25 Greatest Cars of all Time

Automobile

Drive, He Said

Numbers rule our lives. Given a chance, humans will quantify anything and everything, reducing the things we love to cold, heartless figures. Engineers live for this-it gives them a definitive "yes" or "no", a way to instantly seperate good from bad. So, too, with cars: we measure output, performance, and even the number of heads turned, all in the name of calculating end worth. Blinded by stats, people forget that numbers often lie. And so, here we give you our five favorite driver's cars-cars that entertain above all else, cars that possess that elusive, almost ethereal quality: balance. Some are fast and expensive; some are slow and cheap. But they all have one thing in common. They're great to drive.

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Automobile

Thank goodness for homologation requirements and the unbridled competitiveness of German industry. If it was to respond to Mercedes-Benz's compact new screamer, the 190E 2.3-16, and save face in 1980s European touring car racing, BMW's motorsport division had to design and build something like the first M3. Based on the successful E30 model, as the second 3-series (1984-91) was internally designated (and which itself marked a return to form for BMW), the original M3 was an instant classic. That it still tugs at our heartstrings twenty years later suggests that it probably always will.
This is, notably, in spite of the fact that all subsequent M3s have been faster, with bigger engines. The original M3 laid claim to the 2.3-liter S14, a robust and rev-happy engine whose humble cylinder count numbered only four. It revved like a banshee and rarely broke, a useful real-world combination. But many people still can't get past its paucity of cylinders.
Don't let us hear you making that mistake. The E30 M3 is that rare, latter-day example of the historic ideal-a car fit for both road and track. It reminds us, too, of what has been lost as cars get ever heavier and more powerful. The first M3 possesses the sort of balance, composure, and grace that only a lighter, smaller car can offer. Progess is by no means pitiful, with the M3's stock 192hp capable of shifting its 2,735 pounds to 60mph in just under 7 seconds. That may not be supercar fast, but it's enough to explore the underlying brilliance of its chassis. To aid the racing effort and the worthy cause of bigger tires and brakes, the M3's fenders were box-flatted. A Boeing 747-size spoiler bolted to the rear deck lid may not be to everyone's taste, but it comes in handy on the way to a 141-mph top speed and helps reduce lift.
The M3 was quite the racing car, too, winning more races than any single BMW model ever, including the German, European, and World Touring Car championships, along with endurance races such as the 24 Hours of Nurburgring and Spa.
But it is as a driver's car that we'll always cherish the M3. A key benchmark in the history of rear-wheel-drive handling excellence, it reminds us of a time when carmakers trusted drivers to control their own traction and one didn't have to drive 90Mph to start having fun. It continues to make a great daily driver, and as our well-sorted test car's owner, assistant editor Sam Smith, reminds us, it's never going to be more affordable than it is now. - Jamie Kitman

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Derek Bell

Why I love the...
My favorite has to be the Porsche 962. Without that amazing car, I would not have won four Le Mans 24 hours, three Daytona 24 hours, and two World Sports Car Championships.

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YSSMAN

I'm willing to place bets that the Chevrolet Corvette, Porsche 911, Ford Mustang, and Mercedes-Benz 300SL are all near or at the top of the list. I have a sneaking suspicion that the Volkswagen Beetle will be in the top-five as well.

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Automobile

Race car fun for the road.

