The man’s wife, an actress who looked Scandinavian, called it “The Monster.”

“You’ve come for the Monster,” she said.

“Yes, I have,” I said. Meanwhile trying to figure out why she would call one of Pininfarina’s most beautiful Ferraris– the GTC/4– “The Monster.”

I say “most beautiful” but the Italians, with their ever more refined eyes for body shapes (both women and cars) called it “the hunchback with clown lips” because it had an ever so slight rise to the center of the rear deck lid, and up front there was a rubber bumper surround. Neither feature hurt the car’s looks but you know the Italians. They wanted things just right or they would find something to criticize.

I found out later on, once I took the car, it ate money. It wasn’t the cookie monster, but the money monster.

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Terrence Steven McQueen was born to a stunt pilot father and an alcoholic mother on this day in 1930. His father left them both halfway to Steve’s first birthday. In the ensuing years he would find a home on his Uncle’s farm in Indiana, be moved to Indianapolis and L.A. where he was shipped off to a Junior Republic by an abusive stepfather, lumberjack, be a Marine guard for President Harry Turman’s yacht and become the highest paid movie star in the world.

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March 20, 2010.  Spring Equinox. Spring has sprung. How could Thetruthaboutcars.com celebrate the first day of spring 2010 better than with a concise pictorial history of springs?

Apart from tires and seats (which typically have their own springs, the seats, not the tires) the car’s suspension is what protects your (personal) rear end and spine from the rigors of the road. Apart from shock absorbers (which we’ll celebrate the minute we’ll find an appropriate season for shock absorbers), springs are an essential ingredient of your suspension. Springs come in three basic flavors. Read More >

Statistically speaking, it’s a little early to be ragging on the baby boomers. In addition to numerical advantages, the boomers also haven’t slipped fully into retirement, meaning mainstream culture will be stuck for a little longer in the era of unrepentantly rosy nostalgia. And though the pasturing of America’s second-greatest-by-default generation will be ruinous for little things like government entitlement programs, the benefits to important stuff like car design will be profound. Unlike subsequent generations, the baby boomers still had the privilege of living during the golden age of the automobile, a time before Detroit’s decline, the massive government regulation of safety and emission standards, and the general blandifying of the car. As a result, boomers bring a bizarrely retro-sensibility to the modern car market, not just for restored classics, and retro-muscle cars, but for the vehicles that brought an end to the era of Detroit Baroque. Which is where things get interesting.

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The video showing the destruction of 46 of the 55 Chrysler Turbine Cars we posted recently generated lots of heated discussion. The key issue is, and has been for years, whether import tariffs played a material role in Chrysler’s decision. There is a wealth of sites and reprinted vintage articles dedicated to the TC, and the import duty conspiracy theory reoccurs throughout them. Interestingly, Wikipedia, which is not to be trusted in all things automotive, is the only source that throws some doubt on that story: “The story at the time that this was done to avoid an import tariff was incorrect^{[citation needed]}.” Lacking that citation, it was time to do some further sleuthing, and either join the tariff theorists, or put a stake through it once and for all. Read More >

Passenger pigeons were the most common bird found in North America. So common that flocks numbering 2 billion were up to a mile wide and 300 miles long. In other words, the average North American in the 18th and 19th Century saw a lot of these pigeons. You could easily argue that a passenger pigeon sighting in 1812 was something on the same scale today as seeing mind-numbing crap on TV. Not a particularly noteworthy or unique experience. So what took the passenger pigeon down? It was a combination of things but the biggest factor was that these pigeons tasted pretty good (a lot like chicken) and they were plentiful-hence a cheap source of food.bThey were wiped out at the pace of millions per year, so the last documented passenger pigeon named Martha died on September 1st 1914. In other words, something the average American had seen every day was extinct in a matter of a few decades. Quick extinction of a very common species is not a phenomenon exclusive to Mother Nature because cars can disappear overnight too. Here are a few that will soon be joining that “whatever happened to…” list.
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There is always going to be a generation gap. The term “generation gap” was coined in the 60s when it became evident that Baby Boomers had developed a whole new set of rules for themselves that put a significant chasm between them and their parents in terms of interests and values. Generation gaps will always define new generations and every generation will march to the beat of their own drum. For me, the gap got Grand Canyon wide when I read the LA Times piece by Martin Zimmerman that cited a J D Power study which indicated that Generation Y has less interest in cars. As a lifelong car guy who built an entire social world around cars I would have to ask; “Generation why?”

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The 1969 Camaro is an automotive icon. Because of this juggernaut tag there are tens of thousands of these late 60s pony cars restored or under restoration. The late Reverend Jimmy “drink the Kool-Aid” Jones would have been humbled by this kind of blind loyalty-the sole reason the 09 Camaro exists was GM’s critical need for a home run.

