Offering a sporty-looking car which is also child-friendly is a great way to appeal to people who’ve grown up enough to get a real job but who still want to pretend that they’re still young, and this is the most profitable of all demographics.

There’s an alternative option for obscure Swiss 6-wheeled trucks: Mowag Duro!

(They seem to be popular for camper conversions)

Remember when every car had ashtrays? Including in the rear seats, which were almost exclusively used by children. I can imagine little Laurent and Nicole huffing away on their Gauloises on the way to école.

These things are an amazing deal if you want a Unimog cheap; not such an amazing deal otherwise. I bid on one a couple of years ago.

Wonderful!

Early-80s AMC deserves more respect! They gave us the XJ, basically the first modern SUV; they made the Eagle, a precursor of all the lifted wagons and not-quite-SUVs; they helped the convergence of North American and European markets (even if Renault ultimately pulled out, it’s normal for plafotms to be shared across…

What we really need is colour-matched wheels.

The last 3 new (new new) cars that I tried to buy:

Dramatic suggestion: Technology restrictions don’t work.

Preventing driver aids was supposed to reduce the cost of competition, but instead of spending $10m on state-of-the-art electronics, constructors now spend $10m on sneaky workarounds to design a mechanical system that has 10% of the capability of the ideal…

Auctions are dangerous for people like us. This auction is more dangerous than most. There are professional buyers there who barely even look at the cars, probably just trust their spreadsheet and the rating from the inspection company; and there are enthusiasts who see something pretty and just keep on bidding.

It may only be a small car, but 57.5mpg sounds quite optimistic for an engine made out of cardboard and discarded Meccano, based on a 1950s design. No fuel injection here!

This is already a mature product in other markets: https://www.autocar.co.nz/autocar-news-app/analysis-what-happens-to-stranded-evs

Tesla, also searching for a breakthrough for electric car batteries, bought Skeleton’s competitor Maxwell Technologies Inc. last year. Musk’s company, like other manufacturers, still uses the relatively cheap and recyclable lead-acid battery in addition to the lithium-ion unit.

My heart says “Yes” but my brain says it’s an LHD car in Galway with UK plates, and a bunch of modifications that make it a terrible daily-driver, and it’s not modern enough to race and it’s not special enough for a museum and it’s not pretty enough to impress anybody on your street, so... where’s the business case?…

the legendary Bedford M-series military truck

1st gear and 3rd gear: The internet has transformed commerce. A few decades ago, the slow and inexorable trend in retail seemed to be that shoppers were gradually shifting away from local stores towards bigger, more distant ones. Now a large % of retail has gone to a completely new channel. Some bricks-and-mortar…

BMW have thrived for years on the difference between brand perception versus what people actually buy. BMW’s biggest sellers are SUVs and hatchbacks, usually with small engines, but when people think of BMW they think of prestigious sporty cars like the M3, and that makes people willing to pay a few thousand € more…

I love the look of those creases in the interior. You don’t see them much in modern cars, because of the minimum-radius rules for occupant safety. (Imagine hitting your head on a sharp edge inside your car; it could turn a minor crash into a life-changing injury).

Maybe, but UK businesses pay taxes that are strongly tied to vehicle efficiency, so the TCO of hybrid vans can be pretty good despite the higher capital cost.

Surprisingly practical! If you’ve never camped in a car before, you think your first priority is “I need room to stretch out”, but once you’ve tried it the priorities suddenly change to “More storage!”; heating and cooling which can also use external power supplies; windows and curtains; things like that. The CHMSL is…