Willys MA, Willys’ entrant in the jeep competition

General Motors was the largest supplier of war materiel to the American armed forces. Ford famously built B-24 Liberators that rolled off the Willow Run assembly line at a rate of one per hour. Chrysler alone built as many tanks as all the German tank manufacturers combined. With those high profile contributions to the war effort made by the big three automakers, it’s easy to forget that the independent automakers (and automotive suppliers as well) also switched over completely to military production.

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Tank testing at General Motors’ Milford Proving Grounds

To commemorate Memorial Day here in the US, we’re taking a look at how the American auto industry was mobilized into war production for World War Two. Because that mobilization was so extensive, the conversion to military production so complete, a blog post by it’s very nature cannot really do the subject justice. This is only the most cursory review of the topic, which truly deserves a book length treatment. As a matter of fact, historian Arthur Herman is currently working on a book about the “arsenal of democracy”, American industry during the war.

Herman will have a lot of material to work with.Today we’ll be looking at the role of the Big Three automakers in war production, starting with General Motors. (Read More…)

Chrysler A57 Multibank 30 cylinder Sherman tank engine made from five inline sixes

Memorial Day is a time set aside to remember those who gave their lives in military service to the United States. Today, even as we are fighting two wars and have men and women in harms way in yet other places, though, a relatively small fraction of Americans serve in the military. Few civilians, except military families, understand the sacrifices necessary to protect our country. There was a time, though, when the military conflict was genuinely existential and just about every able bodied man was drafted or enlisted, while virtually the entire civilian population was directly involved in the war effort, either through their jobs in military production, or more personally, because just about everything was rationed giving the military a higher priority for things like vehicles, tires, fuel and food. With the dawn of total war, the plants and proving grounds of Detroit became a new kind of battlefield, in which the tools of economic prosperity were turned into munitions and machines that would change the course of history.

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Not that many fashion models have worked in machine shops, but most people should know that loose clothing and rotating objects don’t mix, or rather they mix too well. The cape streaming off of her neck may make for a nice photo but it could easily have led to some seriously negative publicity had that cape been snagged by a spinner on those knockoff wheels. Dancer Isadora Duncan’s penchant for long flowing scarves led to her demise in 1927. Riding in a friend’s Bugatti, she was strangled when one of her signature boas got caught in a rear wheel. One would think that at least one person at BMW or their ad company would have known about Duncan’s fate when they started tossing around ideas for a photo shoot to promote their new concept, the 328 Hommage. Apparently that wasn’t the case.

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Elvis Presley famously bought (and gave away) Cadillacs, lots of them. One of the first cars he bought after his first success with Sun Records was a 1955 Caddy, which caught fire and burned up out while on tour. Around that same time he bought Sun owner Sam Phillips a Cadillac as well. He bought a 1955 Fleetwood 60 Special and had it custom painted pink for his mother, Gladys, but she never drove it. There’s even a web site devoted just to Elvis’ Cadillacs. though he had at least a couple of notable Lincolns including a ’55 Continental that Ford had customized by Hess & Eisenhardt, the same company that made presidential limos. That web site documents about 30 Cadillacs known to be owned by the King, along with at least a score of Caddys that he gifted to friends and associates. The Cadillac fit Elvis’ image. They were big, bold, brash and fast. That big white Cadillac hearse that the king of rock and roll took for his last ride seemed particularly fitting. All it was missing were rhinestones. That’s why it’s a bit surprising to find out that Elvis owned and drove a tiny three-wheeler Messerschmitt micro car, and he owned it right around the time he couldn’t help falling in love with the much bigger Cadillacs.

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While 3D has been getting a big push from Hollywood and the video game and television set industries, consumers have not yet wholeheartedly embraced 3D when it comes to home tv. Stereo photos and videos can be visually stunning and emotionally evocative, but for many people 3D is a no-starter because current 3D tv requires using special glasses of one kind or another. It’s possible though, that consumer acceptance of 3D may come from an unexpected area, the automotive sector. While the technology for autostereoscopic, glasses-free, displays exists right now, there are cost, distance, and viewing angle issues that keep them from being currently applicable for home television sets. Those issues, however, may not exist for automotive applications. In fact, 3D technology is advancing so rapidly that cars may present particularly appropriate applications for the current state of the 3D art.

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Photos courtesy of Cars In Depth

As a Detroiter I hate ruin porn. I particularly hate it when lazy journalists, bloggers, editors and video crews shoot photos or video, or worse, use stock footage and pics, of the Michigan Central Station and the old Packard plant. So I’m a little reluctant to share these photos that I shot just south of State Fair, east of Woodward. Ultimately, the photos were just too good, so emblematic of Detroit’s decay, that I had to share them. Also, it’s an opportunity to share some hope about the city.

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Start the video, then pause. Click on the “3D” icon on the YouTube menu bar to select your choice of 3D formats or 2D. Video and original photos courtesy of Cars In Depth

We’ve all seen too many pictures and videos of the magnificent ruin that was once the Packard plant on Detroit’s east side. It turns out that there’s a Packard site in the Detroit area that’s not a ruin, the Packard Proving Grounds in Shelby Twp. about 15 miles north of Eight Mile Road. Like the Packard plant on East Grand Blvd, Albert Kahn designed all the original Packard buildings on the proving grounds site, including a tudorish looking lodge where the facility’s manager and his family lived. It may be the only place where Kahn designed both residential and industrial buildings. It was built in 1927 at a cost of over a million dollars. Packard used the facility to develop and test their cars, aviation engines (there was a small airfield inside the big oval track – Charles Lindbergh visited the site), and also for publicity and marketing. The proving grounds even had a role in the Arsenal of Democracy. Chrysler used the facility during WWII to test Sherman tanks, erecting a building used to service the tanks that were tested inside the paved oval.

