;)
John Shen
Technology Editor
I’m 24 years old, a mechanical engineer by profession, photographer by interest, and I have a mild case of obsessive compulsiveness so I was a natural choice for helping put this site together. I’m also going to be taking a lot of the pictures that show up on the site. (we’re going to try not to borrow from wikipedia as much as possible)
Cars and adventure go hand in hand for me. In college I spent four years building 2 Solar Cars, and raced one of them all the way across the Australian Outback, which actually meant driving either a Subaru Forester doing lead escort (this meant that I actually drove a Subaru across the Outback) or a manual Toyota HiAce eurobox carrying a trailer (the engine was literally under your seat, and there wasn’t a tachometer, so you shifted when you felt your butt vibrating at about 4000rpm). I backpacked across New Zealand in a 1997 Nissan Bluebird manual, sleeping in it at times when I had to. I spent a few months in Germany and road-tripped across central Europe in a 2005 VW Touran (basically a Golf), taking it up to 140mph on the Autobahn.
I’m a sucker for details, I appreciate little things in cars: buttons having the right feel and sound when you click them, matching springiness of the plastic on the dash with the door handle, the sound doors make when you close them. I can also tell you the difference between a McPherson strut setup and a double A-arm, and what effect caster angle has on handling (having built and tuned the suspension on the solar car). So I’m going to try and provide a more detailed, technical look at some of the cars we review, hopefully without making you too bored.
Hope you like the site!
Cars I’ve owned:
1992 Geo Prizm i.e. Toyota Corolla ’00-‘03
2005 Scion xA manual ’07-‘08
2009 VW GTI 2 door manual ’08-now (that’s my car you see going around the bend in the banner pic)
