The Motor Muse
April has been quite depressing for the car enthusiast. AMG has announced the inevitable end of its mega bi-turbo V12 engines, Mitsubishi says that the beloved Lancer name will continue on the back of an SUV, and Ford has announced that they will phase out their car model range in North America in favour of […]
…any era you fancy. Yes, that is right. Any particular era you think gave the world your favourite cars can be called “The greatest era of motoring”. It could be the swinging 60’s whose optimism gave us the pony cars, or the 80’s excesses that could only have birthed the Group B craze. Even our […]
There is no better sign of the times that the return of Honda’s Insight hybrid generating barely any significant buzz at the New York Auto Show. This is the return of hybrid royalty, especially for the North American market where the Insight was its first commercially available hybrid. There should have been celebratory toasts of […]
Let’s say you are a car maker and you would like to join a motor show. How do you plan on standing out from the crowd? Bring more cars to the show? Make an elaborate display? Hire more showgirls? Although we would like to think that we have benefitted from over a century of cultural […]
Ten years ago if you had told anybody that the 2018 performance bar in everybody’s mind is an all-electric five (or seven) seat sedan, they would be in the right mind to call you delusional, or Al Gore. Ten years ago the financial markets had just imploded and nobody knew if the entire concept of […]
Many scientists believe that the lasting legacy of our existence would be our earliest. Scores of scientists and engineers work tirelessly to ensure the preservation of the Mona Lisa while cave paintings have survived far longer than collective human civilisation itself, and will likely continue to exist without any preservation. Just as how the 1990s […]
It took sixty-six years from the moment humankind figured how to pull off powered-flight to us landing on the moon. Never in human history has there ever been such a rapid pace of development as the journey from Kitty Hawk to the Sea of Tranquility, and much of it had to do with how the […]
I’ve never been to Mercedes-Benz’s museum in Stuttgart, but I’ve been told that visitors are greeted by a stuffed horse standing next to the words “I believe in the horse. The automobile is only a passing phenomenon” at its entrance. Those words were uttered in 1905 by Kaiser Wilhelm II, the last emperor of Germany, […]
Industry veteran and serial straight-talker Bob Lutz stirred the hornet’s nest recently by declaring that the automotive industry is on its last legs, 20 years to be exact before the autonomous revolution would render all human-operated cars, buses, and lorries, redundant. The outspoken businessman envisioned a future where driverless faceless electric pods zipping around city […]
As surely as the sun rises in the east Nissan continues to be undecided on the fate of their Z sports car. This year will be the 370Z’s 9th birthday, which would make it the second longest running Z car, after the wedge-tastic Z32 300ZX that soldiered on till the turn of the century in […]