The $1.6 Million Australian Coupe Built for the Driven
Hand-built in Melbourne and limited to just 10 cars a year, the Zeigler/Bailey Z/B 4.4 is reshaping what a modern collector car can be.
2 min
In a quiet workshop in inner city Melbourne, one of the most ambitious performance cars in Australia is being built by hand.
Limited to just 10 cars a year and priced at $1.6 million, the Zeigler/Bailey Z/B 4.4 is not designed to chase mass appeal.
It is built for a very specific kind of driver. One who wants feel over flash, engineering over hype, and a car with soul as well as speed.
The Z/B 4.4 takes visual cues from the classic air-cooled Porsche era of the late 1970s and 80s, but beneath the familiar silhouette sits an entirely new platform.
Rather than restoring or lightly modifying an old chassis, the team has replaced the floor and structure with a clean-sheet, motorsport-bred tub, engineered to modern Australian safety standards and designed to work in both right- and left-hand drive.
The result is a car that looks nostalgic, but behaves like a thoroughly modern performance machine.
Power comes from a bespoke 4.4-litre air-cooled flat-six engine, designed and assembled in-house and machined from solid aluminium billet.
With 300 kilowatts of power and 500 Newton-metres of torque, its output slightly surpasses that of today’s Porsche 911 Carrera, while retaining the raw sound and character of classic air-cooled engineering.
Much of the car’s suspension architecture is inspired by Le Mans prototype racing, with push-rod actuated dampers and a multi-link rear system designed to deliver both comfort and precision.
The electronics have also been built from scratch, using a solid-state CAN-bus architecture that allows for digital instrumentation, remote diagnostics and ongoing software updates.
Every Z/B 4.4 begins life as a donor Porsche 911 from the 1975 to 1989 G-series era. From there, almost everything mechanical, structural and electronic is reimagined. More than 3,500 bespoke parts go into each finished car.
Despite the engineering depth, this is not a track-only machine.
Owners are involved in the personalisation of colour, trim and finishes, with many choosing to take part in selected phases of the build itself. Seating, ride settings, digital displays and even engine tuning can all be adjusted to suit the driver.
Behind the project are entrepreneur and Porsche collector John Zeigler Jr and automotive engineer Greg Bailey.
Together, they have created not just a car, but a global low-volume manufacturing model, using advanced CNC machining and 3D printing to produce parts that would once have been impossible to fabricate locally.
The business now employs a specialised team of designers, engineers and assemblers, and has plans to scale internationally through engines, components and licensed assembly.
For collectors, the appeal is as much about rarity as performance. Only 10 cars a year will be built for the Australian market. Six are already sold. Delivery from order is about 12 months.
In a world where hypercars increasingly blur into one another, the Z/B 4.4 stands apart as something deeply personal and proudly Australian. It is not designed to dominate social media feeds or sit under velvet ropes. It is designed to be driven.
As the creators like to say, you do not buy cool. You build it.
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As AI productivity trackers reshape workplace evaluations, employees are learning how to manage calendars, activity levels and AI usage to ensure their contributions are recognized.
4 min
What’s more important than being a good employee right now? Looking like a good employee in the eyes of AI productivity trackers that more managers are using to evaluate their teams.
Employee-monitoring systems are especially popular at tech companies and are also used by other white-collar firms that want to probe how people spend company time. The scary thing: You might not even know you’re being watched because many states don’t require disclosure.
Metrics can include performance data that is undoubtedly relevant, such as sales results. But it also can employ dubious proxies like keyboard strokes and how often your computer screen goes into sleep mode.
We generally accepted, or at least understood, heightened surveillance during the work-from-home era. Back then it seemed reasonable for bosses to keep tabs on employees they couldn’t see.
Yet the oversight has only escalated, and tensions are rising, too.
A group of former Meta Platforms employees alleges in a lawsuit that the company used a “constellation of internal artificial-intelligence systems” when it began laying off about 10% of its workforce in May. Meta says humans make termination calls.
However that case shakes out, a couple of things are clear. Companies eager to gauge which employees are locked in now have sophisticated AI monitoring systems at their disposal. And they believe they have leverage in a tepid labor market.
So while we may chafe at having our worth reduced to numbers on the boss’s productivity dashboard, we have to play the game as it’s being played. Here are some tips, based on conversations with people who make employee monitoring systems—and others who game the systems.
Be meticulous about your calendar
Calendar integration is one way that productivity trackers have gotten more advanced and, ostensibly, fairer.
Let’s say you make an old-fashioned phone call or attend an in-person meeting. Your Outlook or Slack status may switch to “away,” making you appear as inactive as if you were taking an extended coffee break.
Employee monitors like one made by a company called Insightful cross-check your online status with your calendar to see whether there is a valid reason for your apparent inactivity. If that call or meeting is on your schedule, then the system will recognize that you are busy offline. If nothing is on the books, it could look like you’re slacking off.
Hit the activity sweet spot, around 80%
Let’s not go any further without addressing the underlying question: How much downtime is permissible during the workday? After all, people have been scared to let managers see anything non-work-related on their screens since personal computers first arrived in offices.
No one knows this better than Roger Wagner, who is widely credited with creating the first “boss button” in the early 1980s. He designed a keyboard shortcut to instantly display a spreadsheet if the boss walked by your cubicle while you were playing a computer game. Boss buttons have been features of countless diversions since. (I confess to using one built into a March Madness streaming app.)
Wagner, the founder of computer-education company 1010 Technologies, says his original design was a joke—more of a commentary on overbearing managers than a cover for lazy employees. Good bosses understand workers need mental breaks throughout the day, he says.
This matches what I heard from Insightful Chief Executive Ivan Petrovic. He says customers that use his company’s workforce-management platform don’t expect employees to stay on task 100% of the time.
“On average companies are aiming for 60% to 80% of your time being utilized for work during the day,” he says.
Go ahead and exhale. It’s probably OK to watch an occasional YouTube video at your desk.
And if you’re going to artificially inflate your activity level, be careful. Hitting 90% could look suspicious.
Get physical
So don’t leave your mouse jiggler on all day. Choose the right one if you must resort to shenanigans.
There are lots of software applications that mimic the movements of a computer mouse, so you can appear to be working while away from your desk. There are also devices that plug into computer ports and do the same thing.
Corporate cybersecurity systems increasingly block these apps and devices, and productivity trackers claim to be able to detect them. But some workers swear by mouse docks, like one made by Tech8 USA, that keep cursors moving. The company originally made mouse-moving software but now focuses on physical jigglers.
“People are drawn to mechanical solutions because they’re so simple and don’t require software,” says Tech8 Marketing Director Sam Matthews. “As monitoring technology becomes more sophisticated, that distinction has become even more relevant.”
Use AI, but not too much
Another popular metric for employee-monitoring systems is AI usage. Companies want to know who is embracing new tools, and it can be tempting to think more is better.
“There’s a performative aspect where employees overblow their usage of AI so that they appear relevant in the organization,” says Andrea Derler, principal researcher at Visier, which helps companies track and analyze employee work habits.
In a recent Visier survey of 1,000 U.S. workers, 48% admitted to exaggerating their AI usage.
This is already an outdated strategy. Using AI for everything used to score points for experimentation. Now it can seem wasteful because many companies are watching AI token spending more carefully.
Look, productivity theater has always been part of work. Most of us aren’t trying to cheat the system, but expectations are changing so quickly that we need to be savvy about what the latest employee trackers are looking for.
Sometimes it takes a little gamesmanship to get full credit for our contributions.
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