The F430's allure begins with the sound. Thanks to its flat-plane crankshaft, which spreads the exhaust pulses evenly in each cylinder bank, the F430's 479-hp, 4.3-liter V8 emits a high-pitched wail unlike anything this side of a Formula 1 engine. If I were to successfully render the F430 sound track in onomatopoeia, this magazine would explode into flames right in your hands. So I won't. But I can tell you that in literal terms, it sounds something like a pair of straight-piped-Hayabusas drag-racing through the Sydney Opera House.
Adding to the aural drama, there are a pair of vaccuum-actuated muffler bypass flaps in the exhaust, one for each set of pipes, and trying to drive an F430 without triggering the flaps is like trying to get Macho Man Randy Salvage to use his indoor voice. So, that's the first addictive part of the F430 experience - that burbling, snarling, caterwauling motor gorging itself on 8500-rpm atomosphere binges just abaft your shoulder blades.
I could fill this entire space rhapsodizing about that engine, but let's move on to the F1 sequential manual transmission. You can still choose the traditional gated manual, but to me that seems like ordering an Apple iPhone and demanding a monochrome green screen. The rest of the car is cutting-edge, intended to emulate the Formula 1 experience, and the F1 transmission furthers the illusion that even when you're trundling along with a herd of Chevy Malibus on the expressway, you're really Felipe Massa fending off Alonso at Monaco. Dive into a corner, let the optional carbon-ceramic brakes hang you against your seatbelt, and the F1 transmission will crack off downshifts as fast as your left hand can pull the paddle (blipping the throttle for perfect rev-matching all the way).
Of course, we are talking about a driver's car here, and the chassis figures into that discussion every bit as much as the powertrain. On that front, the F430 isn't juts mid-engined - it's extremely mid-engined. As in, if you stand at the back bumper and pop the engine cover, you'd practically need to climb into the engine bay before you could lay a hand on the motor. And then, once you take a closer look at said hunk of mass, you notice that those red intakes are perched atop towering velocity stacks, and the actual engine block is so low that the F430's center of gravity must be somewhere in Middle Earth.
The flip side of the F430's proportions is that it puts very little sheetmetal in front of the driver, so your perspective on the world is as if you've strapped a saddle on a tiger's nose - it's all sinew and anger behind you, rapidly approaching world ahead. Grip is, of course, stupendous, but what really causes passengers to reflexively adopt a crash position is the turn in - if the rubber profile of the F430's front sidewalls were any thinner, it'd be for sale in a truck-stop vending machine.
The glory of the F430 is that it marries high technology with primitive sensory stimulation, when too often tech sublimates tactlility. Sure, the F430 sports dry-sump lubrication, adjustable traction and stability control, and a gee-whiz automated gearbox, but all that gear is subtle shading, background to the primary brushstrokes of noise, poise, and undiluted, visceral feedback. As fast as it is, the F430 enjoys instant-classic status not because of its horsepower number or skid-pad grip, but because it epitomizes Ferrari's understanding that driving pleasure is about more than speed. - Erza Dyer

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YSSMAN

I understand. Its hard to put everything in order, as there are quite a few that just meant so much to the world. Furthermore, ones that moved the entire industry forward so much. I'm interested in seeing the whole list. Didn't Top Gear do one a few years back? I seem to remember the Golf and the Beetle doing quite well...

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foamy_302

I hope it's not the Tourag

and on the Ferarri??????? ~DROOL~

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Automobile

Perfect.

