When I saw this 1964 Mercury Park Lane convertible at the Ford and Mercury Restorers Club meet a few weeks ago, I immediately knew what it was. Actually that’s a fib. I didn’t actually realize exactly what car this was until I saw the informational panel laid out in front of the Merc. Then I knew immediately what it was. Earlier this year TTAC ran a post of mine about the car companies’ pavilions at the 1964-65 New York World’s Fair. The Detroit automakers went all out and Ford, working with Walt Disney’s team, came up with a novel way of exposing fair visitors to Ford and Mercury cars.
With Lincoln abandoning the tradition Panther platform Town Car and moving to the awkwardly shaped MKT for its offerings to livery fleet operators, you might think that Cadillac would aggressively market their new XTS to the “black car” industry. The XTS, like the outgoing Town Car, is a traditionally styled luxury sedan. Cadillac just announced it’s plans going forward for professional vehicles, and while they are indeed based on the XTS. Cadillac will be appealing to fleet operators that want to offer something a bit more luxurious to their customers than the decontented Town Cars of recent years.
The person ultimately responsible for choosing colors for BMW cars, Sandy McGill, the other day attributed today’s popularity of white cars to the influence of Apple on consumers and designers.
Prior to Apple, white was associated with things like refrigerators or the tiles in your bathroom. Apple made white valuable.
McGill’s claims at first glance seem to be backed up by DuPont’s annual Color Popularity Report for 2011 that shows that 22% of new cars sold in the world were white, tied with silver. However, if you look at the historical data, white and lighter colors have been increasing in popularity for decades, long before Apple embraced white as their primary (no pun intended) design color.
The Obama administration, through the EPA and the DOT, on Tuesday released new Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards that mandate a national fleet average of 54.5 MPG by the year 2025. That figure was the result of negotiations with automakers, state officials and environmental activists. Despite the industry’s apparent support, Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s campaign called them “extreme”. President Obama responded by implying that Romney was some kind of 19th century Luddite, suggesting that the former Massachusetts prefers steam engines. (Read More…)
Overlooked in the announcements by General Motors and Chrysler that their factories will not be hosting any presidential campaign events such as photo ops or speeches by either the Obama or Romney campaigns is the fact that GM, which for 30 years has supplied both major US political parties’ national conventions with hundreds of new vehicles used as courtesy cars, will not be doing so this year. Frankly though the Big 3 are rather notorious for the casual way in which they provide complimentary cars to high profile celebrities, and though I was familiar with the practice of providing courtesy cars for major sporting events, I had no idea that GM has been doing so in connection with the big political conventions.
I don’t think I’ll make a series out of it but this is the second time this summer that I spotted a car in a car show parking lot that wasn’t what it first appeared to be. When you go to an American Motors Owners meet, you expect to see some uncommon cars, so I wasn’t surprised to see what I at first thought was a mid 1980s Chevy El Camino parked off to the side. When I got close enough to read the trucklet’s badging I realized that it was even more uncommon. It had a Spanish name like the El Camino but it came from different GM division than Chevrolet. (Read More…)
Much as reviewers and consumers have embraced the products that Ford Motor Co. has introduced under Alan Mullaly’s leadership, as well as embracing Mr. Mullaly’s public image as the most competent auto executive currently in charge of a Detroit based car company, there has been almost uniform criticism outside of FoMoCo for the company’s headfirst plunge into digital infotainment and control.
Jaguar is getting ready to launch their F-Type, the long anticipated successor to the fabled E-Type of yore. If there ever was a car that was associated with the word “sexy” it’s the E-Type, first introduced at the Geneva auto show in 1961. The two-seater F-Type will get its debut next month at the Paris auto show and it looks like Jaguar is trying to sex up the launch by announcing that indie music and YouTube sensation Lana Del Rey will “collaborate” with the car company on that launch and be the F-Type’s public face.
