From the ridiculous to the sublime. After subjecting you to that curious Hudson Terraplane “coupe”, please consider this my apology. A visual palette cleanser, if you will. Before organizers let the public in to the Detroit Autorama at noon on the Friday of the show, members of the media can get in at 9 AM while the Ridler Award competitors and other top-quality, high-dollar customs are still being set up in their sometimes elaborate displays. Those displays in the front part of Cobo Hall include stands to jack the cars up off the floor so you can see the undercarriages, mirrors to do the same, professional lighting, build books and hero cards. There was one car in the front of the hall, though, that had a decidedly minimalist display, just enough machine turned aluminum floor tiles so the ’32 Ford roadster’s retro bias ply tires weren’t sitting on bare concrete. Read More >
Category: Editorials
In response to my post about how the Nazis tried to write Austrian inventor Siegfried Marcus (who was Jewish) out of history by ordering German encyclopedia publishers to replace Marcus’ name and credit Gottlieb Daimler and Carl Benz as the inventors of the automobile, some of our readers felt that I was unfairly diminishing Daimler and Benz’s contributions to automotive history. My point that in pre-1938 Austria Marcus was considered the inventor of the gasoline powered automobile was dismissed as the result of Austrian chauvinism – as if Germans haven’t been eager to accord their own countrymen the same honor.
Of all the GM J-bodies sold in America, the Olds Firenza may be the rarest. In 1984, most Oldsmobile wagon shoppers wanted a stately rear-wheel-drive behemoth with a V8 engine, not some newfangled small wagon with a little communist-inspired four-cylinder engine driving the wrong wheels. Thus, Firenza wagons are rarer today than early AC Cobras. Here’s one that I found in a San Francisco Bay Area self-serve yard last weekend, while I was in town for the fifth annual Sears Pointless 24 Hours of LeMons. Read More >
* Check out Part One of this Special Report on French manufacturers here *
This is Part 2 of my special feature on the future of French manufacturers. You can see Part 1 here.
After evaluating both PSA and Renault through their European sales, overseas sales, international alliances and low cost models, we continue on this study of what lies ahead for French carmakers by going through 3 additional elements of comparison.
When our dear EIC pro-tem took a friend BRZ/FR-S shopping, a lot of readers defended the extremely poor selling skills of the salespeople by remarking that they were looking at low-volume models that the salespeople probably didn’t need to know much about—and that might be accurate. According to goodcarbadcar.net, Toyota only sells about 1200 FR-S a month on average and Subaru sells a little more than 700 per month. In comparison to the Camry, which sells over 30,000 units a month, or even the Forester, which comes in around 12-13k, those numbers are pretty insignificant to your average Toyobaru dealer.
But what about a bread and butter car, like, say…a Ford Fiesta or Focus? Or maybe a Chevrolet Sonic or Spark? You might remember my article a few months back talking about how young women aren’t that interested in the small cars currently offered by American carmakers (even if they ARE made in Mexico or Korea). Since I’m in the market for a new car, I thought that maybe I would buck the trend and visit my neighborhood Chevy and Ford stores. My budget is pretty small, so my plan was to start with the Spark and the Fiesta and go from there.
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Few topics stir the blood of the Best&Brightest like the future of the Lincoln brand. Some of you agree with me that the company should build a new Continental. Others think that Ford should, as Michael Dell once famously stated of Apple in the pre-iMac era, sell the assets and distribute the money to the shareholders. Lincoln has platform problems, dealer problems, image problems, and competition problems — but the biggest problem Lincoln faces is its parent company’s current product line.
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Henry writes:
Sajeev,
My wife and I are planning on taking a large 20 day vacation this summer where we plan on driving aver 5000 miles with our three older children. My wife drives a 2008 Ford Taurus X, which we love, but does not have enough space for a family of five for such a long journey. We were originally going to rent a minivan from the local enterprise, but a two week rental will set us back $1,300 with tax.
Ouch. Read More >
Mazda has some big news for Miata lovers at the New York Auto Show, with an exhibition of some of their favorite Miatas over the car’s 25 year history. Both myself (97 C Package, 2003 Shinsen) and Jack (former owner of a 93 ) will be attending, and we will make sure to get detailed photographs of everything – but don’t be surprised if we come back empty-handed when it comes to the 2015 MX-5.
