Here Are 40 Difficult Trivia Questions About Cars, Let’s See If You Can Answer Them

Every week, Jalopnik hosts a virtual car trivia night and asks readers from around the world extremely difficult car-related questions. The point is to help car enthusiasts interact with one another during the coronavirus shutdown. Here are the 40 questions from last week; see if you can guess the answers.

Though we had only about 45 people show up last Friday (I still think it’s because Jason and I drank too much the previous week, and our hosting skills dropped as a result), Jason and I had a great time chatting with readers about cars, and asking them these 40 questions:

(This article was originally published in May 2020)

Round 1: Technical Questions (17 Points)

1. If a wheel has a 5×4.5 bolt pattern, what do the 5 and 4.5 represent?
2. What do you call the tiny slits in winter tires that help them grip on ice?
3. Calculate the displacement of a six-cylinder engine with cylinders that have a bore of 3.75 and a stroke of 3.89. Name one engine with this displacement. Name all the GM vehicles in the U.S. that offered an inline six with this displacement.
4. What material are pistons in modern gasoline engines typically made of?
5. Give the name of the three piston rings found on a typical engine in order from top of piston (closest to combustion chamber) to bottom (closest to crankshaft).
6. What is the word for the inward slant of a car’s greenhouse towards the car’s centerline?
7. Where might you find the material Inconel in an automobile?
8. When rebuilding an automobile engine, what is a plastigage used for?

[Answers to round 1]

Round 2: Soviet-Bloc Cars (9 Points)

1. One of the Soviet Union’s luxury cars for important apparatchiks was the Packard-inspired GAZ Chaika. What kind of bird is a Chaika, in English?
2. Polski Fiat produced the rear-engined Fiat 126p for many years. What was the biggest change when they introduced the 126p Bis version?
3. Why is it so hard to tell the year of a Tatra 603?
4. was the Soviet Union’s entry-level peoples’ car. What other well-known people’s car was it based on, in overall layout and design?
5. What was the official name of the fibreglass-like material—allegedly made from old Soviet cotton underpants and phenolic resins—that the East German Trabant had its body made from?
6. The Czech Velorex three-wheeler had a body made from what?
7. If you took a Trabant to the moon, what would happen to your fuel flow to the carburetor?
8. The East German Wartburg traces its history to a well-known automaker’s factory that ended up on the wrong side of the wall. What was the company that originally owned the factory, and what was the company renamed after WWII? Also, how was the original company’s logo changed?

[Answers to round 2]

Round 3: Car Acronyms and Weird Tool Questions (9 Points)

1. What does AMG stand for?
2. What does PDK stand for? What does it mean in english?
3. What does TDC stand for?
4. What does LSD stand for?
5. What does a “skinny pete” do?
6. What is crocus cloth?
7. What is a ridge reamer?
8. Name one thing you’d use a vacuum gauge for.

[Answers to round 3]

Round 4: Know These Toy Cars (8 Points)

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

[Answers to round 4]

Round 5: Name The Cars Described By These Haikus (8 Points)

1. Back in the big war/They made nothings in the sky/That’s not real water
2. They call her goddess/this Francophonic turtle/She has five ride heights
3. Hot hatch named for a/Mediterranean wind/only has one wiper
4. Awesome as a Brit/Just meh when American/I’m no prostitute 
5. Twin brother is from/Swiss mountains; I’m twice the car/I have fangs and stripes
6. The marque’s no longer here/Small car named after a whim/Joe told us some lies.
7. Tough little Cossack/Looks like a Golf on steroids/A Commie no more
8. You have only three pots/the smallest American/hypermilers’ toy

[Answers to round 5]

Week Five Winners

1. Team 7: 41
2. Team 1: 37.5
3. Team 5: 36
4. Team 8: 33.5
5. Team 2: 31
6. Team 6: 22

Alarmingly, there were 51 points up for grabs, and team seven scored 80 per cent of them! That’s quite a high score for a trivia night that’s meant to be rather difficult, though I knew week five would be easier than previous events, as I wrote the questions rather hastily. Still, the average was a 66 per cent, so things weren’t that easy.