Colin Chapman's most fully realized and practical production vehicle was also his greatest stroke of street-car genius. If the kartlike, rough-riding, and laughably impractical Lotus 7 was the ultimate streetworthy expression of Chapman's lightness-at-all-costs mantra, then the Elan was his masterwork, the fantastically balanced Lotus-for-the-people that behaved like a real car.
The 1962-73 Lotus Elan succeeded where the fiberglass-monocuque Lotus Elite before it had famously failed: it was fast, relatively durable, comfortable enough, and surprisingly suited to mass production. In marrying a rigid steel backbone frame to a fiberglass body, Chapman gifted the Elan with remarkable lightness and stiffness. In the same motion, he avoided the structural woes of the relatively fragile Elite, where a thick fiberglass shell bore all suspension and powertrain loads. In contrast, the Elan's engine, gearbox, suspension, and differential mounted directly to the backbone frame, leaving the bodywork virtually unstressed. As a result, the Elan's fiberglass panels were free to be as thin (and light) as was practical for a road car.
The upshot was a curb weight of just over 1,500 pounds. A 105-hp, twin-cam, 1.6-liter four lived under the hood. Four-wheel independent suspension; 145-section-width, 13-inch tires; and 4-wheel disc brakes rounded out the package.
Of course, clever engineering and light weight alone do not a driver's car make. And so we come to the Elan's greatest attribute: balance. Through a combination of carefully located mass, precisely tuned suspension, and a whole lot of Chapmanian gusto, the Elan ended up...perfect.
Everything on the Elan exudes lightness and delicacy. It starts with that spindly little steering wheel - the black-rimmed factory 3-spoker is so thin that you have no choice but to hold it with your fingertips. Couple that with effortless, quick steering, and you find yourself turning the car simply by flicking your wrists. The tiny shift knob and gear lever - a grape on the end of a drinking straw - are so small that you fear for their health. The doors, hood, and trunk lid are light enough that they take flight in the faintest of breezes.
Look: there's a corner. Turn in, and the Elan simply grips, no drama. The car changes direction if you so much as tense up the muscles in an arm. More bends come up, so you take them a little faster, and a little faster, until suddenly, almost surprisingly, the car is drifting. Four wheels are adrift, sliding equally, and four tiny tires are skittering across the pavement at thoroughly modern speeds. You might as well have been asleep for the all the talent it took.
Feedback? An endless rush of information buzzes and flows through that microscopically rimmed wheel. Get it wrong, and long before the faintest whiff of understeer shows up, the front tires telegraph their distaste. (You can actually feel their sidewalls deflecting.) The twin-cam barks a hollow, snorty cry, and you snick the shift lever --- it actually makes this noise --- with another effortless flick of the wrist. Few cars have gotten everything this right.
The Elan is nearly ideal embodiment of every sports car cliche we've got, and while other cars may be faster, smoother, and endowed with higher limits, none of them are quite as entertaining, friendly, and brain-dead easy to drive. Therein lies the Lotus's fundamental greatness. - Sam Smith

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Automobile

Car #1: The BMW E30 M3

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picklesam

i always wondered rather a modern day car say like a brand new corolla will beat the 20 year old e30 m3 performance wise?

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Wolfe

Anyway, I definitely won't argue with the Elan, either, but I do wonder why they choose the F430 over the 360 Modena. The Modena is by far the more beautiful and passionate car, and the F430 isn't a whole lot faster.

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niky

Who knows? Maybe it should have been the 355... the first "modern" Ferrari, built in response to the NSX... but then, it's hard to know where to draw that line. I'd say F430 > F360 > F355 > F348... etcetera...

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Automobile

An improbably timeless machine.

Enter a roomful of knowledgeable enthusiasts and you'll not be summarily ejected when you nominate Porsche's 911 as the best car ever built, citing its more than 40 years in production, peerless build quality, and countless racing triumphs as proof. But if you want to be extra certain you're on terra firma with gearhead buddies, or if you cannot overcome your philosophical disdain for Porsche's decades of rear-engine, 6-cylinder, and air-cooled hegemony, you need merely say this: the Porsche 911 Carrera RS is the best 911 ever. You'll find few dissenters.
Sure, there have been faster Porsches, 911s that looked more mental, are harder to find, are better balanced and easier to drive. But the Carrera RS, built for 2 years beginning in 1972, stands out as the finest, most elemental expression of an unlikely sports car legend, one with its boxer engine ass-ended outside its wheelbase, an improbably timeless machine that has propelled its tiny maker through close to half a century of success, on and off the racetrack.
The Carrera RS was born in that netherworld where Porsche's competition bias and its well-heeled customers' competitiveness with one another causes magic to happen, a homologation special sold to the public to satisfy FIA Group 4 requirements that at least 500 production cars be built. So desirable was it that this threshold was easily surpassed, moving the car into Group 3 for series-production GTs.
The evocative Carrera name harked back to the muy caliente 356 Carreras of the 1960s, limited-production factory specials named after the Mexican Carrera Panamericana races in which Porsche's former standard bearer, the 356, had distinguished itself. RS meant Rennsport, motorsport in German. Although many an RS went racing, many did not.
The car we're driving belongs to this magazine's longstanding friend, Massachusetts born vivant Jim Mullen. White, like most were, it was not one of the few lightweight racers built. Campaigned nonetheless by a previous owner, it's since been returned to its original "Touring" spec.
Compared with the garden-variety 911s of 1973 the RS gained 300 cubic centimeters to displace 2.7-liters, good for 210hp. The RS also boasted wider tires, bigger brakes, a stiffer suspension, and an integrated rear spoiler - a ducktail. Such modifications, ironically, presaged every fat-tired, whale-tailed 911 to come, although to look at the RS today, one wouldn't know that this delicate machine would be the one that set a Porsche-loving world's taste for deficit disorder into perpetual motion. Shocklingly brash for its day, the tarted-up RS seems quaintly understated now.
Start it up, however, and there's nothing quaint or understated about it. A featherweight by modern standards - 2,150 pounds - this 911 was about as fast as cars got back then, with 60mph coming up in little more than 5 seconds. As with all 911s, is it that impossible combination of eminent driveability, total practicality, and huge fun, with an extra veneer of performance and idiosyncratic character. The big tires and the big brakes raise the bar for rear-engine oversteer misadventure that much higher, but chasing the limit in a Carrera RS is as addictive an automotive thrill as we've ever experienced.
Is an RS worth almost a quarter of a million dollars, or rougly ten times more than a nice, early 911 might set you back? Before answering, stand on it. Register the steering feel as it telegraphs the road surface with precision and concision to cry for as you barrel through a tight corner. Hear the mechanically injected flat six loudly sucking air, crackling and cackling on the overrun, then slot into third gear and blast off. Now, you tell us. - JK

