The Truth About Cars » Curbside Classics

Curbside Classic: GM’s Deadly Sin #4 – 1983 Chevy S-10 Blazer

Paul Niedermeyer — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 17:34:54 +0000

This Curbside Classic took the same trajectory as the Blazer. It started as a legitimate nod of acknowledgment to the S-10 Blazer as the trailblazer of the compact SUV market. But as I got further along, I realized just how badly GM bungled the huge opportunity for the baby Blazer in a segment that became [...]

Curbside Classic Review: 1951 Oldsmobile Super 88

Paul Niedermeyer — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 18:06:03 +0000

No one’s going to accuse me of not having a nostalgic streak, especially when it comes to cars. That’s what motivated me to write the Auto-biography, my time travel through words. How about the real thing, in steel, glass, rubber and wool? One of my main motivations for starting Curbside Classics was to document and [...]

Curbside Classic: 1989 Nissan Pao

Paul Niedermeyer — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 17:31:11 +0000

Oregonians have long treasured the random little collectable objects that Japan’s artisans inadvertently send our way. Usually that takes the form of beautiful hand-blown glass fishing floats that spend years or decades bobbing in the Pacific before a storm washes them on our shores. But occasionally another form of distinctly Japanese objet d’art finds its [...]

Curbside Classic: 1973 Ford Mustang Mach 1

Paul Niedermeyer — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 16:43:11 +0000

Look at this car and what do you see: Eleanor, star of the original 1974 “Gone in 60 Seconds” movie? All the worst excess and ugliness of the early seventies folded up into one bloated pile? A long stripe of black rubber burned into a country road? The destruction of an American icon? Nostalgia for [...]

Curbside Classic: 1968 Chevmobile Impala

Paul Niedermeyer — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 05:20:09 +0000

Hybrids are big in Eugene, but some are just plain huge. The Prius is the official new car here, having dethroned Subaru. But here’s a hybrid of a different color: instead of a marriage of two drive systems, it’s a cross between two brands, the engine of one transplanted into another. Back in the day, [...]

Curbside Classic: 1965 Volvo 122S Amazon

Paul Niedermeyer — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 14:57:44 +0000

How exactly did the Volvo 122 Amazon achieve its mythological stature? Naming it after the eponymous nation of all-female warriors was a good start. Legendary ruggedness and durability solidified its status. Sporty performance burnished it further. Then there’s the magic belt: one of the twelve labors of Hercules was to secure the girdle of Hippolyta, [...]

Curbside Classics: Chrysler’s Deadly Sin #1 – 1976 Plymouth Volare and Dodge Aspen

Paul Niedermeyer — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 14:59:08 +0000

While the human Seven Deadly Sins – lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride – clearly play a part in any automaker’s fall from grace, Detroit cultivated its own favorite deadly transgressions. Chrysler’s recurring dirty little habit was premature ejection: spurting cars out of the factory door before they were ready. The shoddily built [...]

Curbside Classic: 1985 BMW 635CSi

Paul Niedermeyer — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 16:29:35 +0000

Somewhere deep in the comments to last week’s oft-misunderstood Datsun 210 CC was this: “With all the beautiful cars in the world, why do you insist on picking shit boxes all the time?” Well, it’s not like the streets of Eugene are lined with Delages and Delahayes sitting curbside in the [...]

Curbside Classic: 1980 Datsun 210 Sunny

Paul Niedermeyer — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 17:04:05 +0000

With what words shall I express my overpowering feelings toward this tin can wrapped in vinyl wood appliqué? Jeremy Clarkson once called the Sunny “the worst car in the world ever” (probably not for the first or last time). To show he meant it, he hurled one to its death from [...]

Curbside Classic: 1951 Packard 200

Paul Niedermeyer — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 16:50:31 +0000

You would be forgiven for mistaking this modest-looking sedan as a low-end Dodge, Pontiac or Mercury. A Packard? The very name conjures images of exclusive cars from the classic era, like this illustrious coach-built V12, or perhaps its last gasp luxo-boat, the 1956 Caribbean. But finding this lowly [...]