Perhaps you haven’t lived in a flyover state where brown leather gear dominates your town during Rodeo season. While the Ford+King Ranch press release celebrating the 15th Anniversary of those famous brown leather pickups reached the autoblogosphere, only a local writer with an internationally known knack for automotive snark both finds the sweet mochalicious lede and refuses to bury it in the dirt.
And what does that mean? You gotta click to find out.
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We had two updates to a previous Piston Slap this weekend, surprisingly within two hours of each other. Let’s hear from the OP first:
TTAC Commentator sundvl76 writes:
Sajeev, reporting back:
You may be interested in this, if for no other reason than to add to your diagnostic toolbox; my experience certainly can’t be unique: Several comments below your post also suggested the motor mount(s) as the problem. I more recently discussed this with a professional wrench acquaintance, who also said that the mounts can be expected to go south after ~80K miles; he suggested using a padded floor jack to lift slightly on the engine during a time when I detected the “rough” idle (the oil pan on this vehicle, and maybe all Duratec engines, is waffled cast aluminum). Bingo! The vibration ceased when I did that. Read More >
TTAC reader Evan Reisner thinks that a small pickup is just the ticket for GM. But it’s not the one you may expect.
The prevailing wisdom on TTAC is that many Americans are interested in a compact pickup truck – but the same wisdom also suggests that such a truck would be bad for GM’s CAFE ratings. Market demand aside, CAFE is one of the reasons that Chrysler and Ford got out of the small truck game.
Yet few people know that The General has a product that can combine the best of both worlds. But they’ve chosen not to offer it in the USA.
I was browsing the internet the other day and came across a website that purports to be “A guy’s post-college guide to growing up.” Normally I avoid websites like this. I learned about the manly arts the old fashioned way, dangerous experimentation, but since I have been wrestling with an especially verdant crop of nose hair recently I thought I might find some grooming tips and so I decided to check it out. Amongst all the articles on slick, greasy-looking haircuts, sensual massage techniques and the power of positive self-development, I found this handy beginners’ guide on how to drive a stick shift. Since it was one of the only things on the site I had any real experience with, I looked it over and decided it was pretty good. Naturally, I thought I would share it.
The Detroit Autorama has a definite blue collar vibe. Even those of the half million dollar cars competing for the Ridler award that are “bought, not built” are paid for by couples who obviously are affluent, but who have made their money not as doctors or lawyers or financiers but rather from operating some kind of small business enterprise. Most owners participate one way or another in their builds and most also have some experience working with their hands. Last year I had the chance to visit the facility where Chevy has the COPO Camaros built and I was present to watch two owners take delivery of what is essentially a $100,000 toy. One of them, Dan Sayres, of Waverly, West Virginia, now owns a number of automotive related businesses, including a collision shop and a recycling yard. He told me that he started with a single tow truck. It takes some smarts to go from one used tow truck to buying purpose built drag racers. Of course, you don’t need deep pockets to come up with a big idea. From the mid six figure Ridler competitors to the unfinished projects in the basement, there are lots of big ideas at the Autorama, not all of them successful. One of the biggest ideas, both figuratively and literally, is the car that Tom Carrigan built because he thought he could do it.
Here at TTAC, we’re often accused of being libertarian cop-hating anarchist hippie freaks. Nearly as often as we’re accused of being tools of the corporate power elite and their propaganda machine. It’s true that most of our writers have a bit of an anti-authoritarian bent. After all, car guys want to go fast, and so on, and the Man doesn’t want you to go fast, and so on, and so forth, and also tickets for having a non-CARB-approved intake pipe suck, and so on. Sometimes we take it pretty far. We’ve even had a writer quit because we were being insufficiently respectful of highway cops, or something like that.
Our struggle against the police state is just that — a struggle against an ideology, not a war on the best of the peace officers out there. Today, I was reminded of that fact again, when a sheriff’s deputy went out of his way to fix a major problem for me.
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“This life came so close to never happening” -David Benioff, The 25th Hour
A bit of fortuitous timing can make all the difference. Just missing a particular wave by even the briefest interval can radically alter a particular outcome.
(N.B. Unlike most Sunday Stories, this story is true. Names, dates and other details may have been modified.)
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