at a disadvantage. And I don't want to give good grades to students who are doing effectively nothing. LLM use is difficult to police. 

Lastly, I have no patience for the whole "AI is the future so you must incorporate it into your classroom" push, even when it's not coming from self-interested people in tech. No one knows what "the future" holds, and even if it were a good idea to teach students how to incorporate AI into this-or-that, by what measure are us teachers qualified? 

Kate Conroy 

I teach 12th grade English, AP Language & Composition, and Journalism in a public high school in West Philadelphia. I was appalled at the beginning of this school year to find out that I had to complete an online training that encouraged the use of AI for teachers and students. I know of teachers at my school who use AI to write their lesson plans and give feedback on student work. I also know many teachers who either cannot recognize when a student has used AI to write an essay or don’t care enough to argue with the kids who do it. Around this time last year I began editing all my essay rubrics to include a line that says all essays must show evidence of drafting and editing in the Google Doc’s history, and any essays that appear all at once in the history will not be graded. 

I refuse to use AI on principle except for one time last year when I wanted to test it, to see what it could and could not do so that I could structure my prompts to thwart it. I learned that at least as of this time last year, on questions of literary analysis, ChatGPT will make up quotes that sound like they go with the themes of the books, and it can’t get page numbers correct. Luckily I have taught the same books for many years in a row and can instantly identify an incorrect quote and an incorrect page number. There’s something a little bit satisfying about handing a student back their essay and saying, “I can’t find this quote in the book, can you find it for me?” Meanwhile I know perfectly well they cannot. 

I teach 18 year olds who range in reading levels from preschool to college, but the majority of them are in the lower half that range. I am devastated by what AI and social media have done to them. My kids don’t think anymore. They don’t have interests. Literally, when I ask them what they’re interested in, so many of them can’t name anything for me. Even my smartest kids insist that ChatGPT is good “when used correctly.” I ask them, “How does one use it correctly then?” They can’t answer the question. They don’t have original thoughts. They just parrot back what they’ve heard in TikToks. They try to show me “information” ChatGPT gave them. I ask them, “How do you know this is true?” They move their phone closer to me for emphasis, exclaiming, “Look, it says it right here!” They cannot understand what I am asking them. It breaks my heart for them and honestly it makes it hard to continue teaching. If I were to quit, it would be because of how technology has stunted kids and how hard it’s become to reach them because of that. 

I am only 30 years old. I have a long road ahead of me to retirement. But it is so hard to ask kids to learn, read, and write, when so many adults are no longer doing the work it takes to ensure they are really learning, reading, and writing. And I get it. That work has suddenly become so challenging. It’s really not fair to us. But if we’re not willing to do it, we shouldn’t be in the classroom. 

Jeffrey Fischer

The biggest thing for us is the teaching of writing itself, never mind even the content. And really the only way to be sure that your students are learning anything about writing is to have them write in class. But then what to do about longer-form writing, like research papers, for example, or even just analytical/exegetical papers that put multiple primary sources into conversation and read them together? I've started watching for the voices of my students in their in-class writing and trying to pay attention to gaps between that voice and the voice in their out-of-class writing, but when I've got 100 to 130 or 140 students (including a fully online asynchronous class), that's just not really reliable. And for the online asynch class, it's just impossible because there's no way of doing old-school, low-tech, in-class writing at all.

"I've been thinking more and more about how much time I am almost certainly spending grading and writing feedback for papers that were not even written by the student. That sure feels like bullshit."

You may be familiar with David Graeber's article-turned-book on Bullshit Jobs. This is a recent paper looking specifically at bullshit jobs in academia. No surprise, the people who see their jobs as bullshit jobs are mostly administrators. The people who overwhelmingly do NOT see their jobs as bullshit jobs are faculty.

But that is what I see AI in general and LLMs in particular as changing. The situations I'm describing above are exactly the things that turn what is so meaningful to us as teachers into bullshit. The more we think that we are unable to actually teach them, the less meaningful our jobs are. 

I've been thinking more and more about how much time I am almost certainly spending grading and writing feedback for papers that were not even written by the student. That sure feels like bullshit. I'm going through the motions of teaching. I'm putting a lot of time and emotional effort into it, as well as the intellectual effort, and it's getting flushed into the void. 

Post-grad educator

Last year, I taught a class as part of a doctoral program in responsible AI development and use. I don’t want to share too many specifics, but the course goal was for students to think critically about the adverse impacts of AI on people who are already marginalized and discriminated against.

When the final projects came in, my co-instructor and I were underwhelmed, to say the least. When I started digging into the projects, I realized that the students had used AI in some incredibly irresponsible ways—shallow, misleading, and inaccurate analysis of data, pointless and meaningless visualizations. The real kicker, though, was that we got two projects where the students had submitted a “podcast.” What they had done, apparently, was give their paper (which already had extremely flawed AI-based data analysis) to a gen AI tool and asked it to create an audio podcast. And the results were predictably awful. Full of random meaningless vocalizations at bizarre times, the “female” character was incredibly dumb and vapid (sounded like the “manic pixie dream girl” trope from those awful movies), and the “analysis” in the podcast exacerbated the problems that were already in the paper, so it was even more wrong than the paper itself. 