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Andy Wallace

Why I Love The...McLaren F1
The best road car I've ever driven is the McLaren F1. I was fortunate to be able to drive this car on a test track at over 240mph [a record that stood for 7 years]. It was a real thrill. What makes it such a fantastic machine is its low weight and razor-sharp handling (in road-car terms), the near perfect driving position, the huge shove-in-the-back throttle response, and the amazing sound track.

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Automobile

Tweaked bunny, endless grin.

It is impossible not to hammer on it. Go ahead. Try. Climb into that high-backed, heavily bolstered velour seat, reach down for the little golf-ball-shaped shift knob, and think calming thoughts. Tell yourself that you cherish the color beige, wipe that grin off your face, and for chrissakes, try and drive nice. We can almost guarantee that it won't happen - and if it actually does, the Volkswagen's dinky little Rabbit GTI will probably unclick your seatbelt, pop the door latch, and spit you out onto the sidewalk. (In that case, don't worry. You're simply a boring person, and the GTI knows it. No offense.)
By the numbers, it shouldn't be that impressive. The American-market version of VW's first GTI, introduced in 1983, produced just 90hp at 5,500 rpm - 20hp less than its European twin - and buzzed to 60 mph in a shade under 10 seconds. It was little more than a stiffened, lowered, and shorter-geared version of the standard Rabbit hatchback. And yet, within the space of 2 short years of production, it single-handedly breathed new life into Volkswagen of America, prompted an entire class of imitations, and changed the lives of more than 30,000 people. If that wasn't enough, it also produced (thanks to an $8,000 sticker price) more grins per dollar than just about anything else on the road.
How was all this possible you ask? Simple: the GTI had character, spunk, and guts, and if had them in spades. The 1.8-liter, fuel-injected four doesn't mind being lugged - its torque curve is flatter than a Nebraska afternoon - but you don't care, because for some reason, all you want to do is go humming toward the rev limiter. You want to beat the snot out of it, shift, and then beat the snot out of it again. There's a chunky, rubber-mounted, Beetle-like feel to everything that convinces you that the GTI can take anything you can dish out. The whole car feels indestructible.
By modern standards, the GTI's front struts and rear torsion beam aren't sophisticated, but the get the job done with touches of brilliance - lines are easily tweaked midcorner with a flex of your right foot, and front-end grip is eye-opening. The unassisted steering is blissfully transparent, and a cheery pitter-patter makes its way from the pavement to your fingers in every corner. The whole package prompts feats of strength; it cries out for full-throttle, giant-killing, lift-a-wheel heroism. From behind that meaty four-spoke wheel, anything is possible. Possible, that is, so long as you don't drive...nice - SS

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Automobile

All four rings gainfully employed.

