One of the most famous cars in the world is one of the most despised cars on my very short list of despised cars.

Hell – who am I kidding? I love all old cars more than most people.

But I don’t love the General Lee.

I love 1969 Chargers- maybe not as much as ’68 Chargers – but I hate the General Lee. I have never even watched ten minutes of ‘The Dukes of Hazzard’, but I also hate this old TV show – probably more than the General Lee.

Sadly, I have seen the commercials and ‘highlights’ from ‘The Dukes of Hazzard’ and the horrible carnage of too many ’69 Chargers sailing through the air toward a very uncertain future. I am no expert on physics, but I do know that large cars will fold like a cheap suitcase every time they get launched into a low orbit and return to earth.

The TV show was a rip-off from the Burt Reynolds “Bandit” movies that starred a Firebird Trans Am. The herd of ‘TA Birds were not thinned as drastically because movies are not filmed on a weekly basis, unlike ‘The Dukes of Hazzard’.

As a result, many 1969 Chargers were harmed during the filming of this highly forgettable TV show. This ridiculous excuse for a TV show wiped out a big chunk of 1969 Chargers and infringed on ’68 and ‘70 models during the process.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not a sophisticated comedy guy. In fact I love the Three Stooges almost as much as I love old vehicles, but Moe and the boys were smart enough to inflict most of their damage on themselves and other people in the successful pursuit of comedy. The idjits behind ‘The Dukes of Hazard’ simply wiped out vintage Chargers every episode, and that is a very serious eye-poke-worthy offense.

Excuse me if I feel nothing but contempt for the General Lee. It is the ugly bastard child of a brutally bad TV show that only serves as a sad reminder of the extermination of a fine car model from the Mopar boys.

In a perfect utopian world, the next General Lee that goes over a cliff would have every one of the bozos who created this TV monster strapped inside and screaming like girls.

For more of Jim Sutherland’s work go to mystarcollectorcar.com

Of course, it isn’t, it’s British. It stranded me six times, the lights don’t work and it usually requires help to start. That is life with an MG Midget.

But I was right. It is different.

You learn things with an MG, and not just “Never have an MG for a daily.”

You learn that most pickups are just too big. Not just Excursions and Escalades. In the Midwest, there is a preponderance of quad cabs heavy-duty pickups. You stare right at their lugs in the little car. Sure, it’s amusing at stop lights, but unsettling on the highway. I have developed a newfound dislike of 20-inch wheels.

You learn that a frown is impossible while driving, unless it is raining. In that case, the top is up and no one can see you.  Even then, you are probably laughing like a mad hatter.  At least that is what I did during record rainfall, flash-flooding and road closures last spring. That morning, I took the only vehicle at my disposal on my 33-mile journey to work.

Two of the highways were under water and impassable, resulting in a commute in an ill suited vehicle for twice my normal drive.

You learn that old British cars are terrible in the rain. You knew this, but you cannot embrace it until you have lived it.

The top is merely a suggestion, electrics are useless and it hydroplanes on any body of water bigger than a sponge.

Approaching a road underneath 2 feet of flowing water, I remembered this. I may be crazy, but I ain’t quite that stupid. As I waited for the traffic in the opposing lane to pass before I would execute my U turn, the aforementioned oversized truck rolled up behind me, unable to grasp my reluctance to pilot 49 inch-tall car into newly formed urban rapids. So the laughing may actually be a result of a mental condition, brought upon by some form of Chinese water torture while driving, or a pre-existing condition that led to the purchase to begin with.

You learn that MGs require commitment, and a Midget requires dedication just to enter the car. As a 40 year-old, 6-foot male, it does require some warm-up stretching to enter the vehicle, especially if the top is up.

You learn not to leave the top up because the charging system sucks.  The top prevents you from bump starting it.  The best hope is to push, leap in it Jackie Chan-style and pop the clutch. Ideally, this fires the motor and you race into the sunset in a plume of oil smoke, almost overcoming the embarrassment of the ordeal. This procedure doesn’t apply if you have friends, but they will soon abandon you.

Not because the car is heavy at 1600 pounds, but because they will be known as the guys or gals, (yes, it happened) who always push that dorky little car. Unless it is an extreme case, you are better off just pushing the thing yourself.

You learn to talk to strangers. There will be plenty of them. You have to be nuts, but you cannot be an introvert. At barely longer than a Suburban’s wheelbase, the height of a computer desk, and the width of a college cheerleader, an MG gets attention. You cannot fill it, wash it, or leave a restaurant without a comment. Miata owners wave, strapped-in children point excitedly and retirees nod knowingly.  If I wasn’t happily married I could parlay this little devil into several dinner dates. Cheap dinners at that, because an MG at a drive-in s much more fun than a minivan. Except when you don’t have a room and need a Minivan.

You learn that while this car makes you young, explaining it can make you old. Two twenty something’s stopped to compliment the car as I folded into it. “Cool car, what is it?” I smiled, “It’s a Midget.” They stared as blankly as they would at a typewriter. “An MG Midget.” I furthered. Nothing. I ended with “It’s an old British car.” They smiled and drove off. It was disappointing. Both were of drinking age. Also, I really could have used the help pushing. So if you hate feeling old, don’t buy an obscure little car that was born when you started walking.

Finally, you learn that aside from getting a daily driving lesson, none of this changes your perspective; it’s just where you take it and how much extra to build into the itinerary. With a more reliable vehicle in the stable, it has seen reduced usage, and as the leaves turn and the sun sets earlier, it will be spending more time in the garage. But maybe by spring, I can chase down that short in the headlight circuit.

It seems unlikely that anyone in 2037 will be inclined to keep a 2012 BMW 650ci in such excellent condition as the 1987 635CSi pictured above -and even if such a thing happens, will said 650i make it that far into the future without a catastrophic electronics failure rendering it a two-ton paperweight? Although Jack and Steve have offered their own context on older cars, mine will be different. I’m still not yet legally able to rent a car on my own. This 635CSi was built before I was even born, so driving it gives me a glimpse into the past, but without the benefit (or handicap) of contemporaneous context.

Ari, the owner of the gorgeous example in the title picture, was the first of our group to have a car, a navy blue Dodge Intrepid that was used as a detective’s car. At the age of 18, telling girls that “I have my own car” was considered the height of comedy, with all the associated dissonance of knowing that it was bound to deliver poor returns.

The Intrepid died sometime in the winter of 2008 only to be replaced by something far more interesting – a 1987 E24 BMW 635CSi. Ari’s Dad had always wanted a BMW, but could never justify the cost of one – the fleet of trucks needed for his contracting business was a priority, and he had a fully loaded Sierra 2500 Duramax for himself, which probably cost as much as a nicely equipped 5-Series. It’s easy to see how Ari’s dad finally justified this purchase: it was in incredible shape, with only 64,000 miles on the clock and a set of authentic AC Schnitzer rims. Ari’s mom promptly managed to destroy one of them after hitting a median at speeds near 50 mph, and a replacement couldn’t be found. For the rest of its life, the car wore E39 M5 wheels – and Ari became its sole driver, with his mom getting a Volvo wagon for the daily grind.

I was lucky enough to drive the CSi on a couple occasions over the years, and those moments are responsible for informing me on how cars, particularly BMWs, used to behave. It wasn’t muted and comfortable like the E39 or any post-Bangle BMW. Rather, it felt a bit rougher around the edges, in the same way that my Miata feels crude compared to a modern MX-5. The big I6 was only rated for 182 horsepower but felt much zestier than its output figure would suggest. The one flaw in the package was the slow, ponderous-feeling recirculating-ball steering which felt dated to someone used to more precise rack-and-pinion systems.

For most people our age, the 635CSi was just a cool looking BMW from a bygone era. For those who knew better, it was a portal to another era of the automobile, before iDrive, Bluetooth and “aspirational brands”, a driving experience that was distinctly analogue and imperfect, but with a fidelity unmatched by modern methods.  Driven back to back with any current BMW, you’d hardly know that the E24 shares a common lineage with the current crop of cars. A quarter century of “progress” has led to the 6-Series gaining two extra cylinders, two turbochargers, 3 extra forward gears and a suite of electronics that would be inconceivable in 1987. Unfortunately, Ari lost his job right around the time that the radiator, brakes and exhaust system all needed replacing, and he decided to quickly sell the car rather than wait it out and try and repair the car at a later date. Had he possessed some extra money and inclination, the 635csi could have easily ran another 25 years.

I remember looking at the then brand new Ford Five Hundred and thinking to myself, “This would make one heck of a Volvo.”

