Autopalooza, the umbrella PR campaign for sixteen top shelf automotive events in southeast Michigan, including races, cruises and car shows, had a kick off press event this past week. As a Detroit booster, I urge you to check out the schedule of events and try to attend as many of them as you can. While I haven’t been to all of them, I’ve attended most and if you get to check any of them out, you’ll find out why car events around Detroit are special.

That’s not what I’m here to talk about, though. The press conference was held at the General Motors Heritage Center, where GM displays some of the corporation’s large collection of cars and trucks. Even if I wasn’t a Detroit booster and at least a little interested in Autopalooza, just which one of us would pass up an opportunity get into the GMHC? I’ve been to the Heritage Center before, but they rotate cars in and out of the facility as some are loaned out for events or to museums, so it’s always worth a visit. Definitely worth taking lots of extra memory cards and charged up batteries for the cameras.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Of course I decided to get there early, to have more time to take pictures. From how many cars were in the parking lot a half hour early, it wasn’t a very original idea. The GMHC is not really a museum. More like a private collection in an industrial building than an elaborate Schlumpf-like display. It’s not ideal for photography. The cars are generally parked fairly close to each other, mostly side by side, but oh, what cars they are! Even the worst Government Motors haterz and most fervent FoMoCo or Mopar fanboys’ eyes will pop at what’s inside another of those proverbial nondescript industrial parks just outside Detroit.

Sometimes the way the cars were arranged set up interesting juxtapositions. First there was the Astro III turbine powered, space age looking car from the 1960s parked right in front of the restored art deco Futurliner bus styled Our American Crossroads diorama from the 1941 Parade of Progress. Call it days of future past or retro futurism, but the two artifacts of earlier times looked curious next to each other.

The other pairing took place, I suspect, because the GMHC had historic Chevys in a row right next to where they had GM’s experiments in alternative energy like the Electrovan and Electrovair II fuel cell and battery powered vehicles.  Just down from the Electrovan was parked the Autonomy concept from 2002. The Autonomy, if you don’t remember, was also powered by fuel cells, with all of the car’s mechanical components mounted in a “skateboard” like chassis that could be mounted with a variety of body “top hats”.

I don’t recall if they ever showed any alternative bodies to this one. At the GMHC the Autonomy was also parked near a 1959 Chevrolet El Camino, which shares the ’59 Impala and other full size Chevys’ horizontal bat-wing like tail fins that curve down to a Vee. That dramatic styling is literally underlined by a simple horizontal bumper. The front end of the Autonomy has a hood line that also has a pronounced downward pointing Vee, sitting above a horizontal lower element. When I saw the two shapes in the same line of sight, I couldn’t help but notice the similarity and when I mentioned it to some of the others at the event, they agreed. I wouldn’t say that it’s uncanny, but there is a resemblance.

Sometimes shapes in automotive styling reappear in new contexts. For example, some people think that Jeff Teague’s Duesenberg concept’s rear end looks like the front end of a Lamborghini Gallardo, though I doubt that was a conscious influence. One of the ideas behind the Autonomy concept was that the “skateboard” would let exterior designers’ creativity flow, since they didn’t have to worry anymore about accommodating the mechanical bits. I think that it’s funny that with all the bodies they could have topped the Autonomy with, they chose one that looks like the back end of a ’59 Chevy.

Ronnie Schreiber edits Cars In Depth, a realistic perspective on cars & car culture and the original 3D car site. If you found this post worthwhile, you can dig deeper at Cars In Depth. If the 3D thing freaks you out, don’t worry, all the photo and video players in use at the site have mono options. Thanks for reading – RJS

Mitsubishi HSR III from 1992

It started with a photo of a strange looking Pinto with a targa style roof and it metastasized into an encyclopedia of just about every concept car you never heard about. Part One, Acura to Chevrolet, is here. Part two, Chrysler to Ford, is here. Part three, Honda to Mercury, is here.

Mitsubishi likes three letter acronyms and alphanumerics. Behold, above, the HSR III from 1992, some kind of Eclipse concept, I think.

And 2001′s RPM.

Or the SSS from 2000.

And the SSU from the year before.

This is Nissan’s Alpha-T from 2001. I’m pretty sure that T stands for truck. As for being the alpha truck or not, a Ford Raptor looks like it could could drive right over the Alpha-T.

After years of mismanaging the Oldsmobile brand, General Motors started giving Olds dealers some decent new product but it may have been too late to resuscitate the brand. It’s possible that new model names like Alero, Achieva and Aurora only confused their existing clientele, many of whom had been buying Cutlasses and Ninety Eights since the Kennedy administration. Someone at Olds must have liked car names starting with A because in 1992, they introduced the Anthem concept, which previewed the Aurora. I suppose they couldn’t use Aurora because GM had just used it a couple of years earlier on a Cadillac concept (see above).

The Wikipedia entry on the Oldsmobile Profile from 2000 says that it’s a crossover, a CUV, I guess that’s because it had sliding doors but I still think it looks like a station wagon. Not a bad looking car either, it had show car features that have since become commonplace on production cars like keyless entry and ignition, a rotating shifter knob complemented by shifters buttons on the steering wheel, hands free phone plus internet and DVD based entertainment for rear passengers. Give it a big glass sunroof and call it a Vista Cruiser.

Olds’ Recon from the year before does have a big sunroof (though it can’t be a Vista Cruiser because it isn’t a glass roof) and it does look more like a proper CUV, albeit with suicide doors. What’s a car show without at least one concept car with suicide doors?

I guess we’re into the dead brand section of obscure show cars. Even Packard made concept cars, though some of them were more like personal vanity projects for Packard executives. The Panther is pretty slick, and while Dick Teague’s Predictor didn’t help Packard survive, true to its name it did influence a lot of cars in the 1960s, but neither of those cars are particularly obscure. The Packard Request, for 1955, on the other hand, is an obscure for a car that ironically came about due to popular demand. The Request was apparently the reaction to requests by Packard executives, dealers and enthusiasts for a car with a classic Packard grille. Now I happen to think that the 1955 and 1956 Packards, also Teague designs, look great. Teague gave the last real Packards a grille that looked contemporary but still echoed the distinctive arched radiator shell of classic prewar Packards. The ’55 and ’56 Packards gave away little in the looks department to the mid-’50s cars from the Big 3. However, grafting an actual upright classic grille onto Teague’s ’55 Packard gave the Request an odd, Edsel like appearance. I suppose that Teague, the original silk purse out of a sow’s ear designer, did the best he could, but I wouldn’t put it on the list of ten top Teague designs. Still, from the side view it looks almost stately and in any case it could have been worse. For instance…

If they arranged the cemetery of dead car brands alphabetically, next to Packard’s grave would be Plymouth. Of course in real life, or death, Packard customers would not likely be buried next to Plymouth owners, Plymouth being one of the “low cost three”, and Packard being America’s most prestigious brand for decades. Low cost three or carriage trade, just as the Packard Request was not Richard Teague’s most attractive show cars, the Plymouth Plainsman, another western themed show car, was not one of the better Exner-Ghia Chrysler concepts. The Darth Vaderish front end is massive, which is good in a way because it distracts you from the oddly shaped B pillar and the wagon’s stepped roof that looks like they mounted it backwards. At one time the as yet unrestored (I wonder why) Plainsman was part of the Bortz collection of show cars but later ownership was transferred to Joe Bortz’s ex wife as part of the settlement of what I understand was a somewhat contentious divorce. It’s not clear if the former Mrs. Bortz wanted or didn’t want the Plainsman. That’s only part of the car’s story, which involves Chrysler avoiding customs fees, the car almost becoming one of Cuba’s old American cars, and a stay in Australia before ending up in Joe Bortz’s hands. The story is much better than the car is.