Thirty years ago, when the first turbo era began spooling up, Audi had a problem. The 200-plus hp that soon would be available from its turbocharged and intercooled 2.1-liter 5-cylinder engine might overwhelm the front-wheel-drive cars planned for the 1980s. Chassis engineer Jorg Bensinger proposed a solution: combine the company's hottest engine with four-wheel-drive parts borrowed from the Volkswagen Iltis military vehicles and fit them to a slightly altered Audi 80 (called the Fox in the United States) body. Construction of a prototype was approved by Ferdinand Piech, Audi's visionary technical chief, and a test team headed by Walter Treser was dispatched to Europe's steepest mountain pass, Turracher Hohe in Austria, for experimentation. Equipped with summer tires, the prototype successfully climbed slippery grades up to 23 percent in January 1978.
So far, Audi was merely retracting a well-trodden path. Four-wheel-drive cars, trucks, and racers had been around for decades. While the extra traction was handy for plowing through snow or powering smartly out of hairpin turns, extra weight, cost, and complexity had convinced many pioneers that the negative baggage of four-wheel-drive outweighed the potential benefits.
Audi's transmission expert, Franz Tengler, contributed the crucial breakthrough - two concentric shafts and a compact center differential packaged inside a slightly extended version of Audi's standard transaxle. Without disturbing the north/south powertrain layout used across the Audi lineup or imposing the extra cost and complexity that had frustrated other manufacturers, these modest hardware additions gave the four-ring brand full-time-all-wheel-drive. A larger floor hump containing a bulky transfer case was unnecessary, and the total weight gain was just over 150 pounds.
After Quattro production commenced in 1980, Audi used its newfound traction to earn a slew of Group B rally, Pikes Peak, SCCA Trans-Am, IMSA GTO, and European touring car laurels. In 1986, a German advertising agency staged an amazing stunt: an Audi 100 (called the 5000 in America) confidently climbed a 37.5-degree ski jump in Finland.
In cars with less than about 500 hp, all-wheel-drive trumps front-wheel - but not necessarily rear-wheel - drive in dry-road handling. The gains on wet or icy roadsm however, are dramatic. Spreading the propulsion task over all four tires improves slippery-surface starting traction and softens the car's response to abrupt throttle changes while cornering. So, the technology that Audi has continued to refine since that first tentative trip up a mountain pass is a mobility extender: a subtle but effective way to give the most novice driver the confidence to forge ahead in adverse conditions. - Don Sherman.

~Shaft Smarts: Three cleverly packaged components were added to the Audi's existing transaxle: a center differential, concentric output shafts, and a drive flange to send torque to the rear axle.
~Easy AWD: A north/south engine and transmission layout in a chassis engineered for front-wheel drive facilitated the implmentation of all-wheel drive. The most notable structual addition was the driveshaft tunnel.
~Diff. Equation: The original Quattro's center differential could be locked in low-traction situations. In 1987, a Torsen-type limited-slip was incorporated, followed in 1999 by a Haidex unit for transverse-engine Quattros.
~Strut Stuff: To support and power the rear wheels, Audi installed a second strut-type front suspension system (rotated 180 degrees) and a final-drive differential from the Volkswagen Iltis military vehicle.

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Automobile

A mom and pop-pop-pop operation. The sons pitched in, too.

