Giles Smith
Guest Author
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/ 29 August 2006

Volvo’s beautiful cruiser

The latest version of the Volvo C70 coupé comes with a retractable steel roof. What larks! At the touch of a button, the boot lid launches itself skywards and the roof rears up, splits into three segments and peels off towards the back of the car. At which point anyone familiar with that recent Citroën television advertising campaign may experience a momentary spike of panic, fearing that the car is about to transform into a robot — with you still wrapped in it.

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/ 12 July 2006

Honda unplugged

In an ideal world, cars wouldn’t have to burn petrol and smog up the place. They would run on a combination of grass cuttings and rainwater and, as they passed, the air would be lightly perfumed with the heady smell of summer. And they would still be capable of doing 120kph, of course. And a bit more than that, when no one was looking.

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/ 8 May 2006

You have arrived

Broad, long and fastidiously smoothed over at every corner and edge, the new Peugeot 407 coupé appears to fancy itself as something in the Thunderbird 2 line. Remember the big green one, with the pod inside? The 407 has clearly been built, similarly, with freelance international crime-busting and tricky spells of hovering in mind.

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/ 31 March 2006

Curb your emotion

Hail the arrival of an all-new car, and hail the arrival, to go with it, of an all-new acronym. You’re thinking: it’s a smallish car with a lot of seats in it, so that would make it a small MPV, or multi-purpose vehicle, right? But you’re wrong. No such tired and misleading labels for the Mazda5.

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/ 28 November 2005

Music of the spheres

”If you are going to go about in a spanking new Ferrari F430, you had better not be shy. There can be no more efficient way of getting noticed on a public highway, short of being Posh and Becks or dressing up as a hand of bananas. Heads turn, fingers point. At least, I think they were pointing,” writes Giles Smith.

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/ 19 October 2005

Peugeot’s teensy-weensy city runaround

The 107 is, it goes without saying, a small car; as small as a Peugeot gets. It replaces the 106, but don’t be fooled by the bigger number into expecting expansion on all fronts. The 107 is still one teensy-weensy little city runaround. It appears to partake of a design philosophy that wraps right around the car industry at present: that a little car must, by default, appear to be a car for little people.

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/ 4 October 2005

Yaroop!

”The Bentley Flying Spur is just about as unostentatious as a 5m long, 2 300kg lump of perfectly tailored Bentley auto-mobile can be — which is to say, about as unostentatious as the Beckhams’ wedding. Asking a Bentley not to draw attention to itself is like asking the pope to loosen up,” writes Giles Smith.

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/ 6 October 2004

Just add water

Desperate to drive into a lake? You’ll be after a Gibbs Aquada, then. It’s the world’s first factory-produced, customer-ready, high-speed amphibian and represents a one-stop shop for all your car-dunking needs. True, you can get amphibious vehicles in kit form. And the military might be prepared to sell you something it has finished with. But they won’t do 56kph across water and come with a stereo.