I never expected that the Windows 10 download would ever begin. I had registered for it, but the Windows 10 notification window kept coming up with various excuses, talking about my drivers being out of date, then claiming that because of the automatic log-in, the download would not start. Clicking ‘Tell me more’ never did […]
Tag: Japan
All the Geelys on Autocade
The Geely King Kong Hatchback, one of the new entries on the Autocade website. Not that I blogged it at the time, but Geely’s multi-brand strategy in 2009 felt doomed. Earlier this year, the company retreated, and brought everything from Englon, Gleagle and Emgrand back under its parent brand again. It wasn’t unlike Mazda’s […]
John Cleese is wrong about humour
Has John Cleese become embittered? He suggests that the Bond films after Die Another Day (his second and final) were humourless because the producers wanted to pursue Asian audiences. Humour, he says, was out. ‘Also the big money was coming from Asia, from the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, where the audiences go to watch […]
How can the Yamaha Motiv make it into the top 10 British cars in Autocar?
Anyone notice the anomaly in Autocar’s top British cars? Let’s not debate what is British—let’s simply consider what is and has been on the market. Antony Ingram spotted this: Apparently this is a reader survey but I agree with Antony: how on earth can a car that is not even produced, the Yamaha Motiv, wind […]
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Calculating 2012’s top selling car: Focus or Corolla?
I see that Toyota is upset that R. L. Polk named the Ford Focus the top-selling car in the world for 2012. Motor Trend has since reported the story as Polk naming the Focus as the top selling ‘nameplate’, but that hasn’t stopped Toyota from throwing a wobbly. I can’t locate the Polk report […]
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Fifty-three years of the Nissan Bluebird: a long-lived model line comes to an end
I’m not the biggest fan of the Nissan Bluebird, but a milestone happened earlier this month that a lot of the motoring press seems to have missed: the demise of this 53-year-old nameplate. Starting in 1959, Bluebird has been a mainstay of the Nissan line-up, and even when the traditional Bluebird line finished in […]
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The new Honda goes at over 400 mph
I have to hand it to Honda. The next new model from the Japanese firm is faster than the NSX and its old Formula 1 cars. It goes at Mach 0·72. The simplified version of Honda’s history goes something like this. Once upon a time, Mr Honda wanted to make cars. He wasn’t […]
Some positive news a month on from the Christchurch ’quake
Tomorrow, it will be one month since the Christchurch ’quake. It’s tempting to argue scale—the Japanese earthquake and tsunami versus our own—but at the end of the day, people are people, and our nations have both been hurting. We have become united, through disasters that emphasized that we live in an emerging global community. […]
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Parts of Japan are decimated, and I think back to my grandfather
My grandfather, Col. Tung Wan Yan, of the Chinese Constitutional Army, had a very interesting war. He was on a Japanese hit-list and was hiding in trees when some soldiers opened fire on him with automatic weapons. By some miracle, he escaped unharmed. It’s one of the close calls he had in China […]
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James Bond’s Zinger
Apart from sounding like a burger, the Mitsubishi Zinger—or, to give its full model name these days in Taiwan, the Super Zinger (not kidding)—is one of those oddball vehicles I come across when editing Autocade. It’s a minivan based on a truck chassis—in this case the first-generation Mitsubishi Challenger—and a pretty ugly one at that. […]