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2 weeks ago | 
evo.co.uk | Richard Porter
In the early 1970s Renault initiated projet VBG (‘Véhicule Bas de Gamme’ or ‘Low Range Vehicle’) with the aim of making a low-cost people’s car. This morphed, via some zany schemes involving round side windows, reversible passenger seats and on-board bean-bag chairs, into a small, functional three-door hatchback that reached the running prototype stage before being cancelled at the dawn of the ’80s.
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1 month ago | 
evo.co.uk | Richard Porter
August 1983 – Toyota announces that it has bought Lotus. The two companies have been co-operating for over a year, with Lotus getting Toyota parts for the Excel and Toyota getting Lotus engineering know-how for the Supra, but few expected this buy-out. Pundits are intrigued, purists are aghast, the entire car industry has just entered a new era.
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1 month 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 month 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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2 months 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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2 months 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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2 months 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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Mar 28, 2025 | 
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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Mar 21, 2025 | 
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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Feb 27, 2025 | 
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.
