I’ve always had a thing for Volkswagen, after all, I spent a good coupla years driving a Golf all around Singapore. Memories of balsa & foam models, girlfriends, pizza, sleeping on the wheel, knocking into curbs and the like surface in abundance and not always together. One thing that does stick out beside the trivialities is the fact that the Golf was a really great and fun car to drive. I could really throw it around and it managed to handle it rather comfortably. Including that one time I went 160km/h on a 80km/h road. This is not a confession. I only truly realised how awesome Europe’s best selling car for eons was, when we swapped over to a Mitsubishi Pajero Mini, with a pathetic, less than a litre engine and loose rear wheel drive steering.

In any case, I was on the bus today and I managed to catch a glimpse of not one but two VW Eos on the road, stuck in traffic. One was classic silver and the other champagne gold. One had two skinhead chumpy dudes whilst the other a rather more elegant lady. What really caught my eye was the styling of the car itself. In either permutation, it managed to look quite classy, drawing a distinction from everything else around it. Granted everything else included a lot of Toyotas but still. Its not the flashiest one around nor quite the most expensive but it looks good. Plus, its a bloody convertible so its always gonna be awesome. Heck, even the skinhead chumps didn’t look that chumpy.

I’m not the only one getting hot under the collar. It was actually awarded the best exterior design award by a local car mag right here in Oz. The pictures don’t truly justify the understated beauty of this gentle fawn. Your eyes would do well to feast upon one in all its clanging metal flesh.

The other day, my peasant ass was walking into work, which means a 30 minute hike up a fluffing mountain that meanders like a hippie on mojo and there’s this bit where I cling onto a precipice with a harness homemade outta leftover plastic bags and dental floss. I’m kidding of course. About the 30 minutes that is. It’s probably more like 29.47 minutes if I wanted to be exact.

Anyway, the main thing was, I saw the non peasant ass of the general manager flash by but it wasn’t his ass I was staring at but his car’s ass. It was fucking smoking and I seriously wanted to tap it but I couldn’t because I was preoccupied with the crossover maneuveur I had to perform at the final part of the climb into work which involved hypnotising the llama security taskforce as well as the plate spinning and unicycles on one foot. Also, I would like to categorically state that my staring at my boss’s car’s ass is totally no-homo.

It was a Volvo C30. What I loved about it was the height of the rear window. It goes down past the brake lights, kinda like when chicks wear dem low slung hipster jeans like 5 years ago and you can always see the ass crack but wayyyyy classier. The clarity was refreshing and somehow just made it seem cooler.

Back in the 80s of course, Volvo were basically mobile bomb shelters that bust shit up on the roads. Pure rectangular bricks where functionality was paramount. Then in the late 90s, they started sexing it up with that bum line, you know, the woovy line on the V70. In fact, its still visible on most of the current range and on the C30 as well. And now, they’re doing it again, bumping that ass.

A couple weeks ago, I ran across an article on a guy named Shai Agassi, who has absolutely no relation to the tennis legend. Instead, this is a guy that WIRED thinks might just change the world. Agassi’s idea is to replace existing petrol driven motor vehicles with electric ones, which isn’t fundamentally new at all. The difference is he’s coming up with the whole infrastructure to make it happen and how it is to be marketed. He wants to manage and control the demand for energy. His company, Better Place, is working together with Renault and Nissan to make the ubiquity of the electric vehicle a reality rather than some poncey celebrity environmental consciousness fad.

So electric cars. Are they all that much better? Whilst they produce zero emissions, won’t the fuel burnt to create said electricity still be an issue? Some argue that the pollution would at least be concentrated to power plants whilst others also look into the fact that alternative energy sources are becoming increasingly viable. I’m leaning a lot more to the latter these days, being the eternal optimist.

Agassi’s plan is radical in that he intends to fuck over the petroleum companies as well as major car manufacturers. He intends to convince whole cities and nations to build an infrastructure system to accommodate electric cars, including recharge stations and a grid network that can move the electricity freely from point to point, to account for changes in demand and supply. You pay for the electricity and lease the car instead, possibly even borrowing it for free. Its a bit like using a car like a mobile phone, where you have a monthly subscription or some such. Recharging can be done faster than at present, by changing battery packs at recharge stations or recharging at home overnight.

