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Audi Quattro: all-wheel drive dominance

22 October, 2015

 

Audi Quattros have a very dear place in my heart. My first car was a 1989 Audi 90 Quattro, complete with five-cylinder 10-valve KV engine. It was fairly gutless, the drivetrain was heavy, and the engine was so far in front of the strut towers that it would understeer terribly. However, the beautiful sound that the slanted five-cylinder engine produced, the traction the five-speed all-wheel drive gearbox gave you, and the quirk of owning an older European vehicle makes it a car that I’ll remember for years to come.

Manuel Leon Minassian has been a fan of the Audi Quattro since he was young. He tells tales of spotting them parked outside his school as a teenager and the feelings it gave him. Now he has his very own Audi Quattro coupe, the UR-Quattro, complete with the 10-valve turbocharged five-cylinder engine — a truly iconic Quattro that is already classed as a collector’s item. Watch the video Petrolicious produced about Manuel’s passion for the Audi brand, and his own Quattro coupe.

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.