The Hongqi Century Star is a popular car with China’s government and officials. Based on the old Audi 100 of the early 1990s, the Hongqi is made by China’s First Auto Works or FAW. 80% of the Hongqi car is locally produced; it still has a very Audi look about despite a new grill treatment.
Hongqi means “red flag” and the Hongqi century star is China’s own luxury car, with stretch and convertible versions also being produced. FAW also make new VWs and Audi’s locally in China for VW. Volkswagen have other partnerships in China producing various VW and Audi products mainly for the local market. Recently some VW products made in China are being exported to other countries around the world including the Polo small car.
The Taylor Aerocar is one of the most famous flying cars ever built. First designed by Moulton Taylor in 1949 it was a time when popular science magazine was predicting that everyone would own a flying car by the year 2000. Although six prototypes of the Aerocar car were built it never entered mass production but it did gain a bit of interest from Ford at the time making it one of the few aeroplane car combos to even come close to being produced. The idea behind the Aerocar was that once you reach the airport you could fold up the wings and drive it back to your own garage. Amazingly all six prototypes survive today with an Aerocar 1 on display at the EAA AirVenture Museum in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, Golden Wings Museum at Blane, Minnesota and at the Kissimmee Air Museum. Florida. An Aerocar 3 (pictured) is on display at Seattle’s Museum of Flight. The Aerocar located in Florida is flying today was once owned by actor Bob Cummings and was used in his 1960s TV program. Taylor went on to design an amphibious aircraft in 1969 known as the Coot that still is being constructed by home builders across the world.
The first in our series of the world’s worst cars is one of the worlds worst cars mated to part of a plane to become the AVE Mizar. It was a project by a former Northrop engineer in 1973 to develop a flying car, It consisted of a Cessna Skymaster rear attached to the Ford Pinto with production scheduled to start in 1974. AVE planed to sell the Mizar for between US $18,300 and US$29,000. A few prototypes were built but the project ground to a halt when the developers of the Mizar were killed when the the wings of the craft broke away from the car mid flight resulting in a fiery crash. This would have to be the first time a Ford Pinto’s explosion was not caused by someone ramming them from behind. The National Transportation Safety Board reported in addition to poor design and loose parts, that bad welds were partly responsible for the crash, a bad idea was naturally assumed.
Liberace was well known for collecting high priced toys like pianos, jewellery, fur coats and exotic cars. He generally liked to make a grand entrance on stage in one of his fancy cars with most of them modified to give it that Liberace touch. The one in the video above is a rare Rolls Royce featuring thousands of mirror tiles across its body. Today this car along with a hand-painted red, white and blue Rolls-Royce, a roadster covered in Austrian rhinestones as well as cars from a London cab to a heavily modified VW Beetle feature in the Liberace Museum in Las Vegas.
With the launch of the FG Falcon tomorrow we thought it only fitting to to check out a ford concept car today to see what the future may hold for the brand. The Ford Airstream Concept uses a plug-in hydrogen hybrid fuel cell to deliver 41 miles per gallon which is pretty good news if it ever makes its way into a production car, what we hope never does make its way into tomorrow’s Ford’s is the LCD display of an open fire, I mean what were they thinking. Sure concept cars are suppose to be way out there, but a display of open fire! Perhaps they thought it was more environmentally friendly than the real open fires we will be using in our cars of the future.
If you have ever wanted to go for a drive under the sea the sQuba is the car for you. This aquatic vehicle is going to be on display at the Geneva Motorshow which starts on the 6th of March. The car can actually drive underwater up to about 10 metres. Designed by Rinspeed who are from Switzerland and have made quiet a few interesting show cars over the years, the vehicle can also be used on land as a car. The car uses two Sea Bob jet drives and have special louvers which control the water intake to help the vehicle drive through water. The little sports car looking vehicle was designed to be open top for safety concerns as it was thought opening the doors underwater might cause a problem and the open design also assisted buoyancy. We are not sure how much or when we might be able to have one but we are sure there are plenty of people who would love a novel vehicle like this.
