Cars that don’t fit any mould. That’s exactly why they’re here
Porsche 542: The Car Studebaker Paid For And Never Built Studebaker wrote Porsche a check for roughly half a million 1952 dollars and got nothing out of it. Porsche used that money to build the assembly hall in Zuffenhausen that still turns out 911s today. The dying American company paid for the German company’s factory. … Read more
Voisin C25 Aerodyne: the plane that never left the ground In October 1934, the busiest stand at the Paris Motor Show was not Voisin’s. It was Citroën’s, where André Citroën was unveiling the Traction Avant and permanently redefining what a mass-produced car could be. Front-wheel drive. Unibody construction. Independent front suspension. A genuinely modern car, … Read more
Mercedes-Benz T80: The Six-Wheeled Nazi Speed Machine Porsche Designed That Never Turned a Wheel Walk into the Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart and you’ll find a black car nearly 27 feet long. Three axles, six wheels, two small stubby wings, an aluminum body built by an aircraft plant. No engine in the bay. No odometer to … Read more
Covini C6W: thirty years chasing a six-wheeled supercar In 1976, a Formula 1 car with four tiny front wheels won a Grand Prix and turned the motoring world upside down. It was the Tyrrell P34, and among the millions it fascinated was a young Italian engineer from a small town in the Oltrepò Pavese. For … Read more
Rinspeed: the man who’s spent fifty years building cars nobody buys Every January, while the tech world descends on Las Vegas for CES to gawk at foldable phones and robot vacuums, a Swiss man rolls in with a car that shouldn’t exist. One year it drives underwater. Another it has a garden growing inside it. … Read more
Aston Martin V8 Cygnet: The City Car With Balls The Aston Martin Cygnet was the brand’s most expensive joke: a Toyota iQ in a ballgown that almost nobody bought. And then, six years after that flop, Aston Martin did the one thing only a company that has decided to laugh at itself with a completely … Read more
SLR Stirling Moss: The Goodbye That Beat Everyone by a Decade Some cars close a chapter. A rare few close it so well that, without meaning to, they open the next one. The SLR Stirling Moss is one of those. It’s the final page of a story this site has been telling in instalments. The … Read more
A War Ace Designed It. He Made It of Plastic. It Ran 20 Years. Citroën Méhari: how a Normandie-Niemen fighter pilot, a shampoo sachet and the presidency of Citroën put one of the first thermoformed-ABS-bodied production cars on the road Deauville, 16 May 1968. Golf course. France is on fire. Paris is shut down. Students … Read more
A Blank Cheque, and the Buyer Asked for Three Pedals The Aston Martin Victor is what happens when a man can order any car in the world and deliberately chooses the hardest one to drive. Picture having that kind of money — not comfortable money, but the kind that gets you into Aston Martin’s “black … Read more
Renault Sport Spider: The Car That Dared to Take Your Windscreen Away Picture a product meeting at Renault in the mid-1990s. Someone stands up and says: “Let’s build a two-seater. No roof. No windscreen. We’ll fit an air deflector instead, and we’ll tell customers to wear a crash helmet on the road.” In any sane … Read more
Peralta S: the Giugiaro Name Returns to the Wedge Here’s a neat trick of symmetry. In 1972, a Giugiaro drew an impossible wedge over a Maserati and turned it into a legend. In 2025, another Giugiaro did exactly the same thing. Same surname. Same brand, near enough. Same wedge. But fifty-three years sit between the … Read more
The Maserati Boomerang: the Wedge That Drew Your Hatchback There’s a concept-car trope that Jeremy Clarkson loved to mock: the show stunner that turns up at Geneva, gets a thousand photographs, and is never seen or heard from again because it can’t actually move, steer, or stop. A non-car. A sculpture on a turntable. The … Read more