Like the Volvos of yore this Ford offered a squarish conservative appearance. A high seating position which Volvo’s ‘safety oriented’ customers would have appreciated. Toss in a cavernous interior that had all the potential for a near-luxury family car, or even a wagon, and this car looked more ‘Volvo’ than ‘Ford’ to me with each passing day.

Something had to be done…

Hmmm… why not subtract ‘twenty’ from the Five Hundred name. Call it a 480, and put in a nice classic Volvo styled fascia on the front end. Throw in an interior inspired by the best of Swedish design and, Voila! Ford would have offered a Volvo that would have hit the square peg of the brand’s main customers… and maybe even a few others who were considering an upscale Camry or a Lexus ES.

Sadly Ford never made a Volvo version of the Five Hundred, or the Flex for that matter. Instead they mis-balanced the diverging priorities of competing simultaneously with BMW (S40′s, C30′s, S60′s) and conservative middle-aged Americans who valued luxury transport over driving dynamics (Xc90, XC60, C70).  The brand became a disaster.

I am starting to see the same ingredients mixed into other brands these days. Take for instance Scion.

Yes this brand will get a nice pop and halo in the form of the upcoming FR-S. Then again, halo sports cars that are shared with other brands tend to be short-lived. Just ask Pontiac and Saturn about the Solstice and the Sky.

So what would be the perfect car to put into Scion’s kinship?

Two years ago I would have strongly argued for making the CT200h a Scion. It didn’t have the luxury trappings of a Lexus. However it offered tons of sporting character and attracted the type of youthful and educated audience that Scion sorely needed at that point.

You know. The type of people that quickly walked away from Scion after they started marketing bloated SUV-like compacts that should have been marketed as… Toyotas… or Volvos. Who knows.

Wait a second. YOU know!

A lot of potentially great cars over the years have been marketed to the wrong brands for the wrong reasons.  So I ask the B&B, “What cars were given the wrong brand, and where should they have gone?”.

Like most marketing classes in modern day MBA-land there are no right answers. Just SWAG’s and opinions. Feel free to demote a Cadillac to a Chevy if you must. So long as you can defend it, let’s hear it.

Last fall, the first tests of the new Chevy Caprice PPV, Dodge Charger Pursuit and Ford Taurus Interceptor generated quite a bit of interest here at TTAC and beyond, as three all-new contestants battled to replace the outgoing Crown Victoria as America’s cop car. At the time, the Caprice seemed like the clear performance favorite, but as Sajeev Mehta has pointed out, there’s more to the cop-car equation than pure speed. Although good luck trying to tell the Detroit Three that, as all three are cherry-picking performance stats in the wake of the latest round of Michigan State Police testing.

• Chrysler arguably has the biggest performance win to brag about, noting that the “fastest-ever lap time at Grattan Raceway [1:33.70] highlights Dodge Charger Pursuit V-8 as the police sedan with the best combination of acceleration, braking, handling and dynamics.” The V8 Dodge also recorded the fastest 0-60 and 0-100 times of the trio, thanks to an optional acceleration-biased 3.06 rear axle ratio and a revised engine management system that allows top speeds of up to 151 MPH (all new for 2012, along with upgraded brakes). For the record, that 1:33:70 time is exactly three seconds faster than the Charger’s best lap time last year.
• After “creaming” the competition last fall, it seems GM was caught a bit flat-footed by Mopars upgrades, and its press release makes no mention of its lap time (its best lap time last year was a 1:35:80). Instead The General brags about the Caprice’s leading top speed (154 MPH) and 60-0 braking (125.8 ft). And despite last year’s “LS-X FTW” talk, the Caprice V6 turns out to be the most impressive model, beating both the Charger V6 and the Taurus non-Turbo V6 in 60-0 mph braking, top speed and acceleration.
• As predicted last year by Sajeev, Ford’s Taurus appears to be something of a performance back-marker. Ford’s presser doesn’t mention a single performance statistic, instead seeming to coast on the Panther-Interceptor’s coattails with bullet points like “Now police departments and other law enforcement agencies can get an all-new, American-made vehicle with the expected durability and price of the popular Crown Victoria.” Ford’s only performance argument is that the Taurus Ecoboost outperforms the Crown Vic… a stunningly low bar to set (even the Impala 3.6 hits a higher top speed than the EcoBoost Interceptor).

But, as we’ve pointed out, efficiency and reliability are for more important for police fleet buyers than outright performance. If Ford can make good on the promise that it will match the Crown Vic’s durability, and can prove that its Ecoboost engine will reliably offer better efficiency than the Dodge and Chevy V8s, it might make an argument for itself. But in a world where police departments are actually hoarding Crown Vics, there’s always going to be resistance to ditching the rear-drive V8 model for the perceived complexity of AWD and a turbocharged V6.

But because the performance differences between the Chevy and the Dodge are relatively small and because performance isn’t the overriding concern for police fleet buyers, Dodge’s lap record at MSP testing may be the most significant achievement in this year’s MSP testing, for reasons that have nothing to do with prospective police sales. With the Crown Vic gone and the competition for the definitive police vehicle thrown wide open, these annual Michigan State Police tests are beginning to take on the feel of a classic Detroit proxy war, not unlike the illegal drag racing that took place on Woodward Avenue at the height of the muscle car era. And because Dodge offers high-performance versions of its Charger to the general public, its ability to beat back the Australian-built, unobtainable-to-civilians Caprice could give it something of a halo to enthusiasts. Even Ford, which sells a Taurus SHO that’s not entirely unlike the new Interceptor, can leverage police performance testing results into a brand halo. Only GM, which stubbornly refuses to offer the Caprice as a civilian model, seems to be oblivious to the civilian-market implications of what is rapidly becoming an annual Detroit showdown.

With racing becoming increasingly detached from the vehicles available for sale to the general public, police performance testing is one of the last factory-backed competitions between cars that are available for sale to the general public. In short, it’s the kind of spectacle that drove the muscle car era… and have since disappeared. As the brand that’s most dependent on continued sales of V8-powered, large  rear-drive sedans, it’s no wonder Dodge upgraded its Charger in order to come away with a narrow win this year. Maybe next year Chevy should hit back… and then capitalize on the rivalry by making a Caprice available to civilians.

The Michigan State Police have not yet released full test results for 2012 model-year vehicles. TTAC will post these results as soon as they become available. Past test results can be found here. 

Bertel’s provocative piece on SaabUnited’s complex relationship with Saab and Vladimir Antonov has drawn a predictable response from the Saab faithful, who have rushed to defend their beloved but troubled  brand as well as its mysterious Russian “savior.” The outburst of anger at TTAC, though harsh to the point of almost blaming TTAC for Saab’s sorry state, is nothing new around these parts: TTAC has long angered the die-hard fans of many auto brands by calling for (or simply covering) the demise of brands that have outlived their usefulness to the market. Even the most basic understanding of TTAC’s history explains away the now-popular (in certain corners) theory that this site has a personal vendetta for Saab. On the other hand, perhaps we’ve been too focused on day-to-day developments to properly make the case for why Saab, sadly, needs to die. Luckily the reasons for Saab’s inevitable demise are not difficult to understand…

Perhaps the first issue to cover in an overview of Saab’s troubled state is the “GM era,” a 20-year period which Saab fans and detractors alike can agree was not the brand’s best. But, while GM is cast as the villain in most accounts of Saab’s recent history, the numbers actually prove that GM’s stewardship was able to turn around some troubling downward momentum in Saab’s global sales volume. As this extended global sales chart for Saab’s entire history (through 2007) proves, GM actually returned Saab to within spitting distance of its all-time sales volume record of 123,112 units, set back in 1987 after arresting its 1987-1993 sales free-fall.

Even more damning are the global sales numbers from 2009 and 2010, when Saab was going through its traumatic divorce from GM and troubled rescue attempt, which included a flirtation with the supercar maker Koenigsegg, as well as the sale of old IP to China’s BAIC and the ultimate sale to Spyker. In 2009, Saab sold 39,827 retail units. Last year Saab produced 32,048 units and sold 31,696, a full 100k units off of its GM-era plateau, when the brand was losing $5,000 per car.

Of course, volume doesn’t tell the whole story. Though GM arguably saved Saab by purchasing 50 percent of its equity back in 1989, Saab’s sojourn in the GM family was not a happy one, in ways that can’t be explained with a sales chart. Though Saab maintained ostensibly independent operations while a GM subsidiary, the transition to shared platforms and mechanicals spelled an end to Saab’s identity as a truly independent manufacturer (a process that had begun pre-GM, with the joint development with Fiat of the “Type Four” platform). I’ll leave a discussion of Saab’s loss of identity under GM for another moment, but needless to say that Saab’s inability to break through its 130k annual unit sales plateau speaks to GM’s willingness to dump the brand. And the fact that this occurred with “nary a tear” from that infamous lover of doomed brands and cool cars, Bob Lutz (who was saddened by the demise of Saturn and Pontiac), says plenty about the kinds of cars Saab was making under GM.

