Recent Posts
23

Curbside Fiction: The Future Is Now

 

Image Couresty of Casey Shain, Artandcolour.com

Image Courtesy of Casey Shain, Artandcolour.com

 

The 2016 Dodge Charger hunched in the driveway like an indignant, angry beast while its owner gently played the hose across the car’s brilliant red paint.  The car was a work of art, long and lean with sumptuous body lines fronted by a wide mouthed grill that made one instantly think of some ancient predator from the Jurassic sea.  The headlights added to the impression, sculpted and arched in such a way that anyone who wandered across the car’s path would instantly know the beast’s attention was focused fully upon them. It was, as one reviewer described it, a sculpture of pure adrenaline and aggression laid down in steel and set on 18 inch wheels.  It was hard to believe that tomorrow would be the car’s 100th birthday. Read the rest of this entry »

80

Curbside Classic: 1978 Cadillac Seville – Nope, Nothing Wrong Here

CC 164 158 1200

Any way you slice it, General Motors made many mistakes in its long history. Good cars, bad cars, government meddling, shrinking vehicles and corporate idiocy all have a part in what New GM is today, and why Old GM perished. Did they learn their lesson? Will they turn it around? It’s too early to tell, but one thing I disagree with is that the original Cadillac Seville was a deadly sin. I just don’t see it.

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33

Automotive History: Chevrolet’s Torque Drive – A Dumber Powerglide

chevy torque drive

Was it in response to VW’s Automatic Stickshift? In the spring of 1968, Chevrolet introduced its own semi-automatic transmission, called Torque Drive. It turned out to be even less popular than VW’s autostick, and was created a different way. Whereas VW put a torque converter in front of a manual transmission, Chevy dumbed down its venerable two-speed Powerglide automatic (full history here) so that one had to shift it manually. A somewhat dumb move, it turns out. Read the rest of this entry »

4

Museum Classic: 1929 Auburn Cabin Speedster

1929 Auburn  Cabin Speedster

1929 Auburn Cabin Speedster

 

On my recent trip to Meadville, PA, about two hours north of Pittsburgh, for one of my nephew’s college graduations, I stopped off along the way to pay a visit to the Auburn Cord Duesenberg Museum in Auburn, Indiana, just north of Ft. Wayne. One of the cars that I found on display there totally knocked me out. For one thing, its a totally outrageous design, and secondly, it was never a production model, only one ever having been built. And it was destroyed. Read the rest of this entry »

28

Curbside Classic: 1968 Volkswagen Automatic Stickshift – Chrysler’s Fluid Drive Returns In The Safer Käfer


Birnbaum 1 900
 

Walking to the the subway on a lovely May day, and a glimmer of chrome-on-powder blue in the distance hits me… it’s a Bug all right, a 1968, but what’s all that script on its rear deck? Could it be…

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25

Cohort Wordless Outtake: Very Disparate Trucks

Trucks Outtake

Posted at the Cohort by dman-x

13

Cohort Classic: FMR Messerschmitt Kabinenroller – The Scooter With A Cabin

Messerschmitt y fq

It’s time for a little balance to all these big Amerkaner Strassenkreuzer. And what could be a better antidote than a Messerschmitt? Along with the BMW Isetta, they have become icons of the micro-car era in Europe, when the post-war yen to hit the road in anything that had wheels and an engine – no matter how small – was so powerful. The result was a raft of tiny cars, but the Messerschmitt stands out for both its unique tandem seating (1+1), its airplane-style bubble canopy (not leftover ww2 Messerschmitt fighter units, as some have suggested), and for the (relatively) high-performance Tg 500 version. Read the rest of this entry »

188

GM: How The Giant Lost Its Voice – An Insider’s Perspective

GM logo crumbling

[CraigInNC is a former GM employee, and has been sharing the benefits of his insider's knowledge and perspective since he arrived here at CC.  In this post, which was originally a comment Craig left, he shares his thoughts on the external and internal forces at work during the crucial era that started with the OPEC Oil Embargo, and which he identifies as a key turning point at GM. The decline of GM is the biggest automotive story just about ever, and there obviously are many takes and perspectives to it. Feel free to agree or disagree, but please keep the tone civil. - PN]

GM’s downsized 1985 FWD C-Body cars (Cadillac DeVille and Fleetwood, Olds 98, Buick Electra) and 1986 E/K cars (Eldorado/Seville) represent one of the key turning points at GM. The situation with these all-new cars was not just confined to those models only, but was part of a broader set of directions that GM decided to take ten years before they hit the street. To say that OPEC had influence on this would be an understatement, but that affected all cars, most especially the domestics who built big cars. At that time, most of the imports were very small, with the exception of some Mercedes models.

As much as we blame Roger Smith for all of the troubles of the 1980s, he was only marginally influential in the process that got all of this going. He could have done more probably to exert pressure to tweak models, but the die was already cast before he assumed the chairmanship in the fall of 1980. The situation as I saw it was like this: Read the rest of this entry »

50

Curbside Classic: 1966 Pontiac Star Chief Executive – Executive Privilege

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

If you look and listen, you can almost hear the late night television commercial:

“Hey, folks, Honest Abe here at Honest Abe’s Used Car Emporium, Tire Shop, and Pool Supplies!  Boy, let me tell you, the inventory is great and the deals are hot!  What kind of inventory? you ask.  I got stuff here you just won’t find anywhere else for prices that you can’t beat with a billy club!

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23

Cohort Sighting: Cadillac Brougham On The Race Track (And A Note To The Cohort)

Cadillac Brougham 1999

This post started out as a note to the Cohort to let you know you have not been forgotten. There’s been a deluge of fantastic cars posted recently, and I (and perhaps others) will try to get to the most interesting ones asap. Keep in mind that I tend to pick cars that we have not done before, or at least in quite a while. And if you include some text to go along with a car, that will increase the chances of it getting posted even more. Now about this car… Read the rest of this entry »