Cars

After School Session

After School Session is Chuck Berry’s debut studio album, released in May 1957 by Chess Records. It compiles twelve tracks recorded across five sessions at Universal Recording Corporation in Chicago between May 1955 and January 1957. Most songs had previously appeared as singles. The album features Chuck Berry on vocals and guitar, Johnnie Johnson on piano, and contributions from Willie Dixon, Fred Below, L. C. Davis, Jasper Thomas, Ebby Hardy, Otis Spann, Jimmy Rogers, and Jerome Green. Steel guitar appears on 'Deep Feeling'. The sequencing reflects single release order, not recording chronology. It arrived during Berry’s peak commercial and creative period, when he was already an established star with hit records, film appearances, and a touring career.

Double Nickels on the Dime

Double Nickels on the Dime is a 45-song double LP by Minutemen, released July 1984 on SST Records. Recorded in two sessions at Radio Tokyo Studios with Ethan James, it mixes punk, funk, country, spoken word, and jazz. Inspired by Hüsker Dü’s Zen Arcade, the band adopted a car-themed concept, assigned each member a side (with 'Chaff' as the fourth), and incorporated lyrics from friends including Henry Rollins and Joe Carducci. It was mixed overnight on eight-track for $1,100. Themes include the Vietnam War, racism, working-class life, and linguistics.

Humain, trop humain

Humain, trop humain (1973) is a French observational documentary co-directed by Louis Malle and René Vautier, filmed inside a Citroën car plant. With no narration, interviews, or music, it records the rhythms of assembly-line work — shifts, tools, gestures, pauses — over 73 minutes. Its power lies in sustained attention, not argument.

Two-Lane Blacktop

Monte Hellman’s 1971 road film follows unnamed racers — Driver, Mechanic, Girl and GTO — across the American Southwest in a stripped-down, near-silent contest with no clear stakes and no resolution. Shot on location over eight weeks, edited by Hellman and photographed by John Bailey, it treats motion, machinery and landscape as primary subjects, not backdrops. Its rigour is formal and philosophical: no backstory, no score, no names, no climax. Over time, it has been reassessed not as a commercial misfire but as a defining work of New Hollywood minimalism.

Days of Thunder

Tony Scott’s 1990 NASCAR romance stars Tom Cruise as a sprint-car prodigy thrust into Winston Cup racing, mentored by Robert Duvall and drawn into rivalry and romance. Shot on location with real drivers and cars, its strengths lie in visceral racing sequences, Hans Zimmer’s propulsive score, and Duvall’s grounded authority. Its weaknesses include underdeveloped relationships, thin thematic scaffolding, and a script that favours momentum over meaning. It remains a coherent, craft-led studio artefact — best appreciated as sensory experience rather than narrative inquiry.

Ross Lovegrove

Citroën DS

The Citroën DS is an industrial design for a mass-production automobile. Flaminio Bertoni co-styled it with André Lefèbvre. Paul Magès developed its hydropneumatic self-levelling suspension. It used hydropneumatic suspension and disc brakes — the first mass-production car to do so. It set new standards in ride quality, handling, and braking. It pushed the envelope in the ride vs. handling compromise possible in a motor vehicle. Its body design was aerodynamic and futuristic. Roland Barthes described it as looking as if it had 'fallen from the sky'. The DS Series 3 introduced directional headlights to automotive mass-production.

Luigi Colani

Carmageddon II: Carpocalypse Now

Carmageddon II: Carpocalypse Now is a 1998 Windows vehicular combat sequel developed by Stainless Games. It uses hardware acceleration to power a world-first fully featured physics engine, enabling detailed vehicle deformation — including fenders, spoilers, and catastrophic splitting — and replaces the original’s ‘stealworthy cars’ mechanic with universal purchase of wrecked vehicles.

Colin McRae Rally (1998 video game)

Colin McRae Rally (1998) is a Codemasters rally simulation built around the 1998 World Rally Championship. It structures progression across three difficulty tiers — Novice (F2 front-wheel-drive), Intermediate (WRC four-wheel-drive), and Expert (Group B classics) — each with distinct cars and increasing challenge. Colin McRae and Nicky Grist provide authentic voice work, with McRae serving as the tutorial instructor. The game supports LAN multiplayer for up to eight players and two-player split-screen. A cheat-enabled Easter egg parodies the Barney and Betty Hill alien abduction incident. It was distributed in North America by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment.

