Rory Carroll

Impressive technological advancements and cool bodywork are a great start

There are legions of adults on your iPad, just waiting to mess with your little gearhead's brain

If you've been thinking about it, go give your money to a Lexus dealer today, or don't

I generally try to buy tools and car supplies locally rather than wait 5 days for shipping, but I live in a small town and that’s not always practical/possible. So there are some things in my collection that I got on Amazon. Perusing the Black Friday deals today, I actually spotted a few of them. I’d feel bad offering my thoughts on I haven’t tried out myself and I’m going to give you my real unvarnished thoughts about these items. These little switches I bought a bunch of these when I wired…

Two, maybe three times in the lead up to driving the new Ford Ranger Raptor, I heard it compared to a rally car. This something that car companies have been increasingly eager to say about their cars in the last few years, and it’s also something that trips the old switch in my brain marked “skepticism.” As I approached the end of my day driving the Ranger Raptor, my I was feeling pretty good about my skepticism and kind of weirdly bummed, or at least undecided about the truck which, as I was ab…

I’ve wanted to get out to the Dirtfish rally school in Snoqualmie, WA for probably a decade. For about as long, I’ve been listening to my degenerate amateur rally driver and co-driver friends warning me that rally school would punch a little hole in my heart that could only be filled with more time in a rally car. Earlier this week, I finally made it happen and now there is a hole in my heart that can only be filled with more time in a rally car. I have been writing about cars professionally fo…

Last week, I twice found myself standing at a gas pump, in single digit temperatures waiting for what must have been individual droplets of gasoline to drip into my car’s tank. The digits slowly ticked over and, as my hands grew colder, I thought about going into the car for my coat, maybe some gloves. I thought about ending the transaction and trying another pump. But I waited. And I told myself I’d Google why this happens. Then, I got in my car and drove away without Googling a damn thing, jus…

The Acura TLX Type S is lightly refreshed for 2024 with mostly cosmetic upgrades. This is a car that Brad drove in 2021, so I wasn’t expecting a massively different car. What I was hoping for was some time with the TLX Type S in low-grip conditions where I could feel around for how the Super Handling All-Wheel Drive (SH-AWD) works. Full Disclosure: Acura wanted me to drive the TLX Type S, so they dropped one off at my house for a week with a full tank of gas. But first, let’s get through the…

If you read our BRZ tS review, you know I was just in Sicily driving some Subarus. As you’ve no doubt gathered by now, the other car was the Subaru WRX TR. With the demise of the U.S. market STI at the hands of America’s goofy emissions regime the WRX TR assumes the mantle of Subaru’s most performance oriented car. It’s also the last AWD sedan you can get with a manual transmission in the US. Theoretically, it’s pitted against some excellent AWD hatches—a very good Golf R and the instant classic…

The Targa Florio is easy enough to read about, you’ve probably come across plenty of photos of Porsches and Ferraris there. When you see a blue Porsche 908/3 with a big orange arrow running down the drivers side, you probably think “Targa Florio.” I certainly have for as long as I can remember. But having just come back from running the actual course in its largest configuration in the new Subaru BRZ tS and WRX tR, I have to admit I had no clue what the race was really about. Full Disclosure: S…

A lot of car dealers don’t have much interest in selling EVs; some are politically opposed to the idea on its face, some just don’t want to make the massive investment their brands are demanding to update their stores to EV readiness and some are just philosophically opposed to learning anything about products and would rather lose a sale than look anything up. (None of this applies to my guy Gage at Betten Baker Honda, he took great care of my Mom and her new CR-V last week. Shoutout to Gage!)…

We all love watching videos of trucks being being dragged down into the briny depths while their drivers scramble unsuccessfully to save them. And obviously, those of us who have occasion to launch boats live in fear of becoming one of the poor saps in the videos. But why do cars slide in there, anyway? Can you prevent it? Turns out, there are a lot of reasons why trucks find themselves in the water. The video above gets into a few of them. Sometimes boat launches get covered in slippery algae,…

When I graduated college, I took out a $2500 loan for an Audi 90 Quattro 20v. It was a 15 year old car, and I was at the start of my learning to wrench journey. That was my car through my first couple of jobs, and generally, I wasn’t embarrassed by it. I’d pieced together the fuel system in my rental house driveway so it ran well, and it generally looked OK. It was fun to drive and suited me just fine. But early on in my second post college job working for an insurance agency, I joined a group…

Allowing the “free market” to decide if EVs take-off seems a little risky

I’ve been working on cars for more twenty-some years. (YIKES) In that time, I’ve had acquired a handful of tools that instantly made me a more-capable mechanic and expanded the world of projects I could take on. Here they are: High Quality Lighting I have thrown away probably two dozen cheap spotlights and headlamps over the years. Lights that fail, or run out of AAs when you need them are a waste of plastic. Finally, I found garage-specific line of lights from Streamlight and I bought all of…

As technology becomes more inescapable and we as consumers feel increasingly alienated, many have begun to seek out more authentic, tangible experiences. Some my find the process of crafting a perfect pour-over more satisfying than operating a Keurig, for example. Others may prefer the process of starting a tiny nitromethane powered engine every time they want to charge their phone as opposed to plugging that phone into the wall. Today there are several products available that deliver just such…

These houses, where the most prominent element you see from the street is the garage, are often called snout houses because the garage pokes out like a big snout. From a design standpoint, they strike me as incredibly weird — like a house for a car with a couple rooms for the car’s caretakers in the back. They’re a little perverse, a mutation of the traditional home.They’re also one of two types of house being built in my area right now, the other being identical black and white Chip and Joanna…

Holy smokes, Lexus really nailed it with the 2024 GX

The 2024 Cadillac CT4-V Blackwing and Cadillac CT5-V Blackwing are getting new color options

Bozi Tatarevic shows us how the car he works on gets up in the air for service