Car nut, quiz whiz or maybe just the sort of person who scrolls through reams of Wikipedia pages simply ‘cos they just like to know things? Here are some crazy but interesting facts about cars we bet you didn’t know.
LEGO is the world’s biggest tyre manufacturer
Forget Michelin, Continental, Pirelli or anybody else, the biggest tyre manufacturer in the world is actually toy company LEGO.
According to the company itself, a staggering 318 million LEGO tyres are produced every year, which equates to more than 870,000 a day and nearly twice the number of tyres Michelin makes in a year.
LEGO’s factories make tyres 24 hours a day, 365 days a year due to the fact that nearly half of all LEGO sets sold include a wheel of some kind.
The 1988 Austin Maestro featured a talking dashboard
More than two decades before Siri arrived, the Austin Maestro came with a special ‘talking dashboard’ which would alert the driver to things like low oil pressure.
As standard, the dashboard featured a female voice but for certain markets, including Spain and Germany, the voice was replaced with a male one because it was thought Germans and Spaniards wouldn’t take orders from a woman.
Cars were once seen as the greenest form of transport
Despite the fact that nowadays the car is seen as one of the biggest contributors to global warming, when they were first introduced they were seen as a greener form of transport because of horse poo.
In 1908, one New York newspaper wrote that the horses used for transport in the city were “an economic burden, an affront to cleanliness, and a terrible tax upon human life”. The solution? The motor car.
In a large city, horses could produce around 133 tonnes of manure every day. In New York, officials calculated that the 15,000 horses in the city could produce enough poo a year to make a pile 175 feet high, enough to breed sixteen billion flies. Yuck.
Buick’s founder never made a penny from his company
It’s a bit of a dark one this, but would you believe that David Dunbar Buick, founder of one of America’s most popular car companies, never made a single penny from the firm that bears his name?
Buick actually started out as a plumber and made his fortune by inventing a special type of porcelain coating for cast iron tubs, before using the funds to start the Buick Motor Company.
The company was bought out by a fledgling General Motors, but after Buick caught on and became successful, its founder never saw any money from it. His children disowned him and changed their names, and David died penniless and alone.
Mini once had a serious problem with feather dusters
Back in the early 1960s, a string of Mini customers were complaining to the company that the new cars they’d just bought were breaking down.
The cause of the problem was eventually traced back to one of the cleaning ladies who worked on the production line. The feathers from her feather duster were getting clogged in the cars’ carburettors.
Ferrari sued over Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
The ill-fated Ferrari 250 GT California Spyder seen in the film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off was actually a fibreglass replica, which was built by Modena Design and Research for Paramount Pictures.
Due to the fact that the real cars were far too rare and too valuable to be used in filming, three reproductions were built by the company using an MG convertible as a base.
However, Ferrari got wind of this and ended up suing Modena for infringing on the 250 GT’s design. Not long after, Modena went permanently out of business.
The winner of the first Monaco Grand Prix was an undercover spy
William Charles Frederick Grover-Williams, who in 1929 became the winner of the first-ever Monaco Grand Prix, also worked for the British Special Operations Executive during WWII.
After fleeing France following the Nazi’s invasion, Grover-Williams was recruited to the secret service and, along with fellow racing driver Robert Benoist, helped form the French Resistance.
In 1943, his secret was discovered and he was captured by the SS, before being executed at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp two years later.
There’s a man who works as a human crash test dummy
Nobody can accuse Rusty Haight, director of the Collision Safety Institute, of not taking his job seriously. Known as the ‘human crash test dummy’, his job involves being repeatedly subjected to car crashes.
Over the past 30 years, he’s been involved in more than 900 crashes and holds the Guinness World Record for the most human subject crash tests. When he’s not busy crashing, he teaches others how to investigate and analyse car accidents.
As well as being a world record holder, he’s been named one of the world’s toughest men and has been featured in various documentaries about people with remarkable abilities.