That’s not much money for a quirky car that would be practical as a daily driver. It’s not so old that it would be impossible to live with.

99% of buyers don’t actually need to haul several tonnes up a slipway and over a mountain pass, although once they buy an oversize pickup truck they’ll convince themselves that capability is what makes them a Real Man.

It’s nationalism, pure and simple. Lots of people think it would be bad if the best vehicle had a foreign badge on it - so remove the badge.

Maybe, but Mercedes’ volumes back then weren’t sustainable. They weren’t tiny, of course, but the market was consolidating, economies of scale were important, and maybe making 200k of the W123 per year is not a strong enough foundation for a global carmaker.

Can I have it as a shooting brake please? In brown?

Ah, yes, extreme shortsightedness is the standard for publically traded companies, such as Daimler, which has been publically-listed for a century and has become quite successful over the years.

That’s a MacGregor 26. #boatlopnik

In recent history, manual cars have had slightly better fuel efficiency than automatics, and there’s a surprisingly large number of people who buy a Mercedes but still want to keep down fuel consumption (especially in Europe, where new cars often get more favourable tax treatment if they’re in a lower CO2 bracket). My…

It’s art. This piece poses important questions about technology versus nature, action versus inaction. I approve. And as a work of Art, it has more æsthetic value than a C4 ever would.

Look at those lines. So clean, beautiful and simple. What went wrong with car design in the last 40 years?

Peugeot was the only company that had already met the targets

Some other geographies have a lot of very small farms. It might not be economically efficient, but there are often populist farm subsidies which hand out more money to maintain some old-fashioned ideal of a rosy-cheeked farmer with three hectares. This means lots of demand for small, versatile farm vehicles...

Won’t that vary between different markets? In Europe, regulators expect shorter shifts and longer breaks (and compliance is closer to 100%, thanks to standardised electronic timecards &c). Although a European trucking business will still expect long-haul trucks to keep going longer than is possible with current…

Noble Destro is wise.

The N2; you get Cape Town, vineyards, beautiful coastline, then the Transkei, Zululand, safari country and the Drakensberg. Everything you want in one roadtrip. Penguins and killer whales, giraffes and rhinos. It’s more fun if you stray away from the main road, but the N2 is built to standards that Westerners would be …

Ford missed some chances with PAG. Maybe Lincoln & Mercury didn’t belong in the same team as Jaguar & Aston Martin, but they had a real opportunity to build a top-end platform that could have been used by 2-3 different brands, improve the premium dealer experience, and maybe trickle-down some technologies better so…

I think it’s an early example of the wave of“retro” cars: New Beetle, Mini, SSR, Fiat 500 &c. I’m sure it’s a fine little convertible in its own right, but to my eyes the styling is just “Look at me! I’m so postwar chic!” whilst carefully complying with modern standards (so there aren’t any chromed bits that would…

Designs of cool new truck tech fall into two neat categories.

Category A is the practical render (or even a prototype) by people who know what they’re doing; a manufacturer like Volvo releases a pic of some future hybrid, and whilst it looks superficially like clickbait, you can tell it’s based on one of their…

Why not do a little platform sharing? Obviously Maserati aren’t yet desperate enough to put a trident badge on an Alfa Romeo Mito, but in the distant past Alfa had a reputation for sports cars - actual sports cars, not rebadged Fiat hatchbacks - with a touch of flair. Why can’t Alfa Romeo and Maserati *both* use the…

...then it’s dead weight? (And a very expensive piece of engineering which isn’t earning its keep that day). But windless conditions are rare on the ocean routes that a car-carrier would be sailing.