Additional video after the jump.
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One of the cool things about the SAE World Congress is that there’s always at least a couple of radical new engine designs. Scuderi was back with their split cycle compressed air hybrid, only this time with a turbo that lets them use a much smaller piston on the intake side, reducing friction. FEV showed an engine optimized for compressed natural gas, with turbocharging, long intake runners, and a piston designed to increase turbulence. Two exhibitors were at the SAE for the first time. Grail Engine Technologies was showing their atmospheric-valve-in-piston engine that routes the induction through the crankcase and up into the combustion chamber.
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1903 Columbus Electric Model 1000 on display at the 2011 SAE World Congress. From the collection of Peter Fawcett.

Photos courtesy of Cars In Depth

The theme of this year’s SAE World Congress was “Charging Forward Together”. In case you haven’t noticed the electrification of the automobile industry, to make the phrase even more obvious the logo includes an electric plug. Keeping with that theme the automotive engineers’ professional association put a couple of early electric cars on display, a 1915 Detroit Electric and a 1903 Columbus Electric.
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Photos courtesy of Cars In Depth

You never know what you’re going to see. I’ve been trying to get in the habit of taking the camera bag for my 3D rigs with me when I go out and about so that I don’t miss capturing the neat old vehicles that I happen across. Just last week there was an impossible-not-to-notice canary yellow 1972 Lincoln Continental that shoulda woulda coulda been posted here but the cameras were at home. So when I walked out of Durst Lumber after picking up a tripod nut for my video rig and saw a very clean, very black Buick Grand National, I was glad that I had the cameras in hand. That’s when I realized that as unique as the Grand National was in its malaise era day and as cool as it is today, there was something far more worthy of note just a few parking spaces away.

This originally equipped 1948 Packard Eight survivor is on only its third owner and has just 40,000 miles on the clock. Other than the tires, fluids, filters, belts and hoses, everything is original – nothing’s been rebuilt. All it takes is a walk around the stately exterior and a peak into the elegantly appointed interior and it’s easy to understand that while Cadillac may have been the standard of the world, Packard was America’s ultimate aspirational car. Packards were what truly wealthy people drove. (Read More…)

Engineers living in southeastern Michigan have had a rough go of it these past few years. As the US automakers bled money, lost market share, retrenched and in the case of GM & Chrysler eventually went through bankruptcy, they shed more and more engineers. The talent, skill and many, many years of experience was jettisoned as successive layers of fat, muscle and then bone were cut out of the domestic automakers in their restructurings (Ford under Alan Mullaly went through what was effectively a restructuring financed by mortgaging the company for $26 billion).

The first tentative signs of the Big 3’s recovery have been based on some pretty decent product so it’s clear that the automakers and their vendors still have a well of in-house talent from which to draw, but with GM & Ford currently banking substantial profits and Chrysler appearing to approach profitability (according the Sergio), the auto industry as a whole is gearing up by going on a hiring spree. Engineers, particularly electrical and chemical engineers (see EVs, hybrids and batteries) are once again in strong demand in Detroit. Companies looking for mechanical and software engineers were actively hiring as well.

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For budget minded leadfoots Forbes came up with a list of the ten quickest cars that cost less than $30,000, based on performance data measured by Edmund’s InsideLine. You can go over to Ray’s place to check out the list in greater detail or Forbes for the original version, but the list got me thinking. Can you derive a metric from performance and price information that measures “bang for the buck”? When cost is not much of an issue, performance is a given. High performance at a lower price point, though, is as worthy of note as high buck supercars. I’ve always been partial to products that provide a large fraction of state of the art performance at a small fraction of state of the art prices. The question that I have when it comes to fast cars is: is there a way to come up with a statistic that realistically models performance per dollar?
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Photos courtesy of Cars In Depth

Whether they’re found at curbside in  the Pacific northwest, or on the island that rust forgot off the coast of California, most of the cool-old-cars-found-by-car-bloggers tend to be from relatively recent decades like the 1960s or 1970s. So when I saw this 1928 Oldsmobile Six sitting in front of the insurance agency in Ferndale, Michigan that it was advertising, I knew that I had to stop and take some photos – particularly after I noticed that it is registered with non-historical, handicapped license plates, indicating that it’s currently in running condition.

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And you thought the dealer wanted a lot for a key fob

Today, to celebrate their new 918 supercar, Porsche announced a new special edition of the venerable 911, the new Porsche 911 Turbo S Edition 918 Spyder. Boy, isn’t that a mouthful? Actually, since it’s available as a drop top, it could even be the Porsche 911 Turbo S Edition 918 Spyder Cabriolet. I admit that the nomenclature is a little confusing, now that Porsche is making a coupe with the word Spyder in its name, and putting two model numbers on one car, so just that you know what we’re talking about it’s not Porsche’s new hybrid supercar, the 918 Spyder. No, this car is indeed based on the more pedestrian (yeah, I know, it’s a car, but work with me) 911. To be sure, it’s a special 911, what with its Turbo and S suffixes, and it’s got some unique-for-a-911 carbon fiber trim and “acid-green” stitching on the leather, to effect some of the look of the 918. I just checked on TrueDelta and a regular 2011 911 Turbo S is $160,700. So how much do you think it will cost you to get behind the wheel of a 911 Turbo S Edition 918 Spyder?

How about a million dollars?

And Porsche will sell every single one that they build.

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