But the problem with Saab, ultimately, is not that it “makes bad cars.” That a vocal number of fans are deeply passionate about Saab vehicles, whether built under Spyker, GM or an independent Saab, indicates that Saab’s are not inherently unlovable or fundamentally flawed vehicles. Unfortunately, automotive history is only too well-stocked with defunct brands and manufacturers who went out of business despite selling cars that could capture the love and loyalty of a vocal minority. The reality, however, is that (though exerting a deeply emotional pull) cars are a business. That GM lost over $5k per Saab built between 2001 and 2009 indicates how flawed a business proposition Saab has been for so long (especially considering that GM brought volume back to the brand’s all-time high while using shared platforms).

Thanks to the deeply emotional connection Saab buyers feel towards the brand, one might even make the argument that Saab is worth investing in and overhauling, despite its long record of losing money and failing to achieve a sustainable business model. Though some might argue that Saab lost enough brand identity in the GM era to make such a proposition laughable on its face, it’s worth looking at the possibility (it certainly is to Messrs. Muller and Antonov).

And luckily we have a worthwhile comparison in Jaguar/Land Rover, another marginal European luxury brand that was sold at nearly the same time by Ford. Though Jaguar is a lower-volume luxury brand than Saab, its turnaround will cost its new owners no less than $8.2b, according to the Financial Times. Without even getting too caught up in the differences between JLR and Saab’s business models, what’s clear is that seriously turning around even a low-volume brand requires the backing of a large parent company and a huge amount of investment. If TTAC has been dismissive of Saab’s recent strategy of securing $30 million here, $30 million there, and a few hundred million in government debt, it’s because of precisely this fact. If a turnaround doesn’t begin with serious funding and a committed backer, it’s doomed to fail.

There’s a (possibly apocryphal) story about Henry Kaiser’s post-WWII announcement that he would spend $100 million ($1.25 billion in inflation-adjusted 2011 dollars) to build a car company to challenge the Detroit titans. At the time (1945), GM’s CEO Alfred P. Sloan supposedly quipped “give the gentleman one chip.” One shudders to think what Mr Sloan would think of Saab’s recent adventures in cash-scrounging (not to mention its odds of survival) were he still alive today.

Of course the Saabelievers will probably protest at this juncture that, as a luxury brand, Jaguar/Land Rover would necessarily need more investment than Saab. But not only does this not mean Saab’s relatively tiny resources are up to the task of a major turnaround, and the re-acquisition of 100k units of lost sales, it also points out yet another reason Saab is doomed to fail, namely its position in the market. Clearly not a volume brand any longer (and, with an all-time annual sales record of fewer than 140k units, it’s never properly been one), Saab is also emphatically not a luxury brand. It’s never been aspirational to anyone who aspires to more than being “different,” and thanks to its GM legacy products, neither does it offer any uniquely aspirational vehicles.

The “entry-luxury” market where Saab plays has been a brutal place to do business in recent years, under pressure from Hyundai’s budget-luxury offensive as well as GM’s huge re-investment in its Buick brand. One has only to look at Acura’s recent woes (its US sales fell in half between 2005 and 2009), for a sense of how tough that segment can be for even a well-established brand. And at the point that Saab’s flagship, the 9-5 Aero with 300 HP and AWD costs thousands more than well-established luxury cars with similar performance, like the Audi S4, clearly the brand’s positioning is problematic.

But the problem doesn’t end there: with a Cadillac XTS coming, based on similar Epsilon II mechanicals, the 9-5 will face even more competition from its erstwhile corporate cousins. Other than being slightly heavier and offering blander styling, the 9-4X is largely indistinguishable from a Cadillac SRX. And with Buick importing lithe, understated Opel Insignias to the US as the Regal, you can now buy subtly-distinctive, European-tuned versions of the Epsilon II chassis for nearly $10,000 less than Saab can offer its cheapest 9-3 at. And with Subaru on a roll in the US, Saab’s recent emphasis on all-wheel-drive is likely to be lost in the shuffle as well.

Which brings us to the “what you can do about this” section. By all means, feel free to loudly support the Muller-Antonov attempt to revivify this dead brand walking, but be aware that Antonov’s motives are still largely unknown, while Muller is clearly profiting by stringing Saab along. In any case, if Muller and Antonov could find the backing they would need to seriously turn Saab around, a task that would conservatively cost at least $2-3b (and still not be assured of success), they would have by now. Hoping against hope is a noble pursuit, but one best understood for what it is.

On a more practical level, my suggestion to Saab’s fans who are struggling with the seven stages of grief as they mourn their dying brand is this: don’t get so hung up on brands. After all, Saab’s connection with its history (on the product level) has, after decades of turmoil and foreign ownership, hardly survived in any meaningful way. Instead of holding on to the emotional attachment of owning a vehicle built in Sweden, I’d suggest identifying the elements of Saab-ishness that you like in your automobiles and look for them elsewhere in a market that has no shortage of brands and vehicles. Want a super-quirky, fun-to-drive turbocharged hatch? Go test a Nissan Juke. Want a refined, subtle, European turbocharged front-driver? Look at the Buick Regal (which many journalists at the launch compared to recent turbo Saabs). Want to fit in with the liberal campus crowd? Get a Prius. Need to buy a brand that offers unique mechanicals, a distinctive engine note and an under-the-radar brand? Snag a Subaru.

My point is this: Saab, as a business proposition is not just dying, it’s been as good as dead for decades. No amount of passion or vocal enthusiasm from Saab’s remaining fans can possibly change that. But the good news is that Saab’s values are not lost to the world of new cars. So rather than “shooting the messenger” and attacking TTAC or any other outlet with the guts to write about Saab’s situation with honesty and clarity, perhaps it would be best if Saab fans worked a little bit harder at identifying what about Saabs it was that attracted them to the brand, and seeking those values among the many viable brands and manufacturers still left in the market.

We’ve all seen too many pictures and videos of the magnificent ruin that was once the Packard plant on Detroit’s east side. It turns out that there’s a Packard site in the Detroit area that’s not a ruin, the Packard Proving Grounds in Shelby Twp. about 15 miles north of Eight Mile Road. Like the Packard plant on East Grand Blvd, Albert Kahn designed all the original Packard buildings on the proving grounds site, including a tudorish looking lodge where the facility’s manager and his family lived. It may be the only place where Kahn designed both residential and industrial buildings. It was built in 1927 at a cost of over a million dollars. Packard used the facility to develop and test their cars, aviation engines (there was a small airfield inside the big oval track – Charles Lindbergh visited the site), and also for publicity and marketing. The proving grounds even had a role in the Arsenal of Democracy. Chrysler used the facility during WWII to test Sherman tanks, erecting a building used to service the tanks that were tested inside the paved oval.

Additional video after the jump.


After Packard folded, the property passed into the hands of Ford. Packard had operated an engine and transmission factory on the north side of the facility, on 23 Mile Rd, where they developed and built the Ultramatic. That site became a Ford facility which now belongs to Visteon. Ford used the proving grounds buildings for storage. Eventually Ford Land started to develop the proving grounds site. There is a condo complex just south of the proving grounds buildings, that sits over part of the test track’s path but for the most part the site was unmolested, though slightly decaying.

A view from inside the restored timing shed at the remains of the test track.

Most of the 2.5 mile high speed oval was still intact until a few years ago when a trespassing hot rodder put his car off the track. Out of liability concerns, Ford Land tore up most of the track. Just the 458 feet immediately adjacent to the timing shed and Packard’s original tree lined driveways remains. That part of the track’s metal safety barrier also remains. The driveways lead from the entrance of the site past the lodge and other buildings out to the track.

The site’s original block and stone walls, stone gate posts, and ornamental iron gates and arches are intact, as is the proving ground’s period perfect water tower with its Packard script logo.

Fortunately for the marque, Packards have always been owned by wealthy folks. The Packard community got mobilized when they found out about Ford wanting to develop the site, kept up enough pressure and eventually the Packard Motor Car Foundation paid $7 million for the site. Ford Land then donated about the same amount of land for a total of about 14 acres. The foundation has started restoring the site, spending about $1 million on new slate roofs for the lodge & repair garage.

The trees have been replanted along the driveways and they have full time employees managing the site. The original timing shed has been mostly restored too. Essentially all the original buildings remain and are in restorable condition, including the “Lindbergh” airplane hanger which was moved to the foundation’s property from elsewhere on the site. The foundation also bought one of the Packard plant’s facades that the building’s owner had put up for auction and it will be on display when the foundation’s planned museum, to be constructed in the repair garage and engineering buildings, is completed. The lodge houses a nascent Packard research center and archive. The Packard Motor Car Foundation appears to be doing this right.

