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UK looks to change classic car parameters

26 September, 2016

As it stands in the UK, any car built prior to 1960 is exempt from the MOT (the equivalent of our WOF) process. Effectively, the powers that be have entrusted those in the driver’s seat of old cars to keep them in such a condition that they are roadworthy — as one might with their own classic car. 

These same powers have recently announced a move to shift this bracket forward 17 years, and make exempt from MOTs all vehicles over 40 years of age. Let that sink in. All vehicles over 40 years old could be driving around on the roads of England with bald tyres, and featuring rust as the main adhesive between body and chassis. I’m just imagining what might occur in New Zealand if these same rules were put in place — actually, it mightn’t change much. The majority of early and mid-’70s cars that don’t growl or turn heads are on their last legs, being driven on country roads without WOFs in place anyway.

What do you think the impact of these rules will be? Do you agree with them? Tell us in the comments below.

Image: BoostCruising

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.