The history behind the brans that shaped the automotive world. Origins, evolution and the moments that made them great.
NSU: The Company That Reinvented Itself Four Times, Then Died the Moment It Finally Nailed It Say “NSU” to most American enthusiasts and you’ll get a blank look, or maybe “isn’t that the rotary thing?” The Wankel. The Ro80. As if the company was born in 1967 to build one weird engine and then promptly … Read more
AUSA PTV: the Spanish carmaker that survived by killing its own car The first site dumper ever built in Spain ran on the engine out of a two-seat convertible. Manresa, 1960. Same engine, same carburetor, same shed, same men. The only thing that changed was who was paying: instead of a gentleman in a hat … Read more
Pininfarina, The House: Ninety-Five Years of Shaping Cars That Other People Built The Geneva Motor Show of 2012. Ferrari unveiled the F12berlinetta. A brutal car — naturally aspirated V12, razor lines, the last card played by pre-turbo Maranello. Nobody made much of it that morning, but the F12 was the last road-going Ferrari drawn by … Read more
Tramontana: the Spanish supercar built by the man who turned down Star Wars A designer once got the kind of offer most people would frame on a wall: come to the United States and design for the Star Wars movies. He said no. He didn’t want to build spaceships for the screen. He wanted to … Read more
Panoz: the nicotine-patch millionaire who chain-smoked and saved American racing There’s an irony so cruel at the center of this story that if a novel served it up you’d say the author overreached. The man who made his fortune leading the team that invented the nicotine patch — the device meant to help people quit … Read more
Studebaker: the last independent Detroit couldn’t let live There’s a grove of 5,000 trees near South Bend, Indiana, planted back in 1937 so that from the air they spell out a single word: STUDEBAKER. You can still find it on Google Earth today. A whole automaker reduced to a piece of landscape gardening you have … Read more
Autobianchi: The Brand Fiat Used to Take Risks It Wouldn’t Sign Its Name To Almost nothing you drive today would exist in its current form without a company most Americans have never heard of. That’s not hyperbole and it isn’t nostalgia. If your car has its engine mounted sideways, driving the front wheels, with the … Read more
The Genius Who Built Cars Pricier Than a Bugatti — and Ended Up Fathering the Poorest Car in Spain If you’ve ever wandered the lawn at the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance, you may have stopped dead in front of an Avions Voisin. They have that effect. Sweeping Art Deco bodywork, aircraft-grade aluminium, aerodynamic rooflines drawn … Read more
Spain Built a Hyper-Luxury Car That Stole the Paris Motor Show — Then Its Own Widow Had the Blueprints Burned Ask almost anyone in Britain or America to name a great Spanish car of the 1920s and you’ll get a blank look. Maybe, if they’re sharp, Hispano-Suiza. And that’s it. The received wisdom is that … Read more
The Maserati Brothers Who Quit Maserati to Avoid Building Road Cars — Then Put Their Engine in a Fiat Here’s a question worth chewing on. What do you do when you’ve built one of the most famous names in motoring, sold it, and then legally lost the right to ever use your own surname on … Read more
Braid: the Spanish factory that quietly puts half the racing world on its wheels Chris Harris can tell you everything about a car the second it leaves a corner. The throttle, the slip angle, the way the rear steps out. But ask anyone, Harris included, what the car is rolling on, and the answer goes … Read more
Fiat: 126 years to build an empire, five to dismantle it Every so often Top Gear used to do those hagiographies about brands that “shaped motoring”. They did Ferrari. They did Aston. They did Porsche. They never quite did Fiat properly, and if you think about it for more than thirty seconds, that omission is … Read more