The Plymouth Belmont is one of two Chrysler concepts that could have competed with the Chevrolet Corvette and the original Ford Thunderbirds, sporty two seat roadsters. The other Chrysler two seat concept was the 1955 Chrysler Falcon, a personal favorite of Virgil Exner Sr., who supervised Maury Baldwin’s design of that car, which Exner used personally. He also used the Belmont as a personal car but that was not an in-house Chrysler (or Ghia) design. The Belmont, like the first two Chrysler concept cars from just before WWII, the Thunderbolt and Newport, was designed and built by Briggs, Chrysler’s body supplier. In 1954, Briggs wanted to experiment with the then new material called fiberglass and demonstrate to Chrysler that they could supply plastic bodies as well as the steel ones they’d been building for almost half a century. Working under Briggs design head Al Prance, designer Bill Robinson, who later worked directly for Chrysler and subsequently taught at Detroit’s CCS, came up with the Belmont. Since Briggs had no experience working with the new material, it is thought that they contracted the actual body making to Creative Industries or Ionia Manufacturing, two companies that did contract work for the major automakers. It’s an attractive car, though I think the design is a bit compromised by the fact that Robinson was told to use production Plymouth bumpers. The Belmont still exists and is in a private collection.

I’m not sure what relevance the Slingshot had to the rest of Plymouth’s lineup in 1988, which was mostly K-car derived. The Slingshot was made of carbon fiber and was designed with input from design students interning at Chrysler. It has a canopy opening, but then I already said it was partially designed by design students. According to Wikipedia, it was designed as part of a series of three concepts, along with the Big Shot and the Hot Shot but since I can’t find anything at all about those other two cars, and since that information has no citation, I think someone’s pulling our Wikilegs.

Continued in part 5 tomorrow, Pontiac to Volvo.

Ronnie Schreiber edits Cars In Depth, a realistic perspective on cars & car culture and the original 3D car site. If you found this post worthwhile, you can dig deeper at Cars In Depth. If the 3D thing freaks you out, don’t worry, all the photo and video players in use at the site have mono options. Thanks – RJS

As the owner of a geriatric, but otherwise well maintained car, you know that getting parts can be a bitch. Depending on company policy, ex-factory supply of parts can cease after 12, or, if you are the lucky customer of a more dedicated maker, 15 years after the end of regular production.  BMW now goes against that trend and offers parts for a car that went out of style 73 years ago.

Manufactured between 1936 and 1940, the BMW 328 ranked as a dream sports car in its days and remained a dream for most. With a total run of just 464 units, it was a rarity even during its production years. A substantial number is still around today. Most suffered from the unavailability of the original Hurth gearbox, which led to the use of synchro gearboxes from other manufacturers and the committing of a cardinal sin amongst collectors: A departure from the true original.

73 years after production of the 328 stopped,  BMW Classic and supplier ZF Friedrichshafen AG laid up a small production run of 55 gearboxes. According to BMW Classic spokesman Stefan Behr, the units are not remanufactured, but new: “What’s special – apart from the technical complexity – is the fact that the parts are approved by FIVA and FIA. Cars with the unit may start in races sanctioned by these bodies,” Behr said.

Through optimized materials and a reinforced bearing for the second gear, the “new-old” gearbox is even better than the original, but it complies faithfully with the factory status in the later production period of the BMW 328. The first prototypes of the new-old gearbox already demonstrated their reliability in the 2012 Mille Miglia, the world’s best-known classic car race.

The gearbox joins a growing catalog of some 40,000 parts maintained by BMW Classic as replacements for the many BMW collector’s items out there. Other makers pay homage to heritage in glossy brochures and glitzy museums, BMW actually keeps history alive.

BMW does not only have an open ear for the needs of owners of their historic cars, it also is receptive to questions of TTAC’s commentariat. Asked a few times what the gearbox would cost, and countering the rumor spread by Cjmadura that its $50,000 , Herr Behr revealed that the price of the gearbox is “19,748.33 EUR, in Germany, including VAT.”  That would translate to $25,755.34, or only half of what Cjmadura figured.

An alert REDDIT reader (manuelv 19) spotted the Seattle Police Museum’s 1970 Plymouth Satellite patrol car responding to calls on the coffee scented streets of dowtown Seattle earlier this week. According to the Seattle Police Museum website, only 53 Special Order Police Satellites were produced in 1970 and 21 of those were purchased by the Seattle Police Department. The cars were mid-size police vehicles and featured the 383 Super Commando engine package complete with 4 bbl carburetors. They were reputed top be quite fast at the time.

This particular vehicle, known as Unit #521, was wrecked with only 9000 miles on the clock and sold at public auction eventually ending up in Los Angeles. The Seattle Police Museum located and purchased the vehicle in 2006 and spent a year returning the car to its former glory. More information on this vehicle is available at the Seattle Police Museum website of by calling (206) 748-9991.

http://www.seametropolicemuseum.org/

http://www.seametropolicemuseum.org/docs/Seattle_Police_Car.pdf

I’m not a reporter. I don’t even pretend to be one. What I do is tell stories and sometimes, if I am fortunate, they resonate with people. So when guy name Joe here in Buffalo contacted me and offered me a ride in his 1995 Lotus Esprit I was torn. Naturally, I wanted a ride, who wouldn’t? Still, I had to tell him up-front that I didn’t know if that a ride would generate a story good enough for the illustrious readership here at TTAC. Luckily for me, he invited me over anyhow and I got my ride, but in the end it turns out I was right. A ride, no matter how exhilarating, really wasn’t enough for me to create an entire story. That’s fortunate though, because Joe’s story about his almost lifelong connection to this one specific car is better than anything I could have invented.

To an ordinary guy like myself, the Lotus Esprit is one of those legendary cars that only live in posters on the walls of kids’ bedrooms. It is a low wedge of a car built for speed and handling and the car I found waiting for me in the driveway next to Joe’s house looked painfully out-of-place in the working class Buffalo neighborhood. The fact that it occupied a space next to a Renault Alliance, Motor Trend’s Car of the Year back in 1983, blew my mind, but the truth is that both cars are perfectly representative of the amazing person that their owner is. The Lotus is what Joe aspired to when he was a child and the Renault is where he comes from. The fact that he has both says something good about the man.

The car was low and difficult for me to clamber into, but once inside it felt surprisingly roomy and comfortable. The engine behind me hummed with pure energy as Joe put the car out onto the main road near his house, the pop off valve hissing impressively every time he switched gears. “This is one of those cars that gets a bad rep,” said Joe, “I don’t think that reputation is deserved though. A lot of guys take them out, flog them before they get fully warmed up, don’t rev match when they downshift and they generally beat on them. It’s a hand-built car, after all, I mean back in 1995 they only built 46 of them. TThese things need a little more TLC than your average sports car, but they are damn good cars” We continued up the rutted street, Joe using the car’s superior handling to dodge manhole covers and, as we drove, Joe’s amazing story trickled out.

When he was a kid, Joe was fascinated with the Esprit. He studied the specs in the magazines, read about them in books, admired them in film and photo and decided that one day he would own one. So intense was his desire that as a 14 year old riding with his mother, when he saw one on the road he forced her to turn around and chase after it. “I believe in the code of exotic car ownership, “Joe told me as he grabbed third gear, “One of the rules is that when kids come up and ask about your car that you encourage their interest. I know exactly what that means.“ The owner, it turned out was of a similar opinion and he encouraged the boy’s interest. The two soon became friends.

Eventually the cost of speeding tickets and insurance became too much and Joe’s friend sold the Lotus. Joe mourned the loss of the car, but continued his friendship. Flash forward almost a decade when Joe, a recent college graduate, decided to make his lifelong dream of Esprit ownership come true. “I got on-line and looked at dozens of ads for used cars.” He told me, “I knew exactly what I wanted, a 95 Esprit S4 like my friend’s and it took a long time to find one. On the very last page of the classifieds I finally found the perfect one. It was in Texas but I knew right away that this was the car. There was only one made in this color combination, it was my friend’s – the same Esprit I first saw when I was 14.” Joe contacted his friend and flew him out to Texas to check out the car. It turned out his suspicions were right. “I sent a check and had my friend drive it back to Buffalo. I have had it ever since and I’ll never sell it.”

