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2010
If you think of countries with a strong heritage in automobile manufacturing, the Netherlands is probably not the first one that comes to mind. We can’t compete with England, Germany or Italy in terms of quantity, but there is this one particular brand of sports car the whole world knows about, especially since they acquired Saab Automobile in February 2010. Of course, this company is Spyker Cars. The original Spyker Cars was founded in 1880 by Jacobus and Hendrik-Jan Spijker, who built luxurious coaches at that time. For marketing purposes on the international market the Spijker brothers replaced the ‘ij’ in their name with a ‘y’. In 1898 they were asked to build a coach for the Royal family. The Golden Carriage was the result, and we can still see queen Beatrix ride it every year on Prince's Day.
In the year 2000, Victor Muller and Maarten de Bruijn were looking at the sports car market, and felt the urge to create something new and unique. If you buy a top level sports car you do not want to find out the buttons on your dashboard are actually made by another manufacturer. Every single detail has to be thoroughly taken care of. To create a car like this, hand built and made of only premium materials, they brought the Spyker brand back to life.
For their first motor cars Spyker used a Benz engine. Their cars were innovative in many ways: it was the first car with a six-cylinder engine, and the first ever car to have four wheel drive was not a Land Rover, but that same Spyker racer. In 1907 a Spyker car was one of the very first motor cars to arrive in China, for the start of the Peking-to-Paris race. The race, covering nearly 15,000 kilometers went through countries without roads or road maps. The drivers followed telegraph poles, and to make sure the racers would not get stranded, camels carrying fuel left Peking to set up at stations along the route. One can only imagine the looks on the faces of the inhabitants of remote parts of Asia and Russia who had never seen a motorized vehicle before. Then the Great War erupted in 1914, and demand for motor cars declined. In order to stay alive, Spyker merged with the Dutch Aircraft Factory and started producing planes and plane engines, and elements from the designs of the planes also made it into the design of the cars. The company slogan was “Nulla tenaci invia est via”, which translates into “For the tenacious no road is impassible”. This slogan is still in use today. Take a look at a Spyker’s beautifully designed exhaust and you will find it engraved in there. Spyker went bankrupt in 1925. The cars turned out to be too exclusive for the market at that time, and producing them was very labor intensive and thus very expensive. Moreover, the creators of the company were highly focused on engineering and not so much on marketing.
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A Spyker car is unlike any car you have ever seen before. The first thing you notice is its bold appearance. It is a serious piece of work, nothing to make fun of. The bodywork is made up of large pieces, to show as few seams as possible. Upon closer inspection you see all the little details on the car. The pedal box, the shiny exposed gear lever mechanism, the engraved Spyker slogan, you can tell it is created with an eye for perfection. Get closer still and you’ll feel the cold steel of the side mirrors - no plastic here. You will hardly find any carbon or plastic at all on these cars. They are made of aluminum, stainless steel and high quality leather for the interior. Spyker wants to create a multi-sensory experience, from hearing the distinct sound of the eight cylinder engine to smelling the leather of the interior. Spyker Cars’ racing and aviation heritage can be found in many parts of their cars. From the switches on the dashboard, which look like those of a plane cockpit, to the look of the wheels, which resemble the turbine blades of a jet engine. Another thing that sets a Spyker apart from other sports cars is the absence of electronics and driving aids. If you want to drive this car, you have to do it yourself. There is no computer to help you, and as much as government regulations allow, they want to keep it that way. If you make a mistake, it is your fault, not the car’s. While they bought Saab last February, a year earlier Spyker introduced their own new model, the C8 Aileron, which is longer and wider than the ones they built before. Production for this car will be moved to Coventry, England, where there is still a lot of craftsmanship to be found and skilled people who are used to working with high quality materials in low volumes. Production of the C8 Aileron will probably only be between 150 and 250 cars per year. It is clear a Spyker is not for everyone, and their customers are sports car connoisseurs who like to have the very best available. They can choose to buy a Spyker in stead of a second yacht, or a third villa. And when they do, they can have their car customized the way they want, a set of Luis Vuitton suitcases that precisely fit the car’s trunk, and even a Chronoswiss watch with a crown that matches the design of the handmade steel switches on their car’s dashboard. —
JOURNAL DE Nîmes / Nº 6 the Dutch issue, November 2010