Jason Torchinsky

1 week ago | theautopian.com | Jason Torchinsky

I’m here in New Rochelle, NY – which happens to be the city where I spent the first two years of my life and yet, somehow, there’s not a plaque about that to be found anywhere – and boy am I exhausted. The drive from Chapel Hill, NC to the New York City area was only supposed to take like eight, eight and half hours or so, and yet I found myself rolling into town, what, 15 hours later? How did this happen? You know what, though?

1 week ago | theautopian.com | Jason Torchinsky

Tomorrow morning, far too early for a near-civilized human like myself, I need to get myself and my 14-year-old son into our $800/375,000-mile ex-NYC taxi and begin our big, improbable, cross-country journey. There’s still plenty I need to do for this taxi to be really ready, and plenty I need to do to prepare for the trip itself, like doing laundry and packing. And then I need to be writing and working at the same time. It’s a lot.

1 week ago | theautopian.com | Jason Torchinsky

Okay, yes, I’m still a little obsessed with Citroën 2CVs, mostly because there’s one sitting in my driveway right now. It’s a little frustrating because I’m also about to go on a road trip in an old taxi across the whole damn country on Wednesday, so I haven’t had time to really work on the little Gallic machine. I did order a new fuel pump already, though. And, I’ve been consuming 2CV content at an alarming rate, which made me realize how good some old 2CV newspaper ads were.

1 week ago | theautopian.com | Jason Torchinsky

One of the interesting things about my job is that I get to talk to engineers and product planners and designers and other Important People in the car industry. And, after well over a decade of carefully crafting a persona that many people would call, perhaps derisively, an “idiot” or more charitably, a “drooling simpleton,” I’m often in a place where I can offer suggestions or ideas to these sorts of people, and they’re very often surprisingly willing to listen to me, or at least pretend to.

1 week ago | theautopian.com | Jason Torchinsky

I’ve always said that what Australia was to marsupials, Brazil was to air-cooled Volkswagens. Usually when I say this I’m greeted with either blank stares or angry accusations that I’ve ruined someone’s quinceanera with all my yelling or that I’m standing in someone’s picnic and my left foot is in a bowl of potato salad up to the ankle. Point is, people don’t really understand just how incredibly diverse VW Brazil’s air-cooled offering was in the 1960s and 1970s.