Ferruccio Lamborghini had founded his namesake company in 1963 to challenge Ferrari’s dominance in GT and high performance sports cars. The Italian industrial magnate (known for building tractors prior to founding his car company) burst onto the scene with some very impressive cars, including this 350 GT as tested by Car and Driver in the March 1966 issue. The driving capabilities and performance of the 350 GT were praised much more than the styling–and C&D wondered how Lamborghini would address that issue. The answer would soon arrive: the 1966 Geneva Motor Show would see Lamborghini unveil the landmark Muira, one of the world’s all-time most beautiful cars.
The tale end of the age of virtually no vehicle standards anywhere wasn’t all bad. This car could be imported without sealed beam headlights, or bumper height requirements, or EGR, or side marker lights, or compliance with a unique set of barrier crash tests. Want a 350 GTV with eighty extra horsepower via high overlap camshafts and an astronomical compression ratio? Just convince the importer to order one for you. Clean air and safety are reasonable things, but it would be nice if we could agree that we’ve got enough of both until the next breakthrough in materials and energy conversion. Then we could fire the bureaucracies currently driving up costs and hurting choice while standardizing safety and gasoline emissions limits internationally for the benefit of middle class access to a wider variety of less expensive cars.
Given the fact that you can walk into a Lamborghini store and drive out with a 700hp Aventador, or a Bugatti dealer and drive out with a 1200 hp Veyron, or a Dodge dealer and drive out with a 707 hp Hellcat, what are you ranting about?
Never mind; I already know….
I think that argument had more validity is the period between this Lambo and ending with the widespread adoption of fuel injection. Cars today are all pretty homogeneous regardless of country of origin besides a few obscure outliers. The old headlight laws, bumper laws, detuned for the US import era is pretty much a finished phenomenon.
The one thing I do miss is when you could really tell an Italian car from a German car, a German car from a French car, French from US, ect. ect. just from all the varying minor details embraced by the countries of origin. I’m not sure that’s something I’d lay blame on regulation though, some sure(aesthetics are definitely affected to some extent), but stuff like high overlap camshafts and an astronomical compression ratios has long been solved in the wake of multiple valves per cylinder, variable cam timing, multiport fuel injection and direct injection and in the quest to stay competitive as far as the all important stat pages are concerned, the laws of physics will ultimately guide any automaker to similar conclusions as to how to make a car handle, accelerate and be efficient.
The problem is if all they do is chase engineering nirvana, what makes them special from one another? It seems to me today if I were rich I’d be utterly spoiled for choice if I wanted a really really fast supercar, the most beautiful though? umm no. The most penultimate to the Brand? Is the Aventador really the ultimate Lamborghini if I were to ignore the stats? I don’t think so. This faces more than just supercars today, it’s even more prevalent in cars I can afford – it goes beyond the “all new cars all look the same” thing, it’s that all new cars ARE the same – Regulation only keeps them in set parameters, but there were always set parameters, even in the 60s, whether it be tooling, lack of exotic materials(or tempermental ones that weren’t favored outside of racetracks), poor tire construction, ect.
The real entity that forces compliance on cars are ourselves, non car people look at cars as “just a car”, enthusiasts on the other hand obsess about every last thing we may or may not notice in a car we like unless scientifically observed, just to counter our other car enthusiast friends disagreeable preference. Automakers in all categories cater to that. They want to attract both the people who don’t care and just want reliable/efficient/safe/good value, and the people who argue about millisecond differences and G forces as if they matter. I’ve just learned to step back and try to look at things from the non car guy perspective – just cars – Does it get me where “I” want? Do “I” enjoy driving it? Do “I” like how it looks? That’s what matters to me, and unfortunately that places me squarely outside of either extreme as far as choice is concerned. I don’t want the worlds most efficient car if I don’t have that mechanical symphony and I don’t want the worlds fastest car if it means it’s “shaped by the wind”. I think this applies to most of us that aren’t necessarily enamored by the technically excellent 2016 automobile marketplace.