As we headed home we passed an old steel mill, now shuttered and dark. “My dad worked In that building for 38 years.” Joe said over the growl of the super car’s engine. “Buffalo is changing and those changes have taken a lot of jobs with them. This town has been on a downward spiral for a lot of years but I think we’re past the worst of it, though.” He said hopefully, “The industry is gone but the people have always been what made this town special. They still do, Buffalo is the city of good neighbors, you know?”

Back at home the Lotus slipped into its spot next to its polar opposite, the battered Renault. “I always wanted this,” said Joe from the seat of the Lotus, “But I grew up in that.” He said waving to the small car. “My dad was diagnosed with cancer a few years ago and I got that so we have something to work on together when he gets better. I had to spend a lot of time finding one like he had, but I finally got it. I think we’re going to have a good time with it.”

The childhood dreams that most of us have fade away over the years as we grow into adulthood so it’s nice to know that sometimes people make those dreams a reality. It’s nicer still, to know someone who lives those dreams but remains firmly grounded. Joe knows who he is, where he is from and what is really important in life. It was my honor to meet him and to tell some of his story. That’s all I can do, I hope it resonates.

Thomas M Kreutzer currently lives in Buffalo, New York with his wife and three children but has spent most of his adult life overseas. He has lived in Japan for 9 years, Jamaica for 2 and spent almost 5 years as a US Merchant Mariner serving primarily in the Pacific. A long time auto and motorcycle enthusiast he has pursued his hobbies whenever possible. He also enjoys writing and public speaking where, according to his wife, his favorite subject is himself.

The salesman must have thought I was nuts. I could hear the incredulous tone in his voice, “Some guy calling from Okinawa wants to buy a used car that we put on Craigslist? When does he want to come and look at it? He doesn’t? How’s he going to pick it up? He isn’t?” Fortunately for the both of us, money talks.

By the spring of 2010 I had spent six straight years in Japan and I was worn out. Although I wasn’t exactly eager to return to the United States, whether I wanted to believe it or not, it really was time for a change of scenery and the closer my departure came, the more comfortable I became with the idea. A return to the United States meant a lot of good things, I realized. My wife would get to experience life in the land of the free and my kids would get to hear someone other than their dad speak English for a change. It would also be a return to live football games on TV, real bologna sandwiches and, best of all, I might even get the chance to own a cool car again.

As soon as the thought entered my mind, I knew what I wanted, a great American sedan. I spent a lot of time hemming and hawing about the various ones on the market but, when the time came for me to put my money where my mouth was, reality reasserted itself and took control of the situation. As an auto enthusiast, I’d like to say that I refused to settle, but the truth is a couple of my dream cars went out the window, foremost among them the Pontiac Bonneville GXP I had long dreamed about. Then an old memory tickled the back of my skull, what about the 300M?

From the days of the Eagle Vision, I have been a sucker for the LHS cars. Now, of course, I know that some of them have transmission issues, but from the day photos of the Eagle Vision hit the magazine stand those cars have featured large in my own personal vision of the future. Each iteration of the design, the New Yorker, the LHS and eventually the 300M represented another step towards a better, brighter tomorrow. So the 300M really didn’t have 300 horsepower? It looked so good to me that it didn’t matter.

With my departure from Japan just a month away, there was no time to be lost. After reading as many old road tests as I could, I set down a list of requirements so thorough it resembled the build sheet for a brand new car. I chose the 300M Special, a slightly sporty variant of the already good-looking 300M that featured a few more horsepower, fake carbon fiber interior trim, special body work, lower stance and special wheels. I decided too that I wanted the white/grey two-tone interior, a sun roof and all the other options. Finally, I decided that it had to have less than 70K miles and be in perfect condition.

Thanks to the internet, I had a whole world of 300Ms at my finger tips. Thanks to my list of demands, I had very few choices. I found a nice black one in Salt Lake City that looked like it met the criteria, but it was sold when I called. A gorgeous blue one in Sandusky Ohio was long gone, too. Eventually, thanks to a Craigslist search aggregator, I found a dark grey 300M in Tucson, AZ. This time when I called it was still there.
The salesman was shocked, but when I told him I was a cash buyer he jumped at the chance to sell a car. He sent me dozens of pictures and promised me, under threat of a major beat down, that the car was in great condition. From half a world away I held my breath, took the plunge and bought the car sight unseen. Then I had to get it up to Seattle.

Fortunately, I am from a big family and my older sister Connie needed a vacation. For the price of a one-way ticket to Tucson and a few dollars pocket money I was able to solve that problem. I watched her progress via Facebook as she picked-up the car and then headed across the high deserts of the American Southwest, then Northward through California, with a stop to visit the wine country, Oregon and finally Washington state. When I arrived at the airport two weeks later, Connie was there to meet me and the big Chrysler was waiting for me in the airport garage. It was a thrill to step right off an airplane and slide right behind the wheel.

The car was and still is immaculate. I used it to travel from my home north of Seattle across the country to my new assignment in Buffalo. Later I used it for a trip to New Hampshire and another trip to Washington DC. It has, thanks to the birth of my third child and the subsequent purchase of a mini-van for my wife, slipped from daily driver status but considering the winter road conditions here in Buffalo, that isn’t a bad thing. Even now it sits hunkered down safe and snug under its cover and a layer of early spring snow in my driveway. I may have had to move heaven and Earth to get it, but it was worth coming home for.

Thomas M Kreutzer currently lives in Buffalo, New York with his wife and three children but has spent most of his adult life overseas. He has lived in Japan for 9 years, Jamaica for 2 and spent almost 5 years as a US Merchant Mariner serving primarily in the Pacific. A long time auto and motorcycle enthusiast he has pursued his hobbies whenever possible. He also enjoys writing and public speaking where, according to his wife, his favorite subject is himself.

When you say the word Cord, most car enthusiasts think of the “coffin nose” 810/812 models, designed by Gordon Buehrig for the 1936 and 1937 model years. There was much about the ’36-’37 Cords that was revolutionary, or at the very least advanced for their day. Buehrig’s art deco masterpiece was E. L. Cord’s automotive swan song. His styling included hideaway headlights flush mounted in pontoon fenders, hidden door hinges, no running boards, and that distinctive one piece hood was hinged at the cowl and opened from the front, not from the sides as in most prewar cars. From a technical standpoint, what people remember about the ’36 Cord is that it had front wheel drive. Some mistakenly believe that the Cord 810 was the first front wheel drive American production car. Actually, the first front wheel drive Cord was the L-29, named for 1929, its year of introduction. The L-29 was not just the first Cord with front wheel drive, it was indeed the first American car with front wheel drive that was offered for sale to the public, beating the now obscure Ruxton to the market by a few months.

1929 Cord L-29. It sits lower than the 1940 Ford next to it. More photos here.

The Ruxton is best remembered for its stylish but ineffective Woodlight headlamps. Pretty much nobody then knew who Ruxton was (the company was named to entice a potential investor, who demurred but by then the name had ironically stuck) but by 1929 plenty of people knew who E.L. Cord was. Errett Loban Cord was a savvy businessman, a wheeler dealer, a pioneer in a variety of industries and the father of some of the greatest automobiles ever made.

A racecar driver and mechanic and then a successful car salesman, he was brought in by Auburn in 1924 to help turn the moribund company around. By 1928 he owned Auburn, part of a growing empire that eventually included Duesenberg, Lycoming Engines, Stinson Aircraft, radio stations, the predecessor of American Airlines, and for a while the Checker Cab and Checker Motor companies (which got him into trouble with the Securities and Exchange Commission).