"How can anyone get into such a pitiful, unreliable, noisy contraption when there's no shortages of horses and such elegant carriages and cabs, too?" This, Karl Benz recalled in his 1925 autobiography, had been a common reaction nearly 40 years earlier to the test drives of his Patent Motorwagen around Mannheim and environs. "It's such a shame for the man," people said. "He'll ruin himself and his business with this crazy idea."
The patent was granted in January 1886 after Benz, 42 years old and the father of several children, had toiled under great financial pressure since establishing his own company a little more than 2 years earlier. Before he could realize his dream - "A rail-less vehicle had been me preoccupation ever since my school days" - he had to tend to such minor details as improving the coil ignition, designing the spark plug, and developing his own float-equipped carburetor. He also refined Nikolaus Otto's theory of the four-stroke combustion process and built an engine compact enough to be put into a vehicle.
The Motorwagen, a purpose-built three-wheeler, bareled preceeded the motorized carriage of Gottlieb Diamler and Wilhelm Maybach. Power came from the rear-mounted, 1.0-liter, single-cylinder unit that produced 0.9hp at 400 rpm. Its cooling was simply achieved by the evaporation of water. While the power unit was mounted above the deck, the huge flywheel that smoothed things out was situated below, horizontal to the ground. A gear at yonder end of the exposed crankshaft turned a pulley and sent the drive forward to a second pulley. The driver engaged a lever-operated arrangement composed of another pulley on countershafts that turned sprockets and carried the drive via chains back to each rear wheel. Top speed was about 10 mph. Sales were inexplicably poor.
In 1888, with her husband down in the dumps, Bertha Benz and her 2 teeange sons secretly undertook a demonstration of the Motorwagen's real potential: an unprecedented journey of more than 50 miles to the town of Pforzheim, to see her mother. They stopped regularly at apothecaries, where fuel was sold in small quantities, and refilled the tank. They also replaced the cooling water as it evaporated, and they made minor repairs. Word spread of their progress, and as darkness settled, people held lanterns to light their way. At the journey's completion, Karl recieved a telegraph from the wayfarers. Their attention-getting gambit does down as the first great marketing ploy of the automotive business. - Ronald Ahrens

~More Water, Please: The barrel of the single-cylinder engine was jacketed to contain cooling water. Steam was supposed to rise to the reservoir and condense; instead, most of the liquid boiled away, and replenshing was frequent.
~Can I Get A Push?: The sliding intake valve operated via a long arm driven by a beveled reduction gear turning off the crankshaft. With low combustion efficiency and meager power output, hill-climbing was a challenge.
~Loose Leather: A leather belt carried primary drive from the crankshaft to an intermediate shaft. Leather's deficiencies - stretching when hot, for example - resulted in the slackening of performance during a run.
~Hands Full: As today, driving required two hands. With the right hand on the tiller, the driver controlled a pointer that set the direction. A lever on the left engaged the final drive.

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Automobile

The progenitor. At last, a front-wheel-drive success.

Biographer John Renolds asserts that, in bringing the automobile to the common people of Europe, Andre Citroen was a much a liberator as were poets and philosophers. But his social contributions were only the half of it. Be amalgamating various developing technologies in 1934, as well as contributing original innovations, Citroen liberated the automobile from its forebears, the motorized carriage and the locomotive, and essentially created the modern car.
For his model 7A, the first iteration of the Traction Avant, he collaborated with Edward G. Budd and a small group of engineers to develop a body shell welded from steel stampings, thereby eliminating the need for heavy, wood-reinforced coachwork and a ladder-type chassis. The resulting rigid unibody afforded any number of advantages, including relatively light weight, easy of entry, roominess, excellent outward vision, and a low center of gravity (22.75 inches from the road, according to one contemporaneous assessment). The unibody's inherent possibilities continue to be developed to this day in such far-flung permutations as the latest crossover SUVs as well as in minivans weighing nearly two and a half tons.
Yet Citroen's genius extended even farther: the 7A's body shell housed an overhead-valve, four-cylinder engine displacing 1.3-liters, with the attendant mechanical cases extending like a long boot and taking the drive to the front wheels. The radiator straddling the spiral-bevel differential and the twin electric horns peering thoughtfully down at the 3-speed gearbox made this longitudinally mounted powertrain odd-looking indeed, but it worked beautifully and provided important advantages, such as improved traction. (Traction Avant translates as front-wheel drive.) Additionally, the passenger's compartment's forward location within the wheelbase moved the back seat off the rear axle. As the car lacked a fore-and-aft drivershaft, a flat floor was the complement.
Then, in yet another innovation perfected, there was the Ferdinand Porsche-inspired suspension by means of torsion bars instead of the typical leaf-sprung live axles. An upper control arm and a lower transverse radius arm located each front wheel, allowing independent movement, while trailing arms at the rear linked transverse torsion rods to the beam axle. The ride was pleasing, and the roadholding was simply amazing. The Traction Avant was also equipped with Lockheed hydraulic brakes and soon adopted rack-and-pinion steering.
During the long production run, which ended in 1957, specifications continued to be uprated, culminating with the self-leveling hydropneumatic rear suspension. Drivers never escaped such peculiarities as the gear lever poking through the dashboard, with the shifting pattern mirroring a convential arrangement. Nevertheless, more than 700,000 examples of the Traction Avant were built. It uncannily prefigured the modern, mass-produced, practical car: just add overhead cams, disc brakes, and electronic controls. - Ronald Ahrens.