But which car is going to be more valuable in 2019? Even after 10 years of service as a daily driver?

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In a recent news article, RF stated: “…here’s another story where the web pulls the rug from under auto industry types seeking to hide the truth. We’ve been saying it forever (in Internet terms): the collector car market has collapsed. Well, duh. But the mainstream media and specialist press has both been happy to perpetuate the myth perpetuated by the auction houses that their business has been defying gravity. See? Cars are selling for phenomenal prices! Meanwhile, Hagerty’s CARS THAT MATTER is telling readers to pay attention to the men behind the curtain.” In truth, the men behind the curtains are not the market. They are middlemen. They extract a percentage from every participant they can find to witness their activities; Buyer, Seller, hell, even the gawkers have to pay to watch the show. The auction houses are, in ecological terms, parasites on the very market they claim to serve. Like any parasite their success has a tendency to cause harm to their host. These guys are tarted up used cars salesmen. That, and the recent transformation of the car auction into a three ring circus, is what is killing the auction companies, and it has absolutely nothing to do with the collector cars being sold.

All these moves created an artificial market bubble where some people were proven to be fools, easily separated from their money. It successfully convinced them that a machine mass-produced by the hundreds of thousands could have rarity based on factory options. They achieved this by wining, dining, and blinding those fools with the bright lights of live TV coverage. In an era where celebrity is valued above wisdom, why not go for fame and throw a few hundred grand at that Mopar?

Smelling blood in the water, and seeing the resulting feeding frenzy themselves, more parasites attach themselves to the market. Builders and restorers taking less-valued stock from that mass-production pool of used cars and create a host of dubious offerings for the auction block. “Resto-mods.” “Tribute” cars. “Continuation” cars. As a bonus, many of them even turn this activity into TV shows, attaching themselves to the celebrity culture.

Finally even the manufacturers themselves got into the game. Selling the first cars off the lines at auctions. Selling off their own collections. The final insult to both the auction houses and to their own lack of vision: Building retro-cars and selling straight to the consumer.

This whole collection of players created a market-within-a-market, and it inflated too far, too fast to sustain itself. That is what has collapsed. In a decade we might call it “The Muscle Car Bubble” or maybe “The Baby Boom Bubble.” Like all economic downturns a few of the “innocent” were harmed in the collapse, but mostly the damage, deservedly so, has been contained within the bubble’s sphere of influence.

The collector car market is, and always will be, healthy. Collector cars are not beanie babies or Pokémon cards. Automobiles have aesthetic appeal and genuine practical use. They have intrinsic value, both as a utilitarian object, and as a stylistic example of what happens when engineers and designers create something. Sir William Lyons, the man behind Jaguar, once said, “The car is the closest thing we will ever create to something that is alive.”

There is palpable inspiration and creativity expressed in the form of the automobile. People who love cars will always want, buy, and sell them. Private sales make up the vast majority of all collector car transactions, and the Internet is transforming that market from a local to a global phenomena accessible by anyone, anywhere. Car auctions are also dying for the same reason swap meets, car clubs, and buff-books are. You can browse the whole planet’s supply of cars, parts, and automobilia from your laptop or cell phone. On your schedule, at minimal cost. Craigslist has far more reach and power than Craig Jackson. Google will find what you want better than Gooding.

The Collector Car Market hasn’t collapsed. It merely sheds excess now and then when parasitic traders come in and inflate a bubble such as we’ve seen recently. There are top tier collector cars and there are pedestrian collector cars. Duesenbergs and Delahayes will always have value, as will ‘Cudas and Camaros. Only when the latter types start trading at prices near the former you have a market as artificial as testicles hanging off a truck.

Smart people and smart money were never in the bubble anyway. The market survives. Smart auction houses will even survive the stupidity of some of their brethren. Those that haven’t fallen into the trap of celebrity culture glitz will continue to bring buyers and sellers together for as long as there are titles to trade along with the hardware. What we are seeing is the deserving death of a small portion of the market. Couldn’t have happened to a more deserving bunch.

I set out to write a book not so much about the varieties and comparative deficiencies of cars in the Soviet Union as what these objects meant to Soviet citizens. The structure and organizing principles of the book were among the first things to become clear. There would be three chapters on the “Soviet Detroits”—the places where automobiles were built, the people who built them, and how the cars and trucks they produced both embodied the state’s agendas and inspired popular identification.

