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Overdue reappraisal: The Mitsubishi 3000 GT
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“The 3000GT offers a rather detached driving experience and is simply too big and bulky to feel as truly agile and involving as a sportscar should” The words of Autocar there, in its August ’92 review of Mitsubishi’s heavyweight high-powered projectile. These are words that I first read as an eleven-year old, and came to…
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What's the most special special edition?
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‘Special edition’ can mean many, many things, and just how special they are tends to depend on whether we’re looking at a supercar or a shopping car. The Bugatti Veyron Vitesse SE, for example, was conceived to give the ultra rich a reason to buy another Veyron that’s somehow more special than the bog-standard version…
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The Carchive: 1975 Ford Pinto
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What could be more fun than perusing a forty-two year-old brochure for a really excellent, broadly celebrated automobile of class and distinction? Why, reading a forty-two year-old brochure for a car that’s widely panned as an example of automotive mediocrity from the least lamented era of all time, of course. It’s the Ford Pinto. This…
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V.I.S.O.R: A Czech military toybox
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I bet you’re the same. I can’t just sit and watch the scenery pass me by if I’m on a train in a foreign land, I’m constantly scanning the vista for interesting things as I hurtle past. On the very impressive Railjet between Prague and Vienna, I happened to have my camera on standby, together…
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The Fickle Pheneomenon of Unwarranted Vitriol.
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“I’d rather push a Chevy than drive a Ford”, the bumper sticker says. The world of motoring is a maelstrom of blind leanings and biases, and that’s unlikely to change any time soon. Many, many years ago, Skoda was the butt of cheap shots from British ‘comedians’, but these all stemmed from the Czech company’s…
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The Carchive: '74 Ford Econoline vans
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The last time we visited the Ford section of The Carchive, it was to take a glimpse at a car that Ford didn’t have the faintest idea how to market. It was the European Ford Fusion, a car that came some way short of appealing to the people it to whom it should. Today’s helping…
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V.I.S.I.T: 1963 Daimler V8 250
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Two Daimler-badged cars were ever offered that offered the exquisite, turbine-like power of Edward Turner’s jewel-like small V8 engine. The first was a befinned, plastic-bodied atrocity with a guppy mouth and propensity for cracking in early models. It was the Daimler SP250 (nee Dart) – and I rather like it, of course. The second was…
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The Carchive: The 2007 Japanese Motor Vehicle Guidebook
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Among the several documents that make up The Carchive, the Japanese Domestic Market volumes are among those that I revisit the most often. It all comes down to the ‘forbidden fruit’ nature of so many Far Eastern cars – just like even the most prosaic of North American cars, you just don’t see them on…
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Fighting Obscelescence as a Grumpy Old Man
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This coming weekend I will become 36 years old, distressingly sweeping me into the ‘late’ thirties bracket – an age that I remember my parents being just five minutes or so ago. While I know that many of you have a good few years on me, and that I still fall into the ‘what does…
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SO, do we actually want Automotive Autonomy?
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Autonomous cars are gradually lurching closer to being a reality. Pretty soon kind of cars that mortal man can dare to aspire to will soon have an automatic pilot that runs beyond a simple cruise control. But what do you – the folk who will be sharing your roads with robots – really think? Personally,…
