Many new Automotive Histories as well as updated and expanded versions of many of these articles below are at the author’s new Curbside Classic site here]
Industry
Detroit Deathwatch – The Prequel (Part 1: 1950s-1960s)
Detroit Deatwatch – The Prequel (Part 2: 1970’s)
Detroit Deathwatch – The Prequel (Part 3: 1980’s)
GM
Those Amazing Psychedelic Pontiac Ads by Fitzpatrick and Kaufman
Wild and Garish Cadillac V16 Concepts From the Sixties
Those Deadly-Glamorous Seville Conversions
The Cars of Bob Lutz: A Gallery of Winners and Losers
The Story Behind The Best Bob Lutz Photo Ever
GM’s Suburbans: Celebrating 75 Years of Myth and Reality
Chevrolet Veraneio: Brazil’s Own Suburban
In Praise of the ’55-’57 Chevy
Stunning Corvair Concepts by Pininfarina, Bertone and GM
Cadillac’s OHC V12 Engine That Was Almost Built
Pontiac – Part 1: 1926 – 1970 (2010)
GM’s Branding Fiasco: Buick (Updated 2010)
GM’ Branding Fiasco Part 1: Sloan’s Vision Betrayed (2007)
GM’s Branding Fiasco Part 2: Chevrolet’s ADD (2007)
GM’s Branding Fiasco Part 3: Pontiac Only Lived Twice (2007)
GM’s Branding Fiasco Part 4: Oldsmobile Pegs Out (2007)
GM’s Branding Fiasco Part 5: Buick, Fading Fast (2007)
GM’s Branding Fiasco Part 6: Cadillac Falls Down (2007)
GM Deathwatch 2752: Mistakes from the 1940s-1950s
Ford
1972 Ford Carousel Concept: The Minivan’s True Father?
Ford’s Déjà Vu Moment, Part 1 (re: Donald Petersen/1981 crisis)
Chrysler
The Truth About Why Chrysler Destroyed The Turbine Cars
Book Review: Chrysler’s Turbine Car – The Rise And Fall Of Detroit’s Coolest Creation
Hemi Love: A Personal Retrospective on the Hemi
Other US Makes
Germany
VW Kübelwagen and Schwimmwagen
VW’s Stillborn Big Wide Car: The AmiWagen (EA128)
1949 DKW Schnellaster: The Mother of all Minivans?
Mercedes 207D and other Vintage MB Vans, Small Buses and Campers
Tempo Boy – Three Wheeled Trucks And World Speed Record Holder
England
Bristol Coupes: The Ultimate Living Dinosaurs
The Jenson-Built Austin A40 and other Austins of the Fifites
France
1968 Quasar Unipower: The Rolling Glass Cube
Italy
Ferrari Pinin: The Four Door Ferrari That Was Almost Built
Czechoslovakia
Tatra T613 and T700: The Ultimate Rear-Engined Sedans
Japan
TTAC Celebrates Forty Years of the Corolla
Honda’s Wild 9000RPM Mid-Engine 1963 T360/T500 Pickup
Subaru: The Scrappiest Car Maker Ever?
Vintage Subaru 360 TV Ads And Promo Film
Technology
Automotive Aerodynamics: Part 1
Paul,
I just found a great automotive history resource. It’s Wayne State University’s Virtual Motor City project. The Detroit News donated decades’ worth of photographs to Wayne’s Reuther Library and they’ve all been digitized and made available online. There are thousands of photographs relevant to automotive history and you can get lost just browsing and searching there. They’re mostly black and white, but there are a few color photos. Just a cool site.
Here’s one of Louis Chevrolet racing on the beach at Daytona:
Here’s the home page. The organization of the site doesn’t thrill me. For example, if you browse by subject, there’s Packard, Hudson and Ford (lot’s of Ford) but not Chevy. If you use the search function, though, you can find plenty of Chevrolet related material.
http://dlxs.lib.wayne.edu/cgi/i/image/image-idx?page=index;c=vmc;g=photojournalism
Thanks. I’ve run across it before, but haven’t had much time to really peruse it.
Great collection of your Automotive Histories posts. Thanks, Paul!
This web site desperately needs a real database – Want to find a curbside classic by model or year? Nope! Find a review by sedan/wagon/SUV body type? Nope!
Hell, even to find the curbside classic *portal*, which is supposed to make it easier to find them, you first have to search for things that are portals and then dig through the results!
Come on, guys – you’ve got all this content here, but it’s next to impossible to find any of it. Having a single old blog entry with (immediately outdated) links as a substitute for a database might have cut it in 1997, but not in this century…
I couldn’t agree with you more. How I wish it were so! I don’t know that this type of blog software (WordPress) makes it possible.
My Portals are designed to help find CCs and Histories easier, and they are, and will stay at the very top, on the Features Bar across the top. This is my way of compensating for the intrinsic limitations.
For what it’s worth, the Search feature works much better than it used to.
Wimp. In this era, at least, you can punch the site through Google (“site:thetruthaboutcars.com mustang near curbside”). Why, in my day we had to wget the whole site locally, then pump every page through awk/sed/grep to find stuff.
Over dialup. In the snow. Both ways.
Side note: WordPress doesn’t make this possible. What you could do is add specific tags to your content (atype=curbside,make=ford,model=mustang,my=1969)and build a database from auto-generated indices of the tags, then add a query tool that scans those tags. That would allow you to get away with keeping WordPress, and it’d require minimal updates to existing content and no change in structure elsewhere.
I am in no way volunteering to do this.
That came across as a little harsh, now that I reread it. It’s only out of love, guys! So much stuff to read, so hard to find which thing to read next… :)
I also tend to do a lot of TTAC-reading from my BlackBerry, so searching tags and navigating menu structures only get more difficult.
Paul. Good job, keep them coming. You and your boss Ed, plus all the other contributors are doing a great job. And happy mothers day to all you muthas.
This is a great part of TTAC. Why is it not being updated?