There’s an old Russian saying, “success has many fathers while failure is an orphan”. The automotive world has plenty of examples of that. Perhaps a half dozen Italian designers have taken credit for the Lamborghini Miura. Zora-Arkus Duntov is often called the “father” of the Corvette, even though it was seeing the already in production Corvette on display at the 1953 Autorama in New York City that inspired Duntov to write Ed Cole asking for a job as an engineer at Chevy in the first place.

Another case of mistaken automotive paternity is the Mustang. If you asked 100 auto enthusiasts the question, “who originated the idea of the Ford Mustang?”, most would say Lee Iacocca. After all, he made the cover of Time magazine when the original 64 1/2 was such a hit. When you type in Iacocca, Google autosuggests “iacocca mustang”. He’s even sold Iacocca signature editions of the ‘Stang. Sometimes Ford product manager Donald Frey, who passed away earlier this year, is given the credit for the Mustang’s concept. While Frey was a staunch advocate for the sporty four-seater, selling the idea to Iacocca and shepherding it past resistance from Henry Ford II, it turns out that he wasn’t the originator of the idea. In fact, as Robert Cumberford explains, the idea didn’t even start at Ford, or even a car company, it was the idea of ad man Barney Clark, and he pitched it first to General Motors, not Ford.

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John Dingell Jr. has represented Michigan’s 15th congressional district for 55 years. His father held the same seat for 22 years before that. Dingell has lived his entire life in Washington, D.C., never in the southwest suburbs of Detroit where his constituents live. For perhaps the first time in his life, Dingell is actually in a political battle. The Detroit Free Press published the results of a poll that showed him 4% down to his challenger, Dr. Rob Steele, a cardiologist from Ann Arbor, with just three weeks to go before the election.

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Handed out to undeserved recipients and devalued by lazy writers alike, few words are as hackneyed as iconic or legendary. If everything is an iconic legend, nothing is. Sometimes, though, the words are exactly appropriate. The Canadian American Challenge Cup racing series which ran from 1966 to 1974, more popularly known simply as Can-Am, included cars and drivers that are truly iconic and the series was genuinely the stuff of legend. Though the big block V8 engines of Can-Am last roared over 35 years ago, even today the name Can-Am resonates strongly with car enthusiasts.

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After reading Tal Bronfer’s review of the Euro spec Honda CR-Z, I made arrangements to get a North American model for a week.  The car arrived the same day that Michael Karesh’s second review of the CR-Z ran on TTAC. Instead of a third review, Ed and I discussed doing a comparison with an original […]

Later this month at the upcoming Paris auto show, Lotus will be revealing the first car that reflects their new strategic vision, a vision of going upmarket and luxurious to compete directly with the likes of Porsche, Ferrari and Aston Martin. The car, originally slotted to fill the role of the much beloved Esprit, will now be “something more” than the Esprit. The midengine supercar is rumored to be powered by the V10 engine that powers the Lexus LF-A. Toyota currently supplies Lotus with all of its production car engines. The LF-A’s announced production run of 500 units probably won’t cover that engine’s development costs, so the rumor makes sense.

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Part One of this piece can be found here.

Were it not for an act of God, the fecklessness of General Motors’ executives and the difference between a self-promoting Texan and a Californian willing to walk away from it all, the many Cobras you see, real and ersatz, would be joined by another predator, Bill Thomas’ Cheetah.

Developed with backdoor assistance from Chevrolet, the Cheetah was the Chevy powered answer to the “Powered by Ford” Cobra. A racing Cheetah was given one of the first Gen IV big block 396 Chevy “rat” motors made. Based around Corvette drivetrain and suspension components, and a not very robust tube frame, the Cheetah was covered in a body that is unforgettable.

Though the Cheetah only competed in a small number of SCCA races, winning 11 events while simultaneously developing a reputation for extreme speed but treacherous handling (caused by the flimsy chassis), its drop dead gorgeous body styling made it instantly memorable. The fact that the Cheetah came out in the mid 1960s, when scale models and slot car racing were hugely popular with teen baby boomers, didn’t hurt the car’s popularity.

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The Shelby 427 Cobra is a curious car. There are few vehicles that more worthily deserve the description iconic. The originals are so historically significant and rare that each is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars (and in the case of the six Daytona Coupes, millions), yet stylistically identical replicas are ubiquitous. Chances are, if you see a Cobra, it’s probably not real baby seal. Over the decades thousands of replica Cobras have been produced to varying degrees of fidelity by a variety of kit car and turnkey manufacturers. When Carroll Shelby realized that he couldn’t sue the replicar makers into submission, he decided to make his own “continuation series” Cobra replicas (in your choice of carbon fiber, fiberglass or original aluminum bodies). He’s also come to a licensing agreement with Superformance, who make superb Cobra and Daytona Coupe reproductions. I’m a big supporter of the idea of intellectual property, and Ol’ Shel is entitled to make a living off his name and accomplishments, but Carroll Shelby’s proprietary attitude towards the Cobra borders on the absurd.
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One of the reasons why I started writing for TTAC was that, as a lifelong resident of the Detroit area I was tired of watching people with little direct knowledge of this region using stereotypes and caricatures to demean my neighbors. Typically people outside the region will describe Southeastern Michigan as a place of unemployment, indifferent workers, crime and racial disharmony. As with most prevarication, there’s an element of truth to those stereotypes, but it’s not the whole truth.

