Revelations with Jason Cammisa

You've heard of Land Rover — but who is Rover? Well, same company, just without the Land. And when Rover was folded, together with Triumph, into the dysfunctional British Leyland conglomerate, this is the outcome. The SD1 replaced both the Triumph 2000 and the Rover 2000, formerly direct mid-size sedan competitors. It used Triumph construction methods, suspension, transmission, and steering, together with Rover's 3.5-liter all-aluminum V-8, which started out as the Buick 215. Its exterior styling was straight-up copied... errr... inspired by the Maserati Indy and Ferrari Daytona and BB, inside and out. In addition to immediately winning the coveted 1977 European Car of the Year award, the magazine reviews were outrageously positive. And then it all started to fall apart — literally. The SD1 was a victim of Leyland's cost-cutting and dysfunctional management, and sometimes-hilarious build quality issues scarred its reputation. However, as automotive journalist Jason Cammisa points o

The Lamborghini LM002 didn't start out as a Lamborghini at all. It wasn't much of a Lamborghini at the end. And yet, if it's the job of a Lamborghini to be outrageous, it's actually the Most Lamborghini Lamborghini ever.

Volkswagen once made a 2-seat, carbon-tubbed, mid-engine, butterfly-door pint-sized supercar with only 68 hp. This is the amazing story behind the most efficient internal-combustion car ever made.

This is the History of the Bugatti EB110 — the perfect 1990s supercar. It had a carbon tub, four-wheel drive, Gandini styling, Billionaire Doors, and a mid-mounted bespoke V-12 with four turbos. And yet it all ended in tears. What happened?

The E31-chassis BMW 8-series was not a replacement for the E24 6-series — it was a completely new kind of GT, designed not to be rolling art, but a way to show off BMW's R&D Department. The 850i was one of, if not the, most technologically advanced cars in the world. Its list of industry firsts is enormous, and includes drive-by-wire, CAN-bus technology, and the first German V-12 in 50 years. But BMW forgot to install the fun. the 850i was a sales disaster. At its debut in 1989 at the Frankfurt Auto Show IAA, BMW received 35,000 orders — enough to sell out 3 years of planned production. However, once the car magazines drove it, the reviews were brutal and customers cancelled their orders. (Largely in favor of the R129-chassis Mercedes SL.) 850i sales were so poor that BMW cancelled plans to make an E31 convertible, and also killed off the planned M8, which used the McLaren F1's S70/2 640-hp V-12 with ITBs and carbon intakes. Instead, M engineered a less-expensive M8, the formula f

The Lexus LFA was a hard sale: it was more expensive than its Ferrari and Lamborghini counterparts. Didn't matter that it had the best-sounding V-10 in history. Didn't matter that the Nürburgring Package variant set the production car lap record at the Norschleife. Didn't matter that it was innovative, rare, and beautiful. Didn't matter that it was a carbon-fiber chassis supercar that actually went racing. Lexus' F Performance Brand just hadn't earned the right to command those kinds of prices. Learn the full history behind the Lexus Flagship that changed our world for the better.