I was recently introduced to the Rover P5 at a car event, and while it was always a car I was aware of, I had never really examined it in any great detail. The Rover P5 was the higher end car offered by Rover at the time, competing with the likes of the larger Jaguars. As far as I know, it was the...
The 2016 CARNivale was moved from the City (Sydney CBD) to Parramatta Park, due to the light rail construction. CARNivale is a car show, held every Australia day since 1986, previously held on Macquarie street and around Hyde Park. It has always been quite limited in terms of the number of cars allowed to be displayed (around 500 this year), which given the...
I was recently in Munich and was able to spend some time at the BMW Museum. It is a nice museum and well worth a look, and you can see most of it in about an hour and a half. They have some nice exhibits, covering the history of their motorbikes, the first car which was actually an Austin 7 under licence, and then a...
October 18, 1953 The Citroen is as stable as it appears possible to make a car under our present design technique. Un-doubtedly the out-standing characteristic of the car is the way it holds on to the road surface, particularly on corners and bends. Although the Citroen was designed in France about 19 years ago, it has persisted essentially in its original form, with the...
I recently came across an old price list for Mercedes-Benz in Australia in the mid 60s. They were very expensive cars back then, probably more so than they are today, and even a base model was around double a holden, let alone the range topping (for the saloons) 300SE. These prices are for the standard car, so most buyers would have selected at...
The front indicator lenses on the DS were badly cracked and discoloured, so it seemed like a good idea to replace them. They are available aftermarket and are quite easy to change over. I had started what I assumed would be a quick job a while ago, but the new lenses used spade connectors instead of bullet connectors and I did not have...
I’ve now moved two cars onto the new 60 day logbook trial with the RMS, and the cost savings are well worth it! The cost of full registration is just a bit above $1,000 if you assume a green slip of over $500 and the Rego of a little under $500. The cost of the new rego is around $150 including...
The world has officially gone mad, with prices for Kombi vans (aka the VW Bus) reaching the stratosphere. This to me is a clear bubble market and anyone who has a split window Kombi should sell it now while you can. You’ll probably be able to buy it back for a third of the money in 5 years. Offered for auction was...
I have always admired Rolls Royce and Bentley automobiles, and was impressed with the display at the British Car Show, so decided to go down and see the 2015 Rolls Royce Owners Club concours. The event was held at Linnwood House, which is a historic house located in Sydney’s western suburbs. The House has some very nice grounds that are perfect for...
Driving a car from the 50’s often means impatient drives roaring around you when you set off from traffic lights, especially uphill. Sydney drivers are particularly bad for this. Traction Avants, as with most 50’s cars are only fitted with a small interior rear-view mirror and no outside mirror. This makes parking and lane changing a challenge. I had seen many tractions...
Every classic car community has an issue that polarizes opinion and spawns countless threads on Internet discussion boards. For the Citroen DS, that issue is what is the right tyre for the DS? Michelin were the owners of Citroen during the entire production run of the DS. During that time they pioneered the radial tyre, which was introduced in 1949. The Radial was...
The regular Shannons auctions are always a great way to see an interesting collection of classic cars and know what they actually sell for. Many classics languish for months (and sometimes years!) on carsales.com.au with ridiculous asking prices, whereas with Shannons you know the actual sale price, not the inflated asking price. There were two cars in particular I was interested in seeing...
My 250SE Cabriolet was produced 50 years ago today, or at least I presume it was, since it has this date noted on the data card, and the first service was December 1965. The Original owner was the Australian Diplomat Brian C Hill, who collected the car from the factory and apparently took it with him to various diplomatic postings around the...
My 250SE was sporting the stacked style of headlights, which are quite popular on these models. Personally, I prefer the original type. I had some original lights, but needed to restore them before they could be fitted to the car. The wear parts of the headlights are the reflectors that dull and rust over time, the gaskets that crumble (as can be...
In October 1955, Citroen unveiled one of the most innovative cars ever designed. There have been plenty of new cars that have introduced a new technology, or even a couple, but the DS was so radical that it immediately made everything else on the market seem old fashioned. And this was just the looks. Under the covers, the car contained a revolutionary...
I was down at the RMS today, putting my Traction on the new trial for a logbook style registration scheme in NSW. I really had been dreading putting the traction on the old historic scheme, but with so many cars I just couldn’t justify them all on full rego, despite how bad the old scheme was. Under the new rules, you get to...
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