I settled on Moscow’s AMO factory (later known as ZIS and still later ZIL) from where the first Soviet-made motor vehicles emanated in 1924; the Gor’kii Automobile Factory (GAZ) that began turning out Model A cars and trucks in the 1930s and later the Pobeda, Volga, and Chaika; and AvtoVAZ, the giant factory built on the banks of the Volga in the late 1960s and early 1970s to produce the Zhiguli, or as it became known abroad, the Lada.

These chapters would be followed by one on roads and their construction, the forms of labor relied upon to build and maintain them, and other dimensions of the struggle against “roadlessness.” The final two chapters would tell the story of how Soviet citizens experienced trucks and cars in their daily lives, how Communist ideology eventually accommodated the private automobile, but why cars required a lot of semi-legal or illegal activity to keep them on the road.

The book is structured around three axes: foreign and domestic, public and private, and continuity and change.

Contrary to Cold War-era assertions, the Soviet automobile industry was neither entirely dependent on nor completely autonomous from western technological developments. It did a lot of copying, mixing and matching, and innovating on the fly. In the 1930s, Soviet highway design and construction emulated Fascist Italy’s autostradas and Nazi Germany’s autobahns but for better or for worse otherwise depended on indigenous inspiration and approaches.

Foreign trucks and cars—the pre-revolutionary playthings of the aristocracy, the “Renochka” that the revolutionary poet Vladimir Maiakovskii bought as a gift for his mistress, the legendary Lend Lease Studebakers, the trophy cars that Red Army officers brought back from defeated Germany, Detroit’s finest on display at the 1959 American National Exhibition in Moscow—were icons of a world few Soviet citizens had seen. Yet, Soviet citizens took pride in “their own” luxury models (ZIS and ZIL limousines, Chaikas, etc.), thrilled to accounts of auto races and rallies in which Soviet drivers heroically overcame obstacles, and for the most part leapt at the opportunity to acquire even the most modest of Soviet models.

Actually, even the state’s property—trucks and, until the 1970s, the vast majority of cars—often was appropriated for private or personal purposes by drivers and officials in need of wheels. With the proliferation of privately owned cars in the 1970s and 80s, owners appropriated state supplies of parts and gasoline too. The mutuality of such relationships and the hybridity of forms they produced meant that occasional ruptures in the life of the Soviet automobile did not prevent the emergence over the long haul of a Soviet “automobility.” Many of its features survived the collapse of the USSR itself.

The book’s main argument is that the Soviet automobile had to adapt to Soviet circumstances as much as it provoked adaptation. If the particularities of Soviet socialism can better inform us about the history of cars and trucks, then the Soviet automobile can help teach us about Soviet socialism.

THE WIDE ANGLE

No contextual landscape for the book existed in the sense of a previous body of historical scholarship devoted to the subject. The Soviet automobile did figure in Cold War-era economists’ reckonings of the so-called “second economy.” And sociologists, anthropologists and historians have been producing an impressive number of articles and books on car and truck cultures in many parts of the world (although not the USSR or other former Soviet-bloc countries). But the twin inspirations for the writing the book came from elsewhere.

Visiting Moscow and other ex-Soviet cities during the 1990s, I could not help noticing the tremendous increase in the number of cars and the difficulties urban infrastructures had in accommodating their growth. This observation made me reflect on the intricate relationships among cars, cities, political systems and the choices they offered and constrained with respect to human mobility. It also made me start to notice the presence of cars and trucks in a lot of places previously hidden in full view—in Soviet novels, poetry, films, photographs, and songs, in the speeches by Soviet leaders, in memoirs and elsewhere. Soon my project was awash with material.

The other source of inspiration was my own weariness with the narrative of Soviet history that emphasized tears, state oppression, and violence—a narrative especially prominent in and appropriate to accounts of the Stalin era. This was the period in which most of my previous scholarship was situated. I longed for a subject that was more capacious, that would enable me to trace its arc through the entirety of the Soviet Union’s existence, and found it in the odd coupling of the automobile and Soviet communism.

Of course I encountered tears and shed a few of my own as I struggled to master the vocabulary of auto mechanics. But among the unexpected pleasures of writing this book were several discoveries among the myriad of sources: film comedies from the Soviet 1950s and 60s about a driver and his boss in a case of mistaken identity, about a would-be ice skating princess who settles for becoming the best gas station attendant by filling up the tanks on roller skates; a Stalin-prize winning novel from 1950 in which a truck driver rhapsodizes about the joy of the open road; and Ilya Ehrenburg’s 1929 dystopic novel about the devastating effects of the automobile on labor, the environment and pedestrians. From the latter, I derived the subtitle for my book.

