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
Dymaxion Car: Brilliant and Forgotten Walter Chrysler wanted in. Henry Ford wanted in. Henry Kaiser wanted in. Three of the biggest names in American manufacturing looked at Buckminster Fuller’s three-wheeled aluminium teardrop and reached the same conclusion: this thing changes everything. Ford offered him anything in the catalogue at seventy-five percent off. Chrysler believed it … Read more
Lancia Sibilo: Gandini’s last wedge, a Stratos in alien clothing Picture this. Turin Motor Show, April 1978. The car industry is five years deep into a hangover that just won’t lift. The 1973 oil crisis has rewired everything. Big cars don’t sell anymore. Safety regulations are forcing designers to bolt rubber bumpers onto everything like … Read more
Lancia Megagamma: Lancia invented the modern MPV in 1978 and Fiat buried it Quick quiz. Without looking at Wikipedia. Who invented the modern MPV? The boxy family hauler with the flat floor, the five doors, the room for five people plus their luggage plus a bike inside? The category Top Gear used to mock relentlessly … 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
Vision EQXX: Everyone bragged about horsepower. Mercedes drove 750 miles on 201 and won There are two ways to impress someone with a car. The easy way and the hard way. The easy way is big numbers. A thousand horsepower, two thousand, nought to sixty in under two seconds — figures that fit in a … Read more
BMW X5 Le Mans: The SUV That Beat the Cayenne Two Years Before the Cayenne Existed Hans-Joachim Stuck took a BMW X5 around the Nordschleife in June 2001. Seven minutes, forty-nine seconds, ninety-two hundredths. Three hundred and eleven kilometres per hour on the Kottenborn straight. The first SUV in history to break the eight-minute barrier … Read more
Volkswagen W12 Nardò: the supercar that was always a test rig If you watched Top Gear in the early 2000s, you remember the era. Clarkson worshipping the McLaren F1. May still mourning the death of the V12 Vantage. The Veyron was about to land like a meteor and rewrite everything we thought we knew about … Read more
The Golf That Volkswagen Was Too Scared to Build VW Golf GTI W12-650: A Bentley Engine, Lamborghini Axle, Audi RS4 Brakes, and the Most Terrifying Hot Hatch Ever Created — Built in Two Months Section: Builds & Swaps | Not Enough Cylinders Every major automaker has a parts bin. But only one ever had a … Read more
