Car Culture

The Skoda Octavia Combi vRS 245 is the holder of a new, very specific world record. However, unlike Jaguar, it’s not on the Nurburgring.

Being at the helm of a major, multi-billion dollar automaker has some perks. For Akio Toyoda, the current President of Toyota, those perks include a very cool one off car.

While the Wednesday Want typically revolves around cars, for this week’s edition we are mixing it up a bit. Instead of the traditional four (or six) wheel creations, this time around we’re going for two. Nonetheless, this motorcycle still has a connection to a prominent British automaker.

Bugatti has several awe-inspiring cars on its resume. From the Art Deco era Type 37 to the modern day Chiron and Divo, pretty much everything is amazing in some way. The subject of this week’s Want is no different with the Bugatti EB110.

There’s something cool about movie cars. In fact, we’ve featured a few in previous Wants such as the Land Rover Defender from Spectre or the 350Z from Tokyo Drift. This week we are taking a look at another film car, the Peugeot 406 from Taxi.

It might be the best hot hatch ever made, but it’s about to get better — if you can afford it.

It was only in June that LEGO released its model of the Bugatti Chiron. That 3,599-piece kit looked like a bit of a challenge, but LEGO has already one-upped it with a new model.

When you’ve just stuck two fingers up at Maranello, what’s the next step?

Another open-wheeler could be coming to the Gran Turismo series in the future. No, not a modern Formula One machine, but a 51-year old Indy 500 competitor driven by motorsports royalty.

Canada’s favorite word is “sorry”. It’s so pervasive we literally have a law on the books that uttering it isn’t an admission of guilt. But you wouldn’t know it at Canadian Tire Motorsport Park — or more affectionately, simply Mosport, its original name. No, here, about an hour outside of Toronto, one word rises up above the trees:

Badge engineering, for better or worse, is commonplace in the automotive world.

Car manufacturers spend billions ensuring that our cars can withstand the worst the weather can throw at them. They take prototypes to the world’s hottest and coldest places and wring their necks to make sure they don’t let us down.

Over the years, the Japanese auto industry has given us some incredible cars. However, one of these cars stands out to us the most. That’s why for this week’s Want we’re focusing in on the Toyota 2000GT, perhaps one of the best Japanese cars ever made.

Australian Touring Car racing is quite simply some of the best racing you could ever watch. The V8 Supercars series features four-door, family sedans packing naturally aspirated, five-liter V8 engines. These send 645hp straight to the rear wheels. With some of the closest and most intense white-knuckle racing in the world, there’s little wonder it’s so popular.

24 hour endurance races are quite simply the pinnacle of circuit racing. Man and machine are pushed to their very limit in the ultimate test of finding the perfect balance of speed and staying power. Braving the daylight cycle, the elements, and the opposition, the racing is fierce and the stakes high; surviving the entire 24 hours is the sweetest success for most of the competitors.

The 1980s and 90s saw some rather strange cars hit the roads. The emphasis was on the future and it showed in nearly every radical new design. Supercars were no exception to this either. That’s why for this week’s Want we’re taking a look at two of these cars from Vector.

Automakers spend a ton of time and money to name their products. They often want something that conveys emotion without being offensive. It’s hard work for sure; for every Lamborghini Countach, there’s a Ford Probe. But Geely thinks it’s found a solution to this — let the internet do it.

I first met Sam Mitani in London’s Heathrow airport. We were there for Gran Turismo’s 15th Anniversary — the blowout event which saw the announcement of Gran Turismo 6 — and we quickly became friends.

Nobody likes getting a traffic citation. They’re annoying, but part of driving and something many drivers get over their lifetime. But, for the most part, these citations are just a small fine. For one British tourist on holiday in Dubai though, it wasn’t just a small fine.

If you follow the Wednesday Want, you know we rather like road-going race cars. That’s why for this week we’re featuring yet another one of these awesome cars: the Mercedes-Benz CLK GTR.