A CLOSE-UP

The spatial requirements and landscape consequences of the automobile age—the roads, oil and gas refineries and stations, garages, tire and parts stores and junk yards, billboards and flashing neon signs, suburban tracts and shopping malls—hardly made their presence felt in the USSR. “Consequently,” wrote a Dutch-born writer in the late 1960s “the Westerner in his own car …moves in an odd way back through time” to “how [our world] once looked, how it was supposed to look.”

Still, already in 1960, Krokodil, the Soviet humor magazine, could print a cartoon of makeshift sheds disfiguring the courtyard of a new apartment bloc, and residents in Leningrad soon were lodging complaints about garages getting “in the way of people’s everyday lives.” The proliferation of private automobiles also had temporal consequences as car owners required considerable amounts of time to maintain and repair their vehicles.

Hence, car owners and car parts suppliers (both of whom were overwhelmingly male) appropriated courtyards, alleys, roadsides and fields for the predominantly masculine activities of car work and car talk. Garages, furnished with old chairs and perhaps a heater and a cot became sites of celebration—places to drink vodka and consume sausage and pickles. They and the interiors of the cars themselves served as alternative living rooms for men seeking privacy and male companionship. The essentially private activities in which they engaged thanks to the car and the infrastructural inadequacies of the centrally planned economy were beyond the surveillance not only of their wives but of the state that inadvertently had fostered them.

All of this was a long way from the vision of Valerian Osinskii, a prominent Bolshevik who did more to give life to the Soviet automobile than anyone else. In a series of articles that Pravda published in 1927, Osinskii called upon his comrades to adopt the “American automobile” instead of the “Russian cart” and thereby put “every worker and peasant in a car within not more than ten to fifteen years.” Osinskii also dreamed of a future in which a car trip from Moscow to the provincial town of Voronezh would mean traveling on an asphalt highway so smooth that the only sound heard would be the swish of tires. Only since the collapse of the USSR have such journeys become possible, but at the same time, the post-Soviet landscape is now littered with the detritus of the automobile age.

LASTLY

In the late 1950s, Nikita Khrushchev, who never had been a fan of the private car, proposed a rental system as an alternative route to automotive modernity. “We will use cars more rationally than the Americans,” he assured an audience in Vladivostok. But even before his ouster in 1964, the system that had lacked funding and provoked innumerable complaints was phased out. With it went the chance for the USSR to take advantage of its relatively late entry into the automobile age and improve on the record of its predecessors.

Cars for Comrades is about more than cars. It is about the chimera of overcoming the gap in technology between the capitalist (First) and socialist (Second) world. Even as Soviet and American engineers were installing an assembly line to turn out Model A trucks and cars in the late 1920s, Soviet journalists were conjuring up visions of a technological utopia, not just a factory out of which would rumble identical machines one after the other, but an entire city, the “City of Socialism” lit by electricity, heated by steam, and with rectangles everywhere. But the capitalist world’s technology was a moving target. By the time the techno-utopian “Soviet Detroit” of the future was actually built—in the early 1970s in Togliatti to complement the AvtoVAZ factory—the real Detroit was definitely showing signs of stress and decay from which it would not recover.

The book’s larger significance is about the intersection of technology, ideology, and material culture. I argue that Soviet socialism exchanged the possibility of an alternative modernity for one much more entangled with the material culture of the western world.

This process was difficult to predict. For much of its existence, the Soviet Union was defined by its leaders as a more rationally organized and socially just polity than any in the capitalist world. The preponderance of trucks—those workhorses among motor vehicles—and the rare privately owned car was consistent with such difference. But eventually the comrades and other middle-echelon personnel wanted to enhance their personal mobility, flexibility, and status. They wanted the wealth within what had become a vast empire to be shared with them not only in the form of access to first-rate educational institutions, vacations abroad, family apartments, and domestic appliances but that most representative of twentieth-century material objects—the car.

In the end, they got their way, sort of.

Over the years, I’ve attended thousands of “old car” shows. At the most prestigious of these events, eligibility rules are clear, consistent and cast in concrete. Meanwhile, at the bottom end, the cars on display have grown to include brand new Chevy trucks and late model imports. As long as it has four wheels, it’s in. What kind of twisted logic allows a post-millennium car or a brand new truck to qualify for a car show when some poor schmoe who put thousands of unpaid hours into his ’57 Ford has to park away from the show in a dusty parking lot? I know: times are tough. If you want to shoot ducks, go where the ducks are; the money’s in the mods. But once again, we’re looking at an auto-related industry where the relentless pursuit of short term gain threatens long term survival.

Commercially, the lack of temporal quality control is lethally short sighted. I know of one show that takes place in a small town of 5000 people that routinely brought hundreds of cars and tens of thousands of dollars into the community. Over the years, they had a few bad weather weekends. As classic car owners don’t like to risk their ragtops to the slings and arrows of outrageous hail, the weather “inspired” the organizers to lower the bar and raise the gate.