I can understand finding that kind of behavior in comment threads online, but it’s distressing when what is generally considered the leading newspaper in the country, the New York Times, lazily relies on a ‘usual Detroit template’ when covering an event in this area.

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Gestalten, a German publishing house specializing in books on design, has published an intriguing book on a subject that surprisingly has previously only been addressed tangentially but is sure to appeal to most auto enthusiasts: the graphic designs of race cars.

While the shape of racing cars has been the subject of endless technical and aesthetic discussion, Voelker points out that the history of the colors and liveries that have been applied over those shapes has not been particularly well documented. Considering the emotional and aesthetic impact of the colors and graphics used, this is surprising. As Voelker says, who would want to watch a plain white Ferrari race?

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After the watching the OPOC engine run and shooting some exclusive video for TTAC, I was introduced to CEO Don Runkle.
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Predicting the future is a risky business. Lincoln Steffens, muckraking journalist and admirer of the Soviet Union said, regarding the then young USSR, “I have been over into the future, and it works.” Steffens apparently wrote that before he actually visited the workers paradise in the early 1920s. A decade later he regretted that endorsement.

Music writer Jon Landau’s prediction was a bit more accurate. “Last Thursday, at the Harvard Square Theater, I saw my rock and roll past flash before my eyes. And I saw something else: I saw rock and roll future and its name was Bruce Springsteen.” Landau was soon to edge The Boss’ original manager, Mike Appel, out of the picture, took over management of Springsteen’s career and production of his music, and did everything in his power to make his prophecy a self-fulfilling one.

Earlier this week I believe that I saw the future of transportation and stationary power and its name is OPOC. That stands for “opposed piston opposed cylinder”, a new engine architecture being developed for production and licensing by EcoMotors, a Troy, Michigan startup.

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I’m not sure when I first read an issue of CAR from the UK. I was still reading the American buff books in 1977 but American cars were ugly (5mph bumpers) slow (early emissions controls) and ran poorly (ibid). I was a Brit car fan but I sold my ’66 Lotus Elan to my dad. He wanted a car project to work on and I needed money so I could market an invention of mine (U.S. Patent # 4,253,475, The Hydraulic Bong). When I discovered CAR, not only was it a fix for my Brit car jones, but it was a revelation. They covered all kinds of cool cars, many not available in the US, and they had a superlative writing staff, including the incomparable LJK Setright. (Read More…)

In the previous edition of the Big Buff Book Cover-Up series, we looked at the Cumberford Martinique, a BMW & Citroen based retro roadster designed by a small startup that never got beyond prototypes or demonstrators.

The last of the three-part series shows (for starts) that you don’t have to be a small startup for your concept to stall at the prototype stage.

You can be a small British luxury marque with a storied but financially checkered past. (Read More…)

We continue our look at the rock stars of car magazines, the concept cars splashed across the covers, cars that rarely if ever went anywhere.

The cover concept dream cars that I find most intriguing are the stillborn ideas, cars that were not quite vaporware, but that also never made it past prototype stage into production. Some were from specialist manufacturers, others from new startups and yet others from large and established firms. Some, like the six-wheeler Panther, were so unique that they have stuck in my memory for decades. Others completely slipped my mind. Most of them, I’m sure, sold more magazines than cars.

If I asked you to name a major Japanese automaker that developed a mid-engine sports car you’d most likely mention Toyota and the MR2 or Honda’s highly esteemed Acura NSX. You probably wouldn’t mention Nissan. (Read More…)

For this edition of Magazine Memories, we’ll be reviewing what I like to call “cover concepts”. For decades, perhaps since the buff book genre began, putting a completely new and typically exotically styled concept or dream car on the cover, more often than not accompanied by hype that the car will actually go on sale, has been a staple of the automobile magazine industry. Hindsight tells us that most of them were indeed dream cars, never really making it to production. The dreams were so vivid (and so much in vain) that this will be a three-part series that barely scratches the imagined body paint.

Some of the cover cars were more concrete, representing cars that made it to production, mass production in some cases, but again hindsight gives us some perspective on unrealistic expectations or journalists buying into the hype. Examples of this category would be the May 1979 edition of Car and Driver, announcing the arrival of GM’s latest attempt to sell small cars, the all-new front wheel drive X cars, with a large photo of the Chevrolet Citation in its “performance” package X11 trim. The cover copy reads “REVOLUTION! GM blows everybody into the weeds with new front drive compacts!” (Read More…)