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You ever hear that old joke, man asks the dealer “Cargo space?” and the dealer says “No, car go road.” That’s how it feels sometimes asking questions that seem like they should have obvious answers, but danged if anyone knows those answers off the top of their head.

So today we’re going to run down a list of questions we’ve all pondered at one point or another, but maybe never wanted to ask aloud. You can get your answers right here so your gearhead friends don’t laugh at you before admitting that they don’t actually know the answer, either.

Does One Horsepower Really Equal One Horse?

And Why Do We Call It Horsepower, Anyway?

The question of whether a horse actually cranks out one horsepower of force is a tricky one. A horse can actually produce up to 15 horsepower, but only in short bursts. Get a horse on the road for a few hours and they’ll probably be producing well under a single hp of force. We call it horsepower because of Scottish engineer James Watt, who used the term as a marketing gimmick so that the public could get a rough idea of how many draft horses it would take to match one of his steam engines.

Why Are We Buying The Next Model Year Today?

Shouldn’t A 2025 Release Be For The 2025 Model Year?

You can blame FDR for this one. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed an executive order in the 1930s dictating that automakers should launch their new vehicles in the fall of the preceding year in order to “facilitate regularization of employment in the industry”. By moving next year’s new releases a few seasons back, the idea was that auto-workers would remain employed around the end of the year, which would keep them spending during the holiday season, so the economy wouldn’t stagnate around year’s end.

Why Do We Fill Tires With Air?

Solid Rubber Seems To Work Just Fine On Skateboards, After All

We’ve all wondered at some point or other, usually after getting a flat, why they don’t just make car tires solid rubber all the way through. Well, it comes down to a few key points:

1. Solid rubber doesn’t deform as well, meaning it doesn’t grip the road enough to create any forward momentum. Skateboards, wagons, trailers, these are pushed or pulled by an external force, they’re not motivated under their own wheelpower.
2. Solid rubber doesn’t absorb shocks. Even with a modern suspension system, you’re gonna feel every bump sitting on solid rubber.
3. Solid rubber is expensive, and heavy. You’ve lifted a tire, right? Imagine if it was solid all the way through. You’d be moving an extra half-ton of weight down the road, at the least.

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Why Isn’t The Driver’s Seat In The Middle Of The Car?

You Know, Like In F1 Cars?

You tend to only see center-positioned driver’s seats and steering wheels on track cars, because that only makes sense on track cars. First, sitting the wheel in the center limits seating, and that’s a problem when the modern car was designed with the family in mind. Second, it’s actually easier to see incoming traffic when you’re seated to the left of center, giving you a better view of the opposite lane. It’s also easier to gauge the size of your own car when you’re looking across your hood at an angle, rather than staring right down the barrel.

Why Don’t Cars Rust As Quickly As They Used To?

Whatever Happened To Those Rustbuckets We Grew Up In?

If you’re over the age of 30, you probably rode around in a few old rust buckets growing up. Now you walk down the street and even the oldest, most poorly-kept car on your block shows no signs of severe rust. This comes down to the hot-dip galvanization process that the steel used in cars goes through these days, adding a layer of zinc that helps to prevent corrosion. Cars can still rust, especially in the salt belt, where you see a lot of road salt used to clear the roads of snow and ice in the winter. But the steel used in modern cars is more resistant to rust than the clunkers we grew up in.

Why Don’t You Hear Cars Backfiring Anymore?

The Streets Used To Sound Like A Warzone In The Morning

Backfiring, where you start your car up and hear a shotgun blasting out the exhaust, was the result of overheating, poor air/fuel mixture, and bad ignition timing. The answer here is simple: onboard computer systems have got better at managing fuel distribution, controlling the air/fuel mixture down to a microscopic level, which makes backfiring far less common in modern cars.

Why Do We Call Them “Cars?”

Automobile Makes Sense, But Where Did Car Come From?

“Car” likely comes from the Latin word “carrus” or “carrum,” which refers to wheeled carts. From there you get the English term “carriage,” the Gaulish “karros” for chariot, and “cart”. Automobile, meaning “automatic” and “mobile” is easier to break down without having to trace the meaning of the word back hundreds of years, but it’s also a mouthful. “Car” is easy to say, and even easier to spell.

Why Are Taxis Yellow?

Is It Just Tradition At This Point?

If you had to guess this one, you’d guess right: yellow just stands out. It’s a highly-visible color which makes taxis easy to spot on the road when you need to hail one. But, who figured that out? John Hertz was maybe the first to take credit for this, founding the Yellow Cab Company in Chicago in the 20th Century, and stating that he consulted with “a local university,” and ran a survey determining that yellow was the easiest color to spot.

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This may be a bit of mythmaking, though, as Hertz’s cabs were not the first ones painted yellow, and he never did name that “local university”. In any event, the science does back the claim, as a 2017 study showed yellow cars to be 9% less likely to be involved in an accident, owing to their visibility.

Why Do We Drive On The Right Side Of The Road?

And Why Can’t The Whole World Agree On Which Side To Drive On?

In the US, the preference for right-lane driving supposedly has to do with agriculture. When farmers would transport goods, they would prefer to sit behind the rearmost left-side horse on the team, managing the reigns with their left hand, and the whip with their right. In England, the story goes that knights would wear their sword on the left hip, to draw with the right hand, so they would walk on the left to keep their swords from clanging in the middle of the road.

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To what extent these origins are true or embellished, who can say, but the bottom line is that you’ve got to ride on one side or the other, and we all need to be on the same page to avoid head-on collisions.

Why Did It Take So Long For Electric Cars To Start Catching On?

They’ve Been Making Battery-Powered Cars For As Long As They’ve Been Making Combustion Cars, Right?

The first electric car was probably the electrified wagon built by William Morrison, of Des Moines, Iowa, in 1889, shortly after the 1885 invention of the Benz Patent-Motorwagen. So we’ve had battery-powered cars for about as long as we’ve had combustion-powered cars. The reason they’re only just now starting to catch on comes down to battery technology.

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Modern EVs use advanced lithium-ion batteries which offer better longevity, higher energy density, and faster charging than the lead-acid and nickel-iron batteries experimented with in the past. EVs have been possible for over a century, they just haven’t always been practical.

Sources: AAA, NHTSA, IIHS, EPA.