Suddenly, dramatically, you saw a shift in the show’s philosophy.

At first, the show dedicated a side street to newer mini-trucks and cars-with obscenely loud sound systems. The peaceful family affair was turned into a cheap carnival overnight with moronic, pounding crap loosely called music dominating the atmosphere. A formerly peaceful summer day, once a benign, positive celebration of the car, became yet another example of hi-tech audio torture.

Not to go all get off my lawn on you, but the change came complete with what’s called a punk-ass attitude. Hats were turned around or tipped to the side like Gomer Pyle’s at the gas station in Mayberry. We lost a car show and gained a hip-hop Woodstock.

Needless to say, the show fizzled. It’s now a fraction of its former size. The revenue dipped to catastrophic levels; turns out the“hats worn funny” guys with the hellish music turned up to 120 decibels don’t like to spend money on restaurants. Or hotels. The best they can do for the local economy: pick up a case of beer for the trip home.

The guys that used to go to this event set up show-and-shines closer to home where the greed factor isn’t an imperative. Something was lost at that point because the show in the small town was always unique. The town was full of old main street buildings that readily lent themselves to that trip down memory lane.

This trend continues to spread. And I’m not happy (in case you missed it). I don’t care if these new car drivers worked ten jobs and every holiday to pay for their tricked-out Accord or brand spanking new Silverado—they still have a bog standard vehicle, not a Boss 302. Come back when you restore a notchback ’66 Mustang with a three-speed manual and a six-cylinder motor. Or similar.

Enthusiasts who are living in new car world have shows every day of every week. They’re called dealer’s lots. Or parking lots outside the Higgly-Piggly. I know I speak for every car owner in the free world when I ask for a hard-line adherence to the 25-year rule. In other words, bring that 2009 Mustang back in 2034. Until then, leave it in the dusty parking lot outside the show because you haven’t paid any old car dues. You’ve simply taken on monthly payments for a soulless clone made out of 90 percent plastic. That hardly qualifies as earth-shaking (although the sound system might), and it leaves you outside the fence in the “real” old car world.

It’s an unarmed fence. But don’t be surprised if somebody snaps at some point and unloads a few rounds of 12-gauge buckshot into a Honda with a brutally loud sound system at a so-called old car show. I’m not advocating violence, but I am saying that when worlds collide, bad things happen. Alternatively, hopefully, a little dignity and respect go a long way.

[Read more of Mr. Sutherland’s work at mystarcollectorcar.com]

In general, today’s cars don’t put us in mortal peril (by themselves) or strand us miles from home. They don’t require any special driving or mechanical skills. As always, progress has come at a cost: it’s eliminated the character-building experiences that helped guys of my g-g-g-generation become “car guys.” Yup, I come from a time without cell phones, GPS navigation, OnStar, and vehicles that can breeze through 100,000 miles with little to no fear of meltdown. A time when cars offered a shorter shelf but more human – machine interaction. When car guys could look under the hood, see a problem and correct it. On the spot. I’m not bragging, so don’t put me down. Not yet, anyway.

Over the years, many a car has left me on the side of the road. I’ve seen blown up u-joints, water pumps, transmissions, alternators and starters. I’ve been in cars with busted clutches and blown gaskets. In fact, I’ve encountered failure in pretty much every component between the front bumper and the rear bumper. Few of these experiences were accompanied by a standard-issue warm and fuzzy Walt Disney ending—unless you include Bambi and Old Yeller in the mix. But they were all powerfully instructive experiences (the movies, too).

Today’s cell phone-wielding, speed-dialing AAA members will have no idea what I’m talking about. In the olden days, a breakdown mandated an immediate, hands-on mechanical inspection. Check belts, hoses, electrical connections, etc. Look for missing pieces. Listen for strange sounds. Check for puddles. Find a tool. Adjust, tinker, experiment. Pray. Repeat.

I view some of my unscheduled roadside pit-stops as impromptu shop class. For example, I learned that’s it always advisable to grease wheel bearings when I first heard the god-awful sound of a wheel bearing dying a horrible death on my way home. The same experience taught me that extreme heat makes for a great weld on parts that shouldn’t actually be welded together.

I repeat: living in a world without the luxury of dependable cavalry, malfunctions taught me to think on my feet. And how to drive.

I once had a charging problem on a busy highway at 2AM in the morning. There were exactly two solutions to this dilemma: pull on the headlights and listen to the sound of a car in mid-stall or leave the headlights off and continue the journey.

