A very humble 3,800th entry on Autocade

We almost never plan which car winds up being the x hundredth model entered into Autocade, and here’s proof.    The humble, boxy Mazda Demio (DY) was the 3,800th entry in Autocade. It makes a nice change from all the SUVs that have found their way on to the database in recent months, even if […]

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Capturing a buyer: some advice to Renault New Zealand

On this Pope Gregory Arbitrary Calendar Start Day, I wrote to a contact of mine at Renault New Zealand.    In mid-2018, I joked that, since Renault had no dealers in Wellington (never mind what’s listed on their website—the only people who can see a dealer there are psychic mediums), I could sell them out […]

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Autocade hits 14,000,000 page views, and we start a YouTube channel

Above: Behind the scenes of the Škoda Karoq road test for Autocade. I hadn’t kept track of Autocade’s statistics for a while, and was pleasantly surprised to see it had crossed 14,000,000 page views (in fact, it’s on 14,140,072 at the time of writing). Using some basic mathematics, and assuming it hit 13,000,000 on May […]

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Ford to stop selling passenger cars in the US and Canada, save for Mustang and Focus Active

The Ford Focus Active: by the turn of the decade, this will be the only four-door passenger car Ford will sell in the US and Canada   In a surprise move, Ford has announced that it will cease selling passenger cars in the US and Canada by the early 2020s, excepting the Mustang and the […]

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The path of least resistance: we humans aren’t discerning enough sometimes

I came across a thread at Tedium where Christopher Marlow mentions Pandora Mail as an email client that took Eudora as a starting-point, and moved the game forward (e.g. building in Unicode support).    As some of you know, I’ve been searching for an email client to use instead of Eudora (here’s something I wrote […]

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The last American Falcon

  I’m fascinated by the 1970½ Ford Falcon for a number of reasons. The first is the obvious one: rarity. This car was built for only half a model year, from January to August 1970. If you think it looks like a contemporary Torino, you’re right: it’s basically a very stripped-down Torino. Yet you could spec it […]

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It took a little longer, but Autocade reaches 12 million views

It’s a little disappointing to note that Autocade has taken slightly longer to reach 12 million page views: it ticked over to its new milestone earlier today. I really had hoped that we’d get there before 2017 was out, but it was not to be.    Part of it might have been the slower rate […]

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Wikipedia corrects serious error after 12 years

Well done, Wikipedia, you got something right. It only took you 12 years.    Nick, who appears to be a senior editor at the site, fixed up the complete fabrication that a user called ApolloBoy entered about the ‘Ford CE14 platform’ in 2005, after I wrote a pretty scathing piece on Drivetribe about Wikipedia’s inadequacies, […]

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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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