~A Good Steer: Independent front suspension posed a challenge in engineering a means of steering. First, a complicated divided linkage was used, but rack-and-pinion steering was soon implemented.
~Chill Out: The overhead-valve four-cylinder engine employed detachable wet liners for the cylinder bores, ensuring superior cooling. The engine sat on rubber mounts - an adaption of Chrysler's "floating power" - for smoothness.
~Easy Fix: Aside from its relatively low weight and height, the unibody had the advantage of a seperate and removable front clip with engine and suspension components, expediting both the manufacturing and repair process.
~Trunk Route: Intially, the Traction Avant had no trunk, although luggage space was available behind the rear seats. Eventually, a rear opening was added. A long-wheelbase model was fitted with jump seats.

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Automobile

An innovative and heroic character.

This will sound wearily familiar: when Middle East strongman Gamal Abd el-Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal in 1956, there were widespread fears that the flow of oil from the region would be interrupted. So the chief of the British Motor Corporation told engineer Alec Issigonis that the company desperately needed a tiny, fuel-efficent vehicle. The result was the Mini, a car that changed the face of the industry.
Issigonis gave his team a terrifyingly simple brief: create a package with room for 4 adults in a vehicle that would only be slightly longer than 10 feet and no wider than 5. Issigonis's solution was to mount the engine transversely, kick the wheels right out to the corners of the body, and put the gearbox in the only space not in use - under the engine.
Back in 1959, the Mini was launched in a way that was just as innovative as the car itself. Tony Ball, who was a young man in the company's sales department, remembers getting the call.
"I was summoned into the design studio by the directors and people like Alec Issigonis. They pulled back the curtain, and there was the Mini. I was amazed. I'd never seen a car with front-wheel drive and a transverse engine before - or a car designed to be so small but so big inside. The word 'magical' came to mind. 'It's wizardry on wheels,' I said. They said, 'How would you like to launch it?'"
Ball had a plan, for which he requested a 500 pound budget. Incredibly, given the size of the modern launch budgets, the company balked initially but eventually relented. Ball's plan revolved around a magician's enormous top hat, from which the Mini emerged. Then the real theater began: "Inside the car, rather like a magician pulling endless rabbits out of a hat, I had put three of the biggest men I could find, two ladies, one of whom was my wife, a baby who was my 3-month-old son, two rather large poodles, and all the luggage we could possibly cram in - in door wells and under the seats, and golf clubs, almost everything you could imagine. As I waved a wand, these men and women and babies and poodles and golf clubs came out of this little car and made such an impact that people just stood and cheered.
"After having put the car on the market for less than 500 pounds, we wanted to make sure that it would not be regarded as a novelty or a gimmick. We wanted to show that it was car with genuine, ingenious, practical design. We felt it also needed to be regarded as something people would love to be seen in, a charismatic vehicle rather than a gimmicky one. So we made sure all the leading social figures of those days were seen to own one or drive one. Peter Sellers, for example, and people like him, who moved in great social circles. All the leading fashion models, we made sure, were seen in the car."
Ball went on to have a successful career in the industry. The Mini went on to become a symbol of the 1960s as well as world-beating racing car with victory, at among others, the Monte Carlo Rally. Pretty good for a car that Issigonis once described as having been designed "fo the district nurse." - Galvin Conway

