New cars that feel like classic cars
09/02/2014
Modern passenger cars are as far removed from the cars we drove in the 1950s or even 1970s as a modern business jet is from a biplane. The advances in comfort, safety, aerodynamic efficiency, performance, etc. over the last 40 or 60 years are so great that hardly anyone can imagine driving the cars of yesteryear in everyday life. And the new generation can hardly imagine what the cars of the past were like and how they drove.
But they still exist, the quaint small-series vehicles from current production that take us back to the days of yore. They don't feel much different from their ancestors that left the backyard workshops many decades ago.
The Caterham Seven 160 is a modern incarnation of Colin Chapman's first LotusSeven . It rides on narrow wheels and dispenses with any comfort, just like back then.
And that is precisely why it is so much fun on today's roads. No supersonic speeds are needed to make the wheels slip and there are no electronics to prevent this.
The Morgan 3 Wheeler, which will be produced in 2014, feels just as radical. As ever, a two-cylinder V-engine hums and rattles away at the front. And just like back then, there is only one driven rear wheel, which even the latest rubber compounds cannot stop slipping.
And in view of their exclusivity, they are not even expensive; the Seven must even be seen as a special offer, but the Morgan cannot really be regarded as cheap, quite the opposite of its predecessors, which made motorization possible at the lowest possible budget. But the last dinosaurs don't have to be that cheap either .....