For 1929, Cord decided to launch his self-named brand to slot in between the supremely patrician Duesenberg and the slightly more plebeian (but still not cheap) Auburns. Racing legend Harry Miller had already demonstrated the promise of front wheel drive on the racetrack. E.L. Cord realized that FWD had some advantages for road cars as well so he had Cornelius Van Ranst design a front drive layout based on Miller’s patents, using a straight eight Lycoming engine sitting behind the gearbox with a De Dion axle and inboard drum brakes up front.

Cornelius Van Ranst designed the Cord FWD layout based on Harry Miller’s patents. More pics here.

By eliminating the need for a driveshaft to the back axle, the engine and transmission could sit low in the chassis, allowing not just a lower center of gravity but also letting the body sit lower to the ground. The long drivetrain meant that stylist Alan Leamy could give the L-29 an exceptionally long hood. Leamy used the long hood and the low body to give the car a rakish and very sporting look, not unlike chopped and channeled hot rods.

The L-29 was not a huge success, having the misfortune of being introduced a few months before the stock market crashed and the Great Depression was triggered. It also was heavy, slow, and had some reliability issues, so only a few thousand were made and sold, ending production in 1932. Still, the L-29 remains the first American production car to offer front wheel drive and it continues to be a great looking car, timelessly rakish and sporting.

Architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s L-29 in his signature Taliesin Orange color. More pics here.

To promote the then revolutionary layout, the Auburn Automobile Company published a 15 page brochure with technical drawings of the chassis, photos of the L-29 with various body styles in locations in what I believe was southern California, extensive technical specifications and about two pages of advertising copy, attributed to E. L. Cord himself, titled Why We Introduce A Front Drive Automobile.

It’s fun to watch Cord (or whoever wrote the text) try to tout FWD as the latest and greatest while insisting that the traditionally laid out Auburns and Duesenbergs were not being made obsolete by his company’s new brand. In many ways, the brochure isn’t that much different than what you’d see today, though a modern advertisement is not likely to start out with two pages of text from the company founder.

Ronnie Schreiber edits Cars In Depth, a realistic perspective on cars & car culture and the original 3D car site. If you found this post worthwhile, you can dig deeper and get a parallax view at Cars In Depth. If the 3D thing freaks you out, don’t worry, all the photo and video players in use at the site have mono options. Thanks  for reading– RJS

According to a report in the Detroit Free Press, GM North America President Mark Reuss has suggested that Buick might be revising its “tri-shield” logo, which dates to the 1950s. The current all chrome version has been in use for the past decade or so.

The current Buick logo/badge, in use since 2002

Buick has been using a shield in its logo since the 1930s. The tri-shield was introduced in the late 1950s and is said to represent the LeSabre, Invicta and Electra models, popular then but discontinued at the present.

The change could involve a return to the red white and blue color scheme that the shields used to wear. As seen in the picture above, the Buick logo has a long and confused history, where proponents of spelling the name “Buick” (or “BUICK”) wage war with friends of medieval heradldry. Sometimes, an eagle soars as a compromise, only to be shot down for Red, White & Blue shields. With China a big part of Buick’s (GM sells 4 times as many cars with a Buick brand in China than it does in the U.S.), one might think that the Detroit automaker would be reluctant to wave the colors of the American flag on its products there. But it’s not as it seems – knee-jerk reactions often reduce us to jerks on knees.

Ironically, China is where the initiative for the red white and blue Buick logo seems to be coming from. In China, Buick never gave up the Red White & Blue.

The red white and blue Buick logo is a familiar sight in China, as this badge on an all chrome Excelle, sighted at last year’s Shanghai Auto Show, proves.

All this just goes to show how much influence China wields on GM. So much that it might even reintroduce the Red White & Blue to America.

Ronnie Schreiber edits Cars In Depth, a realistic perspective on cars & car culture and the original 3D car site. If you found this post worthwhile, you can dig deeper at Cars In Depth. If the 3D thing freaks you out, don’t worry, all the photo and video players in use at the site have mono options. Thanks for reading – RJS

I stumbled upon this car at the Packard Proving Grounds‘ fall open house.

Of late I’ve been enamored of classic dual cowl phaetons. Forget Lamborghinis, if you want to make a statement, a dual cowl phaeton from the late 1920s or early 1930s is the definition of arriving in style. While getting some photos of a burgundy red Packard phaeton, I noticed that the classic behind the Packard was a Duesenberg, or rather it had a Duesenberg hood ornament. It turns out that it’s a one-off replica of a Duesenberg built for a man who owns a real Duesey.

There are forgeries and then there are fakes. Owners of fine art paintings, oriental rugs and collectible precious jewelry will sometimes have replicas created for display purposes while the originals sit safely in a vault built to the satisfaction of insurance underwriters. Part of me asks what’s the point of owning something if you can’t enjoy it, but then do you really want your friends to be walking on a 17th century Isfahan? There’s a point somewhere where an item’s value as an artifact exceeds it utilitarian purpose, so the prudent thing would be to archive and protect it. Even art has a utilitarian, decorative function, and if it’s decoration we’re after, a well executed copy can be just as decorative as an original painting.

Errett Lobban Cord was responsible for many of the greatest American cars of the prewar era. Under his control, Auburn, Duesenberg and the eponymously named Cord brand produced cars that were technologically advanced for their day, in some cases revolutionary, with style and design that continue to enchant car lovers and design aficionados alike.

Fred and Augie Duesenberg were self-taught engineers who were making engines with overhead camshafts and four valves per cylinder almost a century ago. The earned their reputation in racing, eventually winning the Indianapolis 500 three times and the 1921 French Grand Prix. As skilled as they were at making great cars, they were not great businessmen, and their company struggled. After taking control of Auburn, E.L. Cord bought the Duesenberg company in 1926 and tasked Fred Duesenberg with building the best car in the world. It was to be big, fast and expensive. After more than two years, Fred produced not just the finest American car made then, but a car that is arguably the finest car ever made in America, the Duesenberg Model J.

The Model J had a straight eight engine, assembled by Lycoming, another one of Mr. Cord’s companies, with two overhead cams operating four valves per cylinder. The 420 cubic inch engine was claimed by Duesenberg to put out 265 horsepower, an impressive figure in the late 1920s. At a time when few cars were capable of reaching 100 miles per hour, Duesenberg claimed that the Model J could do 94 in second gear and had a top speed of 119 mph. It was the fastest American car in its day. To stop the car from those speeds, the Model J had four wheel oversized drum brakes, hydraulically operated. From 1930 on, the brakes were vacuum power assisted. That may not sound impressive but they were the Brembos of their day – remember, Ford and Chevrolet sold cars with mechanically operated brakes well into the 1930s.

Equipped with a supercharger designed by August Duesenberg, the SJ models had 320 HP. The SJ had a 0-60 time of 8 seconds, zero to a hundred in 17, with a top speed of 135 mph or more.

The Model J was a big car, with a standard wheelbase of 142.5 inches. Frame rails were made of 1/4 inch thick steel and were 8.5 inches deep. Considering how big it was, though, it wasn’t as heavy as you’d think. With a body the Model J weighed a bit over two and a half tons. Weight was saved through extensive use of aluminum. Alloy components included dash, steering column, differential and flywheel housings, timing-chain cover, water pump, intake manifold, brake shoes, and the gas tank. Worthy of a car with the Model J’s racing heritage, it was fully instrumented: 150 mph speedometer, ammeter, coolant temperature and oil pressure gauges, a tachometer, brake pressure gauge, altimeter/barometer, and, the Trackmate of its day, a split second stop watch. The Model J also featured the Bijur automatic chassis lubrication system to which Frank added a warning light to remind drivers when to add lubricant. There were even warning lights for changing engine oil and topping off the battery water, predating Honda’s service indicators by half a century.

