Alex Lauer

I have to be honest with you: most “best cars of the year” lists are just not that interesting to me. If you've got a panel of people voting on the cream of the crop, as some awards and automotive outlets do, then oftentimes it's the least offensive models that rise to the top. Meanwhile, if you're looking at the inventory of best-selling vehicles of the year to get an idea of what people are actually buying, you're more accurately getting a picture of what vehicles were best positioned to sell. And I'll be the first to tell you: the cars in my driveway weren't acquired because they're the best of the best.

Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk used to be interested in innovation, but that pretense has been shed in favor of a new goal: power

In an early video interview with Jeff Bezos just three years after he founded Amazon, the then-33-year-old e-commerce pioneer, squinting into the sun and cocking his head on his long neck like a confused emu, overflowed with excitement about the possibilities offered by the growing internet. “The late 20th century is just a great time to be” — here he paused, awkwardly pursing his lips and nodding his head, like his brain was moving faster than his pale flesh could follow — “alive!”

In the last decade or so, there's been a growing concern about the homogeneity of car design. Not only was the proliferation of SUVs, which have been subjected to increasingly strict safety standards in the U.S. along with all other passenger vehicles, seen as a detriment to automotive aesthetics, transforming daily drivers into rolling bricks, but the subsequent rise of electric vehicles threatened to turn the other half of the vehicular landscape into rolling eggs, with all the edges smoothed out to decrease drag and increase range.

In the last decade or so, there's been a growing concern about the homogeneity of car design. Not only was the proliferation of SUVs, which have been subjected to increasingly strict safety standards in the U.S. along with all other passenger vehicles, seen as a detriment to automotive aesthetics, transforming daily drivers into rolling bricks, but the subsequent rise of electric vehicles threatened to turn the other half of the vehicular landscape into rolling eggs, with all the edges smoothed out to decrease drag and increase range.

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Nota bene: All products in this article are independently selected and vetted by InsideHook editors. If you buy something, we may earn an affiliate commission.

Nota bene: All products in this article are independently selected and vetted by InsideHook editors. If you buy something, we may earn an affiliate commission.

As long as electric vehicles have been part of the national conversation, there have been panic headlines written about them. That's understandable. EVs are an alternative to gasoline-powered cars, which have essentially been the same for a century. Change is hard, especially for something so ingrained in the day-to-day lives of people around the world, and American culture specifically. But when those panic headlines are published by otherwise reputable news sources and based on insufficient evidence, that's when we have a problem.

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