The history behind the brans that shaped the automotive world. Origins, evolution and the moments that made them great.
Lancia: the brand that invented half the modern car and ended up selling Ypsilons in Italy There’s a question Chris Harris has asked, more than once, on camera. It goes something like this: which manufacturer, when you really dig into the history books, turns out to have invented more of the modern car than any … Read more
McLaren: Sixty Years of Building Cars That Hurt, From a Limp in Auckland to the Top of Formula 1 Top Gear’s Chris Harris once said that the McLaren F1 is the only road car that has ever genuinely scared him. Not in the way a Lamborghini Diablo scares you with its switches and its truculence, … Read more
The French Disaster That Built Alfa: Portello, 1906 Picture this. A French industrialist with a handlebar moustache walks into a Naples hotel in April 1906, signs a stack of papers, and announces he’s going to teach Italians how to build cars. Eighteen months later his factory is bleeding money in the wrong city, his Italian … Read more
URO: The Spanish Factory You’ve Never Heard Of That Builds Tactical Vehicles For Thirty Countries Three letters, zero recognition In the English-speaking world, when someone says “Spanish car industry,” the answers are predictable. SEAT. Maybe Hispano-Suiza if the person reads about pre-war luxury. Pegaso if they know their Wifredo Ricart history. Spano if they follow … Read more
Ebro: how Henry Ford founded a Spanish brand, a Nazi-sympathising falangist built it into an empire, Nissan swallowed it, and the Chinese just brought it back Stop a hundred random British or American car enthusiasts on the street, ask them where Henry Ford ran factories outside the United States, and most will say Britain (Dagenham). … Read more
Santana Motor: the Spanish 4×4 that humiliated the British, died with the country — and just came back with Chinese blood You’ve probably never heard of Linares. It’s a small city in the south of Spain, sitting in the middle of an olive-tree ocean in the province of Jaén — historically one of the poorest … Read more
LAGONDA: THE BRAND THAT ALMOST MADE IT Lagonda has been on the verge of greatness for 120 years. It has never arrived. They won Le Mans. The finest engine W.O. Bentley ever designed carried their name. David Brown bought them the same year he bought Aston Martin. And yet, if you stopped someone in the … Read more
Bentley: the Man Who Built the World’s Fastest Lorries It all started with a paperweight. An aluminum paperweight sitting on a desk in a French office. That single object changed British military aviation, Le Mans history, and the luxury car industry forever. Because Walter Owen Bentley wasn’t a businessman playing at making cars. He was … Read more
Pegaso: The Winged Horse That Motorized a Nation and Couldn’t Survive Itself A brand born from the ashes of another. A state-owned company created to build trucks in a country shattered by war that, by the vision of a genius with zero business sense, ended up producing the fastest production car on the planet. A … Read more
Rezvani Motors: when California decides that war is a lifestyle Picture this. You park your SUV at a Beverly Hills shopping mall. Someone walks up to the passenger door handle. They touch it. They receive an electric shock that drops them to the pavement. From underneath the vehicle, a thick smoke cloud billows out to … Read more
Automobili Estrema Fulminea — 2,040 HP Born in a WhatsApp Group During a Pandemic There’s one sure way to know if someone has what it takes. It’s not looking at how many times they’ve won. It’s looking at how many times they’ve got back up after losing everything. Gianfranco Pizzuto put $2 million into Fisker … Read more
Fisker Karma — The Car That Arrived Too Early to a World That Wasn’t Ready Some cars are born to change the rules. And some cars are born to prove the rules aren’t ready for change. The Fisker Karma was both. And it paid for it with its own existence. Think about it for a … Read more