Curbside Classic: 1960 Comet

Paul Niedermeyer — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 15:19:21 +0000

If this goofy-assed little car showed up at your premium brand’s doorstep and told you it was an unwanted orphan, would you let it in? And keep it as a foster child, or adopt it as your own? That’s the scenario Mercury found itself in with the Comet. And true to [...]

Curbside Classic: 1978 Ford Fiesta

Paul Niedermeyer — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 14:54:49 +0000

In the depths of the gloomy automotive winter of the late seventies, the Fiesta made a brief appearance that brought a ray of sunshine into our deprived existence. She was like that cute, skinny little German exchange student who appeared one day at High School, and dazzled us with her algebra, physics, gymnastics and fencing. [...]

Curbside Classic: 1965 GMC Handi-Van

Paul Niedermeyer — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 15:27:11 +0000

Regression to the mean. Lowest common denominator. Thinking inside the box. These over-used expressions are all-too often applied to Detroit iron. But which vehicle most fully lives down to them? Here it is: the crudest, simplest, most wretched-handling and least-safe vehicle made by the Big Three in the sixties. It’s a box with two cart [...]

Curbside Classic: GM’s Deadly Sin 3: 1991 Saturn SL2

Paul Niedermeyer — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 14:47:46 +0000

Friends, we are gathered together to pay our last respects to a fallen brother. Saturn was the love child of Roger Smith and Hal Riney; one was the Chairman of GM, a manufacturer of cars; the other, an ad man extraordinaire, a manufacturer of emotions. Let us savor their own words as [...]

Curbside Classics: GM’s Deadly Sin #2 – 1971 Pontiac Ventura II

Paul Niedermeyer — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 15:24:01 +0000

Bernie Madoff’s first bogus trade. Richard Nixon’s first fib. Charlie Parker’s first hit of heroin. What do they have in common with this perfectly harmless-looking Pontiac Ventura II? That first little giving in to temptation has a nasty way of turning into a big deadly habit, like GM’s badge engineering. All bad habits have a [...]

Curbside Classic: 1973 Jaguar XJ12

Paul Niedermeyer — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 15:21:27 +0000

Jaguar and V12. Two of the most lyrical automotive icons ever. One stands for grace at speed, the other for speed with grace. The combination of the two offered the prospect of a marriage made in automotive heaven. Yet when they finally enmeshed, the result fell short of the potential envisioned by the marque’s match-maker [...]

Curbside Classic: 1959 Ford Courier

Paul Niedermeyer — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 13:41:43 +0000

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, [...]

Curbside Classic: 1959 Chevrolet Biscayne

Paul Niedermeyer — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 15:30:05 +0000

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 [...]

Curbside Classic: 1950 Cadillac Series 61 Coupe

Paul Niedermeyer — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 17:02:27 +0000

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. Well, there was that Vega...

Curbside Classic: 1970 Honda 600

Paul Niedermeyer — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 16:19:45 +0000

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?

Curbside Classic: 1963 Oldsmobile Dynamic 88 Convertible

Paul Niedermeyer — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 17:28:52 +0000

Tear the highly practical metal roof off 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.

Curbside Classic: 1972 Plymouth Fury and Saab 95

Paul Niedermeyer — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 16:50:10 +0000

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 it wasn’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.

Curbside Classic: 1984 Toyota Tercel Wagon

Paul Niedermeyer — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 15:26:41 +0000

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.

Curbside Classics: 1970 Camaro RS

Paul Niedermeyer — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 15:43:57 +0000

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."

Curbside Classics: 1971 Small Cars Comparison: Number 1 and GM Deadly Sin #2 — Chevrolet Vega

Paul Niedermeyer — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 15:46:22 +0000

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 speccing 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.