Welcome to the Thursday edition of Curbside Classics. Tuesdays is for the big winners (and losers), the exceptional, the unexpected. Thursday will be for the more modest and prosaic finds. Any car a quarter century old or more still plying the streets of Eugene is worthy of our respect. Along with a helping of disdain, as needed. The 1959 Chevy Curbside Classic ignited lingering embers of the old Chevy vs. Ford (and Mopar) wars. My apologies to the younger readers who are probably bored to tears over this. I promise I’ve got something much newer and more voluptuous next Tuesday. But no less than geeber asked if a ’59 Ford could be the subject of the next CC. Be careful what you wish for, Fordophiles, because what I find sitting on the street is what you get. So here it is: a delectable Courier wagon. Now let the debate begin: was the ’59 Ford better looking than the Chevy?

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Look at the picture above. Now pretend it’s your rearview mirror. That giant set of batwings is right behind you and gaining; now it pulls into the fast lane. A couple of teenagers grin as they zip by you ass-backwards at seventy miles an hour. The front grille of the ’59 Chevy slowly recedes in the distance ahead. If you spent any time on the roads of Cincinnati around 1969, this may well have happened to you.

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Bob Lutz may well prove that the Cadillac’s CTS-V is the fastest production sedan in the land, thanks to an engine transplant from the Corvette ZR-1. But what about a genuine all-Caddy production racer? Something you could take to Le Mans, and challenge Europe’s finest exotics or just down to the local drag strip, and blow away every production car in its day. You’d have to turn the clock back sixty years, when Cadillac’s new V8 was the hottest engine in the land. But if you were serious about racing with it, like Briggs Cunningham did at Le Mans in 1950, or the original owner of this car, you’d have to request the factory to make one important change, which alone makes this hot rod Caddy the most historically significant Curbside Classic find to date. Read More >

Your 2050 Brazzaville Micro-i600 solar-electric personal transportation device automatically glides into the Biodynamic Vego-Taco Loco lot and parks itself. On the way inside, you pass the static display of a 2010 Honda Pilot. Your seventeen year-old son stops in his tracks, looks at it with bewilderment, and asks if you really drove around in one these big, ugly, two-ton carbon-spewing behemoths forty years ago. Will you mumble something incoherently about times being very different then and tell him to hurry along, or will you stop, gaze admiringly and wax eloquently about your distant but ever-so-vibrant Pilot memories? Read More >

Tear the highly practical metal roof off of one the most boring big American sedans like a 1963 Olds Dynamic 88, and suddenly it becomes the key ingredient of an intensely romantic scenario: a hot summer day, a full-size ragtop, a beautiful woman to share it with, and the open road. What could be better? It’s got to be one of the top “relive the youthful automotive memories/dreams” recipes for guys my age or so. Except in my case, it’s a nightmare. Read More >

A recent study shows that the generation gap has dramatically narrowed. Parents and kids are now each others’ best friends, or something like that. But they weren’t always so chummy, especially in the sixties and early seventies. I have a theory for that: it was the heyday of the rear-facing third-seat station wagon. Nothing like the generations traveling while facing in opposite directions to cultivate oppositional disorder. And just to add a little more dissonance, how about we examine the two most polar opposite examples of the genre. Read More >

I’d say we all could use some R&R after exhaustively documenting the Vega’s innumerable weaknesses and frailties. So how about we spend a little time communing with its polar opposite in almost every conceivable way possible (while still being a small wagon). I could have picked any of some thirty or forty Tercel wagons still hard at work on the streets of Eugene to shoot. But check out the impeccably-restored 140 year-old Carpenter Gothic house behind this one. The house and the Tercel are both owned by my nearby neighbor David Gusset, a renowned maker and repairer of fine violins, including my 1833 Valenzano. If anyone can appreciate a well made instrument built for the long haul, it would be him. Read More >

After being trapped six weeks in a 1971 time warp, I had the controls of the Curbside Classics time machine all set for the mid-eighties. But once again, fate interceded. Running some errands, I had my first encounter with no less than two 2010 Camaros. Then, on the way home, something called out to me as I tooled down Franklin Boulevard. I found it parked behind the old boarded-up Chevy dealer, and it had an important message for you and me: “beauty is not in the eye of the beholder; it’s in the object itself.” Read More >

Curbside Classics takes you back to 1971 for a virtual comparison test of six small cars, based (and partly borrowed) from a C/D test.

