Description of car models from around the world and their history.
Today’s Bentleys are some of the most lavish cars available, with a decades-long reputation as the pinnacle of the British motor car. The company’s founder, Walter Owen Bentley (known as “W.O.”), was an engineer who was concerned about engine performance and reliability when he began his own company in London in 1919. Born in 1888, […]
The Kilowatt project wasn’t the end of electric vehicles for Victor Wouk. He continued his research and came to the conclusion that batteries as a power source were not practical. Instead, he advocated a hybrid – electric motor and internal combustion engine – as the answer to America’s pressing pollution problems. Wouk’s chance came in
Fiat (Fabbrica Italiana di Automobili Torino, or the Italian Car Factory of Turin) was founded on July 11, 1899, by Giovanni Agnelli, and quickly established itself in almost every automotive sector. Its specialty in small cars began in the 1930s, and continues today. The company has owned Ferrari and Lancia since 1969, Alfa Romeo since
As the fifties drew to a close another company was preparing to launch an electric car on to the American market. Bankrolled by an ambitious would-be motor magnet, the Henney Kilowatt had a powertrain built by a vacuum cleaner company that was installed in the body of a Renault Dauphine. Quite why the Henney Motor
The French, too, were revisiting the electric car after the Second World War. The Symetric (also known as the Arbel or Symmetric-Paris) was a relatively sophisticated four-wheel drive hybrid design, which harked back to the country’s glory days of the Krieger automobile. Lightweight, thanks to plastic bodywork, the car used a 4-cylinder gasoline engine to
After the Second World War, Japan was in ruins. With the exception of Kyoto, all the large cities and towns were severely damaged. To the casual observer Tokyo looked indistinguishable from Hiroshima or Nagasaki – just mile upon mile of bombed and burnt-out buildings. The transport infrastructure and big factories had ceased to exist. Allied
Of electric cars in America there was virtually nothing. However, on the other side of the Atlantic, the British had discovered a new use for electric vehicles: household deliveries. Battery-powered vans and light trucks often had a greater payload capacity than their internal combustion-engined rivals and were used to ferry milk, eggs, bread and coal
If the electric car was doomed to failure 100 years ago, what of its commercial equivalent? Initially, electric trucks did well in the market. Fleet managers preferred them over unreliable and noisy gasoline rivals and, to start with, their modest pace was acceptable to an industry where horse traction had been the norm. By 1905,
By the 1920s, virtually every electric car manufacturer had gone out of business or thrown in the towel and moved on to making gasoline-powered cars. In the space of just two decades the electric car had gone from a technology that, in the words of Electrical World magazine, ‘has no rival’ to being utterly redundant.
The Milburn Wagon Company knew a thing or two about large-scale production. George Milburn was born in Alston, Cumbria, in 1820. He emigrated to Canada before moving across the border to the United States of America in 1835. A successful businessman who owned hotels and property, George started the Milburn Wagon Company to manufacturer farm