From a sow’s ear

Talented designer Alan Leamy Jr., whose other notable works included the Cord L-29 and the Chrysler Imperial, gave the Model J a majestic front end. Customers could pick from a catalog of factory bodies, or take delivery of a rolling chassis to be sent to a coachbuilder like Murphy.

All that came at a price. A rolling chassis was $8,500 ($9,500 after 1930). Supercharged Model Js were $1,000 more. Factory body styles started at $2,500. The least expensive coachbuilt Model J could run $13,000, more typical Model Js cost about $17,000 and a few as much as $25,000. By comparison, a new Ford Model A Tudor was $500.

Introduced to great acclaim at auto salons in the US and Europe in 1928 and 1929, the initial projection was to sell 500 Model Js a year. The stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression made those projections unrealistic and only 481 Model Js were produced in eight years. Today, it’s not unusual for a Duesenberg Model J to fetch more than a million dollars on the auction block. They are the creme de la creme of American classic cars.

A real Duesenberg Model J engine (in a sort of real Duesenberg)

As great a car as the Model J is, as advanced at it was in 1929, that was 83 years ago. Vacuum boosted hydraulically operated oversized drum brakes may have been state of the art in 1929 but would you want to try to stop a 5200 lb car from 135 mph with them today? Also, though we may make fun of trailer queens, would you risk driving an irreplaceable million dollar car in traffic? Winning a blue ribbon at a top shelf concours may be worthwhile but how much fun can you have driving a car from a trailer to a show field and back to the parking lot?

So an unnamed Duesenberg owner who wants to be able to drive in Duesenberg style without risking damaging his own real Duesenberg commissioned Steve Pasteiner’s Advanced Automotive Technologies to build an accurate replica of a Duesenberg Model J Murphy convertible coupe. AAT is one of the companies that builds prototype and concept cars for the major automakers. Car companies are not set up to make one-off cars so most of that work is jobbed out to companies like Metalcrafters and AAT. You may remember the Buick Blackhawk concept built for Buick’s centennial. That was built by AAT. When GM was melting down financially prior to its bankruptcy and bailout, the Blackhawk was one of the cars from its Heritage collection that GM sold at Barrett-Jackson’s January 2009 auction. It sold for $475,000 (plus a 10% fee for the B-J folks), the highest price GM got for any of the cars it sold.

The Ford V-10 Tritron engine is not as pretty as the Duesenberg straight eight Model J, but it’s rated at 362 HP vs the Model J’s 265. The slick routing of the steering shaft with its universal and Heim joints should give you a clue about the first rate build quality.

The Packard Proving Grounds show was the replica’s first public showing after a four year build. The Model Js bodied by Murphy of Pasadena, California are held in particularly high regard by Duesenberg collectors. Unlike East Coast body builders who used heavier and more ornate designs, Murphy bodies reflected California tastes. Sporty looking but elegant cars with simple and trim lines including Murphy’s trademark narrow “clear vision” A pillars. Perhaps Murphy’s Duesenbergs are successful designs because that trim and elegant design ethos manages to keep the massive cars from looking truly gargantuan. Cars from that era in general are tall, the components and body sat on top of the frame, but Auburns and Duesenbergs are just plain big. If you look at the people in the photographs, you’ll see that the cowl of the car is about as high as a man’s chest.

Now normally, replicas aren’t my cup o’ plastic tea. A few things, though, made me take a second look at this one. To begin with, as soon as I asked Steve if it was a Duesenberg he readily said that it was a replica. Also, there are no Duesenberg logos anywhere on it. As one of AAT’s employee’s said to me, “it’s not a Duesenberg”. It does have a Duesenberg hood ornament, a reproduction made by Don Sommer’s American Arrow. The body is mostly fiberglass reinforced plastic, though the hood, running boards and door frames are steel. That body is dimensionally accurate. It may use GFRP but this is no kit car. When I first saw it, I thought it was real. In case you’re hoping for AAT to build one for you, it’s a true one off, Pasteiner vociferously shook his head no when I asked if they’d build another.

To replicate the most patrician of American automobiles, Pasteiner, who started AAT after a career as a designer for GM in the 1960s and 1970s, used the most workmanlike of vehicles imaginable, literally. The donor car was actually a truck, a brand new 2007 Ford E-350 work van with a V-10 Triton engine. The van’s body was removed, the frame was narrowed, the engine was moved back considerably behind the front axle line (the replica Duesey would qualify as a “front mid engine” layout by a foot or more), and a custom frame was fabricated for the back half of the car. The frame members look just as massive as those used by Duesenberg. Unlike the Duesenberg’s ox-cart rear suspension, the replica uses a modern four-link setup plus a Panhard bar to control the solid axle in the back.

In the back, four trailing links, a Panhard rod, coilovers and big disk brakes are an improvement over the original Duesenberg’s leaf springs, drum brakes, and lever action shock absorbers.

The front suspension is one reason why the Ford Econoline was picked as a donor. The customer wanted something that looked like a real Duesenberg but drove more like a modern vehicle. Trick rear suspensions are one thing, nobody can see the rear suspension, but in a classic car, the front suspension is usually right out in the open for all to see. The original Duesenbergs were advanced for their day but their day was still a bit early for independent front suspensions. The Model J had a front beam axle on elliptical leaf springs. Not many modern vehicles have front suspensions that could pass for something from the classic era. Ford does, though, continue to use their famed Twin I-Beam Front Suspension in their F-350 and E-350 trucks. Works like a truck, drives like a car, as the old ads say. It’s not an ideal independent front suspension, tires wear more unevenly than with A arms, but it’s a lot more controlled ride than a beam axle, and out at the exposed working ends of the I beams they still look like a solid front axle.

Click here to view the embedded video.

So using an E-350 was a clever way to solve a few problems. You can see from the original tape layout that Pasteiner did on the side of the van before removing the body, the dimensions work out. It also gives you an idea of just how large the Model J is. Note how the seating position in the replica is not that much lower than that of the E-350 truck. The Duesenberg Model J engine was powerful and torquey. For a replica you’d want an engine that has some grunt. The V-10 Triton may not be as pretty as the shiny green and chrome DOHC straight eight in the real Model J, but the Ford truck motor puts out 362 hp and 457 lb-ft of torque. That’s more power than a supercharged Model J put out and the replica body weighs less than an original Murphy, so the replica is likely to be faster than the original. However, if the patron who commissioned the replica has a need for eveb more speed, or just wants to have a supercharger like the SJ Duesenbergs, Vortech sells a blower kit for the Ford V10. Besides being faster, the replica has a much more sophisticated suspension than the original, so the ride is better and the handling is much better.  While the twin I beam front suspension pulls off a vintage look, one concession to classic style was not made. Large disc brakes at all four corners replace the drums of the original. Coilover shock units and a power steering rack out of a Dodge Ram truck complete the front end.

Ford’s “Twin I-Beam Front Suspension”, coilovers, and a Dodge Ram rack & pinion give AAT’s Duesenberg replica modern handling and ride characteristics while retaining the look of the original’s solid front axle.

Some vintage parts were used. The headlamps and fog lamps are off of a period Hupmobile. The taillights are retro-futuristic, with a vintage STOP diecut that lights up, but the actual lights are LEDs. One side of the hood has mesh, the other has four flexible stainless steel exhaust pipes that drop through the fender into a polished collector. Those exhaust parts are props, the V-10′s original cast headers are still being used. The wheels are very art deco looking discs, but they are modern two piece units of custom machined and polished aluminum. They’re actually a bit larger than the original Duesenberg’s. Pasteiner, as a retired designer, has an affinity for larger than standard wheels. They’re also wider. The Model J put that 320 horsepower to the road through 19X5 inch wheels shod with bias ply tires. The replica sports 20X6.50 inch wheels mounted with modern radials from Coker that look like vintage tires.