In short, there is nothing particularly surprising in how badly the AI worked here—but these students were in a *doctoral* program on *responsible AI*. In my career as a teacher, I’m hard pressed to think of more blatantly irresponsible work by students. 

Nathan Schmidt, University Lecturer, managing editor at Gamers With Glasses

When ChatGPT first entered the scene, I honestly did not think it was that big of a deal. I saw some plagiarism; it was easy to catch. Its voice was stilted and obtuse, and it avoided making any specific critical judgments as if it were speaking on behalf of some cult of ambiguity. Students didn't really understand what it did or how to use it, and when the occasional cheating would happen, it was usually just a sign that the student needed some extra help that they were too exhausted or embarrassed to ask for, so we'd have that conversation and move on.

I think it is the responsibility of academics to maintain an open mind about new technologies and to react to them in an evidence-based way, driven by intellectual curiosity. I was, indeed, curious about ChatGPT, and I played with it myself a few times, even using it on the projector in class to help students think about the limits and affordances of such a technology. I had a couple semesters where I thought, "Let's just do this above board." Borrowing an idea from one of my fellow instructors, I gave students instructions for how I wanted them to acknowledge the use of ChatGPT or other predictive text models in their work, and I also made it clear that I expected them to articulate both where they had used it and, more importantly, the reason why they found this to be a useful tool. I thought this might provoke some useful, critical conversation. I also took a self-directed course provided by my university that encouraged a similar curiosity, inviting instructors to view predictive text as a tool that had both problematic and beneficial uses.

"ChatGPT isn't its own, unique problem. It's a symptom of a totalizing cultural paradigm in which passive consumption and regurgitation of content becomes the status quo"

However, this approach quickly became frustrating, for two reasons. First, because even with the acknowledgments pages, I started getting hybrid essays that sounded like they were half written by students and half written by robots, which made every grading comment a miniature Turing test. I didn't know when to praise students, because I didn't want to write feedback like, "I love how thoughtfully you've worded this," only to be putting my stamp of approval on predictively generated text. What if the majority of the things that I responded to positively were things that had actually been generated by ChatGPT? How would that make a student feel about their personal writing competencies? What lesson would that implicitly reinforce about how to use this tool? The other problem was that students were utterly unprepared to think about their usage of this tool in a critically engaged way. Despite my clear instructions and expectation-setting, most students used their acknowledgments pages to make the vaguest possible statements, like, "Used ChatGPT for ideas" or "ChatGPT fixed grammar" (comments like these also always conflated grammar with vocabulary and tone). I think there was a strong element of selection bias here, because the students who didn't feel like they needed to use ChatGPT were also the students who would have been most prepared to articulate their reasons for usage with the degree of specificity I was looking for. 

This brings us to last semester, when I said, "Okay, if you must use ChatGPT, you can use it for brainstorming and outlining, but if you turn something in that actually includes text that was generated predictively, I'm sending it back to you." This went a little bit better. For most students, the writing started to sound human again, but I suspect this is more because students are unlikely to outline their essays in the first place, not because they were putting the tool to the allowable use I had designated. 

ChatGPT isn't its own, unique problem. It's a symptom of a totalizing cultural paradigm in which passive consumption and regurgitation of content becomes the status quo. It's a symptom of the world of TikTok and Instagram and perfecting your algorithm, in which some people are professionally deemed the 'content creators,' casting everyone else into the creatively bereft role of the content “consumer." And if that paradigm wins, as it certainly appears to be doing, pretty much everything that has been meaningful about human culture will be undone, in relatively short order. So that's the long story about how I adopted an absolute zero tolerance policy on any use of ChatGPT or any similar tool in my course, working my way down the funnel of progressive acceptance to outright conservative, Luddite rejection. 

John Dowd

I’m in higher edu, and LLMs have absolutely blown up what I try to accomplish with my teaching (I’m in the humanities and social sciences). 

Given the widespread use of LLMs by college students I now have an ongoing and seemingly unresolvable tension, which is how to evaluate student work. Often I can spot when students have used the technology between both having thousands of samples of student writing over time, and cross referencing my experience with one or more AI use detection tools. I know those detection tools are unreliable, but depending on the confidence level they return, it may help with the confirmation. This creates an atmosphere of mistrust that is destructive to the instructor/student relationship. 

