All posts by Francis Mitterrand

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2025 Mitsuoka M55 Concept

Mitsuoka Motors is a Japanese car company for building unique cars with unconventional styling, imitating the look of retro cars from the 50s and 60s. Their latest work is the M55 Concept.

The car was revealed late last year to celebrate the company’s 55th anniversary and is based on the Honda Civic with a design reminiscent of the Dodge Challenger. However, the company thought for a long time whether the car would go into production or not. Due to numerous positive reactions, it was decided that production could begin, and the biggest influence on the decision was the positive comments on the company’s website.

Mitsuoka Motors was founded in 1968 and since then has made many cars, some of them are Rock Star based on Mazda MX-5 and Buddy based on Toyota RAV4.

The M55 Concept will go on sale from 2025, and the company has warned that not everyone may have the opportunity to own this car, as each example will be hand-built.

Source: Mitsuoka Motors

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2025 Mitsuoka M55 Concept
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BYD ordered 7 new cargo ships

The largest Chinese car manufacturer, BYD, became one of the top 10 largest manufacturers in the world last year with 3,024,417 vehicles produced. In an effort to expand its business outside of China, their first target is the European market, where they are lagging behind the competition. In order to meet the goals and the increasing demand, the speed of transporting cars to Europe is needed, and for this reason, BYD ordered 7 new cargo ships.

The development of the automobile industry in China is expanding, primarily fully electric vehicles, which are killing competition worldwide with low production costs and subsidies provided by the Chinese government. Thanks to that, in 2023 China became the world’s largest car exporter with 4.91 million vehicles. That is one million vehicles more than Japan, which was the world’s largest exporter for decades.

BYD currently owns one transport ship (BYD Explorer No.1) built by a local company, whose capacity is 7,000 cars. That is not enough, so the additional 7 ships will help this Chinese giant to transport its cars around the world faster. Currently, Chinese companies own less than 50 car cargo ships, and their combined capacity is less than 150,000 vehicles. In comparison, Japanese companies have ships that can transport 1.6 million vehicles.

How serious a player BYD is is also shown by the fact that it invests 14 billion dollars in the development of advanced technology, especially the ADAS system, which will make its cars safer on the road. The company also invests in marketing, thus becoming an official partner of UEFA Euro 2024, which will be held in Germany this summer.

Source: Reuters

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WEC teams will transport cars by airplanes

At the beginning of the month, the first race in the FIA World Endurance Championship (WEC) was held in Bahrain, and the winner was the Porsche Penske 963 Hypercar. The next race is on April 21 in Italy and the teams are facing the problem of how to transport the cars. Until now, they did it by ships through the Red Sea and the Suez Canal, but due to frequent attacks by the Yemeni Houthis, they chose another option, transport by airplanes.

The Houthis have begun attacking all cargo ships sailing the Red Sea and will not stop doing so until Israel stops its aggression against Palestine. So far they have had several successful attacks and sinkings, although the US and British navies are in those waters trying to ensure the free transport of goods on one of the busiest sea routes in the world. This sea route is of great importance for Europe, so there are more and more frequent announcements from other European countries that they will send their navy. One of them is Denmark, which intends to protect the ships of one of the largest transport and logistics companies, Maersk.

Due to the attacks of the Yemeni Houthis, the transport ships did not arrive on time, so the Prologue test was not held in Qatar. It was concluded that air is the safest option for the teams, and in fact the only possible solution that guarantees the safety of WEC participants and the guarantee that everything will arrive in Italy on time. This has further increased the cost to the teams, which is around £250,000. It should be noted that the teams pay for the air transport of their cars.

Source: Motorsport