Hurting choice???? The choices are out there; limited only by the depths of ones pockets…
Er…no, we do not have “enough” clean air or “enough” safety, because there’s no such thing. People have been bellyaching about vehicle regulation ever since its advent, with your exact same catchphrase: “They’re clean and safe enough now, we can stop now!”. And that view has been soundly rejected, because the state of the art in all the technologies involved in traffic keep advancing, so the line between science fiction fantasy and science fact reality keeps moving outward. And even if we disregard the direct effects of ever-safer, ever-cleaner cars (fewer sick, injured, and dead people despite more cars and more miles driven), there are enormous benefits to all of society just by the continual research and development put into the quest for better and better cars. If you stop raising the bar by progressively more stringent regulations, that “next breakthrough in materials and energy conversion” you mention will be severely delayed, if it ever comes at all.
Nevertheless, a small percentage of people cling to your idea that progress ought to stop. There was an SAE paper in 1969 asserting, with straight face, that the new 1970 models were so clean that pollution from cars had effectively been solved and there was no point in putting any further effort, money, or (especially) regulation into it. Eleven years later there was another SAE paper by the same author, with an almost identical title, making an almost identical argument. And yet a new (let alone an old) 1980 or 1970 car was a gross polluter compared to a new 1990, which was dirty when new and dirtier sooner when old compared to a new 2000, which was nowhere near as durably clean as a new 2010, etc. The population of cars keeps growing, so each additional car must put less dirt in the air just to maintain any given level of air pollution, let alone cleaning up the crapmess our cars have made. Otherwise we wind up with unbreathable “air” like they have in China now (like we had here in the ’60s).
And it’s just the same for vehicle safety, for traffic-related injury and death. Today’s cars and whole traffic systems are vastly safer than ever before, but they’re not “safe enough”. Take a look at the graph of traffic-related death and injury rates trending steadily downward since 1962 or so. To those people above the graph line, there are things a whole hell of a lot more important than your dismay at not being able to have a new 1967-spec Toothgnasher Superflash with the high-lift camshafts and no stupid ol’ side marker lights, etc. Too many people are still killed or maimed in traffic. Most people just don’t share your apparent aversion to being “forced” to buy a safer car each time they buy a new car. The market has voted, and it keeps voting the same way: your view has been rejected. It’s been trounced! That doesn’t make your view wrong, and it doesn’t make the popular view right, but it does mean the popular view is what’s catered for by the people who are in business to sell cars.
Fire the bureaucrats, you say? Oh, and who’s going to replace them? We already tried letting the auto industry police itself. It was an abject failure. We (in the US and Canada) put in a minimally-burdensome auto regulatory system based on automakers self-certifying their vehicles’ compliance, rather than a type-approval system that requires government scrutineering before a vehicle or safety component is legal to sell…and whaddya know, self-policing still doesn’t work (GM ignition switches, Takata airbags, exploding Jeep gas tanks, Ford wheels falling off, shall I go on?).
All that said, you do have a solid point about the unnecessary costs and choice constraints imposed by country-specific regulations. The US + Canada is essentially a “regulatory island”—most of the rest of the world recognises the UN (formerly “European”) regulations on vehicle equipment, construction, and safety performance; ours are just about the only two countries in the world that don’t. Neither the UN nor the US standards are categorically better; there are superior and inferior aspects of both, almost no matter what we’re talking about (brakes, seatbelts, window glass, headlamps, turn signals, crashworthiness, emissions…). And that’s just if we objectively compare the requirements. It gets a whole lot murkier when there are points—and there are many—that come down to philosophical differences with no clear superiority one way or the other. Murkier still when some UN practices work well with what’s developed around them over the years, and some US practices work well with what’s developed around them over the years, but they don’t intermix well. Yet still murkier when the question arises of what is the best practice. Different parts of the world really do have different needs and priorities—take a look at how Dieselgate is affecting VW in the US vs. Germany vs. Korea vs. China, for example.
