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 […]
Tag: car
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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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 […]
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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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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Snapped on Instagram
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 […]
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? […]
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 […]
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 […]