Henry Ford was the first motor manufacturer to use mass-production techniques, and his Model T was the best selling car of its era. The company he founded has been one of the world’s largest car-makers for decades, with an enviable automotive portfolio as broad as...
Increasingly sophisticated technology made the best saloons and GT cars even better as the 1960s turned into the 1970s. At the top end power usually came from V8 engines, often built in the US, though V6s and VI2s were used as well. All of them...
Giorgetto Giugiaro’s Italdesign was the most influential car-design bureau in the world in the 1970s. The Alfa Romeo Alfasud and Volkswagen Golf put a Giugiaro original into the hands of even the humblest motorist. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); ...
Premium saloons were offering all sorts of routes to performance and panache. The old-school method was to drop a big, lazy V8 into a medium-sized body. This was the path taken by Mercedes in Germany and Rover in the UK. Other car-makers went for smaller...
Named for an era when the world was caught up in the excitement of the international space race, the diminutive Cosmo 110S was a sophisticated, two-seater coupe designed to sit at the very top of the Mazda range. At its launch in 1967 it was...
Toyota was at the forefront of the Japanese motor industry’s move into exports in the 1960s, establishing satellite plants around the world. It became a force in rallying but its foray into Formula 1 proved unsuccessful, and it has been rocked by quality scares in...
The classic front-engine, rear-wheel-drive, soft-top sports car appeared to be under threat from all directions in the 1970s. New US emissions laws were emasculating engines, affecting those European models that relied on lighter weight and relatively little power. Added to this, safety and insurance concerns...
Small cars made great strides in the 1970s. Hatchback bodies were used almost universally, making little cars more useful and adaptable than they had ever been before. Many manufacturers adopted front-wheel drive, which brought with it improvements in space utilization, allowing for more passenger and...
One of the great visionaries of the car world, Colin Chapman was a born competitor. To fund his passion for building race-winning cars, he created a string of dazzlingly brilliant Lotus sports cars for road drivers. Chapman was a magician when it came to weight...
In the 1970s ever larger and more powerful engines provided greater top speeds, while slashing acceleration times. Ferrari was the last of the big three Italian supercar-makers to switch to mid-engined designs: while Lamborghini built the Miura and prepared the Countach, and Maserati offered the...