There it is, a golden yellow Vega, seductive and infinitely irresistible, hanging from the tree of automotive disappointment. Its serpent maker found plenty of smitten takers (especially among the motor press), because the bitter truth imparted was apparently in a time-release potion: “The best handling car ever sold in America” (Road &Track). Motor Trend’s COTY. C/D readers voted it the best economy car three years in a row. And it won this C/D six small car comparison. I (mentally) bit too, having spent idle hours in 1971 with a Vega catalogue specifying a yellow Kammback GT exactly like this one. But sure enough, the sweetness of that first bite evaporated all too quickly: the apple was rotten at the (engine) core. The Vega was GM’s Watergate/Waterloo, the beginning of its inevitable end. And yet here I am forty years later, totally smitten, seriously considering biting the apple again. Read More >

Curbside Classics is taking you back to 1971 for a virtual comparison test of six small cars, based (and partly borrowed) from a C/D test.

I don’t have any shots of the Simca 1204. I haven’t seen one in over twenty-five years; have you? So I’m taking my lifeline (to Google images). The Simca 1100/1204 was such a remarkable and historically significant car, perhaps the most influential small car since WWII. Its DNA is in every transverse-engine FWD hatchback in the world. The VW Golf was a perfect crib of the Simca wearing a handsome Italian suit. Plus, j’aime les voitures françaises. And the Simca almost won the C/D test. It should have won. So forgive me, but we’re going to have show and tell without the show. Read More >

Curbside Classics takes you back to 1971 for a virtual comparison test of six small cars, based (and partly borrowed) from a C/D test.

Hail the conquering hero! Well, not of C/D‘s comparison test, but who cares, as long as the sales are there. And by 1971, the Corolla was well along in its conquest of the US small car market, despite being only three years fresh. In 1969, only its second year on the US market, the Corolla leapt to the number two import sales spot, and was nipping hard at the Beetle’s pointy tail. Try replicating that today! And by 1975, the “little crown” was lording over the defeated krabbeltier. So what exactly were the Corolla’s remarkable qualities that sent VW (and Opel) into such a deep and permanent retreat? And its shortcomings that kept it from winning this comparison? Read More >

Curbside Classics takes you back to 1971 for a virtual comparison test of six small cars, based (and partly borrowed) from a C/D test.

Few cars are more polarizing than the Pinto (except the Prius, of course). Commonly derided for its exploding gas tank and general crappiness, other folks found (still find) it to be cheap, fairly reliable transportation with a variable fun quotient, depending on its configuration. Sometimes, cars develop their reputations later in life, but the underdeveloped Pinto was pretty much an open book right from the beginning. A children’s book, at that. The Pinto should have been called Foal; it was a baby car. Read More >

Curbside Classics takes you back to 1971 for a virtual comparison test of six small cars, based (and partly borrowed) from a C/D test.

If you were going to a speed-dating event, and were thirty-three years older than all the “competition”, you might be forgiven for wanting some quick cosmetic surgery. But if the result was a reverse Michael Jackson, you’d damn well better hope that your “experience” and “build”, and other timeless qualities are still in demand. Otherwise, your days finding willing partners/buyers are numbered, like this 1971 VW Super Beetle.

Curbside Classics takes you back to 1971 for a virtual comparison test of six small cars, based on (and partly borrowed) from a C&D test.

Was a car ever born with the odds so stacked against it? Its name is defined as “a small gnome held to be responsible for malfunction of equipment.” Its design was penned on an air-sickness bag during a (bumpy?) flight. It carries almost sixty percent of its weight over the front wheels despite being RWD. Its steering has six turns lock to lock. And it looks exactly like what it is: a perfectly normal-looking sedan that had its rear end amputated by a cleaver. The Gremlin would have had to create a pretty major malfunction in my PC (and C&D‘s typewriters) for it not to end dead last. Read More >

Did I hear someone ask “How about more capsule reviews such as a 1930 Ford Model A where 0-60 is measured with an hourglass?” At Curbside Classic we aim to please; I’m on it. And although I didn’t rustle up a Model A within 24 hours, I came pretty close: a 1936 Plymouth. The only problem is that the Plymouth never did make it to sixty. Read More >