The point is, we all know burning fossil fuels is bad for the environment. That and just as important, it doesn’t last forever. So we need to be looking at a solution and they’re all around. The question is why aren’t things happening? One reason is the pace of technological advancement and the other is simply politics. Agassi’s plan, detailed more on the Better Place website, simply throws such problems aside and sounds pretty darn convincing in talking about how to really get the wheels rolling. It already is in fact.

I am awaiting the Jonathan Ive designed iCar sometime circa 2015 that can accommodate my 2015 version iMac (which is actually the iDSLR + iPod + iCamcorder + iWallet + iPhone + iKeys + iMac) whilst I dream about some iArabica to go with some iSourdough with iRoastPork, iceburgLettuce, iDJon and an Apple chutney.

An old Beyond Tomorrow vid but you get the idea… Its about the compressed air car engine and the 2 inventors that came up with it. MDI is a company headed by Guy Negre, a Frenchman who came up with an idea to make a car run on compressed air back in ‘97. Engineair is a Melbourne based company run by Angelo Di Pietro that also has a similar idea, only his engine can be held up by a baby.

Both engines run on compressed air, promising decent performance when commercially available. The other pluses include zero emissions and cheap, easy refueling. At first glance, I have to say I was skeptical and still am somewhat but I hope its legit.

Ok, so of course compressed air doesn’t come without the use of electricity or burning of fossil fuels but the thing is, not all of it needs to come from that. It could come from solar/wind/hydro/nuclear stations as well. Pollution would get concentrated where the power stations would be and roads would probably get a whole load cleaner.

Another thing is safety. With compressed air tanks under the car, the engineers’ solution is to use carbon fibre tanks, which splinter under duress but do not create shrapnel. I still wonder if there’s gonna be a big bang if that happens anyway and you get forced through your windscreen by compressed air.

Then there’s performance. Will it ever be possible to have a compressed air car run like an Bugatti? Perhaps only time will tell. Tata Motors of India is apparently already in contract with MDI to try to actually produce the Air Car soon-ish.

Last week, I was watching this movie where the main character has a sort of tank he called a “batcar”. I was also able to see this same car in the metal when I went on a trip to the Gold Coast recently. Now I can’t tell you where to buy a tank, but I can tell you that you could get something cooler.

Bertone doesn’t make tanks. They just make really awesome cars. Cars much like the one you see below. This small, family run Italian company has been designing cars for close to a century now for the likes of Fiat, Alfa Romeo, Lamborghini and Ferrari amongst many other carmakers. They’re soon to be sold due to financial difficulties but hopefully, they’ll keep on keepin’ on.

The BAT 11 is a new concept released recently that Bertone designed for Alfa Romeo. Its a revision of 3 older models made in the 50s, hence the distinct retrolicious streamlining.

The back end of the new BAT also looks pretty good as you can see. Apparently, they also ship with a free female as well.

Its been 7 years after the Mini and 9 years after the Beetle, but Fiat have finally revived the classic Fiat 500. With its kooky cute looks and retro leanings, its the latest challenger in the quirky car segment and judging by how critics have taken things, its better late than never.

The new Fiat 500, hot chick optional extra.

It doesn’t really look anything at all like the old 500 but its still really cute and cuddly, kinda like a little gummy bear that you wanna chomp the head off of. Like the Beetle and the Mini, it also comes with customizable graphic options aside from the cutesy colors. I personally like the white version myself. The interiors also look suitably funky from whatever photos I managed to check out.

I had no idea Fiat was Italian until they put 3 in a row. Only Italians park like that.

I suppose it suffers from being less iconic like its old counterpart. In contrast the new Mini and Beetle really do look like the older versions to some extent. Not even considering the fact that the 500 was always less famous compared to the other 2 vehicles, particularly outside Europe. Still, its been well received enough to be able to have a life of its own, which may be to its benefit instead.

