Mercedes W-126 – Driven To Write

Anniversary Waltz – Never Get Out of the Boat

“Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared”.

Dystopian paranoia and reactionary politics were the order of play as this turbulent decade faded out. Having become inured to kidnappings, airline hijackings and low-level terrorism, 1979 witnessed the Islamic revolution in Iran, the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, and the ascent to power of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. In Britain, Margaret Thatcher led the Conservative Party to power, proving Britain could Continue reading “Anniversary Waltz – Never Get Out of the Boat”

A Fiesta For Sunday

It ought to have been a PfS (as it is now referred to by fans, cognoscenti and insiders) but something happened while I was taking photographs of the cars. That means we will be instead applying aesthetic theory to a car to see what happens.

If you had asked me my opinion of this car, a white Fiesta, in 2003, I would not have been able to say much other than to suggest it was nothing special or wasn’t bad.

Fifteen years later I seem to be in a better position to discuss its merits. Merit number one relates to the fact the car is demanding my attention in ways other cars don’t. When I look at it in a variety of ways (in detail and overall gaze) I am noticing that I am registering a lot of impressions (thoughts) and eye-feelings.

Eye feeling is a coinage of my own and refers to a sense that is located in the visual system where light lands on the eye. I can’t Continue reading “A Fiesta For Sunday”

Lineaments, Landmarks and Leys

The code names HT51S, E-28, W-124, CDW27 and SD-1 surely no longer remain obscure enough to demonstrate proof of your car design knowledge. Add, please, G20, G30 G40, G50 to the list. Toyota’s third Century, G60, arrives soon.

2018 Toyota Century: source

Elsewhere here I have discussed the possibility of technical updates of classic designs where the styling remains much the same even as the engineering gets revised on an evolutionary basis. The Porsche 911, the New Beetle and New Mini approximate to this ideal. Cars like the LR Defender didn’t change enough to count and nor did the long-lived original Mini or Renault 4. For an exemplar of gradual, engineering-led evolution, we must turn to the Toyota Century, now only getting to its third incarnation since 1967. Continue reading “Lineaments, Landmarks and Leys”

First of Its Kind : Last of Its Kind

The car that would come to be defined as the quintessential S-class was in fact, a deeply conservative vanguard of modern engineering. However, its legacy would not last.

A blackened wreck with a blown-off bonnet and deflated tyres lying across a cordoned-off street. This is how most Germans of a certain generation remember the Mercedes W126, the S-class model of the 1980s.

In the autumn of 1989, Alfred Herrhausen, chairman of Deutsche Bank, as well as head of Daimler-Benz AG’s supervisory board, was killed on his way to work by the blast of a roadside bomb. Herrhausen had been one of the most influential economic leaders of West Germany, and certainly the most charismatic among them. A proponent of challenging concepts, he advocated the need for global corporate expansion, as well as debt relief for Third World countries. Continue reading “First of Its Kind : Last of Its Kind”