As a teenager ninety miles from home after eight hours on the road, the choice was easy (if monumentally foolish). I kept going. I tucked in behind a semi and followed his clearance lights. The trucker was an unwilling Good Samaritan; he flicked his rear lights continuously for the first 50 miles. But eventually he gave up and got on with the program. I never met the guy, but we shared one of those life-affirming moments despite his obvious initial blind terror. 10-4, good buddy.

Now that the statute of limitations has passed, I also admit piloting a brakeless car home. I wouldn’t recommend this kind of driving to anybody, but it does train you to look down the road a lot further than the average kid with a working set of brakes.

Of course, most of my roadside education was preventable. If I’d bought into the concept of the most basic maintenance, I’d have spent less time swearing at cars, skinning my knuckles and praising the Lord when my journey continued. But let’s face it; planning ahead is a rare part of any teenager’s game plan. At least not in the non-geek component of a high school environment where most of us desperately wanted to live.

Like all kids at my age, I learned everything the hard way—including the time I found out that a 1962 Volvo may look like a VW Beetle, but it doesn’t float like one. I had a 17-year-old’s less than stellar grasp of the legal implications of his daredevil behavior and wasn’t afraid not to use it.

Fast forward and we’ve arrived in a new era, where kids negotiate the Nürburgring in the comfort of their parent’s living rooms, without once worrying about flat tires, carburetor failure, fan belts breaking, etc. And when they take to the road, they can do so with the same ignorance and insouciance.

You could say that engineering excellence has sucked the life blood out of the automotive experience. Sure, today’s cars are remarkably easy to drive. Joe Consumer no longer has to calculate his chances of getting there from here, or acquire skills to raise the odds. But we’ve lost that hands-on spirit of adventure. Plastic engine covers and restrictive warranties deflect amateur interest. A significant percentage of problems are electronic, for which a wrench is less useful than package of Hamburger Helper.

I’m not saying that the average motorist yearns for a return to the days of “car trouble” and a reasonable chance of fixing it. I’m just saying that I am.

[For more of Jim Sutherland’s work, please visit mystarcollectorcar.com]

For the last decade or so, nostalgia has been big in the car biz. Does it work? If substance backs it up. To wit . . .

*  The MINI is a great drive.

*  The PT Cruiser is practical—easy to park yet plenty of hauling volume, especially if you remove the back seats.

*  The current Mustang has so much style it doesn’t need much substance, and it does have the muscle car thing going for it. (Fun fact: Mitt Romney drives a 2005. Chris Dodd was driving a late model ’stang until he started running for president. Then he traded it for an Escape Hybrid.)

*  The Miata is probably the best drive per dollar. It does that job so well that people often forget that it tips the ragtop to British roadsters of the mid-twentieth century.

* The New Microbus concept could have made minivans cool. I would have had trouble holding onto my wallet, and I’m a single guy. I want to drive it around America.

When it lacks substance, nostalgia doesn’t go very far . . .

*  The new T’bird was an expensive car that looked nice but didn’t do anything well.

*  The PT is an interesting styling concept, but a terrible execution. (Pokemon eyes on a retromobile???!) Good style doesn’t go stale, but the PT was stale almost out the door. It’s not a driver’s car and it’s not a reliable car. The original xB does everything better than the PT, and if you don’t care about cool, so does the Element. Another fatal mistake by the pentastar.

*  The Charger is a pale imitation of the original, as if some middle-schoolers tried to copy it with papier mâché, with a really mean face. The slit windows are annoyingly impractical on both the Charger and the Magnum.

*  Even the Camaro is weak in the styling department, for similar reasons, although the concept looked much better. Even if deus ex machina saves GM and the economy roars back, I predict mediocre sales.

Rule breaker . . .

*  The VW (Real) Beetle was a car that eschewed style for substance. It had so much practicality, from which it derived so much personality, that it became stylish. The New Beetle eschews substance for style. I’m not wild about it—too cutesy—but they did a really good job of cutesy, and a lot of people like that.

You can’t hang nostalgia on a name alone . . .

*  The “GTO” completely lacks the original’s panache. Imagine it next to the real thing. (G8 is a much better name for a Pontiac in this age of globalization. In fact, Pontiac should have had a top of the line G8, which they could have called the “Summit.” Then Larry Summers could have bought one.)

One reason we like retro is because it so often puts the “car” in charisma (or the other way around). Most of today’s vehicles have all the personality of a room air conditioner. But you can inject personality without invoking the past, if only the bean counters would get out of the way. Occasionally, they do . . .

*  The (real—gen 1) xB looks so cool that even my friend, Paul, a 53 year old family man with an aging Odyssey and an early ’00s Civic hatch with about 35,000 miles and a few dents that he calls his “pocket rocket,” whose life is far too interesting and successful for a midlife crisis, wants one. It’s also extremely practical; kind of a modern Old Beetle.

