Text by Patrick Bell.
Camping has been a part of car culture for nearly as long as there have been cars. Today we are looking at a slice of that; people with luxury cars as a tow rig. Luxury cars were better tow cars in many ways than trucks of the day, and comfort was at the top of the list. We have campers and a few boats in many sizes, but the cars were all large and cushy highway cruisers, so let’s take a look.
For a while there, it looked really exciting. The first new engine design to reach production for ages, decades! And it was so simple. It seemed everybody was taking up licences, producing prototype engines, test cars. But as often happens when something seems simple, there was a lot of careful thought and engineering involved – and testing, testing, testing.
And the result was a tiny engine that thrived on revs, put out a phenomenal amount of power for its size, and was unbelievably smooth… but also unbelievably thirsty. And when exhaust emissions became an issue – oops!
Time showed that rotor seals wore out, much more quickly than rings in a piston engine. You didn’t want to be near a rotary with a blown muffler. But while it was running, it looked like the way of the future – provided you could keep it fed.
It broke NSU. Of all the companies that experimented with it, Mazda alone persisted.
This is, believe it or not, a Chrysler. Not only is there a 1953 Chrysler New Yorker chassis underneath its sleek Italian-made skin, this car was actually designed by Chrysler Advance Styling director Virgil Exner at his home studio in Birmingham, Michigan, to be built by Carrozzeria Ghia in Italy. Only a handful of these handsome Italian-American coupes were ever sold to the public.
(Updated 11/8/2026) For decades, British roadsters had a spell on Americans. The rivalry between the MG and Triumph, the two leading exponents of the genre, was legendary. They each had loyal adherents to the respective marques, and the stiff competition kept the improvements coming, even if not exactly at breakneck pace. But by about the time this TR-6 first appeared in 1969, the race was essentially over: the new MGC was DOA, and the MGB was quickly slipping into its ossification period; meanwhile the Triumph reveled in its final incarnation of the classic formula: old school, but with a healthy kick of life in it yet. Read the rest of this entry »
(Updated 11/8/2026) Why was I not surprised to find a Messerschmitt in Tokyo? That old Axis connection, perhaps. And the well-known local penchant for everything exotic, unusual and left-field, at least in automotive terms (and barring anything called Kia or Hyundai – there are still a few taboos here). Nevertheless, I did do a double take when I saw this sitting in front of someone’s house, because even back when these were made, they looked positively alien.
With the exception of the Transit Connect and Transit City (a BEV from China), all Ford commercial vehicles for the European market are made by Ford Otosan, headquartered in Turkey. Early September, I caught their full-size tractor and smallest cargo van at the same event.
I wasn’t even half serious when I opened Craigslist and typed “Mazda Miata” into the search bar. But it led to something that couldn’t have turned out any better.
Automatic all-wheel-drive is so common in modern trucks and SUVs that its hard to remember a time when it was a novelty, but it certainly was big news when Jeep introduced Quadra-Trac in 1973; it was an automatic all-wheel-drive system that required no getting out to lock hubs and no shift mechanism for the transfer case (in its standard form). Like most elegant engineering solutions, Quadra-Trac is a simple concept with simple execution.
(Updated 11/7/2026) Most people, when they hear the word Lincoln, immediately think one of two things: Abraham Lincoln or the Lincoln Town Car. Now because we’re talking strictly cars, I’m going to exclude the former from consideration. After the Town Car, vehicles like the Continental, Mark Series, Navigator, and more recently, MKZ come to mind. But what if I say “sporty Lincoln”, what comes to mind now? Abraham Lincoln in a running singlet? Although many, even the Lincoln Motor Company, seem to forget it, there was in fact, a sporty Lincoln.
(Updated 11/7/2026). The annual London Motor Show is long gone, as is the replacement event in Birmingham. The last formally industry sponsored event was held in 2008, and the only remaining major European shows are in Frankfurt and Geneva. The events of 2020 have obviously impacted both of these, and maybe they too will not come back in the familiar form.
But this is CC, so we can look back to the great days, through the medium of the Pathé newsreel, originally designed for the cinema. Here’s a small selection. Read the rest of this entry »
When it comes to vintage dealer photos, few are as exciting as those capturing new-model-year unveilings, particularly as they took place in the 1950s and 1960s. These were true community events, and you can almost feel the excitement in the images: dealerships prepared for the occasion, sometimes after days of keeping their window displays covered to conceal the new looks. As we’ve seen in previous posts and photo series, there were spotlights, coffee, donuts, and lots more to make the occasion special. Expectations were high, and between the festive surroundings and the latest models sporting their trendy new looks, there was plenty to make an impression. This was especially true of GM’s products, whose fashion-oriented styling of the period remains a subject of conversation to this day.
Today’s photos come from Ripley Buick in Springfield, Ohio, and capture several grand scale events. The one above is undoubtedly the main attraction: the unveiling of the 1954 Buicks (Update: and perhaps the dealer’s new location, as pointed out in the comments?), promoted that year in brochures as “The Beautiful Buy.” Buick was riding one of its styling peaks in the 1950s, making that slogan more than just talk
(Updated 11/7/2026)
The 1954 GM PDX-4901, better known as the “Golden Chariot,” was an extraordinary bus that was decades ahead of its time. The 40′ high-floor coach with large underfloor storage became the standard configuration for practically all modern highway buses. But just who pioneered that? The 1956 Kassbohrer-Eagle was the first production bus of that kind. But there was a precursor to it, the 1954 GM PDX-4901 (“Golden Chariot”), a giant of a bus that GM had high hopes for, but one that was rejected by potential customers and never made it into production.
For years, its fate was unknown, and it seemed likely that this important piece of transportation history had disappeared for good. Now there’s good news: the long-lost prototype has been found, tucked away in a Massachusetts bus company’s storage facility, with hopes of a full restoration. It’s a welcome opportunity to revisit one of GM’s most intriguing experiments—and a bus whose influence far outlasted its brief career. Considering that GM utterly dominated the bus market at the time, and its other buses were copied by everyone else, the failure of the PDX-4901 is a surprising aberration. Read the rest of this entry »
My first VW, a white ’64 1200, had served me superbly, and I sold it for what I had paid for it ($400). When I found myself back in Baltimore in late 1974, having quit the experimental theater company, I needed some wheels, and quick, so when I found an ad for a white’63 for only $200, I bit. White had quickly become my good-luck color for cars; it still is. It ran very poorly, so, I offered them $150, and they accepted. Driving it back to Towson on the Beltway was a nail-biter, but something told me it was going to be ok (it just needed some new points).
But before long I talked myself into rebuilding the engine (a steady job will do that), and adding big bore cylinders as part of the equation. I loved the way my brother’s ’66 1300 had run, so I figured a 1385cc would do about as well. It did, thanks to that and some decambering of the rear wheels. It was closest I’d ever get to my dream car, an old Porsche 356.
A lot of car buffs understand engines pretty well, but seem to blank out when it comes to automatic transmissions and how they change gears. Today, we can cheat a bit and say, “Well, the computer does it,” but what about the 40 or 50 years of automatic-transmission cars built before electronic controls became universal? Here’s how most automatic transmissions since the original 1940 Hydra-Matic have “decided” when to shift — which even in those pre-electronic days was more computerized than you might think.