Forza Motorsport (2005 video game)

Forza Motorsport (2005) is a simulation racing video game developed by Turn 10 Studios for Xbox. It was the inaugural title in a Microsoft Game Studios-commissioned series. It features licensed real-world cars, real and fictional tracks, arcade and career modes, driving assists, realistic vehicle damage, and deep car tuning.

Gran Turismo (1997 video game)

Gran Turismo (1997) is a PlayStation sim racing game developed by Polyphony Digital. It emphasises realism through physics-driven handling, two distinct modes—Arcade and Simulation—and a curated roster of 140 cars from Japanese manufacturers. It was the first game to fully support the DualShock controller. It does not feature car damage. Its design prioritises mechanical fidelity over spectacle, progression over immediacy, and menu clarity over visual density.

Gran Turismo 3: A-Spec

Gran Turismo 3: A-Spec is a PlayStation 2 racing simulator built around linear, tiered progression, realistic driving physics, and graphical fidelity over breadth.

Need for Speed: Most Wanted (2005 video game)

Need for Speed: Most Wanted (2005) is a street-racing game set in the fictional city of Rockport. Players use licensed real-world cars to defeat 15 Blacklist racers, complete varied race types—including Tollbooth and Speedtrap—and evade increasingly aggressive police pursuits governed by a heat-based escalation system. Cars can be upgraded and customised in Career mode. The game features Career, Quick Race, Challenge Series, and multiplayer modes on certain console editions.

RalliSport Challenge

RalliSport Challenge is a 2002 offroad racing game developed by Rainbow Studios. It features four race types—Rally, Hillclimb, Ice Racing, and Rallycross—each defined by distinct terrain-based rules and consequences. Players progress through career mode to unlock cars, choose between Beginner (mid-rally restart) and Normal (full-rally restart) modes, and race either sequentially or against AI. It belongs to the same offroad lineage as Motocross Madness and MX vs. ATV.

Richard Burns Rally

Richard Burns Rally is a sim racing game developed by Warthog and published by SCi in 2004. It features eight cars and thirty-six rally stages modelled from real locations including Gateshead forest, Nevada, Canberra, Hokkaido, the French Alps, and the Arctic Circle. Its defining trait is an uncompromising physics engine shaped by on-location scouting, precise measurement of road width, camber and texture, and direct input from rally drivers Richard Burns and Possum Bourne. It simulates both classic and modern rallying, and is defined by high difficulty—not as a flaw, but as a consequence of its fidelity-first design.

Chrysler Chapter 11 reorganization

Ferrari

Ferrari is a racing operation that sells cars — not the reverse. Its business model depends on using road-car revenue to fund Scuderia Ferrari, which in turn validates the brand, justifies price premiums, and dictates engineering direction. It was never financially self-sustaining in racing alone. Enzo Ferrari maintained control of racing through every ownership change — including Fiat’s 1969 investment — because that control was the source of legitimacy, not the cars.

General Motors Chapter 11 reorganization

PSA Group

Hyundai Motor Company

Hyundai Motor is a state-facilitated, scale-first automaker whose power lies in integration — not invention. It controls the largest single auto plant on earth, ranks third globally by output, and sells more hybrids than EVs. Its origin story is contested across sources. Its value is in execution, not narrative.

Willys

Alfa Romeo

Alfa Romeo was not founded by Nicola Romeo. It was founded in 1910 as A.L.F.A. to acquire the assets of the failing Italian Darracq subsidiary. Romeo acquired it in 1915, took full ownership by 1918, renamed it in 1920, launched the first Alfa Romeo-branded car in 1921, won the inaugural 1925 World Manufacturers’ Championship, faced near-liquidation in 1927 due to poor investments, departed formally in 1928, and was taken over by the Italian state in 1933.

Citroën

Citroën was a French automobile manufacturer founded in 1919 in Saint-Ouen-sur-Seine. It pioneered four world-first production car technologies: front-wheel drive with unibody construction (1934), hydropneumatic self-levelling suspension (1954), modern disc brakes (1955), and swiveling headlights (1967). It also launched the 2CV in 1948, pioneering soft interconnected suspension. Citroën gained international reputation mass-producing armaments in WWI. It became the fourth-largest carmaker in the world in the 1930s, peaking in 1932 with the Traction Avant. Cost struggles aggravated by the Great Depression led to bankruptcy in 1934 and takeover by Michelin. Its double-chevron logo derived from André Citroën’s application of double helical gears, which he acquired after seeing them used by a Polish carpenter around 1900.