On the inside is a lot of red leather. The dashboard is machine turned aluminum, turned on machines right at AAT. Though the replica uses the same 5/6 speed TorqShift automatic transmission that came with the E-350, to keep the vintage look, there’s a dummy clutch pedal and the gear selector looks like a normal three-speed manual shift lever. The electric window switches are activated by traditional window cranks. Though Murphy Duesenbergs had conventional doors, they were custom made cars with personalized features so in the spirit of a custom coachbuilt car, the replica has suicide doors. A removable fiberglass hardtop was also fabricated though the car is destined for a life in southern California and it will likely be driven as an open car. Should it get hot in LA, the car comes with something that no real Model J ever had, air conditioning. Fit and finish is show car quality. The doors close with a solid thunk. It didn’t look out of place sitting parked next to a concours quality restored Packard. You can see photos of the build in progress at AAT’s website.

The net result is a car that looks like a classic Duesenberg but drives like a modern vehicle. Steve’s been around classic cars for a while, he’s been a judge at top level concours, and he says that it drives better than a real Duesenberg. The car will be shipped to California next week, unless they can figure out a way to delay shipment so they can drive it some more. It has more power, it’s lighter and it handles and stops better than a vintage Duesenberg ever could. Also, because of the reduced weight, the new rear suspension and the change in the engine’s location, it undoubtedly drives better than the E-350 upon which the replica is based. It certainly has more style than the donor.

Ronnie Schreiber edits Cars In Depth, a realistic perspective on cars & car culture and the original 3D car site. If you found this post worthwhile, you can dig deeper at Cars In Depth. If the 3D thing freaks you out, don’t worry, all the photo and video players in use at the site have mono options. Thanks for reading – RJS

Since I’m the guy who generally won’t take photographs of ’69 Camaros and ’57 Chevys (well, unless they’re really special ’69 Camaros and ’57 Chevys ) and who will walk past 5 “Eleanor” Mustangs to look at one American Motors Hornet, it should come as no surprise that for the past couple of years I’ve made it a point to attend the annual Orphan Car Show held in Ypsilanti, Michigan’s Riverside Park. This year was the 16th iteration of the OCS, which is affiliated with Ypsi’s Automotive Heritage Museum. With a number of century old (and older) brass era cars at the event, it’s not surprising that some of them had to be started with hand cranks. What is surprising is that not all the crank starting cars dated to before World War One. Actually, a couple of them date to the Vietnam War era and later.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Ypsilanti Automotive Heritage Museum is located in what was the Miller Motors building, the last surviving Hudson dealership in the world, and it is dedicated to that marque as well as the Nash, Kaiser Frazer and Tucker brands (plus Corvairs and GM Hydramatic products, both assembled in Ypsilanti), so the Orphan Car Show was a natural idea. It’s a judged show with rules and the cars range from genuine barn finds to museum loans and top level concours cars. As with other Detroit area car shows, some of the car owners and judges are industry designers, engineers and executives. Buck Mook, a retired Ford designer, was showing his 1954 Ford Comete Monte Carlo coupe, one of only 699 that were made, with a body designed by Pininfarina, commissioned by Henry Ford II, based on a French Ford with a flathead V8 and a body coachbuilt by Facel. Mook’s car was actually the Deuce’s personal car and he bought it from the company in 1967. Not far from the Comete coupe was Howard Payne‘s superb black bustle backed 1937 Cord 812 Beverly sedan. Howard worked with Mook at Ford. Before they collaborated on the Mustang II with Mook doing the exterior and Payne the interior (don’t laugh, the Mustang II was very successful by Detroit’s most important metric, they sold train loads of them), Payne had a significant role in what became the 1961 Lincoln Continental.

To get into the show, a car must be an orphan. For the purposes of the show that means a car from a brand that has not been sold in the United States for at least 8 years. Therefore Plymouths have been allowed in the show since 2009, and since Oldsmobile died in April of 2004, this was the first year that Olds cars were on display. Mercury went out of production in late 2010 so it won’t be let into the show until the 2019 version, but Pontiacs will make it in for the 2017 show. Show organizers bend their own rules a bit because there is usually a large contingent of Corvairs. With the museum’s nice collection of Corvairs, that’s understandable, though Chevy is still in business.

Ford is also still in business but European Fords that are no longer sold here are also displayed. Continental Mark II cars from 1956 and 1957 (surely one of the great bargains among collectible cars, you can buy a nice driver for the cost of a loaded Camry) can be displayed, because technically they were made and sold by Ford’s short lived “Continental” division. AMCs are permitted as are pre-1987 Jeeps by that company, Willys or Kaiser. Cars also apparently have to be stock, another rule that is bent, since one of the Corvairs that’s regularly in the show has obvious modifications (it was the personal car of Corvair designer Ned Nickles and all the mods were done by him, some at GM). Another car owner alluded to that rule when he looked around before lifting the hood of his car and said, “They’re supposed to be stock”. I’m sure some of that engine was still stock but it didn’t leave the factory with that carburetor, those cast valve covers or those headers. I don’t want to get the owner in trouble with show organizers so I’ll just say that it was a later first generation version of a car whose second generation has been the subject of one of Murilee’s Junkyard Finds, an import sold by a company that still exists but under a brand that no longer is sold in the United States, a model name that has been used by the same parent company over the course of many decades on a variety of cars. Note: The first person who correctly identifies the year, brand sold under in the USA, model, country of origin and engine family will win a new car (taxes and delivery fees not included). For tie breaking purposes, please also include all the different models that wore this nameplate.

With Citroens not having been imported to this country in a while (other than the SM, was there ever official distribution of Citroen product in the US?), it’s not surprising that there’d be some cars bearing the double chevron along with the other orphans. Last year there was a Traction Avant, a 2CV and a Dyane.

This year there was a larger contingent of Citroens. Well large is a relative term. The Traction Avant didn’t make it (rain was threatening and there were even a few sprinkles) but there were four Citroens, a pair of 2CVs, separated in production by almost two decades, and two Dyanes. One of the Dyane owners got out the jack handle/lug wrench and stuck it in a hole in the front of the car. If you’re a young’un you may not know this but crank starting cars did not end with Charles Kettering’s invention of the electric self-starter in 1913 (making it possible for many women to drive gasoline powered cars). A number of postwar European cars, and not just microcars, could be started manually… or as in the case of this Dyane with a dead battery, not started manually. The guy cranked it over by hand a few times without starting it and then he and his Citroen buddies decided that they’d push start it later.

I know that Citroens were not the only postwar cars which could be crank or pull started. Early Volkswagen Beetles had a special fastener on the crankshaft pulley and a hole in the rear valence so a hand crank could be inserted.

Click here to view the embedded video.

If you’re older than, let’s say 50, or if you hang around with people who collect old lawnmowers or outboard motors, you might know that small engines didn’t always have a recoil gizmo for the pull start cord. Before they figured out how to make a pull starter that recoiled the rope and freewheeled once the engine started, your lawnmower or outboard came with a rope. It was knotted at both ends (calm down, Bertel) and the rope passed through a hole in a wooden handle. The engine had a pulley or cup with a notch in it for the rope’s knot. You put the knot in the notch, wrapped the rope around the pulley or cup and gave it a good pull. It works the same with an air-cooled VW.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The brother of a friend had a 1964 Beetle with such a notch in the crankshaft pulley. The engines are low enough compression that it’s not too hard, particularly with the early 1300cc models. Just remember, a Model T has a 2.5 liter inline four and people hand started those. I believe that the notched pulley was a factory VW part but it’s been 20 years since I last rebuilt a VeeDub engine. I’m sure that our esteemed editor emeritus Ed’s father could tell us for sure.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I do know that you could buy aftermarket pulleys and it looks like there was also the alternative of using the generator pulley, as an accessory called the Startfix Handenlasser was made in Germany and marketed in the US by Small Car Essentials for the grand sum of $2.45. It’s a leather strap that had a handle secured at one end and a metal rivet at the other. The instructions say to drill a small hole in the generator pulley’s outer flange so you can engage the rivet, you wrap the strap around the pulley, stand to the side and give it a yank.