And even murkier when changing a regulation means upsetting very large, very entrenched industries. If the automakers wanted the US and Canada to recognise the UN regs, it’d happen pretty quickly. They don’t, because the unique North American regulations give the industry tight control over what does and doesn’t enter this market, and at what price. Mercedes doesn’t want el-strippo German taxi-spec cars entering this market and diluting the brand image they’ve cultivated here. BMW wants to sell you the car they want to sell you, equipped and priced as they see fit. And GM and Ford and all the rest like things just fine the way they are, too. Even if we disregard the market-control aspect, there are legal hurdles to same-all-over-the-world standards, but that’ll wait for another post or column. Suffice to say, “Just make one standard for the whole world!” is a nice-sounding idea and a laudable goal, but not at all a simple or easy one.
The average age of a car on US roads is now 11.4 years. The reason is because cars are more expensive and less desirable than they’ve been in a hundred years. What’s the point of a bloated bureaucracy inflating car prices beyond the point of what most Americans can afford? The latest CAFE specials won’t even be serviceable when they’d have filtered down to the working poor, which is THE point of such regulations. Freedom of mobility must be reclaimed as a privilege reserved for the people that are telling you what to think.
The government is no more trustworthy than Detroit. I hope no angry EPA bureaucrats decide to poison your water supply and nobody you care about is killed by an NHTSA that didsn’t trust anyone smart enough to tell them not to require high-power airbags that killed a bunch of small people before the government allowed them to be depowered, as everyone capable of engineering instead of regulating was telling them to do.
As an owner of an ’05 with a wife who also owns an ’05, I think that beyond cost considerations, cars are being made significantly better than they were in ’65. It was unusual then to have a car which would last 93k or 42k (respectively), not requiring valve jobs, transmission rebuilds, rust repairs or head gasket replacements.
I don’t think desirability has anything to do with it. Income inequality, the disappearing middle class, the proliferation of crushing student loan debt, rising housing costs eating up more of our paychecks, take your pick. I don’t even know if I agree that cars are more expensive when adjusted for inflation, but there’s certainly an ever-smaller slice of our paycheck available to make those loan payments or save up for that cash purchase. So they are *far* more expensive in relation to our ability to pay for them.
Also, as noted above, cars last longer and are serviceable for a far longer time. My ’97 Crown Vic, on which I wrote a COAL article a few weeks ago, is still acquitting itself quite well for a nearly 20 year old Ford. 116K and the only major component that’s been replaced is the transmission, and that was an anomalous early failure (happened way back in ’04 with 33k on the car). Good thing, too, because even with two professional incomes in our household and no kids, we’d have to tighten our belts severely to be able to afford a second car payment.
The side profile really does this in. It’s like two completely different designs front to back. Just look at the round on the front/square on the back wheelarches, and the unnecessary character line that disappears into the door skin. The front or back I don’t necessarily mind, the bugeyes are a little too cute looking for a car packing a V12 under the hood though. It really served as a hell of a contrast for the Miura when it came out, that’s for sure.
The reviewers really didn’t care for the styling, did they? “Melted Muntz Jet” indeed. It is a bit of a strange-looking beastie, but I wouldn’t call it ugly.
I don’t think it’s ugly either, although the full on frontal view is unprepossessing. Back around 1970, there was an upscale used car lot in my town that always had a few Lotuses and Porsches hanging around. One night I went over to have a gander at their stuff, and lo, there sat a Lambo 350GT and a Ferrari 330GT, the beast with the slanting headlamps. Comparing them side by side, I liked the style of the Lambo much better, inside and out. That Ferrari was ill conceived for sure, while the Lambo looked like something Yves Montand would drive down to the Riviera – fast.
The 330 GT series 1 did have an awkward headlight treatment, but it was a 2+2 while this car was a 2-seater. The Lamborghini’s direct competition was the 275 GTB, which looked nice. I’ve seen a few 350-GTs, and their appearance doesn’t bother me. I also went to a reception where two 275 GTBs were used to frame the entrance way, and they were gorgeous.