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The Maserati MC12 is a grand tourer produced by Maserati to allow a racing variant to compete in the FIA GT Championship. The car entered production in 2004 with 30 cars produced (five of which were not for sale). A further 25 were produced in 2005 making a total of 50 cars available for customers, each of which were pre-sold for €600 000.
Maserati designed and built the car on the chassis of the Enzo Ferrari but the final car is much larger. The MC12 is longer, wider and taller than the Enzo Ferrari, which has faster acceleration and a higher top speed. The top speed of the Maserati MC12 is 330 kilometres per hour (205 mph) whereas the top speed of the Enzo Ferrari is 350 kilometres per hour (217.5 mph). (more...)
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The Mini Moke is a vehicle based on the Mini and designed for the British Motor Corporation (BMC) by Sir Alec Issigonis. The name comes from "Mini"—the car with which the Moke shares many parts—and "Moke", which is an archaic dialect term for "donkey".
The initial design was a prototype for a light military vehicle in the style of the American Jeep, but its small wheels and low ground clearance made it impractical as an off-road vehicle. It was subsequently offered in a civilian version as a low-cost, easily maintained utility vehicle. The Moke finally achieved success as a beach buggy — becoming a popular 'cult' vehicle in the Seychelles, Australia, the United States and many tropical resorts in the Caribbean. The original Moke used identical engine, transmission and suspension parts to the basic Mini.
Mokes were first built at BMC's Longbridge, Birmingham plant, but production was soon moved overseas. 14,500 Mokes were produced in the UK between 1964 and 1968, 26,000 in Australia between 1966 and 1981, and 10,000 in Portugal between 1980 and 1993 when production of the Moke ended. (more...)
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The Talbot Tagora is an executive car developed by Chrysler Europe and produced by Peugeot Société Anonyme (PSA). The Tagora was marketed under the Talbot marque after PSA took over Chrysler's European operations in 1979. PSA presented the first production vehicle in 1980 and launched it commercially in 1981. The Tagora fell far short of sales expectations, and PSA cancelled the model only two years later. Fewer than 20,000 Tagoras were ever built, all of them at the former Simca factory in the Poissy commune near Paris, France.
Chrysler Europe began the development of the Tagora in 1976, under the code name C9, with the goal of replacing the unsuccessful Chrysler 180 series. Following the same development pattern as with the Horizon and Alpine models, the responsibility for the Tagora's technical development remained in France, while the styling was devised at Chrysler's design centre in the United Kingdom. An early proposal for the name of the car was "Simca 2000". (more...)
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The Lancia Flaminia is a luxury car from the Italian automaker, Lancia, built from 1957 to 1970. It was Lancia's flagship model at that time, replacing the Aurelia. It was available throughout its lifetime as sedan, coupé, cabrio, and a stretched limousine model was even created for official service. The Flaminia (save for the sedan) was a coachbuilt car with bodies from the most prestigious Italian coachbuilders. The demise of this model in 1970 left a void only filled by Lancia Gamma in 1976.
With only 12,633 sold over 13 years, the Flaminias were truly exclusive and unique cars, and are very rare collectibles now. Interestingly, coupés outsold the 4-door variant by far, even in spite of shorter production run and coachbuilt bodies. (more...)
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The Ferrari P4/5 by Pininfarina (more commonly known as the Ferrari P4/5) is a one-off supercar made by Italian sports car manufacturer Ferrari but redesigned by Pininfarina for film director and stock exchange magnate James Glickenhaus. The car was an Enzo Ferrari but the owner James Glickenhaus preferred the styling of Ferrari's 1960s race cars, the P Series. Glickenhaus supervised the project throughout its design and construction and the end result is faster than the original car. The project cost Glickenhaus US$ 4 million and was officially presented to the public in August 2006 at the Pebble Beach Concours d'Elégance, but in July 2006 some images were leaked and Glickenhaus allowed Ultimate Car Page to show the early designs. (more...)
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The Howmet TX (Turbine eXperimental) was an American sports prototype racing car designed in 1968 to test the competitive use of a gas turbine engine in sports car racing. Planned by racing driver Ray Heppenstall, the TX combined a chassis built by McKee Engineering, turbine engines leased from Continental Aviation & Engineering, and financial backing and materials from the Howmet Corporation.
Although not the first attempt at using a turbine powerplant in auto racing, the Howmet TX was the first and is still the only turbine to successfully win a race, earning two Sports Car Club of America (SCCA) race victories and two qualifying sprint victories during its only year of competition. The TX later set six Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA) land speed records for turbines after being retired from racing. (more...)
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The Chrysler 180 was the base name for a series of large saloon cars produced by Chrysler Europe. Resulting from joining development efforts of Rootes Group and Simca, the car was produced from 1970 to 1975 in Poissy, France, and later in Chrysler's subsidiary Barreiros' factory in Spain. The Chrysler 180 was also the base for the medium-sized model built by Chrysler Australia model, the Chrysler Centura.
