Kyle Smith

While it may seem like the car has been unchanged for decades at this point, with only bold new shades of gray and larger screens creating selling points and “value” for would-be buyers, the fact of the matter is there has been so much innovation over the years. However, much of it is taken for granted because just about every driver on the road today has little understanding of just how far the automobile has come. To provide a little perspective, here are six parts of a car that were revolutionary when they first debuted, but are now so common that they go entirely unnoticed.

Any business that successfully navigates 140 years without completely disappearing has every right to celebrate. Only a handful of companies that can boast that kind of record, and considering the first patented automobile debuted 138 years ago, it’s impressive that any car or motorcycle manufacturer has been churning out products since the very beginning. Piaggio, an Italian maker of scooters and motorcycles, has stood that test of time and released a special edition from one of its most popular brands, Vespa, to commemorate it.

There are lots of rules that automakers have to play by, and they’re imposed from a lot of different places. A few even come from inside the house, and those who know their automotive history are well aware that the people and projects that broke those internal rules are often fodder for some of the most interesting tales. John Delorean and the team behind the Pontiac GTO was an experiment in loopholes that led to an industry-defining success, but there’s another side of that coin. Other cars pushed the envelope a little too much, and amazing though they were, rules and hierarchy meant they were destined for a short run. Case in point: The Camaro ZL1.

There are a lot of projects in my garage at any point in time. Often my celebration upon walking into my shop on a Friday evening is sullied when I am forced to pick from the options—and especially when I realize that there is a project sitting in the back corner, covered in dust, a sad hulk of what it once was. For the last year, the saddest machine in my garage has been the 1989 Honda XR250R. It’s the machine that somehow survived a lot of racing before losing compression and becoming hard to start. Now is the time to deal with it.

The engine is considered the heart of a car, and while the analogy does work, it starts to fall apart once you get beyond the superficial. The human heart is a relatively boring necessity that is at its best operating with no interesting quirks, flutters, or rhythms. I don’t want my heart to have much personality. My engines on the other hand, well, those had better be interesting. That desire got me thinking about what defines the character so many of us seek from our power plants.

Back in 2007, rumors swirled about the “Blue Devil,” an even hairier and more capable Corvette than the C6 Z06 introduced a year earlier. With a name like that had and an already potent 505-hp Z06 to beat, expectations were high. But when Chevrolet turned the first C6 ZR1s loose, those expectations were met. The ZR1 badge was familiar from uber-Corvettes of old, but this was a new, massive leap forward for America’s sports car, and it wasn’t just the supercharged LS9 popping through the window in the hood that made it. The draw of the 2009-13 ZR1 has pulled in a surprising subset of enthusiasts. And while it’s never been cheap, it’s still one of the lowest-priced ways to buy into extreme performance.

I f you think newspaper editors are more worried about upholding the reputations of their communities than sales, attention, and awards, and will therefore try their damnedest to quash muckraking tales because they might harm major local corporations, you’re the naif to whom Henrik Ibsen is pitching An Enemy of the People

It’s one thing to win a competition with an unlimited budget. It’s quite another to bring home top honors when you’ve got a strict cap on what you can spend. In this circumstance, it’s usually the most innovative and creative competitor that prevails, and Material Girls Racing proved that in this year’s Grassroots Motorsports $2000 Challenge. The team, made up of four high school seniors, evolved their vehicle over years of competition and came up with a winning formula that just happens to wear a Ford Ranger body.

Life requires equilibrium. In a perfect world, we all would have an even trade-off of time spent working for someone else and time spent indulging our own personal interests and passions. The scale is rarely so neatly balanced though. So maybe shoot for quality over quantity and indulge yourself with five minutes of peaceful forest noise punctuated by the howl of a Ferrari V-8.

Best known for his masterful driving behind the wheel of Formula 1 race cars—and that one video where he drives the wheels off an NSX in loafers—the late Ayrton Senna is a legend. People with stories like his get special editions named after them, and sometimes those special editions seem to make little sense. The limited-edition Ducati Monster Senna is one such example, but if you are questioning why anyone would name a motorcycle after a Formula 1 driver, I’m here to explain.