*  The original Saturn was another car that was cool without being retro, something that could happen because it was created outside of the usual GM channels. Too bad GM blew it.

*  The Acura Integra’s cool was a combination of major, yet inexpensive, fun, practicality, and better style than most anything on the road (even if it is still not nearly as stylish as, say, a Corvair).

*  The CRX was cheap, quick, agile, and honest.

*  The old, boxy Volvos look exactly like what they are, and they do their job well. (They are already becoming classics.)

*  The ’90s Caprices really look like they’re going to pull you over. I want to drive a black and white down the left lane and watch everybody get out of my way.

We wouldn’t need retro if there were more room for creativity in the big car companies. And we wouldn’t need it if all the once-great brands hadn’t completely lost touch with their heritage. Take Chevrolet. Through the mid-’60s, most of these were gorgeous pieces of commercial art. Despite the names of some of the modern models—Malibu, for instance—these cars bear little resemblance to and completely lack the artistry of their classical forebears. Of course, when even a Citroën looks like an appliance, you know the end of days is near.

With all that the domestic automakers have done wrong, it’s important to remember the things they’ve done– and continue to do– well. In his post about dumb moves behind the wheel, Jonny Lieberman highlighted one of these engineering accomplishments: Heating Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HAVC). As JL pointed out, even when Detroit was making malaise-era cars that barely ran, their HVAC systems were the “envy of the world.” Sure, Volvos and Saabs had good interior heating and defrosting systems, not to mention heated seats. But Detroit led the world in keeping drivers physically comfortable. In this, geographic happenstance played a critical role.

In European cities, streets are narrow and go in all directions. The history and glamor of road racing looms large. Small cars, precise handling and confident cornering were always high priorities. In contrast, Detroit’s streets are broad and, for the most part, adhere to a 90 degree grid. Boulevard and interstate cruising defined the automotive gestalt. Motown’s suspensions were calibrated more for comfort than precision handling. And HVAC systems enjoyed pride of place.

Every year when the NAIAS rolls around, people question the wisdom of holding a big auto show in Detroit in January. The weather outside the hall isn’t Fargo or International Falls cold, but it’s enough to evoke mention of brass monkeys’ testicles witches’ mammaries. Statistically speaking, January’s average temperature: 17.8°F. Not to mention wind chill; the “breeze” coming off Lake St. Clair can cut you to the quick. And yes, there’s snow. Average annual snowfall: 41 inches.

Detroit auto execs and their contemporary counterparts may have never experienced the joys of dealer service managers and warranty work but they still had to deal with Michigan weather on the way to and from work. Auto execs don’t like to be cold. Neither do engineers. Working together, they made sure that Motown’s products could warm their bones– and keep them warm– through the worst of the midwestern winter. 

Quick digression…

I reckon the Volkswagen Beetle’s token HVAC system is one of the main reasons Motown diss-missed the small car boat. In January, Wolfsburg’s average temperature is a relatively balmy 38°F. This may account for the fact that the Bug’s heating system didn’t have an electric blower. Pressurized air was ducted off of the cooling shroud into the headers/heat exchangers. Heat, then, was speed sensitive– under the best of circumstances. 

After a Michigan winter or two, with plenty of road salt rotting the German car’s undercarriage, the Vee Dub’s heat exchangers and heat ducts were perforated with rust. Small wonder VW offered a gas heater: a self-contained 18k btu gasoline-fired furnace. 

Back to Detroit, which isn’t located in a desert. Still, the average July temperature clocks in at 83.4°F (Wolfsburg 72°F), with plenty of relative humidity to keep the sweat flowing. 

Air conditioning was originally introduced by Packard in 1939 as a $274 option. It filled up the vehicle’s entire trunk. To turn it off, the driver had to stop the car, turn off the engine, open the hood and disconnect a belt connected to the air conditioning compressor. In 1941, Cadillac built 300 equally inconvenient air-conditioned cars. 

GM’s Harrison Radiator Division developed the first efficient, affordable automotive A/C unit. Offered as an option on all 1955 V-8 Pontiacs, it featured a two-cylinder reciprocating compressor and an all-brazed condenser. Fitted with a magnetic clutch, the unit didn’t need extra power to drive the compressor, which greatly improved performance and fuel economy.

Meanwhile and anyway, by the 1960s, domestic automakers were improving ventilation systems. Cars had air vents in the fender wells, with cable actuators on the kick panel. Flow-through ventilation was soon integrated into the heating system. By the 70’s, automotive air conditioning became a factory option on Detroit’s popularly priced cars. 

