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...

Dream cars: Chevrolet Firenza Can Am

Vauxhall Viva meets muscle car

Today the dream cars series makes a long-overdue return with a surprise new entry. This car is pretty obscure and I have known of its existence for little more than two weeks, but even in that short time I have already developed a strong desire to own one. It is another product of the fascinating but little-known South African motor industry, although this one is far more exciting and desirable than the dull old Sao Penza I have previously featured. It's a true muscle car in the American tradition but with the benefit of right-hand drive and a more manageable size, so what's not to like? It all started with a chance encounter at the recent Earls Barton Classic Car Meet, an event pretty much guaranteed to turn up something out of the ordinary...

No ordinary Firenza - there's a ridiculously big engine under the bonnet

Unsung heroes: Chevrolet Corvair

Unsafe at any speed?

Today's unsung hero is the first American car in the series and another controversial choice. The Chevrolet Corvair is often cited as one of the worst cars of all time and ranked alongside such other disasters as the Edsel and the AMC Pacer, but was it really that bad? Yes, its reputation was ruined (unfairly as it turned out) by a best-selling book that condemned it as an inherently dangerous car, but the Corvair was actually very revolutionary for an automotive industry that had become set in its ways and reluctant to innovate, and inadvertently created a whole new market sector that was keenly exploited by other manufacturers. I think it deserves a reappraisal and here I present the case for the defence...

Is it really fair to call this one of the world's worst cars?
(By Charles01 - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27794784)

Unsung heroes: Bedford JJL

Most of the unsung heroes I have featured so far are cars, but the very first one was a bus and today I return to that theme. It's fair to say the Dennis Dart is one of the major success stories of the bus industry, bridging the gap between minibuses and full-size single-deckers and creating a whole new class of vehicle, but a similar bus could have appeared on the market over a decade before the Dart's 1989 launch. This was the Bedford JJL, an innovative rear-engined purpose-built minibus that was first revealed in prototype form back in 1976 but never reached production, and in many ways was a Dart before its time.

Bedford's biggest missed opportunity or the right product at the wrong time?