Cars that defined an era and are still legendary. History, mechanics and the soul of true classics.
SAAB 900 Turbo: The Car That Deserved to Win, and the Autopsy of Who Killed SAAB By Not Enough Cylinders Let me tell you something German car fans don’t want to hear: the SAAB 900 Turbo was a better car than almost everything its European competition was building in the 1980s. Better designed. Safer. More … Read more
BMW 850 CSi: The 380 HP V12 BMW Built to Humiliate Mercedes and Failed Gloriously The Grand Tourer That Arrived at Exactly the Wrong Moment In 1992, BMW presented the world with the 850 CSi: a Grand Tourer with a 5.6-liter V12 engine, 380 hp of power, a 6-speed manual transmission as the only option, … Read more
The Alfa Romeo GTV6: The Last True Alfa Before the Dark Ages When Italy Still Built Driver’s Cars In 1980, Alfa Romeo did something that seems impossibly romantic in hindsight: they took a perfectly good sports coupé and installed one of the greatest engines ever built. The engine was Giuseppe Busso‘s 2.5-liter V6. The car … Read more
The Lancia Thema 8.32: When Lancia Put a Ferrari Engine in a Family Sedan The Most Insane Executive Car Ever Built In 1986, Lancia did something that should have been impossible: they convinced Ferrari to give them an engine. Not just any engine. The 3.0-liter V8 from the Ferrari 308. The motor that powered the … Read more
Muscle cars: from the 1964 GTO to the last Hemi Challenger of 2023, the gross-horsepower trick nobody explains and the Dodge Darts built in Madrid.
The Lancia Delta Integrale: The Rally God That Destroyed Its Maker Six Consecutive Titles and a Bankruptcy Between 1987 and 1992, one car dominated the World Rally Championship with such ruthless efficiency that competitors essentially gave up trying to beat it on talent alone. The Lancia Delta Integrale won six consecutive manufacturers’ titles. Six. In … Read more
The Chevrolet El Camino: America’s Confused Masterpiece The Vehicle That Shouldn’t Exist In 1959, General Motors did something that made absolutely no sense: they took a perfectly good Impala, chopped off the back, welded on a truck bed, and called it the El Camino. A car that couldn’t decide if it wanted to haul groceries … Read more
The Ferrari 250 GTO: Why a Car Became the Most Expensive Object Ever Sold The $70 Million Question Nobody Asks In 2018, a Ferrari 250 GTO sold for $70 million. Not a house. Not a Picasso. Not a yacht. A car. A machine built to depreciate, crash, and eventually rust into oblivion. And yet, here … Read more
Porsche 993 — The Last of the Purebreds Every great story needs an ending. For Porsche’s air-cooled engine — a design philosophy stretching back to the Volkswagen Beetle and spanning nearly every significant car the company ever built — that ending was the 993. Produced from 1994 to 1998, the 993 is the 911 generation … Read more
Volkswagen Corrado: half of all 97,521 were sold in the US. The Karmann-built coupe with the pop-up wing, the G60 supercharger and the first VR6 Americans met.
Pegaso Z-102: the four-cam V8 supercar built in a Barcelona truck plant by the engineer Enzo Ferrari couldn’t stand, and the 1953 record it took from Jaguar.
SEAT 600: The Car You’ve Never Heard Of That Did for Spain What the Beetle Did for Germany The People’s Car You’ve Never Heard Of Every major economy has one: the car that put the nation on wheels. Germany had the Volkswagen Beetle. Britain had the Mini. France had the Citroën 2CV. Italy had the … Read more
