HWA ZEDU-1
Car of the Day #301: 2022 HWA ZEDU-1 – A new (new) weird
Over the weekend, I came across a gigantic list from 2009 of gallery-style articles we’d dreamt up for Sympatico.ca Autos.
What made me particularly valuable as an editor in those days was the simple symbiosis of advertisers placing banners and boxes, based on page views (PVs) — and my ability to create articles that drove many (many) PVs.
(Other metrics were reported, but we’d often strive for a Goldilocks ratio of unique visitors to page views.)
Page views were easy, just make gallery article that spanned 30 slides (as we did). Uniques, not so much, but if I remember correctly, typical months were 750k to 1 million uniques and a few million page views. I remember one about license plates I wrote that went over a million PVs within a day — this honoured my journalism diploma, right?
(For a long time, when Canadians ordered Internet from Bell, the technician set their homepage to Sympatico.ca. Something needed to be on that homepage…)
Still: this format of gallery articles, in the context of news, reviews, features, and auto show coverage, was weird. Most car writers weren’t yet used to writing a series of detailed captions, so it took some training — and a lot of editing — to get us to a place where we could earn a reliable 600k page views from a single gallery.
(At a CPM of $12-24, depending on the section and ad units, we could earn plenty of ad revenue in a day or two.)
Really, our old image galleries aren’t dissimilar from a modern-day Instagram post, except the latter’s app experience is much better for the casual browser, less hassle for advertisers, and has totally decimated the value of “new” content.
Walkaround in English! It’s not a hatchback, either — the Aquila has a tiny trunk opening.
Top 10 reasons to never visit a car blog again.
Top 10 cars for a person you do not like.
Top 10 weird cars with animal vibes.
Top 1 weird Russian-French-German four-door coupé.
You’d click.
MPM Cup car renderings • MPM Sport
This is so (so) easy for me, it makes me wonder if I am the weird one.
Thing is, in 2012 we didn’t write about this Russian four-door coupé, the TagAZ Aquila (Latin for Eagle) — a regret I’ve had to live with for more than a decade.
Underneath its progressive, modern-for-the-time exterior, the Aquila’s Mitsubishi engine made less than 110 horsepower, it was front-drive, and moved as slowly as a constipated digestive tract.
MPM TR180 Cup car, advertised to list for just 10,000 Euros. • MPM Sport
After a few thousand were built, TagAZ sold the design on to MPM (Mikhail Paramonov Manufacturing) in Paris, France.
Before I forget, there’s still an active MPM club in France, for all your MPM parts, servicing, and community-related needs.
MPM developed the car further, fitting a 3-cylinder turbocharged Peugeot engine for approximately 160 bhp (the PS160). This was expected to increase further with a planned one-make racing series of MPM Cup cars — the first and only prototype was finished in 2019.
Whether you’re shopping for a TagAZ or an MPM, these cars are still out there, with only a few thousand built in total. As a four-door coupé economy car, it’s an intriguing idea…but an idea few buyers wanted to take a chance on.
Surprisingly, a few years later this design ended up in Germany of all places, with the motorsport specialists HWA. In conjunction with the German aerospace center (DLR) and local government, HWA reengineered the TagAZ / MPM into a nearly emissions-free prototype car.
(HWA built all of the Mercedes-AMG SLS-derived competition cars, among other significant racing projects!)
