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Porsche Cayenne S Diesel breaks production car towing record

14 May, 2017

For your general SUV market, towing capacity is a nice bonus, but for some it can make or break a vehicle purchase. Recognising such a necessity, and let’s be honest, selling point, Porsche has taken the new Cayenne S Diesel and hitched it up to the heaviest aircraft they could get their hands one … a 314 ton Airbus A380. 

The mammoth piece of machinery was lent to Porsche from Air France, resulting in a towed distance of 42 metres across Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris, and Porsche are claiming that this torquey wonder is just a everyday feat for Cayenne’s 4.2-litre diesel V8

It marks a new Guinness World Record for the heaviest aircraft towed by a production vehicle, with the A380 weighing in at a staggering 126.7 tons more than the previous record tow.

To put it into understandable, that equates to roughly 232 Porsche 944 race cars … don’t take our word for it though, Porsche have made sure to seal the deal in video evidence.

NZ Classic Car magazine, March/April 2025 issue 398, on sale now

23 February, 2025

An HQ to die for
Mention the acronym HQ and most people in the northern hemisphere will assume this is an abbreviation for Head Quarters. However, for those born before the mid-’80s in Australia and New Zealand, the same two letters only mean one thing – HQ Holden!
Christchurch enthusiast Ed Beattie has a beautiful collection of Holden and Chevrolet cars. He loves the bowtie and its Aussie cousin and has a stable of beautiful, powerful cars. His collection includes everything from a modern GTSR W507 HSV through the decades to a 1960s Camaro muscle car and much in between.
In the last two Holden Nationals (run biennially in 2021 and 2023), Ed won trophies for the Best Monaro and Best Decade with his amazing 1972 Holden Monaro GTS 350 with manual transmission.
Ed is a perfectionist and loves his cars to reflect precisely how they were on ‘Day 1,’ meaning when the dealer released them to the first customer, including any extras the dealer may have added or changed.

You’re the one that I want – 1973 Datsun 240K GT

21 February, 2025

In the early 1970s, Clark Caldow was a young sales rep travelling the North Island and doing big miles annually. He loved driving. In 1975 the firm he worked for asked Clark what he wanted for his new car, and Clark chose a brand-new Datsun 240K GT. The two-door car arrived, and Clark was smitten, or in his own words, he was “pole vaulting.”
Clark drove it all over the country, racking up thousands of miles. “It had quite a bit of pep with its SOHC 128 hp (96kW) of power mated to a four-speed manual gearbox,” he says. Weighing in at 1240kg meant the power to weight ratio was good for the time and its length at almost 4.5 metres meant it had good street presence.
Clark has been a car enthusiast all his life, and decided around nine years ago to look for one of these coupes. By sheer luck he very quickly found a mint example refurbished by an aircraft engineer, but it was in Perth.