GM China, our recently no longer so reliable oracle for the Chinese market, raised its November sales by 11 percent, compared to an absolutely batty November 2009. 11 percent are not the same growth as the 109.5 percent GM China had recorded in last year’s November, but how much battier do you expect them to get? The more meaningful number is that for the first 11 months of 2010:  From January through November, GM’s China sales jumped 33 percent to a mind-blowing 2.17 million units. GM China will most likely close out the year in the 2.35 to 2.4m area – this is higher than the total sales of some of Europe’s larger countries, and definitely a whole lot more than GM sells back  home. Better get used to it. Read More >

According to Cardinal Giovanni Lajolo, the Warlord of Vatican City, His Holiness “would certainly prefer an electric popemobile to a traditional, petroleum-powered one.” I suggest the 1976 Sebring-Vanguard Citicar! Read More >

TTAC Commentator SupremeBrougham writes:

Hey Sajeev, I decided that I want to try my hand at throwing a Piston Slap topic your way: my grandparents gave me a 1995 Mercury Mystique LS that has been passed around our family since new. The car has 121k on it, but the motor (V6) has about 40k fewer miles and the trans (auto) now has around 15k total.

Here is my issue. When pulling out from a stop, the engine revs to almost 5000 rpm before shifting gears, regardless of how gentle I am with the gas. I want to have it looked at, but here is where it gets tricky for me. My grandfather, who worked for Ford in Transmission Engineering, and my uncle decided to take on the task of replacing the engine and trans in this car four years ago, as a final hurrah for my grandpa, as he is getting up in years. It took them six months, but they did it. The car went on to two more uncles before coming back to my grandparents, and then on to me. My grandpa gave me the car with the stipulation that I was not to put any more money into it. And if anything was to go wrong with it I am to bring it back for repairs. But I live almost 200 miles away, so that isn’t so easy.

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I almost forgot; Mercury is dead. Is amnesia a symptom of Mercury poisoning? Was it not just about the most forgettable brand ever? Ask yourself this: how many Mercuries (not counting the German Ford Capri) over its seventy year lifespan were truly memorable? And by memorable, I don’t mean like the time the toilet backed up so bad the shit floated out the bathroom door. And down the hallway. Yes, there’s way too many Mercury memories I’d rather flush away forever. The keepers? Let’s just say that the ’67-’68 Cougar is the best one of that little bunch. Which in some respects, isn’t saying much, so maybe we’d better cover all three of the memorable Mercuries here; a CC triple play: 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?

Read More >

Todd writes:

Hello Sajeev, I have a 2001 Audi TT (225hp) that cranks but wont start, not even a sputter.  Thus far I’ve checked for fuel and spark and both seem to be in working condition.  I verified fuel by unplugging the return line and watching fuel come out as the motor was cranked.  I can hear the injectors ticking so it seems they’re working as well.  I popped off a coil pack and grounded it to a screwdriver to verify that I also have spark.  At this point I’m thinking the fuel in the tank has gone bad because the car has not been significantly driven in 18 months.  I literally haven’t started or driven it in nine months, and when I did drive it nine months ago it was for about 3 miles.  There was less than a 1/4 of a tank of gas in it while it sat for those 18 months and I just added about 3 gallons of premium to the tank with no result.  There also seems to be an odd smell coming from the exhaust when I crank the car, almost like a paint remover or super glue smell.  Is this bad gas? I’m really stumped here because I feel like even if the gas is bad it would at least sputter or run rough.

Read More >

When you think about the Swiss auto industry, one thing usually comes to mind:

“What Swiss car industry?”

They nearly had one. The “Swatch Car” was pioneered by Swiss swatch-watchmaker Nicolas Hayek. It was killed by Ferdinand Piech, 5 seconds after he took the helm as CEO of Volkswagen. The Austrian Piech graduated at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich (ETH) in mechanical engineering, but even that didn’t keep him from exterminating the little Swiss critter at Volkswagen to save his own Lupo 3L (which also died.) Hayek turned to Daimler, the Swatch car became the Smart, Daimler took over, the Swiss car industry remained a dream.