Click here to view the embedded video.

According to the Samba forum, VW discontinued the hand crank on Beetles by 1950 though Type IIs (Buses) had them through ’59. Apparently all VW 181 models (aka The Thing) had a hole in the bumper though it’s not clear how many came from the factory with the correct sheet metal and crankshaft nut. So what other postwar cars besides the air cooled Citroens and VWs could be hand started? The Dyane was in production until 1987. What was the last car built that came with a crank for hand starting sold new in Europe, Japan or North America? Are there any cars still being produced somewhere in the world that still have the facility for hand starting? Have you ever crank started or pull started a car?

Click here to view the embedded video.

Ronnie Schreiber edits Cars In Depth, a realistic perspective on cars & car culture and the original 3D car site. If you found this post worthwhile, you can dig deeper at Cars In Depth. If the 3D thing freaks you out, don’t worry, all the photo and video players in use at the site have mono options. Thanks for reading – RJS

If a lack of charging stations limits the rate of acceptance of EVs by consumers, well then, the businesses (and governments) with an interest in the growth of EV sales will just have to create that charging infrastructure, so Tesla just opened the first four of what is planned to be a nationwide network of more than 100 high speed charging stations that will let most Tesla Model S owners recharge their cars quickly, for free. While the notion of refueling your car at a station owned by the car’s manufacturer might seem a bit unusual, after all we don’t buy gasoline at Ford or Toyota filling stations, the idea is not really a new one, at least as far as electric cars are concerned. Tesla’s automaker owned charging stations were predated by over a century.

Electric cars were first popular a hundred years ago, and finding a place to charge your car was an issue then as well as now. Of course there weren’t gasoline stations on every corner then either so it wasn’t as much of a competitive disadvantage. Some people charged their cars at home – most urban areas of the United States had electric service by then. By 1914 General Electric had sold tens of thousands of mercury arc rectifier based EV chargers. Most of those chargers, it turns out, were installed in public charging stations, usually located in parking garages or at hotels. Some hotels also had dedicated curbside chargers for use by electric taxi cabs.

Until Tesla sells a few thousand more cars, the Detroit Electric, manufactured by the Anderson Carriage company and corporate successors, will still be the most successful electric car ever sold, at least in terms of units sold. About 20,000 Detroit Electrics were sold between 1907 and 1939. As a matter of fact, the Detroit Electric’s fortunes more or less parallel the early history of electric cars, peaking between 1910 and 1920, eventually overcome by the rapid technological improvements in internal combustion engines.

Just as Tesla is opening up a network of EV charging stations, a century ago Detroit Electric operated public charging stations for their customers (and others as well since most EVs of the era used a standard charging plug). Tesla is said to be locating their stations near trendy restaurants. A hundred years ago Detroit Electric also tried to accommodate their generally affluent customers (electric cars were significantly more expensive than typical gasoline powered cars) by locating company owned charging stations near where their customers lived, worked and played. In Detroit, there was a Detroit Electric showroom, repair garage and charging station near the foot of Woodward, another just across the bridge from the Belle Isle island park, and a third near the exclusive Boston-Edison residential district, nor far from where Henry and Clara Ford lived. Clara was not fond of “explosion” automobiles and like Helen Joy, the wife of Packard chief Henry Joy, Clara had her own Detroit Electric. The building for the charging station near Belle Isle still stands and is used by a theatrical prop company.

The charging stations were large, about 17,000 sq ft, and could accommodate charging more than 100 vehicles at a time. Detroit Electric offered a service where owners of Detroit Electric cars paid $35-$40 a month and their cars would be picked up, charged, washed, polished, given a complete mechanical inspection and then delivered back to the customer’s house. According to one inflation calculator, that works out to ~$800-$900 a month.

By 1912, Detroit Electric had sales branches and charging stations in Manhattan, Chicago , Boston, Brooklyn, Buffalo, Cleveland, Evanston, Kansas City, and Minneapolis. Route guides were published, showing the location of Detroit Electric and other public charging stations to show that electric cars were not just suitable for city use, by the Electric Vehicle Association, Goodrich tires and the Automobile Blue Book publishing company. The EVA even published a route guide for charging stations along the Lincoln Highway, America’s first transcontinental highway, though few EVs could have made the trip, as there was one leg with 190 miles between charging stations, a distance beyond the range of any electric cars made at the time. EV drivers were resourceful, though, and in a pinch they’d get a charge from the power cables used by electric streetcars.

Hope and the future promise of battery electric cars spring eternal. In the Feb. 1913 issue of Country Life in America (that also has an ad for REO automobiles penned by Ransom E. Olds himself), the publication’s automotive writer, one Ryland P. Madison, discussed the problems and promise of EVs in a manner that could be be repeated almost verbatim today:

Their well-known deficiency is a lack of ability to carry sufficient storage capacity to give long mileage at high speeds or under heavy loads… In the last three years there has been a marked improvement in storage batteries – so great that some engineers believe that electrics will be the universal car of the future.

Ronnie Schreiber edits Cars In Depth, a realistic perspective on cars & car culture and the original 3D car site. If you found this post worthwhile, you can dig deeper at Cars In Depth. If the 3D thing freaks you out, don’t worry, all the photo and video players in use at the site have mono options. Thanks for reading – RJS

In a recent post on Stillen’s contest to design a body kit for the Scion FR-S, I brought up the history of the Fisher Body Craftsman’s Guild, a scholarship based model making contest for budding designers that ran from 1930 to 1968. Since just about all of the promotional materials for the Guild were targeted at boys, I wondered if any girls ever tried to enter the competition.

Ron Will, who was a national winner of the Guild competition in 1961, later worked at GM design and is now retired after heading Subaru styling for 25 years, is active in the reunions that Guild participants have organized, so I contacted him. To his knowledge, no girls ever tried to enter the competition. With the changes in women’s roles Will says that had the Guild continued beyond 1968, he’s sure that it would have been opened up to female participation, just as the Chevrolet sponsored Soap Box Derby was. Richard Earl disagrees. In fact, the grandson of Harley Earl, the man who started GM’s styling department, says that the Guild was ended specifically to prevent girls and minorities from competing. Furthermore, Earl told me that his source was none other than Irv Rybicki, who headed GM styling after Bill Mitchell, Harley Earl’s successor, retired.

Richard Earl’s mission is enshrining his grandfather’s legacy as the father of automotive styling and he operates CaroftheCentury.com, dedicated to Harley Earl. Since he’s written about the “Damsels of Design”, the women designers who worked for Earl, I contacted Richard to find out if Sue Vanderbilt, the most prominent of GM’s female designers in the 1950s and 1960s, was still alive to see if I could get her perspective on the notion of girls participating Craftsman’s Guild.

Chuck Jordan with boys competing in the Fisher Body Craftsman’s Guild

Earl informed me that Vanderbilt had passed away but then alluded to “the real reason” why the Guild was discontinued.  He was surprised that I’d never heard the story, since I’ve posted before at TTAC about Bill Mitchell’s supposed bigotry. My curiosity piqued, I asked him to clue me in. This is what he said.

Certain Detroit history is illusive. This particular area is one of them. What follows is kind of fast and loose.

I found out why the illustrious Fisher Body Craftsman’s Guild was eliminated while interviewing certain GM Styling Section veterans and Damsels as well when I lived in Detroit area researching the history of Harley Earl/GM’s Styling&Design legacy. I was fortunate to not only sit down and talk to Henry Lauve, Paul Gillian, Irv Rybicki, Homer LaGassey, Stan Parker, Loretta Ramshaw’s brother who worked at Styling for a long time, George Pisiani and a parade of other great old veteran GM Styling guys; but as I mention I talked with a number of Damsels of Design as well.

