Raging bull: Lamborghini sells record number of vehicles in 2015

3 February, 2016

You know the world is doing OK when Lamborghini announce that they’ve sold more cars in 2015 than any other year in the last 53 years, with their 2015 total hitting 3245 vehicles. According to the company this number stands to grow with the addition of the Urus, a supercar crossover with a 4.0-litre twin-turbo V8 engine. Lamborghini expects to sell around 3000 units of this vehicle each year alone, which will double their already impressive sales record.

As part of the Volkswagen Group, Lamborghini have some of the lowest sales figures, with only Bugatti coming in lower, due to the production of multimillion-dollar production vehicles. Even Bentley sell 11,000 units a year, blowing Lamborghini out of the water. Ferrari are currently selling 7000 units a year, which is double that of Lamborghini.

With this many more Lamborghinis floating around, I wonder if we’ll get more press vehicles?

 

Design accord

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

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.