But then, aren’t we forgetting Monteverdi? Read More >

Yesterday, we ran a story about Art Ross. Ross was the Oldsmobile Chief Designer in the post WW II heydays. He was also a prolific and gifted pornographer. Cars and sex have always been related for some reason. Did you know that in Germany, where the car was invented, “Verkehr” can mean both “traffic” and “intercourse?” I render the guess that there are more people that begun their life by the dashboard light than those who passed away in the passing lane. Many are convinced that autos have aphrodisiac qualities. Many heavily object and say that a car is just a conveyance. Then there are some who think cars are just as vile as porn, and both should be banned. Where does the dear TTAC reader stand in this discussion? Read More >

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has but one redeeming quality, and that’s his taste in daily drivers… and now he’s selling it! Yeah, he’d probably prefer to load the thing up with drums full of a VX/BZ cocktail and crash it into a Tel Aviv nursery school… but, still, the story makes me want to rant about downscale “Man of the People” vehicle choices and the love/hate relationship I once had with my own 504. Read More >

In 1959, David Peterson, a professional aircraft designer, had a dilemma: he owned a travel trailer and a boat, but couldn’t tow them both at the same time. He dreamed of putting an engine under the floor of the trailer, and towing his boat with it. When the Corvair appeared that year, he decided to act on it. He rented a large garage, tossed out the trailer, started from scratch, and four months later out rolled the first Ultra Van, weighing a mere 3,000 pounds. It was way ahead of its time then, and it still is today. Which probably explains why it was a commercial flop. Read More >

I see a fair number of total beater 1960s Detroit convertibles on the street, and nicely restored examples show up from time to time, but I’m not sure what to make of this clean-but-nowhere-near-show-quality Impala SS parked on a freezing night in downtown Denver. Read More >

Two fastbacks found in one week; now there’s something to be thankful for (not that I don’t have plenty already). The Packard Clipper Super and this Volkswagen Type 3 may not seem to share anything other than their tapering hind ends, but there is one other quality that they both have in common, and it makes the VW worthy to share the podium with it: Read More >

BG writes:

Hi Sajeev! I am a big fan of TTAC and visit it almost every day. I have a question for you, so here it is:

We’ve heard so much about the goodness of wide wheel tracks, where the wheels are pushed to its corner. And the benefit of this seem natural and easy to comprehend for me, better handling, better looks, perhaps even better interior room if the wheel wells can be made less deep. It’s the other end of the spectrum, the narrow wheel tracks, that I can’t understand. What could possibly be the benefit of having a narrow wheel tracks? For some reason it used to be so popular, nearly all cars featured them. Even after the wide tracks was popularized by Pontiac in the 1960s, most cars still came with wheels that are placed well inside its openings. The only reason for them I can think of to justify that is if you want to use wheel skirts or low, “barely there” wheel openings, the Bathtub Nash being a good example. But most of these cars with narrow tracks have full wheel openings, at least in front. Why the narrow tracks then, I wonder?

Read More >

The last time I attended a ball game, JFK was running for president. My older brother tells me that Mickey Mantle hit a homer. He would remember. Tom was a baseball fan.

I loved cars, not sports. At age six, I asked my mother to count the days until I could drive. I loved especially the elegantly maternal Mercurys. Nonetheless, I saw brands as classification systems, like the species of my beloved butterflies, rather than as foci for tribal loyalty, like my brother’s Yankees.

But fandom–the word derives from “fanatic”–is a holy grail of marketing, and I was not immune. At age nine, I sacrificed my objective appreciation of cars on Madison Avenue’s altar. In choosing my favorite car, loyalty trumped aesthetics. We had a Chevy.

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It’s mysterious enough that a genuine CCCA-designated classic car suddenly appears curbside in my neighborhood. And not just any true classic, but the immensely desirable and infinitely awesome Clipper Super Coupe, the most powerful and fastest American car of its day. But the mystery deepens: why did its owner try everything possible to keep me from photographing it the day I first found it, and then why did someone deface it by pouring paint over it the very next night? Read More >