When designers come up with new car designs you would think they would go out to market research just to check that the public like it and then do a few tweaks. Even if they stuff up you would think management would say.. hey no one is going to like that and send them back to the drafting table, well what went on here? The AMC Pacer would have to be the ugliest car of all time, there isn’t a bit you could like. There have been several polls for the ugliest car over the year but the Pacer comes up tops most times, The AMC Gremlin (its sister) always ranks high, as does the Ford Pinto, The Chevy Aztek and the poor old Edsel from Ford. The Pacer was a two door compact produced between 1975 and 1980 it more resembled a jellybean on wheels than a car. You might remember the “Mirthmobile” in the Hit 90’s movie Wayne’s World and they had a stretched and convertible one in the sequel. The car also came in a station wagon form and with lovely wood panelling that was also just as hideous. The only thing I can’t understand with the whole Pacer story is AMC made 280,000 of them, who would have bought one?
If you have a Pacer and think we are being a bit unfair or have another ugly car to note drop us a line!
The Ford Falcon is Ford Australia’s flagship with 48 plus year history, Before becoming a uniquely Australian model in the late 1960’s the early vehicles were based on the 1959 US Ford Falcon. The same thing happend in Argentina, but unlike Ford Australia they kept pretty much the same design with a few modern tinkers up until 1991. Nearly half a million Argentinan Ford Falcons were produced, there was a facelift in the 1980’s which morphed a Ford Cortina like front and rear to the car and a new dash panel which looked like it came straight out of the European Cortina. The Falcon was very popular with the Police in Argentina and trusted design proved fairly reliable. Today Argentina sells many of the European Ford products like Mondeo, Focus, Fiesta and a facelifted version of the Ford Ka, which appears to be only for the South American market.
For more information: http://www.todofalcon.com.ar/
The Obvio 828 is from Brazil and after a few delays will go on sale later this year for a street price of about $14,000 US. The cute little vehicle is being marketed as a high performance microsport car with seating for three, side by side on a what has been described as a comfy sofa. The car’s overall length is only 2650 mm long and weighs in at only 600kg and has most of the features you would want from a modern car with exceptional safety and good comfort and an impressive aluminum chassis . The car has been developed by Lotus Engineering and will feature an engine which will run on any mix of ethanol and petrol and has a manual ZF continuously variable transmission and the engine is built by Tritec which is a joint venture between BMW and DaimlerChrysler. There will be an electric plug-in version released early next year but the price will skyrocket to about $49,000 US. It will be able to reach speeds of 120mph and will charge in around 5 hours using some innovative lead cobalt battery technology. If you think the outside is a bit out there, wait until you see the inside, the body colours move inside and it looks very funky. There are going to be a huge range of add on accessories including IMobile which is a internet system and plenty of MP3 and video ad ons, they are really going to appeal to the beautiful and young who want to be seen.
Russian vehicles are so interesting and ’stylish’, so lets do another, Today it’s the Volga, based on the Gaz-24 first introduced in 1967 the GAZ Volga has been in production constantly since then and has been modernized several times over its lifespan but keeps the same basic shell as the 1967 cars. While traditionally used by taxi cabs, the police, the KGB and party officials some Volga’s were sold to private buyers and since the fall of the Soviet Union the GAZ company have been trying to lure more buyers away from modern imports to the home grown Volga. Recently GAZ announced they were getting out of car production to concentrate on trucks, but then back flipped by buying the rights to the US Chrysler Sebring platform. They plan to develop new cars of the Chysler platform while continuing production of the Volga, targeting the retro vehicle market. The video above is a Russian motoring show road test of the late 90s GAZ-3110 we don’t know any Russian but we are sure this guy is as funny as Jeremy Clarkson.
Click to the next page to see the very special current model known as a GAZ-31105
