how about a little automotive retro-futurism?

In the automotive world, you have mass produced cars like you see on the road every day, exotics built to be a rare treat for die hard driving enthusiasts for whom money is no object, and bizarre creations from an obscure industrialist whose dream is to make a big statement. The retro-futuristic Veritas SR3 is from the third camp.

Well, it certainly gets points for creative styling and being fast. But it’s not quite super car material because to make someone shell out the necessary cash, you need to offer something more than a quirky design and an engine from BMW and that certain something seems to be missing from the SR3. You get the sense of a real character to the car but the weight of its brand name and heritage just isn’t there. And that brings me to a little opinionated aside when it comes to these exotics.

When I talk about amazing cars that seem like rockets on wheels with price tags sporting enough zeros to be used in astronomical calculations, people ask me what’s the point of creating these automotive monsters. It’s not like they’re fuel efficient or all that practical. You can’t even take them up to full throttle in most nations since about ten seconds after hitting the gas, you’ll be exceeding the speed limit by at least a factor of two. Just ask the driver of a $550,000 Swedish built Koenigsegg which was reportedly caught doing 242 on the highway and is the rumored recipient of the biggest speeding ticket ever. So why does the super car even exist?

Because people can build them, buy them and enjoy them. Why should there be a rule that every car must be practical, efficient and intended solely to get you from the store to the coffee shop and back home? Why deny those who love cars a chance at experiencing raw indulgence on a test track or feel how a V12 engine revs to life with an aggressive bellow? Besides, in the real world those machines aren’t driven all that often and few of them will even be built to keep them exclusive masterpieces of automotive design and engineering.