The facility has a few events every year, open houses in the spring and fall and a big car show in the summer. The spring open house was on Sunday, May 1, 2011 and I was able to hitch a ride out there in a ’48 Packard. There were about 3 dozen Packards including an absolutely spectacular red 1933 dual cowl phaeton. There were two postwar woody wagons, and a nice ’48 convertible owned by a Detroit area Chrysler-Fiat dealer. His store was one of the event sponsors so he also had a new Chrysler 300, 200 convertible (not a bad looking car with the top down but no Packard), and a Fiat 500 on display, away from the Packards.

Among the Packards that stood out.. wait, any Packard stands out, but the ones that most impressed me besides the ’33 were a beautiful blue prewar convertible coupe, a cream colored ’42 convertible and a black ’47 limo that was very long. There were also a couple of very clean woody wagons.

How long was the limo? Well, I shoot everything in 3D now and when you are doing stereo photography, there is one rule that you must obey if you don’t want people to complain about their eyes bleeding (just kidding, but it’s the most important rule). That’s the 1 to 30 rule. You can’t be closer to the subject that you are shooting than 30 times the distance between the two camera lenses. Put your arm out and hold up a finger. Now bring it towards you and touch your nose. At some point, you can’t cross your eyes enough to keep a single 3D image in your brain. Because current 3D camera rigs are not yet as adjustable as the human vision system it’s an important rule to follow. You can move the lenses in closer together, but that reduces the stereo quality. So when I’m framing a photo or video, I’m used to stepping back. One time while stepping back, at the Walter P. Chrysler Museum, I ended up (or down) falling into an exhibit holding a 1915 Dodge Brothers’ touring car. Shooting the 1947 Packard limousine in one of the proving grounds buildings I first stepped back. Then when I saw that it wasn’t in the frame of both cameras, I went back another step or two. Still not enough. The ’47 limo, with a body made by Henney on one of Packard’s professional car (ambulance, hearse) chassis, has a 148″ wheelbase.

The Johnny Trudell big band played jazz in the repair garage and in addition to the cars outside there were cars and displays inside the garage and engineering building, and the Chrysler building. The lodge’s garage houses the facility’s gift shop and there were also other vendors and displays located there and elsewhere on the site. You could take a self guided tour through the lodge.

Some of the Packards were in show condition, others original. As a writer, I could get an article out of just the hood ornaments. I don’t know how big the crowd was, but the event was well attended.

One cool thing loaned to the site is a Packard chassis & drivetrain used as a showroom display in 1956. Also there is the original “towing dynamometer” that Packard built into a sedan so they could measure power out on the road. Allegedly General Motors once borrowed it, and it’s an important piece of automotive history. It’s in rough shape but a sign said that it’s “ready for restoration”.

Oh, and there was a boat. A big and fast boat. Gar Wood’s famous racer, the Miss America X, with four supercharged Packard V12s.

Photo:Packard Motor Car Foundation – 2009 Spring Open House

There were Packard engines on display, including marine and military applications.

In addition to the Packard stuff there were 100-200 other special interest cars most of which were pretty nice. Someone brought a Mercury Comet GT – a Maverick clone in Grabber Blue with a 302 V8. It was sitting next to a Dodge SRT10 pickup.

What the Packard foundation is doing is a great thing. People should know about it. When I got access to the GM Heritage Center back in February to shoot 3D for Cars In Depth, since I was already not far from the facility, I drove up to the proving grounds to get some pictures of the site in the snow.

A few weeks ago, I was walking out of Durst Lumber in Berkley and there was a ’48 Packard in the lot. The guy who owns it is a retired guy, Art Kirsh, who lives a half mile from me. He asked me if I was a “landsman”, and we started to talk, resulting in the Look At What I Found! about his car. I asked if he was going to the spring open house at the proving grounds and he graciously offered me a lift to the event in his car. Art is active in the Packard community, driving to most events in the midwest. Most of the other Packards there were also driven to the event. Art said that only a couple of them were trailered in. In this case, though, the trailer queens were true automotive royalty. Art’s ’48 is a fairly nice riding vehicle for a 63 year old car. He was able to keep up with traffic on the freeways, though Art kept it in the right lane. He said that he’s gotten it up to 85 before with no problems. It had a very smooth ride, but then it weighs almost two and a half tons. Not as steady as a modern car for sure but smoother than most modern cars today that are not luxury models. There was a noise in the dash when the car braked, with Art said was new and jokingly said must be a mouse in the heater. He also might want to get something checked in the front right suspension, because there was also a noise when making left turns. Back then you had to lubricate the suspension and chassis on a regular basis or bad things would happen.

A couple of owners were giving folks rides out on the test track in their Packards. There was a sign that said “Packard Taxi Stand”. I don’t know how many Packards were used for taxis, but as mentioned above, they did sell professional cars. I think one car giving rides was a ’39, not that much different from Clemenza’s Super Eight where Rocco Lampone made his bones by clipping Paulie Gatto. The other Packard on the test track was late 20s. I had my 3D video rig and it would have been stupid for me to not get video of the old Packards returning to the test track.

The word return might be historically accurate. In addition to using the test track and the mostly unpaved “torture track” on the site’s southwest side to develop Packard products, the facility was also used for quality control, with production models being taken off the line at random and being subjected to 25,000 miles of testing at the proving grounds. Packard promoted that QC testing in a brochure you can see in the photo gallery. According to that brochure, every V12 powered production Packard was tested at the proving grounds. That means that it’s very possible that this wasn’t the first time these particular Packards were on the test track. In any case, I was fortunate to get video of both vintage Packards on the Packard Proving Grounds test track, or on what remains of it. The track is wide enough that both drivers were able to enter the track near the timing shed, drive to the far end of what remains, make a U-turn and come back and exit via the drive on the other side of the timing shed.

Leon Duray and Norm Batton on the banking getting ready to exit the fourth turn of the 2.5 mile oval track in 1928. The view is looking towards the east northeast. You can see the water tower in the distance behind the track’s banking. The water tower is still there but there’s a condominium complex where this part of the track stood.

The guy driving the ’39, named Marvin, knew I was there to shoot 3D. I guess Marvin’s a bit of a showman. To celebrate his Godfather looking car, there’s a fake human arm, caught in the trunk lid. For all I know it might be the car from the movie. After all, Clemenza told Rocco to take the canoli and leave the car. Marvin started to show off for the cameras, taking an extra loop around the timing shed and then returning to the track for a figure eight, finally accelerating as he turned past me off the track and up the driveway. It was nice of him to put on a show like that because after the processing, the 3D was as good as I’ve been able to get so far with video. If you don’t have 3D, don’t worry, the YouTube 3D player will display 2D with a few clicks, and that’s plenty cool, but it’s worth scrounging up even some cheap red/blue glasses to watch in 3D.

I took about 70 still shots of the Packards, the buildings and the assorted Packard memorabilia. You can see the full gallery in 2D or 3D at Cars In Depth. I would have been able to get more but when you’re shooting 3D, all the photographers come up and ask you questions about shooting in stereo. That’s how you know they’re photographers, regular folks say 3D. That and the fact that they have three different cameras hanging off their necks.

I’ve also uploaded a gallery of historic black and white photographs of the construction and use of the Packard Proving Grounds. The photos are from the collection at the National Automotive History Collection of the Detroit Public Library, the world’s largest public automotive archive. There are also a couple of shots of Gar Wood at the wheel of Miss America X and the aforementioned Packard brochure about the proving grounds. You can find them in the gallery below the second video.

The Packard foundation and club people are great car people. Friendly, willing to share whatever they know about their cars and justifiably proud of the marque and what they are accomplishing in preserving its history. If you’re in the Detroit area, pay the proving grounds a visit. Their next public event is Sunday, June 12, 2011, the Cars ‘R’ Stars Concours and swap meet.

Start the video, then pause. Click on the “3D” icon on the YouTube menu bar to select your choice of 3D formats or 2D. Video courtesy of Cars In Depth

I was four the first time I rode across the country, from Menlo Park to Cambridge, sharing the back of the 1950 Studebaker with my older brother, Tom, and Mab, the 75 pound Airedale. Mab sometimes stretched across the back seat, pushing us onto the floor, but I digress, partly because I want the reader to know that I actually remember that trip. I also remember the aneurism in the tire, in Utah, and my fear as we approached the Holland tunnel, which my father had explained went under water, and my amazement as we sped dry through that marvel.