Depending on engine employed, the cars were marketed as Chrysler 160/180/2 litre, and since 1977 in France and rest of continental Europe as Chrysler-Simca 1609/1610/2 litres. After the takeover of Chrysler Europe by PSA Peugeot Citroën, the continental Europe models were renamed Talbot 1610/2 litres for 1979 and 1980 model years, after which the model was discontinued in Europe save for Spain, where a diesel model was sold until 1982.
The large Chrysler fared quite poorly in the European markets. The replacement for the car was developed by Chrysler Europe under the codename C9 and was finally launched by PSA as the even more ill-fated Talbot Tagora. (more...)
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The Mitsubishi i (三菱・i Mitsubishi i?) is a kei car from Japanese automaker Mitsubishi Motors, first released on January 24, 2006. It debuted twenty eight months after its introduction as a concept car at the 60th Frankfurt Motor Show in 2003, and its innovative "rear midship" layout proved an immediate critical and commercial success, exceeding Mitsubishi's initial sales targets by 20 percent and winning four major awards in its first year.
Explaining the choice of name, the company claimed that "i" could represent the owner (I, the nominative personal pronoun) as an encouragement to personal expression, or innovation, intelligence and imagination, keywords in the car's development. It is also a play on the Japanese word for love, pronounced /aɪ/. (more...)
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Lexus is the luxury vehicle division of Japanese automaker Toyota Motor Corporation. Lexus brand name vehicles are sold in North America, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Oceania, Africa, and Latin America; in the United States, Lexus is the highest-selling brand of luxury cars. In 2005, the Lexus marque launched in Japan, marking the continued global expansion of the luxury division.
Since its debut in 1989, Lexus has developed a reputation for the luxury and reliability of its vehicles, along with the quality of its customer service. In 2007, consumer ratings firm J.D. Power and Associates named Lexus the most reliable brand in the U.S. based on its Vehicle Dependability Survey, a measure of over 53,000 vehicle owners and the problems they experienced in the first three years of vehicle ownership. It was the thirteenth consecutive year that Lexus achieved this top rating. In recent years, Consumer Reports has also named Lexus among the top five most reliable brands in its Annual Car Reliability Surveys of over one million vehicles nationwide. Additionally, Lexus ranks highly on surveys of dealership service experience. The British Top Gear and Auto Express satisfaction surveys have had Lexus at the top of their ratings since the entry of the luxury division, with high reliability and quality among the main selling points of Lexus around the world. (more...)
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The Brabham BT46 was a Formula One racing car, designed by Gordon Murray for the Brabham team, owned by Bernie Ecclestone, for the 1978 Formula One season. The car featured several radical design elements, the most obvious of which was the use of flat panel heat exchangers on the bodywork of the car to replace conventional water and oil radiators. The concept did not work in practice and was removed before the car’s race debut, never to be seen again. The cars, powered by a flat-12 Alfa Romeo engine, raced competitively with modified nose-mounted radiators for most of the year, driven by Niki Lauda and John Watson, winning one race in this form and scoring sufficient points for the team to finish third in the constructors championship. (more...)
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The Autobianchi Primula is a small car (supermini) from the Italian automaker, Autobianchi (a subsidiary of the Fiat Group), built from 1964 to 1970. It was notable as Fiat's first ever automobile with the front-wheel drive, transverse engine setup, as well as the first Fiat group car with rack and pinion steering. Primulas were built in the Autobianchi factory in Desio and were priced comparably to the Austin/Morris 1100 models built in Italy by Innocenti.
The car's original body was similar to the BMC's fastback "saloon" concept, available with two or four doors and with or without the rear hatch (which made the car effectively a hatchback), producing four different combinations, referred to in Italian as "berlina". In 1965, a year after the original launch, the lineup was complemented with a Coupé model (effectively a more stylish yet spacious 2-door fastback) designed by Carrozzeria Touring.
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The Talbot Samba is a supermini car manufactured by the PSA Group in the former Simca factory in Poissy, France and marketed under the short-lived modern-day Talbot brand. Based on the Peugeot 104, it had the distinction of being the sole Talbot to be engineered by PSA alone (not inherited from Chrysler Europe like other Talbot cars), the last new Talbot to be launched and the last to be produced. Its demise in 1986 was effectively the end of the Talbot brand for passenger cars. Launched initially as a three-door hatchback, it was also for some time the only supermini available in a factory-ordered cabrio body style and at one time the most economical car in Europe.
When the PSA Group (formed in 1976 after Peugeot bought out its competitor, Citroën) took over the former Chrysler Europe in 1979, one of its first decisions was to rebrand all the models manufactured in the French and British factories to Talbot. Among the models inherited from Chrysler was the Scotland-built rear-wheel drive Talbot Sunbeam, the sole supermini in the lineup. (more...)
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