I don’t think its going to be the next big thing though. The design itself isn’t powerful enough to extend it beyond the price range, which is higher than Fiat’s own Punto. Which is kinda cannibalistic if you ask me. Its still cheaper than the Mini and the Beetle though, so its a decent alternative. But with bigger, cheaper options like the Yaris and Mazda 2, its gonna be a tough tough fight for this little bambino. Still, its good to see something new brought to the table.

Sitting alongside dada, mama and other words related to the Surrealist movement, my first words also included the various makes of automobiles on the street. By the time I was 5 or 6, I was pretty much able to recognize and prattle off the names as my dad drove around in a mini.

At that point in my life, Ferraris were it. They were my favouritest car in my collection of miniature die-casts, my dream car so to speak. Sleek, red objects of desire. Lambos were a close second, with Lotus a relatively distant 3rd.

As I grew older, my tastes changed, moving away from flashy sports cars to small, cute movable lawnmowers and the like for whatever absurd reason, be it environmentalism, a love for avant-garde aesthetics, bauhaus or post-punk/modernist leanings. Yes, that was complete poseur rubbish but you get the point.

I just found that sports cars were a completely worthless display of male virility ensconced in a metal shell. 99% of sports cars owners, I found to my dismay, tended to have receding, graying hairlines and seriously bad taste in women and gold chains. It seemed like the sports car was their last refuge of immaturity, the culmination of their final, desperate attempts to cling onto some fading vestige of youth. Despite the throaty engine roars, they have but limp sputters from a phallus lined with wrinkles. My deftly evolving sentient mind would have nothing to do with this grotesque, neolithic version of humanity. /spit.

Then, along comes the new Audi R8. Wonder of wonders, my eyes melted in their sockets when I first chanced upon them. This is the supercar to supercede all the sub-par cars. Initially, I was thinking this renewed interest in flashy sports cars was either a) a rekindling of my innocent boyhood manifesto of sports cars for all; or b) a sign that I’m getting old and falling into that pit of old men slowly whittling themselves away. At the moment, I’m with c), which is, the R8 is just too damn tight to be dismissed aka I’m am in complete denial of b) and way too mature to say a).

Seriously, it is beautiful, absolutely stunning. Top Gear made it car of the year 2007 for good reason. It is based off the Lambo Gallardo which is a fine specimen but one which retains a certain horny old man steez. The R8 though, transcends the hate, making me forget its a wasteful exercise in false opulence/masculine pride/internalized homophobia and allowing me to believe that it is, just a bloody beautiful car too good not to R8.

Ok that’s quite corny but its hard to see anything but amazing from its smart-esque contrasting body panel and mostly aluminium construction. It also comes with an optional B&O soundsystem just for kicks. The aggressive front end is to me, perfectly balanced, incredibly Audi in terms of language and yet incredibly sexy, which isn’t something you’d ever associate with an Audi, until now that is. Damn Germans and their repressed emotional states. This is none more so exemplified by the bum end, which is basically what all women should look up to.

Here’s the R8 besting the Guggenheim in Bilbao. Taxi for Mr. Gehry please.

Here’s a lovely ad.

And here’s another one.

I’m rather enjoying the styling on the 2008 Mazda 2, which blows all the other entry level hatches out of the water in terms of aesthetic save the Renault Megane. Overall, it still wins simply because it’s way cheaper the Megane. Recent, good reviews of its driveability also make it hard to beat.

I just saw one parked on the kerbside near my place and the first thing I can say about it is it’s small. Not the most remarkable in size (the Honda Jazz in comparison is almost an SUV) but it makes up for that with visual character. The lines running down the flanks all the way to the boot door really make it look sharpish. Its like a Yaris wearing Dior Homme circa Hedi, only way better. Which reminds me of another plus. Its not going to be half as common as the stuff you see out on the roads. Interestingly, the design of the car is inspired by Enzo Mari’s Ameland paper knife which might somewhat explain the sleek yet aggressive lines. Certainly cuts clean for me.