Other automotive firsts…

The first car I drove was the ’57 Chevy 210 wagon, when I was seven; the first I drove legally, the 1965 Peugeot 404 station wagon. A year later, I drove cross-country, Cape Cod to Palo Alto, in my first car, an eight year old 1962 Falcon. But I’d long forgotten the make of the car in which I’d taken my first ride, from Mt. Auburn Hospital, in Cambridge, to 44 Westlund Road, in Belmont, three miles, according to Google Maps. Charlie Batterman, a family friend across the street, had chauffeured my mother and me. (My father, fearing the baby’s arrival might unsettle my older brother, had stayed home with him, but my brother nonetheless acquired a loud noise phobia on that Independence Day, 1953.)

I hadn’t seen the Battermans since the late Kennedy or early Johnson Administrations until last weekend, when Nora Batterman (now Campbell), my brother’s age mate, called out to me from the meat counter at the Whole Foods in Cambridge. As we began catching up, I was keeping my curiosity about the Battermans’ old car in check, but Nora launched into that story unbidden. “When you were nine or ten,” she said to me, her eyes aglow, “my father had said to you, ‘did you know I drove you and your mother home from the hospital?’” That news had prompted the obvious question from me: “What kind of a car was it?”

Now I was thrilled to be reminded so unexpectedly of the make, but back then I’d been a rabid partisan of the One True Car Company, and so when her father had told me I’d taken my first ride in a Ford, “you had looked absolutely crestfallen,” Nora said. “And then you had said, “I’d hoped it was a General Motors product.”

Then Nora informed me that I had occupied a special place in Batterman family lore for nearly half a century. Even Nora’s daughter, Amy, 17, smiled as she listened to that story for probably the umpteenth time. Charlie had been especially amused by the phrase, “General Motors product.”

After hearing the story, I pushed my luck. “Do you know what year the Ford was?” I asked. I didn’t expect to find out. Many people I know don’t even know the makes of their childhood cars. Most don’t know the year. But Nora remembered this, too. Let the record show that I took my first ride in a 1949 Ford.

Or, as the Beastie Boys say:
Got busy in Frisco, fooled around in Fresno
Got over on your girlie cause you know she never says no

Fresno Bee, thanks to Team BMW Douchebag Factory Drivers for the tip!

Certain misguided members of the not-so-mainstream media perpetuate the myth that American cars are unsalable in Japan, that nobody wants them, that they are “dasai” or uncool. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The Japanese love American cars so much that they lay on a big festival a few times of the year, dedicated to the celebration of the great American car. I blew TTAC’s travel budget and went all the way to Yokohama to attend today’s Amefes, and to snap a lot of pictures of a lot of old and new American cars in Japan.

Right this way, dozo…

“Amefes” actually means “American Festival,” but the Japanese have this thing for abbreviating everything. Nissan for instance used to be “Nippon Sangyo.” “Family Mart,” a chain of convenience stores, is referred to a as “Famima,” and the remote control, or rimoto kontorora in Japanese, turned into “rimokon.”

The full name of Amefes is actually “Ikura’s American Festival.” Baldheaded Ikura is the owner of “L-Garage”, a customization, restoration and classic car shop in Yokohama. Ikura is also the lead singer of a mildly famous soul and funk band that goes by the same name. Abbreviating “Ikura’s American Festival” correctly would yield “Ikuramefes.” But that’s too long for Japanese tastes. Above is the bald head honcho and rock star, giving last minute directions before the show begins.

Amefes must attract most American cars that actually are in Japan. For instance a whole lineup of  manly muscle, one of them a rare 396 Turbojet.

True love.

The little red Corvettes attract lots of admirers.

There are little red Corvettes with a classic dash (someone left am amplifier on the floor.)

And there are little red Corvettes with a mad dash.

Pink Cadillacs are popular with the ladies …

They are popular with the gentlemen as well. He’s looking very hard whether there’s a Marilyn Monroe in there, somewhere. OK, how about a Marilyn Monroe lookalike?

Cars come in all colors, for instance burgundy.

Did we mention burgundy?

Speaking of colors: For some strange reason, the Chevy vans have a cult following in Japan.

Chevy Astrovans even more so. Maybe, because they save the expense for a love hotel. Which they resemble. In color, shape, and size.

But does this love hotel have a Hemi? Note the flag on the toolbox.

At some Amefes occasions, they have real drag races. This one has only stationary dragsters.

Stationary dragsters are not very popular with some of the crowd: “You promised me a real drag race, dad!”

The show has the finest examples of American ingenuity. For instance, the car that absolutely CANNOT have a 5mph bumper.

There are demonstration vehicles for the double wishbone suspension.

And superb examples of forced air induction.

Such an array of exciting technology remains not without effect on the male visitors of the show.

Back to cars. Here is a Ford that is to die for.

Another Ford that is to die for.

And speaking of dead ….

These three guys got a great deal on a small fleet of brand-new Chryslers. So they started a brand-new Chrysler taxi service. If you are tired of the Toyota Crowns, go to the Kannai station in Kanagawa, after 9 pm, that’s where they hang out.

Wait: Is Elvis alive?

It wouldn’t surprise us. Here is the Japanese cast from Grease.

There you have it. Elvis lives! In Yokohama with wife and sleepy son.

Back to cars: How about some triple orange?

Would you have expected a Plymouth Duster here?

Or this fine example of a Chevy Stepside?

“So THAT’S that Transam!”

Already classics.

Not a single sign of anything Japanese. All true blue American.

Required reading: The 1971 Chilton.

A WHAT is inside?

Even the female shapes are Americanized. Japanese shape (right) for comparison only.

Need a Christian air freshener? Or a Republican air freshener? Or a tax and spend air freshener?

There’s even a Caddy for Junior.

Frau Schmitto-san can’t make up her mind: Fluffy dice or fake boobs?

This one had me stumped. Can you figure it out?

Who buys all these American cars? Japanese people from all walks of life. Here some inner-city customers.

Customers from a high net-worth zip-code in Chiba.

Customers from the South Side.

Customers who love sex.

This customer hasn’t made up his mind yet.

The show isn’t just for old cars. Toyota brought their FJ Cruiser. Lots of them. Now also available in Japan! They even brought an urban off-road course.

Want a Jeep on the cheap? Financing deal! The pricing is an old Japanese custom: They just drop the last four zeroes. That Jeep sets your back 3,990,000 yen. Or $47,500

You can have the Jeep in white also. With that trim and option  package, it will cost a little extra. If you had to ask …

Speaking of which: A hopped-up Dodge Challenger, a.k.a. Saleen SMS 570. Price upon request.

Want a new Chevy Camaro? They brought SEMA right with them.

The GM boothbabes need a little work. He definitely does not come with the car.

Oooops. Two cars that went to the wrong show.

And that was this year’s Amefes, American cars in Japan! Reporting live from Yokohama, for Thetruthaboutcars, this is Bertel Schmitt.

That Karmann Ghia reminded me: There is a German Christmas market, right next door to Amefes, right here in Yokohama. I treat myself to a Bratwurst and a beer. If you want real Christmas, or real American cars, you must come to Japan!

The car industry is looking with envy and trepidation at the biggest bottom fisher in their market: AutoZone. Last week, AutoZone posted a 20 percent jump in quarterly earnings. And don’t look at their chart. You’d wish you would have bought AutoZone instead of the auto. But it’s not the financial results that has the industry worried. Everybody who knows the industry knows that the money is in fixing cars. The average expense per car for repair and maintenance is $1,200 per year, and if you multiply that with the 250 million cars and trucks on the street in the U.S., you’ve got yourself a nice $300 billion business. No, the industry is worried about why AutoZone suddenly is doing so well: America is in love with more mature models.

Everybody expected the repair business to go up in 2009 as people kept their cars longer, and to go back down as people buy more new cars. Not so, says AutoZone CEO Bill Rhodes.

Reuters reports Rhodes saying that “customers have been more focused on maintaining cars than they were three or four years ago.” Rhodes suspects there will be long-term benefit for the auto parts sector as drivers hold on to their cars longer.

The most worrisome Rhodes quote: “I think people have changed their mindset on how they deal with their most valuable assets.”

Translation: No more 2 year leases. Drive you car longer. Not that there is a shortage of cars in American garages anyway. Since 1972, there have been more cars than drivers. In recent years, that trend exaggerated.  Despite cash for clunkers, the average age of cars and trucks is now 10.2 years. Now why do you think Paul Niedermeyer’s and Murilee Martin’s pieces are so popular? Nostalgia can’t be the only reason.

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?

