Dream cars: NSU Ro80

You may have noticed a trend among my previous dream cars: they all have V8 engines, and let's be honest, what true petrolhead doesn't love a V8? This one is different though as it has an engine that sounds almost like a rude word and has no cylinders at all in the usual sense. Alas, that very same engine proved to be its Achilles' heel and caused its manufacturer to go bust less than 12 months after winning a well-deserved Car of the Year award.

Yes, today's dream is the NSU Ro80, a car so packed with innovations it was just too advanced for its own good and pushed the small company that made it over the brink into extinction just a decade after its launch. The Ro80 is celebrating its 50th birthday this year, something you'd find hard to believe looking at its fresh modern styling and the technology underneath, and I have long been among its admirers as it's just so radical and different from what anyone else was making at the time.

Would you believe this is a 50-year old car?
(By Spurzem - Lothar Spurzem - Own work, CC BY-SA 2.0 de, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8042301)

Unsung heroes: Volkswagen K70

If I was to mention the name Volkswagen, there are certain iconic cars everyone will immediately think of: the legendary Beetle, the trendy Type 2 camper and the game-changing Golf GTI. All of those are very much 'sung heroes' though and so much has been written about them that there really isn't anything new to add, so instead I'm going to turn my attention to something a little more left-field that may seem a strange choice to nominate as Volkswagen's unsung hero. This is a pretty obscure car so I guess a lot of you are now wondering just what a K70 actually is, but its rarity belies its great significance as the first front-engined and water-cooled Volkswagen.