Rolls-Royce has been planning another venture into luxury yachts. Last time it got into a deal with Riva, bought by its then-owner Vickers for £9.1 million but it didn’t survive the 1998 change in proprietorship. Then last November Rolls-Royce announced the 62metre Crystal Blue with hybrid propulsion using LNG (Liquefied Natural Gas) and battery power. This is planned to have a composite or aluminium hull and Rolls-Royce’s hybrid LNG/battery SAVe-CUBE system. This has twin 16V4000 MTU M65-N generator sets working in parallel with a battery bank providing 1MWh of genset-free power in port. Two light-weight carbon Azipull thrusters provide a maximum service speed of 20 knots.
Read MoreFerrari Testa Rossa: Not quite the Paragon
Before the time of Michael Schumacher whose car is at the Design Museum until April 18. and just as the 1990 classic car price boom was waning I gave a Ferrari Testarossa a mixed review. It was exciting enough but suffered I thought from a higher centre of gravity compared with other Ferraris. Its engine was big and wide, making it difficult to accommodate low down in the frame. By the last decade of the 20th century there was no need for cars with top speeds getting on for 200mph to feel “difficult” or slightly dangerous. You could get just as much speed and acceleration from the likes of a Honda NSX without any need of macho airs or acting like a grand prix driver of the 1950s.
Read MoreCar Future
Guessing where cars are heading has preoccupied generations. Every motor show I remember had concept cars. Some of General Motors’ predictions from the 1938 Buick Y-Job to the 1951 Le Sabre were more than flights of fancy. HG Wells predicted aircraft, tanks and texting yet he was hazy about cars. He imagined motorways like railways connecting cities, decanting people on to bicycles in town. Some 30 years ago Prometheus sent me driverless on test tracks to show that ingredients for autonomous controls were already here. Now the Royal College of Art’s Intelligent Mobility Design Centre and the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design is presenting Driverless Futures, Utopia or Dystopia? At the London Transport Museum
Read MorePeugeot passed tough desert test
Car launches were the staff of motoring correspondents’ lives. Still are. They had moments such as with the Peugeot 605. Co-driving with the late and much missed Michael Scarlett (below), technical editor of Autocar - we trusted each other with our lives – we raced across the Egyptian desert. It was blisteringly hot. The entire cavalcade of 4-valve 3 litre cars had an identical top speed of 146mph but mischievous Michael would turn off the air conditioning, releasing a few precious horsepower enabling us to pull ahead. Seemed innocent at the time although maybe not what you would confess to in a serious newspaper motoring column.
Read MoreMG Classics
Ted Lee drew up the MG octagon. He was a 1920s accountant with Morris Garages that was selling spruced up Morris Oxfords. Undergraduates wanted sporty cars but couldn’t always run to £1475 Bugattis or £1975 Bentleys, so Lee’s pale small manager with a limp saw an opportunity. Cecil Kimber was good at selling £140 Morrises until he found that fancy bodywork in bright colours could make that £245.
Read MoreDaniel Sexton Gurney
If you wanted to portray a great American you would create somebody like Dan Gurney. Lean, tall, talented, good-looking, lit with a broad Californian smile he personified all the best of the country. His All-American Racers of Santa Ana, founded with another great, Carroll Shelby, inspired the Anglo-American Eagle that in 1967 won the first victory for an American grand prix car since 1921. American as baseball and apple pie, Dan embraced Britain and its racing car engineering from rural Rye, Sussex next door to Harry Weslake. Britain embraced Dan.
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