Just about every biographical account of Bill Mitchell written since his death uses the word “bigot”, mentions his profanity and his heavy drinking, and also usually references his recreational activities with those of the two X chromosome persuastion. It’s in Motor Trend Classic‘s profile of the man and shows up in Ate Up With Motors’ history of the Cadillac 60 Special, the first important design that Mitchell directed.

Based on how Mitchell’s vices usually come cataloged together, my hunch is that most of these accounts ultimately rely on Michael Lamm and Dave Holls’ encyclopedic A Century of Automotive Style: 100 Years of American Car Design first published in 1995. In introducing their book’s section on the Bill Mitchell era at GM Styling, Lamm and Holls characterize the man thusly:

“He was tough and dictatorial, a bigot, a womanizer; he often drank too much [and] had a foul mouth…”

That Mitchell was a womanizer is in no doubt. He had a contentious divorce with his first wife, and was estranged from one of his daughters when he married his second wife a day after it was granted. According to Peter Robinson’s piece in MT, Mitchell’s indiscrete foursome with three women got him banned from an upscale Frankfut hotel. Lamm & Holls quote Chuck Jordan, Mitchell’s lieutenant and successor as saying, “He certainly loved women,” and Mitchell himself often said “If God made anything better than a woman, He kept it for Himself.” A former administrative assistant (they were called “secretaries” in those antediluvian days) said that had the laws existed then, she could have filed a hundred sexual harassment suits against him. One account had him hiring seven prostitutes for a lunchtime orgy. When he discovered that he was short of cash, he sent an underling to the bank with his personal $1,000 check so he could pay each of the working ladies her $100 fee.

When it comes to the ladies, Baruth ain’t got nothin’ on Mr. Mitchell.

He also drank quite a bit. At a party at GM designer George Moon’s home Mitchell was seen tying one on, only to disappear. The next morning they had to call the police and fire department to get him down from 50 feet up in a tree. Another time, he and Oldsmobile design director Art Ross got stuck trying to drive a horse drawn carriage they’d stolen in Central Park into the lobby of the Ritz-Carlton hotel.

Mitchell’s vices are documented but prejudices are a bit harder to pin down. He did have very clear gender roles.

Harley Earl was rather progressive in his thinking. He hired Jews, Latinos, openly gay men and women as designers. Though Arthur Ross had changed his name from Rosenman, he didn’t hide his Jewish ethnicity, and Earl hired him, eventually promoting him to head the Cadillac and Buick design studios. He hired the first female designer in the industry in 1943. Automotive design was often seen as a struggle between the “pretty boys” (designers) and the “tough guys” (engineers). Engineers would called the designers “pantywaists” and “fairies”. As a result of those perceptions Earl himself affected a hyper-masculine persona to have some leverage with the engineers. Still, as a matter of practice, Harley Earl hired some openly gay men for his design staff. Recognizing that women usually cast the deciding vote on car purchases, he made a point of having at least one woman on each design team. Today we’d probably call that tokenism, but in the 1950s it was genuinely progressive.

Earl even used the women on his staff for promotional purposes. Sue Vanderbilt and other female designers chafed at the PR copy that focused on them making cars living rooms on wheels, and weren’t thrilled at being relegated to interior design teams. Still, they were team players trying to get ahead in a very competitive field, so they didn’t complain about being “Damsels of Design” until after they retired. They took the opportunities presented to them, including a 1956 display at the GM Building of ten cars “feminized” by GM’s women designers and the chance to contribute to GM’s 1959 Motorama cars. Earl said, around the time of his retirement in 1958, “I believe the future for qualified women in automotive design is virtually unlimited. In fact, I think that in three or four years women will be designing entire automobiles.”

That prediction did not come to be and interiors would still remain the female ghetto at GM Styling for decades. Bill Mitchell said, “No women are going to stand next to any senior designers of mine on any exterior styling of Cadillac or GM’s other major brands,” and proceeded to demote all the females on the design staff. Not long after Mitchell succeeded Earl as VP of styling, Vanderbilt got a leave of absence from her position as an assistant styling director in order to get her MFA at the Cranbrook Institute. However, when she returned to GM after only two years away she had to start over as a junior designer. Men who left GM Styling and returned usually came back at the same or higher level than they left. Mitchell also paid his female designers less than the men, though this was standard practice in industry at the time and not necessarily due to Mitchell’s personal sexism. Vanderbilt does note that while restricted to interior design, she indeed moved up in the hierarchy at GM. She also points out in her oral history that GM Styling was intensely competitive and that she and other female designers did not always have the stomach for the political and corporate combat needed to move up in rank.

In terms of other prejudice, specifically racial, religious or ethnic bias, the question is a bit murkier. The Lamm/Holls book gives the perspective of the people who knew Mitchell and were likely to be on the receiving end of some of his epithets. Lamm and Holls characterize Mitchell’s bigotry as reflecting not the man, but the era. I’m not entirely convinced. He may not have discriminated against people because of what they were, he just seems to have enjoyed making them squirm for the same reason. I’m not sure that it’s much of a defense to say that someone wasn’t a bigot, just selfish and cruel.

His bigotry was perhaps typical of the era. “Minorities had a difficult time under Bill,” observed designer Stan Wilen [a GM brand design head]. “If you were Black or Latino or Asian, he’d put an adjective in front of a reference that would make conversation a little awkward. I qualified as a minority, so I hear[d] those things. Sometimes when he did not like the design of a front end, he’d say it looked like a grouper. But if someone was in the room who was Jewish, like me or Jerry Hirschberg [later vice president of Nissan Design International in California], Bill would use the word “jewfish” instead of grouper. Maybe he was just teasing, but maybe he wasn’t.

“Or he’d be up in the executive dining room, and there’d be all of his men around him. We’d be eating lunch, and Bill – with no [excuse that he'd been drinking] alcohol, because it wasn’t allowed there – would start telling stories. And Juanita, the waitress, would be serving a salad or something, and he would come up with some of the most outrageous sexual comments. Even the guys around him would curdle. But Juanita would look straight ahead… and pretend she didn’t hear any of it. I mention this to demonstrate a dimension of cruelty in his humor.”

Jerry Hirschberg had another explanation. “Mitchell was never an introspective man. He was all reflex and intuition., and it was clear to me that there was little intent in many of his statements and actions. I heard the ‘jewfish’ comments but also found myself being moved up the [GM] management ladder as swiftly as anyone. The words Jew, Jap, Wop and Nigger tumbled out of him, but his passion for beautiful cars and the talents needed to make them prevailed. Being Jewish never seemed to hurt my career at GM Design Staff, although it occasionally did hurt! Mitchell’s contradictory nature reflected the turmoil and pain around him – and the levels of energy and even inspiration that prevailed.”

Lamm and Holls continue:

Chuck Jordan likewise maintained that Mitchell didn’t intentionally hurt people; he was just thoughtless. And Corvette designer Larry Shinoda, who’s Japanese-American, said he never noticed any racial malice in Mitchell, “…none at all.” Shinoda often accompanied Mitchell on racing junkets and the two became quite close until Shinoda left to go to Ford. Strother MacMinn further pointed out that Art Ross, who was Jewish, not only worked closely with Mtichell on cars like the 1941 Cadillac [60 Special] but was also his friend and faithful drinking companion.” – Lamm & Holls, pg. 173.

Since the Lamm/Holls book has become a standard reference on the history of automotive design and designers, that would probably be where the issue ends: a man of his times whose use of slurs was more personal than prejudicial. However, as I discovered, Strother MacMinn’s reflection on Mitchell’s relationship with Art Ross was not the same as that of Art Ross himself.

How I got to that discovery requires a small digression, so please bear with me.

In recent years the fine art world has discovered and started to appreciate (in both senses of the word) the original artwork and illustrations done by automotive designers. In 2005 Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts published Future Retro: Drawings From the Great Age of American Automobiles, with an introduction by Frederic Sharf and selections from his collection of original design art. In 2007 the Louisville [KY] Visual Art Association put on a show, “Designing an Icon, Creativity and the American Automobile,” with over 100 original art works and clay models, with the assistance of Bill Porter, who drew the 1968 Pontiac GTO. That collection has been shown at a variety of museums, schools, galleries and automotive related institutions, most recently last week at the Northwood Institute.

In reviewing Future Retro, I came across some works by Jerry Brochstein, a GM designer from the late 1950s to the late 1980s. Bill Porter and other colleagues hold Brochstein’s work in high regard, though Brochstein is somewhat embarrassed by the fact that Sharf’s book features work he did as a student, not an experienced designer. Among Brochstein’s designs at GM were the distinctive spoked and spinnered hubcaps for the ’63 Vette (which showed up in later iterations on the Riviera and other ’60s GM cars). He also worked on the AeroVette and Olds AeroTech concepts. Brochstein’s 1988 Cadillac Voyagé, to my eye, established the profile of the mid 1990s B-body Caprice/Impala.

