The Spyker name has had three incarnations: Spyker, Spyker Cars and also Spyker F1. Lets start with the original company. Jacobus and Hendrik-Jan Spijker founded Spyker in the Netherlands during 1880 as a coach-building company – in fact they built the coach that the Dutch royal family still use today. Exports became a big business for the company especially to the Dutch … [Read more...]
An Update on Nokia Maps, Now Called Here
A few years ago, a consortium of German auto makers acquired the Nokia Maps business to help embed the system into their cars and to manage their relationships with Apple and Google. Nokia had bought a company called Navteq back in 2007. Navteq was a mapping company that used first hand knowledge of terrain rather than official Government sourced maps unlike many of their … [Read more...]
The New Mexican Town
A few months ago I wrote about Fordlandia - a new town built by Henry Ford in Brazil to try and control the delivery of rubber to his factories in the US. This was his second attempt after trying to build another town in Muscle Shoals in Alabama. There is another attempt at building a town for workers - this time in Mexico. Audi has built a plant in the middle of nowhere, … [Read more...]
NSU
This article is about NSU, famous for their late 1960s Wankel engined saloons. NSU were one of the original German manufacturers. They were founded in 1873 as a factory making sewing machines. Several European manufacturers like Triumph started out making sewing machines before moving on to other types of machinery. The founders Heinrich Stoll and Christian Schmidt saw that … [Read more...]
Transaxles
A transaxle is the combination of a differential and gearbox in one unit. What this does is to reduce the packaging of the components into one unit rather than two. So in effect it is a transmission axle or "transaxle". In a traditional rear drive car, the engine is at the front with the gearbox connected at the rear of the block converting the power delivery through a prop … [Read more...]
