Consumer’s choice: how I bought a car from the UK over the ’net and shipped it home

Originally published at Drivetribe, but as I own the copyright it only made sense to share it here for readers, too, especially those who might wish to buy a car from abroad and want to do the job themselves. It was originally written for a British audience. Above: The lengths I went to, to make […]

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Too many white cars make fake news

A photo taken in Wellington with a test car I had for Lucire. White cars aren’t the over-represented colour in New Zealand: guess from this photo what is. A friend of mine put me on to this Fairfax Press Stuff article, entitled ‘Silly Car Question #16: Why are there so many white cars?’. It’s a […]

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Fun for car anoraks—till you get to the factual errors

  I bought Steven Parissien’s The Life of the Automobile: a New History of the Motor Car, which started off as a good history. I’m 300-odd pages in now and the mistakes are really worrying. There’s also a shocking lack of editing (one part repeated, albeit in different language, and spelling and grammatical mistakes) in […]

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Autocade hits 11,000,000 page views—a million in four months

The Porsche 901 was the 3,500th model entry into Autocade earlier this month. After lamenting in February that it had taken over six months for Autocade to get from 9,000,000 to 10,000,000 page views (prior to that it was every five months), I was happy to note that the next million took four months, which […]

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Go well, Dave Moore

I was very saddened to learn of the passing of my colleague and friend Dave Moore on May 31, which I learned about a few hours after.    You don’t expect your mates to drop dead at breakfast while on a press trip, especially not at the age of 67, and it’s particularly painful to […]

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Selling Opel: what’s good for China is good for General Motors

Above: The Opel Astra K: on the roster. I’m not so sure that GM going into talks to sell Opel and Vauxhall to PSA (Peugeot–Citroën) is that big a surprise.    We obviously hold a lot of nostalgia for these brands, and it’s only right that we perceive GM as selling its family jewels. Opel […]

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Autocade passes 10,000,000 page views

Some time in the last couple of weeks, Autocade managed its 10,000,000th page view.    I was too busy to notice when it hit 9,000,000, but a quick calculation when views hovered around the 9,500,000 mark suggested it made the milestone some time around August 2016, keeping the growth rate at around 1,000,000 every five […]

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Building a car anorak’s encyclopædia

Above: The first-generation Mitsubishi Minica, though this isn’t the 1962 model. Now on Autocade—though hardly an iconic model. It’s the end of the Gregorian year, which means I get a bit of time to update Autocade. Since 2008, it’s mostly been a labour of love, and typically, the period after Christmas is when I get […]

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Why the next Holden Commodore will have a traditional boot

Above: The Holden Commodore SS-V, facing its last year of manufacture. The current wisdom appears to be that when the Holden Commodore VF leaves production in 2017, it’ll be replaced by the liftback version of the Opel Insignia B. After all, the only big sedan Ford Australia’s offering in place of the now-defunct Falcon is […]

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Drivetribe will be a mecca for motorheads—Autocade readers welcome

Now that the first episode of The Grand Tour has aired, and we’re nearing the official launch of Drivetribe (November 28), we’re beginning to see just how good an investment £160 million was for Amazon when it picked up the cast of The Goodies, I mean, Top Gear (sorry, I get those BBC shows mixed […]

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