I took note of Brochstein’s somewhat Jewish sounding surname and thought about adding him to my list of “car Jews” I’ve been keeping for a possible book about Jews with notable roles in automotive history.

When Brochstein’s son told me via email that his family was “as Jewish as Tevya”, I added him to the list. Searching for information on his role at GM, I found the name of Art Ross, son of Sheckel and Miriam Rosenman, another name for the list. I was able to contact Ross’ son, Carson, via the web sites he has set up to honor his father’s artistic legacies (and sell reproductions, now that such art is considered gallery worthy and collectible).

In discussing Mitchell’s relationship with his father, Carson Ross said that at one time they were indeed close, had been friends, and worked closely with each other at GM. The junior Ross said, though, that the relationship changed as Mitchell gained more power, first as head of design at GM and then later as VP after Earl retired. Earl had hired Ross, was a bit of his patron, and ran interference for him with Mitchell. Once Earl retired, Ross resigned from GM, starting his own successful design firm. Despite what Jerry Hirschberg said, Carson Ross told me that his father considered Mitchell to be an anti-semite, and that one reason why he left GM was that he had grown tired of Mitchell’s frequent use of the word “Jew”. Mitchell would frequently “joke” about Ross being “GM’s token Jew”. Considering that GM hired other Jewish designers like Wilen, Brochstein and Hirschberg, and that both Ross and Wilen rose in the GM hierarchy to head brand design staffs, the joke sounds more pointed than funny. Considering, too, that for a decade and a half after he hired on at GM Mitchell’s paychecks were signed by Meyer Prentis, GM’s treasurer, comptroller and Alfred Sloan’s right hand man, the comment is even less funny, though definitely ironic.

So was Bill Mitchell a sexist, homophobic, racist, anti-semitic bigot? Unlike Mad Men’s Don Draper, Mitchell was a real person who caused real hurt with his remarks, not a fictional character who “evolves”. I don’t think that it’s applying today’s standards to a previous era to say that Bill Mitchell could be bigoted and cruel, but that he also appears to have never let that bigotry or cruelty get in the way of assessing talent.

“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?

Not THAT Monteverdi.

Peter Monteverdi was a Swiss car nut. He built his first car – dubbed the “Monteverdi Special” – at age 16. It was approved as roadworthy by the picky Swiss authorities two years later – just in time for Monteverdi being old enough to drive his own own car.

With his first car being a custom model, Monteverdi quickly developed a taste for rare and expensive specimens. In 1957 he imported Ferraris to Switzerland, later he became Swiss importer for a stable of luxury cars, including Rolls-Royce and Bentley. In 1967, he started his own super luxury car company. In the 1970s, Monteverdi was right up there with De Tomaso, Jensen, and Bizzarini, all likewise mostly forgotten today.

The various energy crises of the 1970s had their effect on exotic cars. Monteverdi turned to a new target group: Oil sheiks. He invented the super-luxury off-road car. The Monteverdi Safari, based on an International Harvester Scout, was a hit in the Middle East – especially in the bullet-proof version. But a few sheiks can’t sustain a car company – unless you are Daimler, Porsche, or GM, and they invest in you. 1984, Monteverdi closed its doors in Basel, Switzerland. As far as I know, and I worked for a Swiss company for many years, Monteverdi was the last car company in Switzerland.

Who was the second to last Swiss car company? You won’t believe it: It was General Motors. GM Suisse had its heydays in 1969, when they built a staggering 18,265 units in their factory in Biel. GM Suisse closed its doors in 1975. The Berner Zeitung called GM Suisse “the one and only Swiss car brand.” But they were wrong. And who knows, maybe there are other Swiss carmakers. You never know what the Swiss are hiding in their tunnels.

A “merci, vielmals” to Robert.Walter for the tip. Sorry for the small video. Everything is small in Switzerland. Except for the mountains. And some banks.

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.

Then my mother informed me that Chevy was part of “General Motors,” which also made Pontiac, Olds, Buick, and Cadillac. Once my shock wore off, I learned to love the sibling brands. Soon, I viewed General Motors as the One True Car Company, and I proselytized anyone I could corner. “Gee, he likes cars,” said the 12 year old daughter of parental friends visiting from out of town.

I kept score. I knew that GM owned more than half the US market. I also knew every car in my suburban Boston development. The McRaes’ ‘59 Borgward was no threat to GM’s hegemony, but every neighbor’s new Plymouth or Dodge stung me like a lost ball game.

True, Fords sold better, but Chrysler Corporation played the spunky underdog. “THE DODGE BOYS ARE WOOING CHEVIES,” the radio would boom. “YES, BRING YOUR CHEVY DOWN AND WE’LL GIVE YOU A SPECIAL DEAL ON A BRAND SPANKING NEW DODGE!” I took it personally.

But by that time, our ‘57 Chevy, with 85,000 miles, had gone geriatric. My parents rented cars for trips. For a ski trip, they rented a Dodge Dart. Before we reached Black Mountain, that car’s obvious excellence would test my powers of denial.

When we stopped to leave the pets at the vet, Dad locked the keys in the trunk. Two policemen came to the rescue. “We’ll have your keys in five minutes,” one assured us.

Twenty-five minutes later, the officers were huffing and puffing, the sweat pouring down their faces in rivulets as they labored to remove the rear seat back from its fasteners. “This [huff] is a great [huff] car,” one officer told my father. Most seat backs detach so easily that in a crash, they can kill people, he said. But not this Dodge.

That only added to the cognitive dissonance weighing down my soul. Consumer Reports, the family bible on big ticket items, consistently ranked Chrysler above GM. My logical mind could not fault its methodology, so I combed each issue for slant. When car-shopping parental friends I evangelized dismissed my recommendations with allusions to Consumer Reports, I insisted it was biased.

I wanted empirical evidence to support my own bias, which was further strained by my sense–which I would never admit to myself–that the Dart felt durable. In contrast, the Chevy was clunky. So as we drove north, I prayed, “God, make the Dodge break down,” over and over, not realizing that had God intervened, it would have been deus ex machina.

We drove into the evening, Tom and I in back with our toddler sister, Miriam, between us. At length, a mysterious warmth permeated my nether regions. When it turned cold, I realized what it was.

“Mom, Dad, Miriam peed on me. Can we stop, so I can change my pants?”

“We’ll be there within an hour, Mom replied. “You can wait.” My cold, clammy privates rearranged my priorities. I quit praying for a breakdown.

Fast forward six years. The current family Chevy had just been totaled. With a sabbatical to Stanford looming, my father sought a beater for the interim. Cognitive dissonance had eroded my devotion, and my expectations were low. But I was still disappointed when he announced his purchase: a $200 1962 Ford Falcon. But when I saw the new car enter the driveway, I was instantly smitten. (Scientific fact: car enthusiasts use the same part of the brain to recognize cars and faces. See Nature Neuroscience, March 10, 2003) It was as if some female schoolmate’s obvious beauty had finally penetrated my thick skull. A revelation ensued: I was no longer a Chevy man. I was free to like whatever car I wanted to like.

At the end of the summer, my parents gave me the Falcon, and I drove to California. Though I loved it, I was through with fandom. My parents needed a car, and so after they arrived, we went car shopping. They had asked me what to get, and I had checked Consumer Reports. The Plymouth dealer offered us a Valiant for $2600–a bargain. The Dodge dealer wanted $2750 for a Dart. The salesman put on the hard sell. My father hemmed and hawed. Finally, in desperation, the salesman said, “well, ask the kid!” I noted that the cars were mechanically identical, and that we could save $150 ($820 in today’s dollars) with the Valiant. He threw in the towel.

My sister was then seven. Years later she told me that she had known–as I had known with the Dart–that the Valiant would last. I taught her to drive on it, and it was still running when she graduated from college.

Suitcase? Check.

Airplane tickets? Check.

Clothes? Check.

Spending money? Check.

Passport? Check.

Then came the thorny issue of how was I going to get around? I couldn’t rely on my hosts to drive me everywhere. So, I took a map out and planned where I’d go and what trains & buses went there and at what times. Eventually, my week in California was condensed into a rather messy timetable (complete with coffee stains, too!).

A week before I was due to fly out, my friend (of friends) phoned me up.

“You all ready?”

“Oh yes! Ready and raring to go!”

“You got everything? Passport? Tickets? etc.”

“Yep! Everything is planned down to the littlest detail.”

“So where are we picking your car up from?”

I paused to make sure I heard her correctly.

“What are you talking about?”

“Your hire car. You have got one, right?”