"LLMs have absolutely blown up what I try to accomplish with my teaching"

I try to appeal to students and explain that by offloading the work of thinking to these technologies, they’re rapidly making themselves replaceable. Students (and I think even many faculty across academia) fancy themselves as “Big Idea” people. Everyone’s a “Big Idea” person now, or so they think. “They’re all my ideas,” people say, “I’m just using the technology to save time; organize them more quickly; bounce them back and forth”, etc. I think this is more plausible for people who have already put in the work and have the experience of articulating and understanding ideas. However, for people who are still learning to think or problem solve in more sophisticated/creative ways, they will be poor evaluators of information and less likely to produce relevant and credible versions of it. 

I don’t want to be overly dramatic, but AI has negatively complicated my work life so much. I’ve opted to attempt to understand it, but to not use it for my work. I’m too concerned about being seduced by its convenience and believability (despite knowing its propensity for making shit up). Students are using the technology in ways we’d expect, to complete work, take tests, seek information (scary), etc. Some of this use occurs in violation of course policy, while some is used with the consent of the instructor. Students are also, I’m sure, using it in ways I can’t even imagine at the moment. 

Sorry, bit of a rant, I’m just so preoccupied and vexed by the irresponsible manner in which the tech bros threw all of this at us with no concern, consent, or collaboration. 

High school Spanish teacher, Oklahoma

I am a high school Spanish teacher in Oklahoma and kids here have shocked me with the ways they try to use AI for assignments I give them. In several cases I have caught them because they can’t read what they submit to me and so don’t know to delete the sentence that says something to the effect of “This summary meets the requirements of the prompt, I hope it is helpful to you!” 

"Even my brightest students often don’t know the English word that is the direct translation for the Spanish they are supposed to be learning"

Some of my students openly talk about using AI for all their assignments and I agree with those who say the technology—along with gaps in their education due to the long term effects of COVID—has gotten us to a point where a lot of young GenZ and Gen Alpha are functionally illiterate. I have been shocked at their lack of vocabulary and reading comprehension skills even in English. Teaching cognates, even my brightest students often don’t know the English word that is the direct translation for the Spanish they are supposed to be learning. Trying to determine if and how a student used AI to cheat has wasted countless hours of my time this year, even in my class where there are relatively few opportunities to use it because I do so much on paper (and they hate me for it!). 

A lot of teachers have had to throw out entire assessment methods to try to create assignments that are not cheatable, which at least for me, always involves huge amounts of labor. 

It keeps me up at night and gives me existential dread about my profession but it’s so critical to address!!! 

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The Department of Health and Human Services—under the control of anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—has canceled millions of dollars in federal funding awarded to Moderna to produce an mRNA vaccine against influenza viruses with pandemic potential, including the H5N1 bird flu currently sweeping US poultry and dairy cows.

Last July, the Biden administration's HHS awarded Moderna $176 million to "accelerate the development of mRNA-based pandemic influenza vaccines." In the administration's final days in January, HHS awarded the vaccine maker an additional $590 million to support "late-stage development and licensure of pre-pandemic mRNA-based vaccines." The funding would also go to the development of five additional subtypes of pandemic influenza.

On Wednesday, as news broke that the Trump administration was reneging on the contract, Moderna reported positive results from an early trial of a vaccine targeting H5 influenza viruses. In a preliminary trial of 300 healthy adults, the vaccine candidate appeared safe and boosted antibody levels against the virus by 44.5-fold.

An HHS spokesperson said that decision to cancel the funding—which would support thorough safety and efficacy testing of the vaccines—was because the vaccines needed more testing.

"This is not simply about efficacy—it’s about safety, integrity, and trust." HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon told The Washington Post. "The reality is that mRNA technology remains under-tested."

Nixon went on to claim that the Trump administration wouldn't repeat the "mistakes of the last administration, which concealed legitimate safety concerns." The accusation refers to mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines, which were developed and initially released under the first Trump administration. They have since been proven safe and effective against the deadly virus.

Kennedy, a staunch anti-vaccine advocate, has unflaggingly made false claims about the safety and efficacy of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines. In 2021, Kennedy petitioned the Food and Drug Administration to revoke authorization for COVID-19 vaccines and refrain from issuing future approvals. In recent days, Kennedy has also restricted access to COVID-19 vaccines and unilaterally revoked recommendations for healthy children and pregnant people to get the vaccines.

The federal funding for pandemic influenza vaccines was awarded as health officials around the country, including federal officials, were closely monitoring the swift and unprecedented spread of H5N1 bird flu through US dairy cows, which also spread to 70 people and killed one. Under the Trump administration, regular updates on the outbreak have ceased, and experts fear that cases are going undocumented.

In a statement Wednesday, Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel struck an optimistic note, saying the company would pursue other funding sources to continue moving forward.

"While the termination of funding from HHS adds uncertainty, we are pleased by the robust immune response and safety profile observed in this interim analysis of the Phase 1/2 study of our H5 avian flu vaccine and we will explore alternative paths forward for the program," he said. "These clinical data in pandemic influenza underscore the critical role mRNA technology has played as a countermeasure to emerging health threats."

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