Driven to write offers one of two items today. The first one is a little puzzle.
The second item comes along a little later, just as soon as I have invested two weeks of research into the matter.
For the first item I must ask you to take a look at the rather grey and miserable image of these cars. They all have something distinctive in common (over and above being rather tediously coated). If all goes well one of DTW’s eagle-eyeballed readers will have worked it out by breakfast time.
Driven To Write 
All petrol?
Not what I had in mind, but thanks Jeremy. Sorry to take so long. You were up early!
It’s an early morning auction and the butty van is closed
Hi Andrew – so very close but also way of the mark.
Smilie faces?
Simon – a salute your imagination. Alas, flair can only get you so far in this kind of competition.
The shutline joigning the grille to the headlights ?
Good observation! That could be it.
NRJ – I can´t quibble but no, that´s not the winnning answer. I had not spotted that. It´s probably a function of the fact they are near-contemporaries.
All of the ‘radiator’ grilles are false and not needed as the radiators are under the bumper line?
Adrian – regrettably that is true and regrettably not the response that I am able to deem to be one that satisfies the success criterion of meeting the challenge.
Back to our homework: may I please have two guesses?
Is it the design cliché of the headlamp shape, the trailing edges drawn well back into the front wings, and a separate, shield shaped* front grille?
* Except the Mitsubishi
Is it the black plastic scuttle covers and semi-concealed** wipers?
**The Leon parked its wipers vertically against the A-pillars, which looked very neat but exacerbated the blind spot caused by already thick and steeply sloping pillars.
Two good guesses granted and those are fine observations. If you aren´t in some job requiring good powers of observation you should be. Detective Inspector? Medecine? Law?
Are they all made away from their motherland?
(I’m also retracting my radiator guess, having misidentified the Colt as a Scenic, which is quite amusing as I have driven a Colt daily for over 7 years now!)
Adrian: do you really drive a Colt? Is it the one with the unusually designed rubber gear lever gaiter? I remember having small paroxysms of joy when I saw that car´s interior. They facelifted all that nice stuff away quite soon after. Nobody really says much about the Colt, do they but it´s a clever bit of work. If Ford or Opel had presented it it would have been praised to the rafters.
Richard: yes I really do drive a Colt, a three door from 2007 which means it has almost all of the nice stuff in it. The bins between the seats and sills had already bitten the dust by then but I do have that lovely gaiter (in black rather than pale grey on my version).
The whole car is very neat on many levels; from the instrument layout to the very tactile round key fob. I am a serial car owner of old, so for something to last seven years without me getting bored of it says something. And it doesn’t have a cambelt to change either!
Here’s the source of inspiration for the gear lever gaiter.
They’re all 1.5 litre.
Are you sure about that, Scott?
No!
I see. I don´t think anyone is going to get this one. It´s not miles from being solvable either. Yet I suspect when I do the big reveal their will be groans.
The headlights could be a hint. I first thought that it might be the round(ish) indicators incorporated in the headlight units which are all located towards the centre of the car, but the red Mazda has a different configuration. Difficult…
One important rule that hasn’t been adressed I believe: Is it only visible at the front of these cars as per the picture or it’s something they could have in common in other parts of their body not shown in the picture ?
The mere identity of the cars is sufficient. There´s no additional information hiding out of sight. That would not be fair.
Are they all 2nd generations of their model lines? The jazz is, the others not so sure
I was about to say their logos all depict the first letter of the brand….but that’s not really true of the Mitsubishi Diamond is it ?
It’s amazing what you find when attempting to answer Mr H’s challenges isn’t it? This is quite neat (and much, much nicer than the abomination that is the Mirage):
https://www.carscoops.com/2011/01/mitsubishi-cs-design-concept-for-sporty/
I’m no nearer guessing the correct answer though.
Overall, yes, that´s a very well done bit of work. I don´t care for the base of the a-pillar or the wavy feature line on the bonnet or the pointy trailing corner of the lamp. Otherwise, very credible. Poor old Mitsubishi.
These cars represent the automotive equivalent of a kitchen bread toaster. Their primary mission is to be stuffed full of people and transport them from A to B, just as a toaster’s is to darken and crisp up bread. How to distinguish a good toaster from a poor one? Well, most people don’t really care as they all sort of work to some degree. The best way to distinguish between them is their brand logo, so that one may dispense plaudits or criticism with precision.
So too here. Every single one of these cars has a giant brand logo stuck smack in the middle of the grille. Gone is the subtlety of the past. None are asymmetrically mounted or show any deviation from the norm. They’re just big. Distinctively similar.
They all have vaguely triangular grilles?
C’mon, Richard, it must be time to take us out of our misery. The suspense is unbearable!
We want the answer ! We want the answer ! We want the answer ! D:
I’m starting to wonder if he even has an answer. Maybe he was drunk when he thought it up and can’t remember what he was thinking. Hold on ! maybe that’s what he was trying to reconstruct when he talked about those ‘4 days in July’ and that ‘scrap of paper’ in the other thread. I didn’t want to say it but my games are much better.
Someone’s looking to be banned from DTW…😁
Lol, doesn’ it feels good to have a good laugh sometimes Daniel ?
Btw I wouldn’t hold my breath for the answer. Turns out it sometimes takes 5 months to get one.
https://driventowrite.com/2017/04/14/vilhelm-koren-bentley-s3/
https://driventowrite.com/2017/04/14/vilhelm-koren-bentley-s3/
The answer will be arriving tomorrow, a little after 5 a.m. CET. So, until then there is still time to have a go.
I can reveal that sadly I have not been drunk in a hugely long time, drunk as in that state when you´re about nine metres away from your eye-sockets and what you want to do your body won´t agree to. That would have been, I am guessing, about 2011 when I had a pleasant evening in the town of Storchen, Germany, getting to know a selection of Franconian white wines. The waitress filled the glasses to the brim – no mealy-mouthed portion control for us that evening.
Another sleepless night then…😊
Hey, NRJ, did you notice that, thanks to your little competition, there was 72 comments on yesterday’s post? Is that a DTW record?
Yes I noticed. Me and you must be responsible for 68 of them. You’re doing well in this competition. It looks like you were the closest so far with your observations.
…and I’m still laughing at Simon’s answer.
I’m hoping the answer isn’t going to be that they were all on sale in Lindholm Aarhus’s Desolation Alley last weekend.
No, it´s a bit better than that, slightly.
You could buy all of them new in 2009.
And the answer is….aargh!…still not here!
Yes it is.
Well, not here, exactly, but there.