Last Month the Japanese try to retrive this mod a little bit more. They played in the at 2pm CET. At the moment the gametracker,com Server Monitorring is off. Hope soon they turn it on. The ranking seems to work.
Registered Member #727 Joined: [ 10:25 ] [ 12 Nov 2004 ] Posts: 998
I often find that some of the members here are rather clueless about history and names of automobile manufacturers. In order to solve this problem, I decided to post some posts about this. Tell me if you're interested.
Issue 01: Designers
There are some car designers out there that are their own brand, putting their logos on cars they designed. This tradition started back when cars could easily be separated in a frame and a body. Several small companies would offer to make new (or sometimes the only) bodies for these cars. From then on, these companies have started to make design for the car companies themselves, and sometimes even produce cars. Most of these well-known designers sit in Italy, but their customers are placed all over the world. Let's look at some of the more important ones, in no particular order:
Pininfarina
Pininfarina, which translates to "small flour" (which makes no sense at all) was founded in 1930 by Battista "Pinin" Farina, who later changed his last name to Pininfarina. The company does design for Ferrari, Peugeot (nearly all modern Peugeots are designed by them), Alfa Romeo, but also Maserati, Hyundai, Volvo, MG, Cadillac and many others from all over the world and at all ends of the price range. They also do industrial design. For example, the streetcars in San Francisco have Pininfarina design work. As a notable example, the yellow Ferrari in Interstate is a Pininfarina design.
Bertone
Bertone is a designer that should be well known to all interstaters. Formed in 1912, it's responsible for the design of many famous cars, including the Lamborghini Miura and all Lamborghinis since, or the Lancia Stratos, If you ever wondered what the b on the Stratos's side means, it's the designer's logo and nothing else. Continuing, the original Ford Mustang was also a Bertone design, making three out of the not very many vehicles in Interstate. Otherwise, the company was is mainly active for european, specially italian, customers. It's got many Alfas, Lancias, Fiats, the odd Maserati, some Citroën, a BMW or two, but not much outside.
Zagato
Zagato only does design, no production. Again, it mainly focuses on italian cars, having done many Alfa Romeos, including the famous SZ and RZ. It's main focus lie on one-off or very limited production cars, based on more conventional designs by italian or british car makers. Most interesting for the american members might be that the company was also involved in the Shelby GT 350.
Italdesign Giugiaro
Italdesign is a rather new company, possibly best known for it's Giugiaro subdivision, headed by Giorgetto Giugiaro. Giugiaro has been working in the industry for quite some time, however, and he and his companies designed a lot of classics, such as the original Ford Mustang (while he was working for Bertone), the original VW Golf (Rabbit for americans), the DeLorean DMC 12 (as seen in Interstate) and many other famous cars from Lotus, Maserati, Lancia, Fiat, but also companies like Hyundai or (shudder) Yugo. As a side note for any photographers here, the Nikon F3-F6 and the D3 are also made by him.
Registered Member #334 Joined: [ 20:26 ] [ 27 May 2004 ]
zagato also helped with the design of the german car spyker c12 zagato, a truely awesome and futuristic supercar.
for me the designer of the car is more important than the people putting it together, its the designer who makes what it is, aside of the engine who has its own respect by itself.