Cars Facts

In 1936, Carl Mayer talked his uncle Oscar into a giant hot dog on wheels. A Chicago shop called General Body Company made it real. It was 13 feet long and cruised Chicago advertising Oscar Mayer wieners. Ninety years later, six Wienermobiles still roam the country year-round. Two recent college grads called Hotdoggers drive each one. Spotting one on the highway is still a family event.

Jay Leno hosted The Tonight Show for 22 years, from 1992 to 2014. Now, at 76, he tears down cars from his own collection in a Burbank shop. He puts them back together with his crew. The collection holds around 212 cars and 186 motorcycles. He posts the work on YouTube every Monday, and almost 4 million people watch. He still drives every car himself.

The U-2 spy plane flies at 70,000 feet, so its pilot lands in a pressure suit that blocks his view of the runway. Fifty feet of wing sticks out each side. A second U-2 pilot chases him in a muscle car at 120 mph, calling the wheels down. Ten. Eight. Six. Four. Two. At two feet it stalls onto the runway. Every landing still ends that way.

The Jaws of Life, the hydraulic tool that pries a wrecked car open, came out of a drag racing parts shop. George Hurst, who made the shifters in America's muscle cars, watched a crash crew take over an hour to free a driver in the 1960s and built a rescue tool of his own. His first weighed 350 pounds; the version that followed weighed 65. Fire crews still cut people out of cars with it every day.

Hot Wheels came out in 1968 built to outrun every other toy car. Mattel handed the problem to its head of research. He had come from Raytheon, where he worked on the Sparrow and Hawk missiles. The fix was a thin music-wire axle spinning in low-friction plastic bearings. Rival Matchbox cars were still rolling on nail axles. Mattel still makes 22.5 Hot Wheels a second.