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Staying true to its pillars: a new Lotus is formed

27 January, 2015

In a time where many automakers are struggling Lotus Cars are bucking the trend. They’ve recently announced that their overall sales are up by 54 per cent in the past nine months. In terms of volume, this is an increase of 551 cars on the prior year bringing sales to a total of 1565 cars.

Clearly Lotus Cars’ new strategy is working, with 25 new dealers added over the past nine months and a further 50 to join by the end of 2015. Lotus’ CEO, Jean-Marc Gales, said, “The positive reception that all our new Lotus cars are receiving in both new and established markets shows that our product development strategy is heading in the right direction.”

Lotus are set to reveal a new car at the Geneva International Motor Show in early March, 2015, said to remain true to Lotus’ core pillars of lightness, performance, and driving purity. The demand for Lotus’ cars is still rising in China and Japan, and a new model is speculated to considerably accelerate sales in the USA, Europe, Middle East, and Asia.

 

Design accord

28 March, 2025

You can’t get much more of an art deco car than a Cord — so much so that new owners, Paul McCarthy and his wife, Sarah Selwood, went ahead and took their Beverly 812 to Napier’s Art Deco Festival this year, even though the festival itself had been cancelled.
“We took delivery of the vehicle 12 days before heading off to Napier. We still drove it all around at the festival,” says Paul.
The utterly distinctive chrome grille wrapping around the Cord’s famous coffin-shaped nose, and the pure, clean lines of the front wing wheel arches, thanks to its retractable headlamps, are the essence of deco. This model, the Beverly, has the finishing touch of the bustle boot that is missing from the Westchester saloon.

Motorman: When New Zealand built the Model T Ford

21 March, 2025

History has a way of surrounding us, hidden in plain sight. I was one of a group who had been working for years in an editorial office in Augustus Terrace in the Auckland city fringe suburb of Parnell who had no idea that motoring history had been made right around the corner. Our premises actually backed onto a century-old brick building in adjacent Fox Street that had seen the wonder of the age, brand-new Model T Fords, rolling out the front door seven decades earlier.
Today, the building is an award-winning two-level office building, comprehensively refurbished in 2012. Happily, 6 Fox Street honours its one time claim to motoring fame. Next door are eight upmarket loft apartments, also on the site where the Fords were completed. Elsewhere, at 89 Courtenay Place, Wellington, and Sophia Street, Timaru, semi-knocked-down Model Ts were also being put together, completing a motor vehicle that would later become known as the Car of the Century.