The topic of young people not getting drivers’ licenses has become a topic of concern for the auto industry, particularly in, ahem, mature markets like Japan and the US. If young people never embrace the automobile as consumers, they’re not likely to become enthusiasts or collectors. Many collectors, of cars and other things, are often trying to rekindle a spirit they felt as a youth. People will gravitate to collect either a car of their youth or a car they aspired to in their youth. Zlati Meyer writes for the Detroit Free Press, often about car events. In this video produced in connection with tomorrow’s Woodward Dream Cruise, Fifty Shades of Dream Cruise, Zlati takes a lighthearted look at the greying of car culture. What do you think, will car collecting die out, or, twenty years from now will the people born in the first decade of the 21st century start Camry, Accord and Elantra clubs? If there is a Woodward Dream Cruise in the year 2030, when today’s 18 year olds will be entering their thirties, what cars will be driven, and how old will the drivers be?
If you’re a regular reader of TTAC, one of the Best & the Brightest, you probably know that the Fisker Karma’s range extender is a 2.0 liter turbo Ecotec engine supplied by General Motors. What you probably don’t know is that GM’s relationship with Fisker goes beyond that of a vendor and a customer. That’s because GM owns part of Fisker. Okay, technically speaking General Motors owns a minority interest in a company that was once Fisker’s majority owner and that still holds an equity stake in the startup EV maker. Regardless of the details, that still counts as GM having an interest in Fisker’s success or failure.
After reports of a Fisker Karma going up in flames in Woodside, California last Friday, we published comments that EV expert Jon Bereisa had made about an earlier Karma fire. Bereisa had said that the tight packaging of the engine and putting the entire exhaust system under the hood and exiting out behind the front wheels compromised the heat shielding. Putting that together with photos and video of the latest fire, that showed the firefighters concentrating their water spray behind the front wheel, I speculated that Bereisa’s criticism was warranted. Now Fisker has issued a statement, specifically absolving the engine compartment and “unique exhaust routing” of involvement in the Woodside fire: (Read More…)
The K-car saved Chrysler the company. The K-car almost destroyed Chrysler the brand. Lee Iaccoca and his team spun nearly endless and very profitable iterations of the K platform and components including the company’s market segment creating minivans. Starting with the LeBaron in 1983, followed by the stretched wheelbase E Class, the company also began […]
Fisker Karma Fire, Woodside, CA – Photo Courtesy of Aaron Wood
A second Fisker Karma has been reported by Jalopnik to have caught fire and burned yesterday. The owner returned with his groceries to find the car in flames in a Woodside, California parking lot. Interestingly, he first called Fisker who advised him, wisely, to call 911. Back in May, after a Karma started a house fire in Texas, engineer John Bereisa said that the proximate cause of that fire was likely heat, the result of tight engine packaging. The ultimate cause, he suggested, was the hybrid vehicle’s weight, which Bereisa said necessitated a larger, more powerful combustion engine to power the car’s generator that charges the batteries for extended range use. Bereisa is one of the world’s experts on building electric and hybrid cars. (Read More…)
This is a follow up to a couple of recent TTAC posts that touched on how and why the Fisher Body Craftsman’s Guild, a youth competition sponsored by General Motors which produced a number of top flight car designers, was ended in 1968. After my first post, which wondered if any girls participated because most of the promotional material was targeted at boys, I was contacted by Richard Earl, the grandson of Harley Earl, who founded GM’s styling department and ran it for over three decades. Richard Earl provided me with a quote from Irv Rybicki, one of Harley Earl’s successors as head of GM Design, that claimed that it was racism and sexism on the part of GM brass that ended the Guild.
When I go to a first-rate car show, collection or museum, I often vacillate between “but of course” and “what a surprise”. There are cars that you know that you’re going to see, cars that naturally belong in that environment, and then there are unexpected but undeniably special cars that turn out to be one of the highlights of the event for you. The Concours of America at St. John’s, formerly the Meadow Brook Concours, is not only at the pinnacle of Detroit area car events but it’s also a world-class event, in the rank of the Amelia Island and Pebble Beach shows. The 2012 CoA was held last Sunday and as expected there were plenty of “of course” moments, but also a few very pleasant surprises, including this McLaren M1B, what I consider the ultimate anti-trailer queen.
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