“Of course I haven’t! I’m not driving out there! I’m planning to take public transportation to get around.”

What followed after my comment was about 30 seconds of laughing on her part.

“You’re not serious? Public transportation?”

“Yeah! What’s wrong with that?”

“Do me a favour. Get onto Avis and get a car. There’s an Avis pick up point near us, we can get it there.”

“But…”

“Just do it!”

I then went to the Avis website to book a hire car. There were so many choices everything from a Chevrolet Aveo right up to a pickup truck. I chose the Chevrolet Aveo. Now I know this contradicts my earlier statement, but hear my reasoning. I chose the Aveo, because I found out that my credit card (or more accurately, my father’s credit card) could get me a free upgrade. You didn’t honestly think I was going to drive it, did you? Eventually, I got my reference number and I was all set.

After I’d filed the booking reference number away, the full horror of what was going to happen hit me. I was going to be in control of a car I’m not familiar with, in a country I’m not familiar with, on a highway system I’m not familiar with. The odds of my survival didn’t look good. So, I spent my last few days (possibly on this planet) researching about driving in the United States. I looked at YouTube videos, The AAA website and some books. I even watched the Top Gear special where they drove from Florida to New Orleans, 5 times!

Then came the day I flew out. I’d driven to Heathrow Airport, handed my bags over and went through security and customs. I won’t bore you with airplane ride, but suffice to say that it was pleasant, the service was great and I couldn’t help but admire the irony of the fact that when you’re flying 36,000 feet in the air at 500mph, you can walk around freely, but when you’re trawling 20mph on the tarmac, they expressly state that you must wear a seatbelt!

After 12 hours, we touched down in LAX. I went through security and customs and met my friend (of fri…you get the idea now) and jumped in her car and set off for the Avis pick up point. She had a Toyota Sequoia and I couldn’t help but marvel at how bloody huge the thing was. It was like a Panzer tank. No wonder they didn’t sell them Europe, it wouldn’t fit on the winding, narrow roads we supposedly have here. They are wide enough for an S-Class or a Rolls, but never for a Sequoia .

Whilst we were driving there, I kept looking out of the window to get a sense of perspective of what was to come. Firstly, I couldn’t get over how big the roads were. One lane of your roads would have been considered “sufficient” to fit two lanes of traffic down in the UK. Next came the size of the cars. I could now see why fuel sippers took their time to take off in the US. I also realised why cars like the Honda CR-V and Toyota RAV-4 were considered to be “cute utes”. Again, in the UK they are considered to be a bit of a menace. They’re lumped in the same category as Range Rovers and Jeeps. Big hulks of machines on small roads. But in the United States, they seemed, well….small. Maybe it was because the size of the roads made them look smaller or it could have been the Chevy Tahoes which drove alongside them on the motorways.

Suddenly, my heart was in my throat. I could see the huge, red sign. It simply said “Avis”. Never had that word been so scary to me before. We got out of the Toyota “Aircraft carrier” and went to the desk. I signed all the paperwork, showed them my passport and they then showed me to my car for the next week. It was a Kia Spectra. I was a touch disappointed. Not because it was a Kia Spectra, but because I wanted a Ford Focus because I’d heard at how bad it was on TTAC and I wanted to find out for myself how bad it really was. But a car is still a car. I took the keys, stuck them in the ignition and fired her up. All four cylinders “roared” (note the inverted commas).

“Right, you stay close behind me and we’ll go to our apartment.”

This was it, my first experience of driving abroad. I was as ready as I ever would be. I put my seatbelt on (safety first) and put her into “Drive”. The Toyota Sequoia roared off. I hit the accelerator – nothing happened.

“What the bloody hell?! What’s wrong with this frigging thing?!”

You guessed it! I’d left the handbrake on! Rather sheepishly, I took the handbrake off and shot forward, past the laughing Avis representative. I hit the accelerator hard because I wanted to catch up with my friend and stay close behind her. Very close behind her. In fact, two feet off her rear bumper. And whilst I’m on this topic, why is it that whenever you’re trying to stay behind a friend in order to follow them, the world and their bloody dog wants to get in front of you and separate you from your friend?! Or is it just me and my rotten luck? Anyway, back to the driving. I was hanging on for dear life. I was driving a rather small car on big roads and my fellow drivers were driving vehicles which made my house in the UK feel like a tent. Soon, we arrived at her apartment. I got out of the car sweating (memories of my trip to Europe came flooding back). But this wasn’t sweat of overheating, this was a cold sweat. A sweat of fear. I had to drive on these roads for a week?! I wouldn’t make it past the first day! But I didn’t have a choice. This was the situation and I had to live with it.

The next day, I was left to my own devices and I thought a trip to the seaside would be a good way to kick start this holiday. I checked a local map and saw that Marina Del Rey was close by. The route to get there was easy enough. Just down a few streets, follow Washington Boulevard and I was there. It seemed like I was only 10 minutes away. I wasn’t. That day I learnt a very valuable lesson about the American highway system. Roads can be deceptively long. If I were to believe that map, Washington Boulevard was only a mile long. It wasn’t. It was closer to 10 miles long. And remember the “few streets” I had to go down in order to get to Washington Boulevard? Each one was about 1 mile long! So from a trip which I’d estimated to be 10 minutes, turned out to be more like 30 minutes.

Driving on the right hand side of the road was disconcerting for me. It just felt wrong. Now I know you lot will say “But Cammy, the majority of the world drive on the right-hand side of the road!”, but you’re missing the point. Imagine the United States suddenly decided to change to driving on the left-hand side of the road; can you imagine that period of adjustment for everyone? How wrong would it feel to them to be driving on (their perception) of the wrong side of the road? Well, that’s how I felt. Every fibre of my body wanted to swing the car over to the left hand side of the road, but I didn’t. There was a Chevy Silverado coming the other way. I would have come off worse. Much worse.

After a pleasant(ish) day at Marina Del Rey, I went back to the apartment and fell asleep. I thought jetlag was creeping up on me, but it didn’t explain why I had a stinking headache. I kept stumbling and couldn’t focus properly. My hosts eventually asked a doctor who lived next door to quickly examine me. Apparently, I had sweated so much that I suffered a severe case of dehydration. My holiday wasn’t going too well. I think after that incident, my friends took a little pity on me and starting giving me a crash course in how to drive in the United States. The mentality of the average American driver, what to look out for, how to second guess pedestrians, etc. It eventually built up my confidence, to the point where I felt confident enough to drive on my own. For the rest of the trip, I was driving like a total native. I felt so proud; I’d overcome my fear and learnt a good skill. Next time, if I ever come back to the US, I could hire a car and ferry myself around. But remind me, what does pride come before….?

On the last day I was so confident I was driving my friend around. We’d just come back from some outlet stores and the back seat was awash with designer clothes. In my confident state, we’d come to set of traffic light which we had to turn left at. Seemed simple enough. I sat at the lights and waited for it to turn green. Eventually, the lights turned green and I hit the accelerator.

“STOP!!!!!!!”

I hit the brakes before you could say “unintended acceleration”.

“What’s the matter?!” I screamed.

My friend pointed upwards. It seems that while I was correct to turn right when the traffic light turned green, what I didn’t do was read the sign which said “yield on green”. I felt so sheepish. After a week of driving around on foreign highways, this one incident knocked me right back to the beginning. A feeling of shame engulfed me. Because not only did I endanger myself, I endangered someone else. And others on the road. That was unforgivable.

After that we handed the car back to Avis (with a full tank of petrol), packed my bags and headed for LAX. On the way there, my friend and her husband turned to me and said “Apart from that one incident at the traffic lights, you did really well for driving over here. We’d get back into the car with you again.” I dismissed their obvious attempt to let me down gently, but once they swore on their lives and their dogs’ lives, I felt I’d succeeded. I came to the US, drove on foreign roads and lived to tell the tale. I could count this week as one of the successes of my driving career. I boarded the plane and headed back to the UK.

On the plane, I went through the trips I’d take in that Kia Spectra. It wasn’t a bad car and it got me where I wanted to go, what more could I have asked for? The air conditioning was strong and the fit & finish of the dashboard was very high. It handled well, despite the way I flung the poor thing into corners. As Bill Maher said “This is your rental car, go forth and beat-eth the sh*t out of it. Who cares? For it is a rental.” If they sold it in the UK as a saloon version (I think the closest we had was the Kia Rio), I would have certainly put it on my shopping list for “everyday drivers”. I settled in my seat for the 12 hour flight back home confident that’d I’d never have to do that again. That last bit of the sentence wasn’t true. I did come back for a second helping of American driving. But that was in a Nissan Versa. I couldn’t make that interesting even if I tried.