Motoring Misfits: Nissan Cherry Europe

It's odd how cars made in particular countries seem to share certain characteristics. Italian cars for instance are known for sportiness and good handling at the expense of reliability, whereas those from Japan are exactly the opposite, very well built but usually very dull. Combining the best bits from these two nations should therefore have created the perfect blend of Italian flair with Japanese quality, but what resulted was instead the worst of both worlds. The Alfa Romeo Arna is a motoring misfit in its own right, but it has a lesser-known twin that is even more so, a Nissan built by Alfa Romeo and rebadged back into a Nissan. How did such a bizarre state of affairs come into being?

A Nissan that's really an Alfa that's really a Nissan 

The Silver Aero

One aspect of the classic car scene I love is the element of surprise from discovering cars I'd never seen before. That's especially true when something very rare and well-known turns up in a low-key location where you really wouldn't expect to see such a thing. Yardley Gobion is one such place that isn't famous for anything at all, a pleasant village in the border country between Milton Keynes and Northampton where nothing of any great significance has ever happened. The annual Festival of Transport is a typical village show, a hundred or so cars in a field with some stalls and kids' activities, attended mainly by locals and hardly one of the season's premier events, which makes the presence of this unique car all the more remarkable...

What's that appearing in the gateway? Surely it can't be...

Life changes...

Hello to all my readers. Once again it's been a very long time since my last blog but there is a good reason for the silence. This is just a quick post to explain the changes I've decided to make in my life and how they should allow me more time for blogging in the future.