Welcome to Must Read, where we single out the best stories from around the automotive universe and beyond. Today we have reports from Air Facts, Vanity Fair and Petrolicious.
Last year, 224 people died worldwide in airline crashes. That means 99.9993 percent of flights were completed without incident. Holy hell.
Here's a number that should be on the front page of every major newspaper: 224. That's how many people died–worldwide–in airline crashes last year. Around 3 billion people boarded some 35 million flights, each of them traveling over 500 miles per hour in an aluminum tube 7 miles above the earth. And only 224 died. That's simply an incredible number.
2014 is going to be a great year, and a number of our motoring crazy colleagues (and our own Aaron Foley) spoke to Vanity Fair about the upcoming year in motoring.
We are living in an age of automotive glory. There's been a domestic economic recovery, and we've witnessed increasing federal fuel-economy standards, advanced design and engineering technologies, and an industry willing to go after niche slices of the vehicular pie. This has all resulted in the development of vehicles that are sexy, sporty, stylish, and (increasingly) svelte, making them capable of hitting performance and efficiency benchmarks that would have been unimaginable even five years ago. To name just one high-profile example, the 2014 Corvette—which has a fervid 460 horsepower V8 under its plastic hood—is rated by the EPA at 29 m.p.g. on the highway.
Lovely little piece on one of our favorite cars.
The Mazda Cosmo 110S hit American shores in 1967, along with several other Japanese sports cars such as the Honda S800 and Toyota 2000GT. Realizing that the key to serious growth lay in wealthier Western markets, all the major Japanese companies attempted to expand their brands with halo cars. Like their national competitors, Mazda sought to appeal to foreign tastes by copying their Western counterparts.
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