This Buick concept hinted at a future SUV/station wagon offering from GM’s Flint-based division; sadly what was rolled out a few years later had none of the bold vision of the concept…
CVT. It’s probably one of the most divisive acronyms in motoring today. For some, the CVT – or continuously variable transmission – is seen as a means of smoothing gearshifts and curbing fuel consumption. Others can only wince at the system’s tendency to turn their driving experience into a drone some affair punctuated with the sensation of gear slip and sluggish performance.
I make no secret at all of my love of Jaguar’s big saloon cars – especially those of the Eighties and Nineties, which I’ve owned in various guises since I was first able to scrape together the insurance premium in my mid-20s.
Count Alexis Wladimirovich de Sakhnoffsky made his reputation in Europe and his fortune in America. There he became the foremost advocate of, as he put it, ‘the illusion of speed’ in design — or, put another way, streamlining. With the likes of Raymond Loewy, Norman Bel Geddes and Walter Dorwin Teague, Alexis was part of a new breed of industrial designers that emerged in the USA in the 1930s and whose name, whether given to a refrigerator or a wristwatch, would give it added sales appeal.
The title of Autocar magazine’s article in October 1967 said it all: ‘Bertone-Jaguar: no dream car – but not for you and me’. This one-off gran turismo wasn’t the first Bertone-bodied Jaguar, witness the Franco Scaglione-styled XK150 and Marcello Gandini-designed ‘FT’ that was based variously on S-type and 420 saloon foundations for Italy’s marque concessionaire, Ferruchio Tarchini. However, in this particular instance, there was no intention of making the Pirana in even the most limited of numbers. It was a concept queen, and a compelling one.
Porsche’s first space framed Spyder, the 550A, competed at Le Mans in coupe form to win its class, marking the only time the model raced as a hard-top. One such car has survived an interim American body to be reborn through a sparkling restoration…
The Carrera RS 2.7’s ducktail may have become a style icon, but it was the start of Porsche’s focus on aerodynamics for both its race and road cars. Fifty years on, it’s also a feature of the manufacturer’s very latest products...
In spring 1975 a customer is inspecting the new Porsche 930 that, thanks to its turbocharger, was probably the most sensational car you could buy. And it attracted the rich and famous like no car since Jaguar’s E-Type.
It’s sometimes amazing just how quickly time passes. I look at the subject of this month’s Across the Pond as an example. The year 1982 doesn’t seem that long ago to me, but four decades have passed since then.
Electric cars may be all the rage at the moment, but the American car industry had a fair few attempts at presenting its vision of how an electric car would look in the Sixties. Richard Heseltine looks at AMC’s offering, the Amitron…
The Jaguar C-Type’s arrival in 1951 might have quickly made the XK 120 obsolete as a racing car but the British Racing Drivers’ Club still chose the now four-year-old model when it was organising a Race of Champions event at the 1952 Daily Express meeting on 10 May.