Seat belt

Toyota Prius

The Prius established hybrid electrification as a viable mass-production pathway—not through technical novelty alone, but by shipping, selling, iterating, and breaking even. Its real innovation was industrial execution under constraint.

Airbag

Automatic transmission

History of the automobile

The Benz Patent-Motorwagen is the first gasoline-powered automobile built in series and proven in extended real-world use. Its mechanism—four-stroke engine, belt-and-chain drive, evaporative cooling—was functional but limited. Its breakthrough was not theoretical elegance but empirical validation: Bertha Benz’s 1888 journey forced immediate, field-driven improvements. It changed nothing overnight—but it created the first reproducible template for what a car could be: a product, not a demonstration.

Crumple zone

The crumple zone is a hardware solution that redefined automotive safety by separating function across the car body: rigid for survival, deformable for energy absorption. It works. It spread. It remains indispensable.

Tesla Model X

The Tesla Model X is a battery electric mid-size luxury crossover SUV developed from the Model S platform and distinguished by falcon wing doors. It shares ~30% of its parts with the Model S—half the originally planned 60%—and weighs ~10% more. Unveiled in Hawthorne on 9 February 2012, it entered production in Fremont and began deliveries in September 2015. In 2016, it ranked seventh among the world’s best-selling plug-in cars. A 2021 refresh added the Plaid model and updated interior, powertrain, and suspension.

Van-dwelling

Alfa Romeo Giulia Sprint GT

The Giulia Sprint GT was revealed at Alfa Romeo's new Arese plant on 9 September 1963 and built until 1965, when the Sprint GT Veloce replaced it. Giorgetto Giugiaro drew its Bertone body, known as the step front for the raised edge of its bonnet. It paired an all-aluminium 1570 cc twin cam four with a five-speed gearbox and four disc brakes, and 21,902 were built.

Alfa Romeo TZ2

The TZ2 was shown at the 1964 Turin Auto Show on the Zagato stand. It swapped the TZ's light alloy body for a more streamlined fibreglass one and dropped the weight to 620 kg. It was a racing version only, with an Autodelta-prepared 1,570 cc twin plug engine, and 12 were built. Development of the TZ cars stopped at the end of 1965.

BMW 1500 Neue Klasse

The BMW 1500 was shown at the 1961 Frankfurt Motor Show and built from October 1962 to December 1964. It was a compact four-door executive saloon with the new M10 four-cylinder engine, MacPherson strut front suspension and independent rear suspension. It was the first car of the New Class, the line that arrived as BMW broke even in 1962 after years of losses.

BMW 2002

The BMW 2002 went into production in January 1968 as the larger-engined derivative of the 1966 1600-2, itself a shortened New Class saloon. It used a two-litre version of the M10 engine, and the range grew to include the fuel-injected tii, the Touring hatchback, a Baur TopCabriolet and, in 1973, Europe's first turbocharged production car.

BMW 3.0 CSL

The BMW 3.0 CSL was the homologation special of the E9 coupé range: a lighter six-cylinder car built to make BMW eligible for the European Touring Car Championship. Its winged racing form earned the nickname Batmobile.

Bugatti Type 57SC Atlantic

The Atlantic was one of the best-known bodies on the Bugatti Type 57S and 57SC. It was based on Jean Bugatti's 1935 Aérolithe concept, and the dorsal seam that began as a riveting method became its signature.

Chevrolet Corvette C6

The C6 is the sixth generation of the Chevrolet Corvette, built from 2005 to 2013. It was the first Corvette since the 1962 model with exposed headlamps, and it brought a larger passenger compartment and a 6.0 L LS2 V8 rated at 400 hp, followed from 2008 by the 6.2 L LS3. Z06, ZR1, Grand Sport and 427 Convertible versions were also built.

Chevrolet Corvette C8

The C8 is the eighth generation of the Chevrolet Corvette and the first with a rear mid-engine layout. The Stingray uses a 6.2 L LT2 V8 rated at 490 hp with an 8-speed dual-clutch gearbox and no manual option. Production began on 3 February 2020, and Z06, E-Ray and ZR1 versions followed.

Michelin Guide