For sale, forever.

I was meandering through Dubizzle trawling the motors section as I often do when I stumbled across something for sale which will haunt me forever.

I don't even know where to begin with this, I actually need a thesaurus just to find some new vocabulary as I don't possess the words necessary to articulate just how horrendous this is.

Let's start with what it is. It's a car, apparently, manufactured by a New York based mental institution called Zimmer and this fine piece is known as the 'Golden Spirit' which I presume is just lazily named because of the golden bonnet ornament, it's probably a copy of the Rolls Royce 'Spirit of Ecstasy', I can't be bothered to zoom in and check for fear of being sick and I'm not interested enough to research it.

The story of it's inception according to someone on Wikipedia is -

"The idea for this automobile was initially drawn on a napkin at a private dinner between Paul Zimmer, Chairman and President of Zimmer Corporation and Bob Zimmer, Paul Zimmer's son, employee and shareholder of the company."

Basically they're in a meth lab together, totally off their faces when Paul thought it would be cool if someone redesigned a car for Hitler. He transcribed his hallucinogenic trip onto a napkin, most likely in blood and excrement. His son took one look at it, and once he had regained consciousness he responded with "Whoa man, that like, totally, like blows my mind man."

This one I found on Dubizzle was actually produced in 1987, begs the question who would of bought such a thing. I have three possible answers, one of which is that time travel is very real and someone simply went from 1972 to 1987. Or perhaps Zimmer had found someone cryogenically frozen and unfroze them just so they could sell it. Thirdly it could of possibly been a genuine buyer there was a lot of very drunk rich people around in the late 1980s.

Yep, it looks pretty dreadful inside there too. Loving the Recaro seats trimmed in afterbirth purple leather. The dials and wood dashboard look like they came from a 1970s Bentley, how uncouth.

Just what is going on back here. Did someone honestly design this, take a step back and this was acceptable? It looks busier than Dubai Mall parking on a Thursday night. Clearly one spare wheel isn't enough, everyone knows that these days tyre quality is so poor that even on a car that isn't designed to be used every day needs to carry 3 spare wheels.

I just can't imagine how these ever sold, they did apparently have a showroom in Jeddah. I can't imagine you'd get too many "Wallah habibi"s driving that around, I'm willing to bet the Police would take you in for questioning and try and charge you with crimes against humanity. Apparently the showroom still exists in KSA, if anyone finds it please send me a photo.

Is the standard response.

It is for sale by 'Top Gear - Used Car Trading' in Dubai if anyone would like to buy it. It's only done 64,000 I guess miles rather than KM since the advert states it is an American spec vehicle. If you have some sort of disorder and would like the most vulgar car ever designed then please get in touch with them and I'd love to hear from you too, the asking price is 

THREE HUNDRED THOUSAND DIRHAMS!!!!

I honestly can not fathom where they got that price from (how much must they be new?) and why did they stop at 300,000 AED why didn't they just make it eleventy-nine-hundred-billion it wouldn't of made any difference to the progress of the sale.

I would like to hear from anybody that can generate an valid argument for buying this car for 300,000 AED, sure if it was 3,000 dirhams it would be amusing to buy it drive it around until it got impounded and then just leave it to die.

Oh and if anyone does see this car in Al Awir take a video of the sound of the horn, I'm 99% sure it will have a comedy sounding horn.

I looked at it again...

.

Because French.

I was going to write a big article ranting of why French cars don't sell well here but then I found an image which basically summed it up for me which I shall reveal to you later.

My history with French cars is pretty minimal, I don't think I've ever actually owned one, maybe I have but purely just to sell on again immediately. I've had a number of friends who elected, against my best advice, to purchase a vehicle built (I use the term loosely) in the peoples republic of France, a nation famed for cheese, wine, and surrendering.

I remember one friend years ago bought a new Citroen C4 with a crappy low spec 1600cc engine that had about the same amount of power as a recently deceased bird and was as refined as emptying a bucket of excrement from a balcony into the street below. Needless to say it never did many KM because the car was constantly in the workshop and the owner was always afriad to drive it too far away from home for fear of it dying, I think he sold it finally after 3 years and 15,000km for a tremendous loss and 36 months of absolute crap motoring. Did he save money? Sure he did, a Golf would have cost several thousand pounds sterling more but he would of enjoyed his ownership and after 3 years when he wanted to move it on he would of been able to get more than small change for his car.

The only French car I'd buy, and I wouldn't buy one here and in any case I don't think you could find one here is the Renault Avantime. A truly pointless car that I can only imagine started out as a joke in a very lazy meeting

Renault Boss - Come on guys, think up something wacky and interesting! Like a big 7 seat people carrier but instead put it with 4 seats, 2 doors, and more glass than the Lourve.

*leaves the room*

Renault design team- Okay, MPV, 4 seats, 2 doors, lots of glass. That work for everybody? Let's take the rest of the day off...

LOL - What have you done?

I think it looks kind of cool, in a quirky kind of way. A bit like the Japanese bullet train, it's pretty ugly but somehow it is quite nice to look at. I'd buy one of these just for the sake of having it, in Europe you can buy these for such small money these days and providing you can keep it from breaking in any irreparable way then I honestly do think it will be a classic in future. Renault are a very old company and won't be going anywhere soon as even though they do make pretty abysmal cars they sell well in other parts of the world. If you get time have a flick through some videos of it on YouTube, the interior is really nice and it does have some very clever little touches and ideas.

I'd take a V6 automatic in the blue above or the bright green, although I can say with an enormous amount of certainty that I was would break mine almost immediately and render it utterly useless as a mode of transport.

If you are wondering what I was talking about at the start of the article, about the image I saw. It's this. The recall sheet for a popular French car in Europe, I don't even know if they import them here, I hope not for the sake of customers.

Wheels may fall off? Joking right?

Engine may fail? That's reassuring.

Rear screen may detach? I bet that's fun for the car behind on the highway.

Fuel may leak and create fire risk? LOL.

Directional control may be compromised? The steering doesn't work.

Can you imagine the fear of trying to drive that any distance, constantly worried about fire or a failing engine. It's amazing how this car even made it to production with these issues. Can you imagine Toyota or BMW releasing a car like this. It just wouldn't happen.

Conclusion?

In future the first 12 months production of any new French car should be sold as 'Beta Version' and once it's actually ironed out all the problems they can sell it as a fully functioning car.....

Inline but off center for Audi.

Autocar reports that Audi is working on a new four-cylinder engine that features a bank of inline pistons sitting offset and parallel to the crankshaft rather than directly above it.

A patent drawing of the proposed design has been discovered that depicts its unusual design, with pistons attached to connecting rods via rocker arms that are fitted with counterbalancing weights.

According to the patent filing, “damping free inertia forces” are created, which should reduce the vibration of the inline four cylinder to the level of a six or eight cylinder engine. Autocar speculates that lobes could be added to the crankshaft that would allow the motor operate using variable compression ratios, something that would be an excellent step in development of ever more efficient internal combustion engines.

Audi and its parent company, the Volkswagen Group, are no strangers to novel engine layouts, having featured inline 5 cylinder, narrow angle V6, W12 cylinder, and even W16 engines in their cars over the years.

I'm sure it will be quite some time before this new engine design ever makes it into the market, but Audi is set to launch a new motor next year that uses electrically-driven turbochargers to reduce lag and increase performance.