Description of car models from around the world and their history.
Vauxhall KN 1909 Before World War II, Vauxhall, still very much with us today as General Motors’ British subsidiary, was as eager as any maker of sports cars to prove its products on the racetrack. At the newly opened Brooklands circuit in Surrey, the company wanted to show that a relatively “ordinary” car could reach […]
The electric vehicle is not a recent development. In fact, the electric vehicle has been around for over 100 years, and it has an interesting history of development that continues to the present. The early electric vehicles, such as the 1902 Wood’s Phaeton, were little more than electrified horseless carriages and surreys.The Phaeton had a
The first mass-produced V8 engine Cadillac is one of America’s oldest makes, and it has been mass-producing cars of quality ever since the company was founded in Detroit by Henry Leland in 1902. For more than 90 years, Cadillac has been at the core of General Motors (GM), and it remains the aspirational luxury brand
Asteam-powered car seems anachronistic today, but when identical twins F. E. and F. O. Stanley began making them in 1897, it was the most proven motive technology around. Early Stanley cars featured a tubular chassis frame with a light, wooden buggy body. The vertical boiler, under the double seat, at first featured copper fire tubes,
Strictly speaking, only one Rolls-Royce is named Silver Ghost: the unique, silver-painted, 40/50 hp open tourer with silver trim that was used in 1907 for a 15,000-mile (24,000-km) reliability trial. The title has, however, been retrospectively applied to all examples of the 40/50 hp made between 1906 and 1925-the model that established Rolls-Royce as the
The history of Mercedes is also the history of the car itself. The companies founded by the two German pioneers of the internal combustion engine and the automobile – Gottlieb Daimler and Karl Benz – came together to form a marque that now makes some of the world’s most advanced and desirable cars. Many Automotive
The Model T led an industrial and social revolution, introducing massproduction techniques to car manufacturing and motorizing the United States. Thanks to Henry Ford’s 1913 introduction of a moving assembly line, production hit 1,000 per day in 1914, and U.S. output peaked in 1923, when two million “Tin Lizzies” were made. More than 15 million
The neighbors might not have realized it, but there was something of a “Eureka!” moment at 58 Bagley Avenue, Detroit in the early hours of June 4, 1896. At about 4am, Henry Ford’s first car clattered into life and set off on its maiden journey along the city’s dark and deserted streets. He was led
You can probably blame the French count Gaston de Chasseloup-Laubat for our global obsession with covering ground as quickly as possible. In 1898, he drove his rickety Jeantaud electric car on a stretch of road near Paris, and was thrilled when timekeepers confirmed that he had reached a speed of 39.24mph (63.15kph). As no one
The Porsche name first hit the headlines in 1900, when a groundbreaking new vehicle was unveiled at the World Exhibition in Paris. The 24-year-old Austrian-born engineer Ferdinand Porsche was already showing his brilliance, in this case with electric power. At the time, electric cars were just as popular as gas-fueled vehicles. The Lohner coachbuilding company