What is the Volkswagen Golf R?
The Volkswagen Golf R is the most powerful Golf, with all-wheel drive.
Wheel facts and facts about wheels, from the Random Facts shelf.
16 facts on this shelf
The Volkswagen Golf R is the most powerful Golf, with all-wheel drive.
The Ford Model T's left-side steering wheel helped make left-hand drive the standard in the US.
The Honda Civic Type R is the high-performance Civic, and it has set lap records at Germany's Nürburgring for front-wheel-drive cars.
"RAV4" stands for "Recreational Active Vehicle with 4-wheel drive."
The Corvette E-Ray, introduced for the 2024 model year, is the first all-wheel-drive Corvette.
The wheel was invented around 3500 BC in Mesopotamia, and it was first used as a potter's wheel for making pottery before anyone put it on a vehicle.
The oldest known surviving wooden wheel, about 5,150 years old, was found in the Ljubljana Marshes in Slovenia.
The hardest part of inventing the wheel was the axle, because the wheel and axle had to fit together almost perfectly for the wheel to turn smoothly.
Ancient Mesoamerican cultures made wheeled toys but never used wheels for practical transportation, possibly because they had no large draft animals to pull carts.
The Bronocice pot, found in Poland and dated to about 3500 BC, has what may be the oldest known image of a wheeled vehicle.
Spoked wheels appeared around 2000 BC and made chariots much lighter and faster than vehicles with solid wooden wheels.
The wheelbarrow was invented in ancient China during the Han dynasty, nearly a thousand years before it appeared in Europe.
George Ferris built the first Ferris wheel for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago as America's answer to the Eiffel Tower.
In 2001, an Australian lawyer named John Keogh received a patent for a "circular transportation facilitation device," basically the wheel, to show flaws in Australia's patent system.
John Boyd Dunlop developed the first practical air-filled tire in 1888 to make his son's tricycle ride more comfortable.
A gyrocompass, invented in the early 1900s, uses a spinning wheel to find true north and isn't affected by magnetism, which makes it useful on steel ships.