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Alastair Sloane

1932 – the invention of the Ford V8 engine

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Alastair Sloane writes: I grew up on a farm where my dad used an ex-army Bren gun carrier as a tractor. It was just after World War II and there wasn’t enough money around for a new Massey Ferguson or Fordson Major. They came later. The Bren carrier humped cream cans a few hundred meters from the cowshed to the ‘cream stand’, where the local dairy company truck would pick them … [Read more...] about 1932 – the invention of the Ford V8 engine

Escape: The way out of a crippled submarine

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This is an excerpt from the book In the Waves: My Quest to Solve the Mystery of a Civil War Submarine. The author is Rachel Lance, a PHd biomedical engineer in the US who studies trauma patterns from blast and ballistic events. She also focuses on the development of safety devices to enable human survival in extreme environments. The book is published by Dutton, a division of … [Read more...] about Escape: The way out of a crippled submarine

World COTY: Kia SUV wins main gong, Mazda takes design award

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South Korean carmaker Kia has won the overall World Car of the Year award with its Telluride SUV (above), a seven-seater available only in some left-hand-drive markets but with a styling language shared by the smaller Seltos, which went on sale in New Zealand last year. The top gong wasn’t Kia’s only award – it also won the World Urban COTY for its battery-electric Soul, … [Read more...] about World COTY: Kia SUV wins main gong, Mazda takes design award

New vehicle sales: the best- and worst-case scenarios for 2020

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The best-case scenario for new vehicle registrations in 2020? Around 60-65 per cent of the 154,479 logged by the NZ Transport Agency (NZTA) last year – or between 90,000 and 100,000 vehicles. That’s a 30-40 per cent slump on 2019 numbers. It would be the biggest in a decade, after the 30 per cent year-on-year fall in 2008-2009 in the midst of the Global Financial Crisis … [Read more...] about New vehicle sales: the best- and worst-case scenarios for 2020