Thanks to one of our intrepid readers, we discovered last night that the changes we made on Thursday night to the site's navigational layout caused some direct links to stop working -- a conflict with our content management system's SEO aliasing. We've now identified and fixed the problem, so both external links to specific pages and internal links within pages should now be working again.

We appreciate your patience, and we apologize for any inconvenience.

You may have noticed some changes to the site's design -- we've added a new nav bar, and created new menus to make it easier to navigate between articles. Our goal is to make it easier for you to find articles of interest and to reduce the amount of clicking necessary to get to the site content.

As we go through this process, there may be the occasional glitch, or you may catch us in the middle of a site change. If you have trouble accessing anything, or if you have suggestions, feel free to let us know.

We appreciate your patience, and we hope the changes will make for a better experience for our users.

Over the next few days, some of our older articles may be temporarily unavailable while we address a number of backend issues. If there's a specific article you would like to access that seems to be unavailable, please feel free to send us an e-mail or leave a comment here, and we will do our best to expedite its return.

We apologize for the inconvenience, and we hope to return to normal service as soon as possible.

You've probably heard it said that modern cars are designed as much in the wind tunnel as on the drawing board. This week, former GM designer Gary Smith, webmaster of the site Dean's Garage, takes a look at the insides GM's own wind tunnel. You can read about it here.

Dean's Garage is a very interesting site, with a lot of first-hand recollections from Gary and other automotive designers about their work and careers; last week, for instance, he presented some of the cartoons the GM design staff drew during his tenure there, like Andy Hansel's caricature of former Styling VP Irv Rybicki.

We think that primary histories like these are invaluable. Automotive designers are among the world's least-known artists; their work reaches millions of people, but many are little known outside the field, and when they retire or pass on, memory of their contributions quickly fades. (We should also mention that Gary has been very generous in helping us research some of our upcoming articles, putting us in touch with surviving designers to help sort out how certain designs came to be.)

If you're interested in the people behind the machinery, check out Dean's Garage -- we recommend it highly.