This wasn’t taken by me, but by another car enthusiast, who goes by Kiwi_cars on Instagram. They (I don’t know the gender though one shadow in one photo suggests it could be a male) photograph some of the more interesting cars in New Zealand, and I was flattered to have mine spotted and posted on […]
Category: cars
Cars and the automotive industry.
Finding the heart on Top Gear again
Above: Chris Evans and Rory Reid talk about the McLaren F1 in Extra Gear. Now that the new new Top Gear has aired in New Zealand, I have to say that it isn’t really there yet. But unlike much of the UK, I’m not going to dis Chris Evans, who is a consummate gearhead. The […]
Where did all the manual transmissions go?
Above: The gear selector in the BMW i3, as tested in Lucire. See here for the full road test. When I was searching for a car to buy after my previous one was written off in an accident, one no-brainer was that it had to be a manual. It can’t be that hard, right? […]
Mitsubishi’s latest scandal: enough to shake it right out of the passenger-car market?
Above: The Mitsubishi eK Wagon, one of the cars at the centre of the company’s latest scandal. One thing about creating and running Autocade is that you gain an appreciation for corporate history. Recently, I blogged about Fiat, and the troubles the company is in; it wasn’t that long ago that Fiat was the designers’ […]
How will things play out at Fiat?
Above: The current Fiat 500. A year shy of its 10th anniversary, is it still cool in 2016? The Detroit News reports that Fiat has been having trouble Stateside, with dealers now permitted to sell the cars alongside Chrysler, Jeep, Dodge and Ram instead of at stand-alone showrooms. It’s been worrying seeing Fiat’s plans […]
Autocade reaches 8,000,000 page views; viewing rate up slightly since last million
I had expected our car encyclopædia Autocade would reach 8,000,000 page views this month, just before its eighth anniversary. The difference was that this time, I was there last Monday GMT (the small hours of Tuesday in New Zealand) to witness the numbers tick over—almost. Usually, I find out about the milestones ex post […]
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How can we help those fooled into believing what their local brands are?
How interesting to see a silly Tweet of mine make the Murdoch Press and lead an opinion column—I’m told it even hit the news.com.au home page. It’s a very old joke that I’ve told since 2002, when I walked along Bay Road in Kilbirnie and saw a locksmith sign in Futura. Back then, Dick […]
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Why a Google self-driving car worries me
Ford With Google and Ford announcing they will team up to make self-driving cars, I have some concerns. I’m not in Luddite position on the idea of self-driving cars. Potentially, they can be far safer than what we have today. I see so many godawful drivers out there—New Zealand has a very high road […]
A look back at 2015: a year that was harder to laugh at
I’ve done this a few times now: looked through my year’s Tumblr posts to get an alternative feel for the Zeitgeist. Tumblr is where I put the less relevant junk that comes by my digital meanderings. But as I scrolled down to January 2015 in the archive, I’m not that certain the posts really reflected […]
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Autocade reaches 7,000,000 page views, growing at its quickest rate
I was surprised to see that Autocade managed its 7,000,000th viewer some time this month, five months after the 6,000,000th. Considering it took three years to get to the first million, this means people are willing to use Autocade more regularly as a resource on the web. As something that started on the side, this […]
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