Now and then a story comes along that’s right in a writer’s wheelhouse. Yesterday, Chrysler filed a lawsuit in US District Court alleging that Pure Detroit, a small chain of gift shops specializing in Motor City memorabilia, was infringing on their trademark “Imported From Detroit” tagline, popularized in Chrysler’s Super Bowl ad starring rapper Eminem. Pure Detroit started selling their version of the shirts on Feb. 7th, the day after the Super Bowl, followed by Chrysler’s own shirts a few days later, which sold out in short order. Chrysler is donating the profits from those sales to Detroit area charities, and the company says that it tried to work out a similar arrangement with Pure Detroit. Pure Detroit did agree to stop online sales, but they continued to sell the shirts in their retail stores, resulting in the lawsuit. Courts have been pretty consistent that owners of intellectual property have to diligently defend it. According to a leading intellectual property attorney, in this case the courts should side with the Auburn Hills automaker, not the small stores in downtown Detroit.

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Photos courtesy of Cars In Depth

There’s a reason why car enthusiast sites have features like Murilee Martin’s Down On The Street and Paul Niedermeyer’s Curbside Classic. People enjoy photos and commentary on cool old cars, particularly those that are still being driven. Site publishers, on the other hand, like drawing traffic and those features do draw in new readers often searching for information about a particular make, model and year. Hence after Murilee departed from Jalopnik, they started a series called Found Off The Street.

So when I saw a Porsche 928 in what appeared to be pretty decent shape sitting at a repair shop in Royal Oak, I asked our esteemed ed Ed if I could take a whack at it. The trick, of course, is to be the same but different.

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The first issue that any reviewer must face is perspective. Whether it’s a $70,000 Jaguar or a $15,000 Chevy you have to maintain an appropriate perspective. You have to be fair to the product you’re reviewing while putting it into proper context for your readers. When Jaguar told me that a 2011 XF Supercharged was […]

Start the video, then click on the 3D button in the menu bar to select 3D or 2D format. You can also select resolution up to 1080p HD. Video courtesy of Ford Motor Company and Cars In Depth, where you can also find 3D images of Ford’s VR lab.

With a big push from the film, computer, video game, camera, and television set industries, 3D seems poised to become rather commonplace, particularly when passive display panels requiring no special eyeglasses will soon be at consumer level price points in just a year or so, I’d say. Some of the most sophisticated 3D technology in use today, though, is not in use in Hollywood, California, or Redmond, Washington, it’s in places called Dearborn, Auburn Hills and Warren, Michigan. The domestic automakers were early adopters of advanced computer aided design and manufacturing (CADCAM) as well as advanced computer imagery. They have some of the the most advanced tools available today and some of the most skilled and creative engineers and designers who develop and use those tools. Virtual reality is one of those tools. By projecting a realistic holographic or stereo display, stylists and exterior designers can get an accurate perspective on how their ideas will look without having to make time consuming and expensive scale and full size models. I think it’s pretty understandable that car companies would use 3D and VR for exterior design studies. Perhaps even more valuable to automakers, though, is how stereo image technology can be used in the interior design and engineering of modern cars.
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PBS Newshour looked at GM’s future, focusing on the Chevy Volt. TTAC editor Ed Niedermeyer was a featured guest. If you want to skip to Ed’s appearances, they’re at 4:19, 5:43, and 9:08 (Or, in the clip embedded above). Transcript below the jump.

I wonder if I’m the only person that found this ironic. Actually, I wonder if anyone at PBS Newshour even knows who Alfred P. Sloan was.

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation provided funding for this project

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The relationship between automotive writers and manufacturers is based on trust in the basic fairness (or pliability) of the writer, and usually it’s incumbent upon the writer to establish their  reliability before being trusted with a week-long tester. What many PR types and press fleet managers don’t seem to understand is that allowing even the […]

The other day, when a popular blog mentioned that the Porsche Boxster was judged to be the car most likely to last 200,000 miles I did a double take. You don’t have to spend very much time in the comment sections of the major car blogs or on enthusiast forums to know that German cars have, at least to enthusiasts, a reputation for being prone to frequent and expensive maintenance and repair. Likewise, a simple internet search for [porsche boxster engine problems] puts paid to any notion that the average Porsche owner has an 85% chance of his or her car lasting to the 200K mark.

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In the wild, panthers are endangered. In the automotive world, Panthers will go extinct sometime in the third quarter of 2011, when the last Lincoln Town Car Executive L rolls off the line. If you think Panthers get a lot of lovin’ around these here parts, you should attend a convention of folks for whom those LTCELs are tools of the trade. Chances are that if you’ve used a limousine or livery service in the past 20 years, you’ve sat in the back seat of a Lincoln Town Car Executive L. That’s why it was big news at Limousine Charter & Tour magazine’s LCT Leadership Summit a couple of months ago when Ford’s fleet marketing manager, Gerry Koss, announced that replacing the soon to be dearly departed Town Car in Ford’s livery fleet fleet will be livery and stretched limo versions of the Lincoln MKT.

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Lots of car enthusiasts have heard of the AAR ‘Cuda, a homologation special that Chrysler made in 1970 to go racing in the SCCA. What’s not widely known is that there was a CUDA designed ten years earlier, and it came out of the styling studio of American Motors, not Mopar.
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This morning General Motors held a press conference at its Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly plant to announce that the Chevy Volt was in production, on sale, and will start shipping today. The Volt goes on sale in seven initial markets, with a national rollout in early 2011. Export sales will begin late next year.

