Fancy buying a sports car company? If you have some spare cash and are concerned that giving it to a tech startup might not be the best idea at this time - just look at the rapid devaluation of Lyft and Uber, then buy Avatar, a niche British sports car company. Avatar is currently owned by the Marlin Sports Car Company who have become one of the last independent sports car … [Read more...]
Jaguar C-X75 Engine
Remember the Jaguar that starred in Spectre, part of the James Bond series of films? The Jaguar C-X75 (named after the anniversary of the company) never made it to production even though it was a leading light in new (at the time) plugin hybrid propulsion systems - that concept ended up reaching the market via Ferrari with their LaFerrari and track based FXX-K models. The … [Read more...]
Rack and Pinion Steering
Rack and Pinion Steering on cars is one of those inventions that appeared early on in the life of the automobile and was taken from another source. Many early components on cars started out life being used by other machines before being enhanced and evolving into something far more complex. The simplest explanation of how it works is that the steering column has a classical … [Read more...]
The Tesla Shooting Brake
This is a story that has been told many times in the last century and probably was the foundation of many manufacturers like Jaguar, Pininfarina and others. The story starts, like many others, with a car buyer lamenting that the car is 90% perfect however they would like it to be changed. In decades past, this would have been the domain of Park Ward, Vignale, Touring, Mulliner … [Read more...]
Jack Griffith
The name Andrew Jackson “Jack" Griffith may not mean much to many people, however to sports car enthusiasts and classic car nuts, he was another genius although his name was initially made by copying someone else's idea! He was born in 1926 on Long Island in New York State and enlisted in the US Airforce in 1943 at the age of 17, being posted to Wisconsin. He met his wife … [Read more...]