In late 1981 Toyota watchers were highly distracted by the new Supra; a would-be performance car was finally getting genuine muscle and poise. Yet slipping in almost under the radar was the standard Celica, a model that outsold the sportier…
Tripping lightly through the corner, accelerating, shifting quickly, then braking for the next curve, the Fiat Super Brava flies like a gerund around the dappled… Okay. Gerund is a grammatical term, not something that goes flying down the dappled whatever….
In the ‘30s, Auto Union was a German General Motors, Sloanian to the max, a car for every pocketbook. DKW –Das Kliene Wunder (the small wonder) – staked out the lower price range and the mighty Horch rivaled Mercedes-Benz, with…
Perhaps England doesn’t produce more eccentrics than any other country. Maybe it’s only that in England eccentricity is cultivated to such a high degree. Adam Smith’s nation of shopkeepers is also the home of the tinkerer, the inventor and the…
Swedish soldiers called it “sugga,” or “the sow,” but you always hurt the one you love, they say. The official Volvo designation for the four-wheel-drive radio and command car was Volvo TP21, and the Volvo TP21 Sugga nickname came not…
Arriving fall 1996. That’s perhaps the best thing we can say about the Hyundai Tiburon. The Korean carmaker put a show car version on display at the New York auto show in April and, according to Jim Hossack, Hyundai’s vice…
War, product failure, even political upheaval couldn’t destroy Siata, but success of the innocuous little Siata Spring did. Both success and failure can be found wearing peculiar dress. However, none perhaps, is as strange as that of the Siata Spring….
When the Mazda Miata debuted in 1989 (as a 1990 model), the smart money would have been on, well, another horse. The day of the traditional British sports car had long past, according to conventional wisdom, and the Miata would…
Surely one of the most idiosyncratic automobiles to burst onto the automotive scene since, say, the cooling of the earth is the Audi TT. Shaped something like a snap beetle with wheels, it’s immediately disliked by some. If that’s you,…