Thomas has spent two years working in the auto journalism industry, contributing to a UK-based newspaper and writing for Euronewsweek. A full-time writer and lifelong engineering enthusiast, he now ...

American gearheads often complain that European automakers never send their best vehicles Stateside. There's a good reason for that: Americans usually don't buy them. No car drove that point home ...

Merkur was a failed experiment as far as sales, but the cars were actually pretty cool. The XR4Ti was a sporty coupe aimed at BMW. This example has the stick shift you want, and just 19K miles. At the ...

Industry giant Bob Lutz has a long list of winners connected to his name, but even Mr. Lutz could swing and miss on occasion. For example, he joined BMW in the early 1970s and helped develop the ...

Either completely forgotten or ridiculed by the few who still remember it, the Merkur XR4Ti failed because of questionable marketing decisions and not because it was a bad car. Throughout the decades, ...

From the November 1985 Issue of Car and Driver. Some of us have a taste for fine imports. Wines, cheeses, leather wear, movies, shotguns, lovers—there's sometimes a certain saveur built into such ...

Few things are sadder than a decent car that doesn’t know what it wants to be when it grows up. That, in a nutshell, is the Merkur XR4Ti, Ford’s ill-fated attempt to transform the European Sierra into ...