Quirky Racer

Back in Ye Olde Days in the Racist Republic, the top tax rate was 48%, and with a National Sales Tax of 14% (on everything including food), you didn’t get much of your paycheck left for any of the pleasures and indulgences of life.

So what employers did was offer most employees a company car — which wasn’t taxed — as part of their total compensation along with a “fleet” credit card to cover all fuel and maintenance costs, and let me tell you, it was brilliant.  (Do the math for yourselves, adding up the car payment, insurance, running costs and depreciation, and see what you end up with.  The number will stagger you.)

Now not everyone qualified for such largess, of course, but if your job involved activities like calling on clients, fetching office supplies each month or visiting field offices, you qualified.  Senior management, of course, also got cars because of the “prestige” of their jobs (even though they were the ones who could well afford not to have one, the bastards, but that’s corporate inequity for you).

Anyway, the company was usually very strict about who drove the cars — you couldn’t let your wife drive it to get groceries, for example — because in most cases the insurance only covered the actual employee.  So if the car was involved in a wreck and you weren’t the driver, say hello to massive damages and (probably) termination.

As for the cars themselves, the model you got was very dependent on your place in the hierarchy of the company, and most companies simply gave you the car that your predecessor had driven, or if it was too old (usually around 2 years or 50,000 miles or so), you could get a new one from an approved list.

Well, my company car was once in the shop for some rather major repairs that would take at least a week to be done, and so I approached my boss and asked what the company was going to do about it.  He called up the company accountant, and was told that one of the other guys at my level in the company would be away on leave for a couple of weeks, so I should just get the keys from him and use his car in his absence.

I must confess to feeling somewhat apprehensive about this, because said vacationer was a slob of the first order — his office looked like he hosted daily food fights and small animal sacrifices — so I got his keys and walked down to the underground parking garage, prepared to run screaming.

However, to my amazement, not only was Fred’s Saab clean, but it was spotless, looking brand new.  (I should have known;  included in approved “maintenance” was a six-monthly full detailing of the interior, and he must have just done it the day before he left.)

But that wasn’t all.  Among the VW Golfs, Passats and Mitsubishis in that group of approved cars, he’d somehow managed to wangle himself one of these:

Yup;  it was a Saab 900 Turbo, the one that came out with a “remodel” in 1984.

Bloody hell, the thing was a rocket (and especially so when compared to my staid Opel Kadett a.k.a. Chev Cavalier stationwagon, with its anemic 1500cc un-turbo’d engine).

The Saab was also a sharp-looking silver (as in the pic), whereas my Opel was… bamboo-yellow.  (Hey, it was the only one available at the time and remember, it was FREE.)

Anyway, I drove that Saab for nearly two weeks, and boy did I love it.  What amazed me was its roadholding, which was better than any car I had driven before, and only bettered by my next company car (promotion!), a BMW 325i.

I don’t know how well the 900 Turbo fared in the U.S., sales-wise, but I’m told that it didn’t do well.  A pity:  it should have blown all American cars of similar type off the roads.  The only problem, as I see it, was that we Murkins loves us our big-ass engines, and even with a turbo, the Saab’s little 2-liter fourbanger probably did not have the allure of the typical mega-liter V8s from Chrysler, Chevy or Ford.

Me, with my fondness for small, peppy engines?  I loved that Saab with a passion, and only getting the promotion to Beemer-level prevented me from nagging the boss for one.

I have since learned that while the Saab wasn’t that popular in the U.S. market as a whole, its actual user base was almost fanatical in their devotion to it.

Can’t say I blame ’em;  for two weeks I was one of them.  Hell, I’d take a new one now, if I could.

Flight Of Fantasy

So what car did Ian Fleming’s James Bond really drive?

Forget that Aston Martin / Lotus / BMW nonsense;  Bond was a Bentley man.

And when you have an actual car designer who was a devoted Bond fan in his youth… well, you get this wonderful creature, handbuilt and derived from another Bentley model altogether.

Never mind that Ian Fleming’s description of said Bentley never existed;  Our Hero Car Designer (Tony Hunter) just went ahead and designed and built his Bentley pretty much from the writer’s description — and the result is a one-of-a-kind, snorting, roaring beauty.

Old W.O. would have approved, mightily.

So would (the real) James Bond.

Sublime Beauty

Please watch just the first 8 minutes or so of this video, and then tell me why I shouldn’t lust after an Arnholt-Bristol:

Good grief, they’re beautiful.  And spendy.  Typically, they run for well over a quarter-million dollars, when you can find one.