Upgraded HVAC systems were an excellent way for dealers to add to a car’s bottom line. (Heaters were an extra cost option well into the 60’s.) Many of our Best and Brightest who grew up sweltering in cars without a chiller gladly paid for extra for A/C when they could afford it.  

Another digression…

My dad, may he rest in peace, loved air conditioning. American Motors used to label the maximum A/C setting “Desert Cool.” They must have had my dad in mind. Though he liked his options, as far as A/C was concerned, they could have had a single setting: max cool, max fan. In the 1970s, he switched from Oldsmobiles to Mercurys; you could have cooled your drink on the dashboard of his 1974 Grand Marquis.

Thirty-eight years later and I’ve never driven a Detroit product that couldn’t blast full heat in subzero weather, or keep you comfortable on a blistering hot summer day. Just about every automaker in the world now makes fairly sophisticated climate control systems. But it’s a clear case of meeting a high standard that Detroit, to its credit, has set.

I live in Michigan. Not on the Detroit side of things, around here it’s mostly suppliers. I’m an engineer. As I write this, I’m off on unpaid furlough. I don’t work in the auto business; my company is in an industry about 10 bailout levels down. But around here, it all looks the same. Two years ago the Delphi fuel injector plant was shut down; two months ago the big GM stamping plant was stamped for extinction. Winter even came a bit earlier this year. It’s cold, damp, gray, and we got some snow before Thanksgiving. Not unheard of, but not exactly welcome. I think it was P.J. O’Rourke who remarked while flying over the “liberated” but still depressed Eastern Europe, “Communism is the only form of government you can see from 30,000 feet.” This economy is like that. You can see it of course, but it’s also cold and gray and it hangs in the Michigan air.

I sit on the couch and watch the TV news shows. I choose a network based on who I want to be mad at. It’s pretty easy to know what they’re going to say. They easily find experts who can easily toss out solutions based on villains that are easy to find. I can blame the UAW for greedily grabbing as much as they could with no thought to the future. Or I can change the channel, and blame the management for the same thing. It’s easy for me to pick my side and find a commentator or a website to validate my choice.

Feeling validated always makes me feel better, but I want things to be like they were. I’m mad at these people for screwing up my plans, screwing up the status quo, screwing up my life. But way deep down, there’s a quiet voice in my head that says, “this is life… this is how it goes.” Newton may have said, “an object in motion tends to stay in motion”, but he wasn’t accounting for friction. In life, there’s friction.

The voice tells me that maybe I’ve been ignoring the friction. I work hard… I “put in the hours”. But I do the work to pay for silly conversations on cell phones. I watch silly shows on cable TV. I pay credit card bills for too much silly shit. Maybe I wasn’t ignoring the friction; maybe I just focused on the wrong friction. When life is in motion at its usual pace, when there’s no obvious crisis, no worthy antagonist, I lose focus. I get caught up in the silly stuff.

I’d like to believe that the leaders of GM, the UAW, or the government don’t get caught up in the silly stuff. They’ve been vetted and validated. They’ve risen to the top through a series of tests that predicted these problems and revealed their solutions. But again, I hear the voice and it reminds me that just isn’t true. All these organizations are simply made up of people like my colleagues, like my neighbors… like me. And since the fate of the country rests with the likes of me, I look back out the window at the depressed economy and become, well… depressed.

But then, deep down, I’m forced to acknowledge that voice. Maybe it’s Newton again, “For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.” But maybe it’s more along the lines of “we finally have a worthy antagonist…we have something to do.”

I easily conjure up more pundits, prognosticators, and keyboard jockeys that shout down the voice with an overwhelming onslaught of facts and scenarios describing insurmountable dooms. But I can’t quite drown it out. “Sure these guys may be a bunch of ass-clowns, unfit to lead during a real crisis…but it’s the crisis that will produce the real leaders. The vetting and validation can take place now. There can be focus.” I’d like to dismiss the voice as jingoistic pabulum. But still, it’s hard to ignore it.

It’s in my culture. Sure, people like to say “work is for suckers”…but most of them hear a voice too. They don’t respect any side that tries getting something for nothing. They don’t shy away from “putting in the hours”.

It’s in my DNA. My parents were immigrants. You can’t leave your whole life behind and not be willing to take a risk. If you were afraid of the worthy antagonist, you’d still be back in the Old Country.

So I just can’t ignore the voice. I have something to do. I have focus. Despite shouts of what may be the worst economic disaster we’ve ever faced… I can still hear the voice saying in it’s best Ed Harris / Gene Krantz imitation, “With all due respect, I believe this is gonna be our finest hour.”