While there were a number of journalists in attendance (including, significantly, a noticeable number from Japanese news outlets) and though there was some news to be made, this particular dog and pony show was more of a pep rally than anything else. Hundreds of assembly line workers from the plant attended the event and the speakers frequently praised them. When GM North America president Mark Reuss walked in before the event started, he made a point of congratulating each member of the GM management team that was in attendance. Ron King, UAW president, was busy so Gary Bernath stood in. He went out of his way to praise the locals at all the GM facilities involved in the Volt project, and he thanked Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm and other elected officials. (Read More…)

Bill Mitchell, only the second man to head General Motors styling when he took over from the monumental Harley Earl, was not a man about whom people were impartial. GM’s official history reveres him. Harley Earl’s family reviles him. His coworkers and subordinates at GM either loved him or despised the man. Even landmark designs that were signatures of his reign at GM Styling, the split-window 1963 Corvette Sting Ray and the boat tail Rivieras, are polarizing designs that had detractors, including some on the GM Styling staff. He admittedly ran that department like a dictator, though he rarely fired anyone. Mercurial in temper, he’d have screaming fits at his design staff, laced with the most vulgar epithets, then defuse the tension with an offhand joke as he left the room. Shamelessly ambitious and self-promoting, often taking personal credit for his staffs’ designs, had the term “larger than life” not existed, Mitchell would have coined it to describe himself.

By today’s standards of workplace political correctness, diversity and racial and sexual harassment law, Bill Mitchell was an atavistic throwback to an age when ethnic jokes by supervisors were uncomfortably endured by the brunt of that ‘humor’. An executive then could tell his secretary to order him up some hookers after a multiple martini lunch, knowing that she’d hold all calls and cover for him if his wife (or another executive) got jealous. As a result, in addition to whatever praise and criticism his aesthetic direction and management skills have garnered, Bill Mitchell’s legacy has been somewhat tarred with the brush of bigotry.

The question is are we being fair to the man? Are we applying contemporary standards to an era that was simultaneously more innocent and more evil in terms of racial, ethnic and other prejudice?

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Initial stock offerings, bankruptcies, brands being shuttered, established manufacturers being taken over by other concerns, financial crises – a time of turmoil in the auto industry. The time I’m describing is not just the present, it could well describe just about any period in automotive history. With the possible exception of the 1960s, when the Big 3 consolidated market share gained after the independent automakers were reduced to American Motors, there really never has been a long period of stability in the domestic auto industry. Even in the 1960s, Chrysler Corp. stumbled badly.

About a month ago Wayne State University Press, one of the leading publishers of automotive history books, sent me a box full of their recent titles, most of which concern the earliest days of the American auto industry: David Buick’s Marvelous Motor Car by Lawrence Gustin, Maxwell Motor and the Making of the Chrysler Corporation by Anthony J. Yanik, The Dodge Brothers: The Men, the Motor Cars, and the Legacy by Charles K. Hyde, and Hyde’s latest book, Storied Independent Automakers: Nash, Hudson, and American Motors.

While reading up on early American automotive history and I couldn’t help being struck by a sense of the more things change, the more they stay the same.

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Occasionally, when talking to other car folks, I’ll hear, “well, you live in Detroit”. It can mean different things. Sometimes it’s an accusation of jingoist bias in favor of the domestic automakers. I plead guilty in not wanting to see lots of my neighbors and customers unemployed. Other times, it’s more wistful, more envious. For a car guy, Detroit can be Mecca and nirvana on Christmas morning with a cherry on top. I don’t have to fly in for press events at the Big 3 and because there are so many automotive writers around here, even the foreign brand press fleet is stocked pretty nicely.

Though not as common as they once were, you can still take a factory tour at Ford’s [not quite so] giant [anymore] Rouge complex, and while you’re in Dearborn it’s definitely worth your while to visit the Henry Ford Museum. Just one note, you won’t find it listed under that name. A few years ago, for some insane marketing reason, the Henry Ford Museum & Greenfield Village decided to rebrand itself, choosing “The Henry Ford”. I suppose that goes over big with museum curators – I’m sure that everyone in Manhattan knows what the Guggenheim is, but in a region that has hospitals and schools named after Henry Ford (I & II), dropping Museum from the eponymous Henry Ford, is just confusing and a little too precious.

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No, Virginia, that’s not a turbo Eldo, that’s a turbine Eldo

Paul Niedermeyer’s article and more recent book review concerning Chysler’s Turbine car show that Chrysler was savvy to use it as a halo vehicle – its appeal continues to resonate today. Though we’re learning new details all the time, most car enthusiasts know that Chrysler made a turbine powered car in the 1960s. Less well known is the fact that General Motors also had their own turbine program. While Chrysler’s Turbine Car was mostly a short lived PR effort, it happens that GM had a much longer lasting automotive turbine development program, starting in the 1950s and lasting for at least 40 years, without ever coming anywhere near to production. TTAC commenter jmo, alerted us to the existence of a powdered coal fired turbine powered Eldorado that GM developed after the oil crises of the 1970s, and we were hooked.

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As they say in Hebrew, im ta’am v’rai’ach ain l’hit’vakai’ach, with matters of taste you can’t argue, and in general I agree with Jack Baruth’s principle that folks who know nothing about design shouldn’t say much beyond “like it” or “don’t like it”. Still, it’s impossible to review current Mazdas without at least mentioning their, […]