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1 week ago | 
evo.co.uk | Richard Porter
When we were teenagers my brother and I had repeated and protracted arguments about who was going to go bald first. This was prompted by the conspicuous slapheadedness of our dad, and the fact he’d felt an unwelcome chill on his scalp since his mid-20s.
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1 week ago | 
evo.co.uk | Richard Porter
The VW Beetle was not an immediate success in the US. In fact, in its first year on sale there the total number sold was two. But Volkswagen kept plugging away and by the late ’50s the Bug was a roaring hit with a six-month waiting list, buoyed by clever advertising from agency DDB that sold Americans on the appeal of these funny-shaped anti-heroes.
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4 weeks ago | 
evo.co.uk | Richard Porter
Astra. It’s hard to think of a car name with such a gap between the intended connotations (celestial, magical, the twinkling glories of the universe around us) and the harsh realities (hire cars, people called Kev, medium-speed police chases). Except, perhaps, Mitsubishi Carisma. It’s equally hard to imagine that anyone has aspired to own an Astra since the aero-shape GTE of the 1980s.
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1 month ago | 
evo.co.uk | Richard Porter
The 1970s was a turbulent decade for Automobili Lamborghini. Founder Ferruccio sold his company to Swiss businessmen Georges-Henri Rossetti and René Leimer just as the oil crisis was making it harder to sell supercars. The Countach hit showrooms in 1974 but wasn’t homologated for the lucrative US market, and there were no funds to address that. Things eventually got so bad that existing Countach orders couldn’t be fulfilled in a timely manner because there wasn’t the cash flow to buy the parts.
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1 month ago | 
evo.co.uk | Richard Porter
There are many times in life you’ve probably been nervous, such as before a school exam or during an attempt to remove a new tax disc from its surround without tearing it. Fortunately, tax discs have been abolished and exams are one of those things I assume I’ll never experience in adult life, like being asked for ID in a pub or falling off a BMX.
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1 month ago | 
evo.co.uk | Richard Porter
When you’re a teenager you can never underestimate the power of a mate with a car. The year we turned 17, only my mate Bricey had his own car, a ropey Capri 1.6 bought by his dad off a man in a pub and which he promptly stuffed into the side of a lorry. Since his dad made it clear he wasn’t going to ask the man in the pub for another one, that was the end of that and the best anyone could do from then on was hope to borrow their parents’ car.
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1 month ago | 
evo.co.uk | Richard Porter
The camera roll in my phone used to be dominated by pictures of my wife and my friends. Then I got a dog. Sadly for her, a couple of years later our first child was born, and from that point on it’s been the kids that dominate the ‘recents’ album in my cloud. The only other things to get a look in are meter readings, labels of pasta sauce spotted in foreign supermarkets that appear to say TURD, and, of course, cars. Quite a lot of cars.
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2 months ago | 
evo.co.uk | Richard Porter
The original Maserati Quattroporte of 1963 was a Frua-styled, V8-powered saloon accurately summed up by the words in an Italian-market ad that said it was ‘fast, elegant, comfortable, sober’. In 1968 Citroën took control of Maserati and the following year the Quattroporte was retired without replacement.
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Feb 10, 2025 | 
spnl.org | Richard Porter
By Richard Porter, adviser on bird conservation for BirdLife international, founder of OSME, and author and co-author of several books, including Field Guide to Birds of the Middle EastStepping off the Orient Express in Istanbul in April 1966, my eyes were opened to the world of Islam. The haunting voice of the Muezzin from the Blue Mosque rang out and may have said, ‘Young man, the Middle East is now your ornithological and conservation playground’. So begins my magical journey.…….
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Feb 7, 2025 | 
evo.co.uk | Richard Porter
It’s sometimes said that young people aren’t interested in cars any more. In the last few years respectable publications from Forbes to The Economist have run lengthy articles about folk under 25 and their apparent disinterest in driving. The Daily Telegraph thrives on this sort of coverage, as it would since its strange transformation into a Home Counties clickbait machine.
