I like my cars to be one of two things: Fast or interesting. Ideally, they should be both, but I'll settle for one or the other if I have to.
Too many people think cars are boring. They see them as appliances that exist merely to get us from one place to another. You and I know this is untrue, but how can we convince people otherwise? Here's one way: we tell them about interesting cars.
This brings us to our question of the weekend: What's the most interesting car of all time?
If I had to pick one, it would be the Tatra, the air cooled, rear-engine car from the country formerly known as Czechoslovakia.
Bring this up the next time you're at a dinner party and someone says cars are boring: You know the Volkswagen Beetle, right? You know how it has an air-cooled engine in the back? It was originally designed by an engineer named Ferdinand Porsche (yes, that Porsche) working at the behest of the Nazi government in Germany?
Well, a lot of people think Porsche ripped that design off a man named Hans Ledwinka who worked for the Czech car company Tatra. When the Beetle came out, Tatra filed a lawsuit against Porsche, but that was made moot because the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia. Kind of a dick, that guy Hitler was.
Anyway, the matter was finally resolved in 1961 when Volkswagen paid Tatra 3 million Deutsche Marks in an out-of-court settlement.
And that, as far as I'm concerned, is the most interesting car of all time. What's yours?
Photo credit Jack_Snell