Welcome - look forward and look back

Welcome to 5ivegearsinreverse, a very personal look backwards and forwards at the automotive world. The observations are occasionally informed by an arcane body of obsessively-garnered knowledge, but more often simply by disbelief, bewilderment, and spite.

For most of the past thirty-five years, I've had a car magazine going on inside my head. Few around me knew, and those who suspected despaired that the mental capacity was not put to a more beneficial purpose.

Unlike its real-world counterparts, my one-reader magazine has matured over the years. Bedroom-wall-poster 'Supercars' and activities involving getting from A to A more rapidly than the next fellow were never of more than peripheral interest. Instead my curiosity was aroused by how and where vehicles were made, and the often irrational machinations of the industry's corporate bodies.

The purpose behind this site is to make occasional observations on the progress of a 120 year old industry which still seems far from mature, and seems set, within the next ten years, to undergo a cataclysmic change unparalleled in the previous fifty. We are living in exciting times.

As a lighter counterpoint, this site will take a somewhat idiosyncratic look into the past, celebrating prophets without honour, unsung heroes, heroic failures and downright oddities.

Hold tight for the ride - even I don't know where we're going.