~Wheel At Each Corner: That approach brought maximum space. But small wheels meant very high rotational speeds - Issigonis had to go to a supplier of submarine conning-tower gear for a driveshaft solution.
~Front-Wheel Drive: Although FWD was a factor in its brilliance packaging, it also made the Mini a giant-killing rally car, espcially after the attention John Cooper, who introduced more power and disc brakes.
~Amazing Space: Issigonis' brief was to create a miniature Morris Minor using the least material needed to surround the minimum space required to contain four people. Sounds easy, doesn't it?
~Transverse Engine: To achieve that relatively roomy interior, Issigonis mounted the engine sideways, with the gearbox located in the sump. As a result, the transmission and the engine shared the same oil

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Automobile

Flying on the ground at Mach 0.3.

Ferdinand Piech was scoffed at when he announced production plans for the Bugatti Veyron 6 years ago at the Geneva Motor Show. During his illustrious career, the grandson of Ferdinand Porsche and former chairman of Volkswagen AG sired several remarkable cars, including the Porsche 917 and the Audi Quattro, but nothing as preposterous as a $1 million, 1000-hp sports car.
One thousand horsepower can move mountains, light a village, and launch a medium-size airplane. As Piech soon prooved, 4-digit power also yields the fastest and quickest accelerating series-produced road-legal automobile in history.
Mustering the target energy was the easy part. Engineers attached two 4.0-liter W8s to a common crankcase and then booster their team of sixteen pistons, four camshafts, and sixty-four valves over the 1,000-hp goal line by adding four turbos and two massive intercoolers.
The tougher challenges were delivering that power to the pavement, ejecting waste heat, and keeping the car in touch with the earth at aircraft speeds. Equally daunting tasks included satisfying a knotty matrix of safety and emissions requirements, supplying ample stopping power, and keeping curb weight below truck levels.
Dozens of problems delayed the project until a new management team arrived in late 2003. Thomas Bscher (who has since left Bugatti), a successful banker and accomplished racing driver, took over as Bugatti's president. Wolfgang Schreiber, who had guided the development of VW's breakthrough DSG transmissions, become the new technical director.
Schreiber's engineering feats at Bugatti made Hercules' twelve labors seem like a tea party. In addition to fulfilling Piech's fantasy, Schreiber blessed the Veyron with a superbly behaved seven-speed dual-clutch automatic transmission manufacturered by supplier Ricardo.
Although Bugatti has orders for half of the 300 Veyrons it intends to build, this project is unlikely to return a profit to parent VW. Of the 70 cars delievered, about 2 dozen are in the hands of American customers. Anyone interested in adding his or her name to the exclusive order list can so for $1.4 million. If you're unwilling to wait a year or more for delivery, instant satisfaction can be arranged for $1.8 million. - Don Sherman

~Carbon Core: The Veyron's structural core is an amalgam of welded aluminum and steel spaceframes along with molded carbon fibre. Two 13-gallon fuel tanks are integral with the passenger cabin.
~Double Clutch: A dual-clutch automatic provides 7 forward speeds and 2 shift modes. Drive to the rear wheels is permanently engaged. The front wheels are energized by a Haldex coupling that's intergrated in the front differential housing.
~Digit Delight: The Veyon's engine is a daunting numbers game: 16 cylinders, 67 valves, 4 turbos, 4 camshafts, 2 air-to-liquid intercoolers, 1001hp at 6,000 rpm, and 922 lb-ft of torque from 2,200 rpm to 5,500 rpm.
~Hot To Trot: 9 heat exchangers cool the occupants, the engine, the transmission, the 2 differentials, and the pressurized intake air. Convection from the open engine bay also effectively ejects heat.

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