Car Design: An Introduction

“Glorious, stirring sight! The poetry of motion! The real way to travel! The only way to travel!”

My very first car related memory is perhaps less than auspicious. As a young boy, I loved the thrill of driving, the speed, the racing lines, and the cardboard box in which I would have these experiences. Then, one evening, tearing out of, or possibly into, a particularly tough bend, my car flipped, and I hit my head on the radiator next to my impromptu racetrack. As I dripped blood into a tea towel, my mother took me bawling and crying to Crawley hospital emergency room where a doctor fought for literal minutes to give me a couple of stitches and a scar I still have to this day. Still, if memory serves me better than my nascent driving skills, I was allowed to choose anything I wanted to drink once we returned home and I chose orange squash.

Fast forward more than forty years, and the only car I have ever owned remains to be a graphite grey Volvo 340 – hardly the race car of my dreams, but still, it was mine and it made my university life immeasurably more comfortable, or at the very least warmer.

Despite these shortcomings, or perhaps because of them, I remain infatuated with cars. Not just sports and luxury cars, all cars. I read reviews of even the most mundane Toyotas and Fords just to learn about their designs, technology, and instrumentation. Why yes, I am a sad and dull little man at times.

Anyway, it’s time to get stuck into cars, let’s see what we can find out…