When I first started writing about cars, I thought I'd eventually run out of things to say. After all, there's only so much you can write about four wheels and an engine before every review starts sounding like it was copied word for word from a sales rep. Instead, however, the exact opposite happened. The more cars I wrote about, the more I realised that every single one has a story. Not just the obvious ones either. A Ferrari F40 has a story to tell, having been passed from one collector to another, but so does a diesel Vauxhall Astra that's spent fifteen years dragging a sales rep around Britain's motorways. As does a battered old Ford Transit that's helped somebody build a business.
That's when I realised something. I want to drive every single car ever made, or at the very least as many as I can before I eventually pass on. I want to create an encyclopaedia of motoring from my own perspective. I want to drive these machines, write about them and make videos about them. I want to build a collection of stories rather than statistics because anyone can tell you how quickly a car gets to sixty or how much leg room there is in the back. But I'm much more interested in finding out the cars whole story.
You see a car, no matter how breathtaking or boring, was the brainchild of someone. Someone decided that car needed to exist and then set about designing it, modelling it, engineering it and building it. So, if someone, no matter how questionable, decided that car needed to exist, then that’s a good enough reason for me to want to drive it, learn about what the designers hoped for the car and then write about how it actually feels to drive or question what the heck went through their heads when they farted out the final model. I want to find out just how many cars are now in fact copy-and-paste cars, bashed out in their thousands, made from bits from the parts bin to pad a bottom line, and how many cars were built with genuine passion and love for motoring. I also want to write about the decisions made along the way, however good or bad, like the wet belt, which I still don’t understand.
I want to drive the cars of people who couldn’t care less what the 0-60 is or how many cylinders they have and the cars of the people who compare chassis numbers and spend Sundays in the garage polishing their intake valves. I want to drive the cars that people dream of owning and the cars that people love owning.
I even want to write about the vehicles that we don’t think about, the ones that busy themselves away behind the scenes keeping our world turning: specialist vehicles, heavy goods vehicles, and emergency vehicles. Every single mechanical box of wizardry with rubber wheels was designed by someone who had an idea and a dream or a problem to solve, and I think that's worth celebrating.
Because the story of a car starts way before the first one has ever rolled off of the production line, before a single bolt is tightened and way before the first panel is pressed, a car's story starts the moment the idea appears in someone's head, when the first lines are drawn on a piece of paper and the first time it is described to someone.
So, whether it's a VW Polo or a Pagani Utopia, a massively underpowered diesel panel van or a pristine Japanese import, I want to get behind the wheel and discover the story it has to tell, because every car deserves someone to tell it.