Maextro S800, with a two-tone paintwork.

We’ll all soon know luxury Chinese car brands

Maextro S800, with a two-tone paintwork.

I noted in the new Autocade Year of Cars that the French faltered in China because the Chinese marques no longer need them, especially when they are churning out superior product. They have no use for French cachet, especially as the brands edge upmarket. You’ve got the HIMA collective from Huawei, all with luxury marques, […]

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Quick numbers on Teslas and trade

I had the strangest dream a few nights ago of piloting a Tesla Model 3, and finding it quite horrid. I’ve not driven one in real life, and I can’t see myself doing so, as it’s the sort of thing you can’t bring yourself to do for fear of being seen, embarrassed, in one. Or […]

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Luxury Facts on the Jaguar rebrand (featuring Cristián Saracco and me)

Jaguar Type 00 concept in purple, shown directly on the side.

A nice way to conclude 2024: my name in a real article by a real journalist with quotations attributed to me that are actually by me. I’m so grateful to Tejashee Kashyap and Luxury Facts for interviewing me and my friend Dr Cristián Saracco, and to our friend Philippe Mihailovich for connecting Tejashee and me […]

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Autocade reaches 40 million page views; thank you, humans

1985 Chevrolet S-10 Blazer.

Autocade has now hit 40 million page views, with the counter at 12,353,148, to be added to the previous installation’s 27,647,011. We’re 159 over the milestone. There has been plenty of activity as we added some pages to match Autocade Year of Cars 2025, our new print yearbook, sitting on 5,222 models, a healthy 114 […]

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Autocade Year of Cars 2025: the covers that could have been

Xpeng P7+ on the road with a Chinese skyline behind it.

Would you have bought Autocade Year of Cars 2025 if it had either one of these covers?     This one, with the Geely Galaxy E8, was rejected due to image quality. It was going to be the cover till about a week before publication. Then we zoomed in 400 per cent on the output […]

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Autocade Year of Cars 2025 now out

A two-page spread featuring cars and their drag coefficient figures plotted against their year.

  We have put a few links around the place, Stanley Moss very kindly referred to it in his blog, and an article has gone up on Lucire: the new Autocade Yearbook is out for 2025. I decided to call it Autocade Year of Cars as that was more distinctive than just Yearbook (which, for […]

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Lucire turns 27, while Autocade’s origins are even older

A montage of 20 years of Lucire print covers.

Lucire turns 27 tomorrow (at the stroke of midnight NZDT as the day ticks over to Monday). After prompting by my friend Richard MacManus, I wrote a piece to mark the anniversary. Though after the song and dance of our 25th anniversary two years ago, I’ve kept it low-key.   Meanwhile, I’ve thinned out some […]

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Autocade reaches 39 million page views

Here we are, 39 million page views on Autocade, as the stats’ counter ticked over to 11,361,125 earlier today (which we add to the previous installation’s 27,647,011). It’s two months, 16 days since we were at 38 million, and as July and August were leap months, that’s 78 days. Last time it was 50 days. […]

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At the dawn of the ’90s

  More from the slimmed-down archives. Here’s a little item from 1991, when I was 19. St Luke’s Church in Wadestown, Wellington was holding a 1960s-themed dance and I designed and hand-lettered the tickets. You can see I was into Swiss modernism even then. The large type was drawn from memory: I didn’t go back […]

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Tesla misfires, Toyota lies

The 1983 Corolla liftback—the E80 series was peak Corolla, relative to what was on offer in the C segment. Toyota was on a high then.   Tesla finished itself this year, by firing its new-product development team at a time when it desperately needs new products—proper products, too, not the Cyberstuck which has so many […]

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