Quality + scarcity + performance… you get the picture.

And speaking of the above features, the other two cars featured later in the video aren’t bad, either.

Informed List

Iain Tyrell talks about his favorite cars.  Unsurprisingly, cars that inspired him as a young man get on his list:

1. Lamborghini Miura
2. Ferrari Daytona
3. Fiat Dino Spider
4. Rolls Royce Camargue
5. W.O. Bentley 4.5-liter Supercharged “Blower”
6. 1983 Toyota Supra 2.8i
7. Chevy Corvette C3
8. 1914 Rolls Royce 40/50 Silver Ghost
9. Rover SD1
10. Jaguar XJC 5.3C
11. Lamborghini Espada
12. Fiat 130 Coupé,
13. Mercedes-Benz 300 SEL 6.3
14. Mercedes-Benz 450SEL 6.9
15. 1965 BMC Mini Cooper S Mark 1
16. 1912 Stutz Bearcat 6.4-liter
17. Bristol 411/412
18-20. 1963 Citroen DS/CS/SM 2.5-liter

Even if you disagree with his choices — and there are some surprises — you can’t really take issue with his rationale for their inclusion.

I have to say that if some of the older ones were remade today, using better build quality, steel and electrics — hello Bristol 411 and Rover SD1, for instance — I’d grab one in a heartbeat.

The No-Sales Company

To the surprise of absolutely nobody, this has happened:

Jaguar sales take a nosedive after fierce backlash to ‘woke’ brand

Jaguar sales have nosedived by more than a quarter in the last year following the legendary British car marque’s dramatic ‘woke‘ rebrand. 

The company was mauled for ditching the iconic ‘growler’ badge, used for decades on grilles and bonnets, and replacing it with a curved geometric ‘J’ badge.

Other controversial changes included unveiling a bright pink concept car, which was aimed at updating Jaguar’s image for the electric age. 

But design experts and Jag fans ridiculed the makeover, branding it ‘cultural vandalism’ and the ‘most destructive marketing move ever’.

Now new industry registration figures released by parent company, Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) revealed the number of cars sold by the Indian-owned firm fell by 12,459 to just 33,320 in 2024.

Fear not, however:

…but carmaker’s classic Range Rover and Defender models are still popular

Meanwhile, sales of JLR’s Range Rover SUV have boomed, with the firm championing ‘strong wholesale growth’ for the 12 per cent increase during the quarter compared to a year earlier. 

Sales of classic Range Rovers rose by 22 per cent, while the Sport and Evoque models rose by 17 per cent and 15 per cent respectively. Defender sales also surged by 13 per cent, while Discovery sales increased by 1.5 per cent. 

Which leads us to this tragic scenario:

Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of wokistas.

About That Beauty Thing

New Wife and I have a Saturday morning ritual which involves me making us tea and coffee and bringing the laptop to bed, where we read the online news and browse a few websites together.

The first thing we look at is this here website, because she doesn’t have time to read it during the week, so we scroll back while she gets a Whole Week Of Kim in one gulp, so to speak.  (And yet she still stays with me, which is a miracle, quite frankly.)

Anyway, our first read this past Saturday was my post about beauty and the differing definitions thereof.

I should point out that New Wife has if anything more conservative tastes than I do, and anything that reeks of “flashy” or “loud” makes her nose turn up in disgust.  Needless to say, she thought all the ’68-’72 cars I pictured were “dreadful” and “disgusting” except for the E-type (and even that gets only a begrudging pass from her).

One of the other websites we visit each week is C.W.’s Daily Timewaster, which on this occasion featured this vision of loveliness, a Jaguar Mk II from the early 1960s:

This she pronounced as the most beautiful car ever made, because it was classy (inside and out).

By her terms, of course, it is the most beautiful car ever made — because she thinks that almost all sports cars are “flashy”, and the family saloon car is the sine qua non  of automotive desirability.

I would actually agree with her, because as 4-door saloon cars go, the Mark II is undoubtedly exquisite, especially when compared to others of its ilk and era both European and American.  (With its 3.4-liter engine, it’s also plenty powerful, which she sniffily dismisses with “If you’re interested in that sort of thing”.)

And in case you’re interested in which sports car she would appreciate were we to win the lottery, it’s this one, the 1964 Mercedes 230SL W113 (“Pagoda”):

Can’t really fault her on that one, either.  (I’d prefer the later-model W113 280 SL because MOAR POWAH, but she’s unmoved by that, as we’ve seen before.)