Irv Rybicki, head of GM styling 1977-1986

I’ll focus primarily on what Irvine Rybicki told me while I was visiting him in his retirement home in East Sandwich, Mass… Reason I’m mentioning all this has to do with the sensitive stuff I learned from Irv, you know the behind-the-scenes stuff on GM Styling/Design. He was not like Jordan, a power broker, and Irv wasn’t scared of losing his pension or any reprisals be waged against him by what he said. He was honest and unmerciful about what went wrong after Harley Earl left the corporation and Detroit’s auto world.

Ronnie, you actually have a little knowledge as to why the FBCG went away because you wrote a story a couple of years ago pointing to the heart of the matter in your titled article, Was GM’s Head Bill Mitchell A Sexist Bigot?

Here’s what Irv told me, “The FBCG was disbanded because GM’s top execs at the time in power sided with Bill Mitchell and didn’t want blacks or young girls coming in and being involved in any way shape or form with the event. So they just got rid of it and told themselves they didn’t really need it anymore and it had already served its purpose.”

Ronnie Schreiber edits Cars In Depth, a realistic perspective on cars & car culture and the original 3D car site. If you found this post worthwhile, you can dig deeper at Cars In Depth. If the 3D thing freaks you out, don’t worry, all the photo and video players in use at the site have mono options. Thanks for reading – RJS

Former Nissan racer Steve Millen’s aftermarket performance company Stillen is running a contest involving Facebook. Amateur designers can style the company’s body kit that will accompany Stillen’s performance toys for the Scion FR-S. The winner will get to attend SEMA this November, when the body kit will have its first public display. When I saw the headline my first thought was, “What, another social media hypefest?” Just the other day, Derek Kreindler questioned the value of Nissan’s efforts to crowdsource product planning via social media sites. Does the general public know any more about designing cars than it does about product planning? As thousands of aesthetically challenged body kits will attest to, the most talented designers seem to be working for OEMs and design houses, not the aftermarket. Then, my cynical self calmed down a bit and the automotive history buff in me took over and I realized that it’s just a new gloss on an old idea. Entrants have to design their own body kit that consists of a front lip spoiler, side rockers, and rear valances. Stillen’s professional in-house designers will judge the entries, winnowing them down to the top 5 designs. Then via Facebook the public will pick the winner. Stillen has provided a template at the contest’s webpage, and they are encouraging people to enter (multiple times, if they wish) even if they don’t have top level digital rendering skills, saying that the judges’ focus will be on shape and design, not how much Autodesk wu you have.

The use of Facebook may make this contest look contemporary but it hearkens back to a design competition for young designers that started in the 1930s and lasted over three decades, the Fisher Body Craftsman’s Guild. Not only was the Guild an important part of the way General Motors marketed itself to young people, but GM’s styling department, then under the leadership of Harley Earl, also used the Guild competition in a serious manner to identify and mentor teenagers with enough talent to actually design cars. Furthermore, at its heyday, the Fisher Body Craftsman’s Guild was a bit of a cultural force. With over 8 million participants, the only youth organization with a larger membership was the Boys Scouts of America. If you were a member of both organizations, you could use your Guild entry to win a merit badge.

Obviously, the Guild was bit more serious than Stillen’s contest, though the goal was about the same: identify talent. Instead of a trip to Vegas, Guild winners won college scholarships. There were junior and senior classes, with first and second place winners in both age categories, as well as regional winners in the national competition. Guild competition winners didn’t just get scholarships. At least two dozen winners went on to careers as auto designers including some very notable stylists like Virgil M. Exner, Jr., Chuck Jordan (who eventually ran GM styling), Richard Arbib, Elia ‘Russ’ Russinoff, and John M. Mellberg.

Though the rules changed over the years, the original structure of the competition was in two levels. The first was to scratch build a scale model of the Napoleonic coach that had served as Fisher Body’s logo since 1922. Winners of that competition would then design and submit models of their idea of a futuristic “dream” car. In 1937, perhaps as a reflection of how important Earl’s Art & Colour department had become in GM’s business model, along with the establishment of design studios at Ford and Detroit’s contract body builders like Murray and Budd, the rules changed to allow an entrant’s choice of either doing the coach or a car model.

The Fisher brothers, like many other successful Detroit automotive industrialists, were very charitable and the Guild started as an effort in philanthropy, with an emphasis on the scholarships. The scholarships were valuable. In 1934, the top prize was a $5,000 college scholarship. With inflation that works out to about $85,000 in 2012 dollars but college costs have vastly outpaced inflation so a $5,000 scholarship was pretty much a full ride deal. In 1934, for example, at the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League school, tuition was $400 and total annual costs including fees and room & board were less than $1,000 year.

By the late 1950s, though, with past winners working at GM and other companies as designers, many young men understood that winning the competition was a career opportunity to do the thing they loved most, beyond just the chance for a college educations. I say young men because the program was clearly aimed at craftsmen and not craftswomen. Entry blanks in 1930s vintage ads for the Guild say “Boy’s name”, and even into the late 1960s, the ad copy mentioned boys even if the entry blanks didn’t. It’s not clear if girls’ entries would have been rejected but the Guild’s male focus has not escaped attention from academic feminists.

It’s interesting that just as the domestic auto industry embraced youth marketing in the late 1960s, they abandoned the Guild. Perhaps a model making contest was seen as a bit old fashioned after 1967′s Summer of Love. In any case, 1968 was the final year of the competition. Of late there’s been a flurry of interest in the Guild, with books like John Jacobius’ The Fisher Body Craftsman’s Guild: An Illustrated History and reunions. The vintage models have even attracted attention from the fine art world. Veterans of the Guild have called on GM to bring it back and, to be honest, with the rendering and 3d printing tools available today, the results might be very impressive. If I was Ed Welburn and Joel Ewanick, I’d pay close attention to Stillen’s contest.

Ronnie Schreiber edits Cars In Depth, a realistic perspective on cars & car culture and the original 3D car site. If you found this post worthwhile, you can dig deeper at Cars In Depth. If the 3D thing freaks you out, don’t worry, all the photo and video players in use at the site have mono options. Thanks for reading – RJS

The early 90s were tough times. Stock markets had crashed, real estate bubbles had popped, budgets were slashed.  The fabled  Daytona 24 hours endurance race survived (barely) with Rolex as a sponsor.

In 1992, the field was down to 49 cars, one of them a newcomer from Japan, Number 23, fielded by Nissan’s Nismo (Nissan Motorsports International) factory team.

Nismo brought its prototype R91CP car, with Masahiro Hasemi, Kazuyoshi Hoshino, and Toshio Suzuki as drivers. Only Hasemi had U.S. driving experience.

After the second lap, number 23 took the lead, and never surrendered it. The only car that came close to being a challenge, the Porsche, broke down in the morning of the second day.

The team credited most of its wins not to engine or driving, but to its headlights. Technical Chief Kunihiko Kakimoto remembers:

“These HID headlights contributed greatly to the victory. We co-developed these with our supplier Ichikoh, which had very good technology. There were many competitors and other suppliers developing HID headlights, but Ichikoh had one of the best in terms of performance and reliability.”

After the race, Nissan was approached by second-placed Jaguar. They wanted to buy the HID headlights, and were ready to pay as much as Nissan wanted.

The Daytona beach nearly did cost Nissan the victory. Sand had clogged up the radiator and the engine was overheating. Washing off the sand did not do it. Nissan had so much of a lead time that someone could be dispatched to the store, detergent was bought, and the sand was removed.

When the checkered flag came down, Nissan No.23 was nine laps ahead of the Jaguar XJR-12, it had done a record 762 laps at an average speed of nearly 113 miles per hour and over 2,700 miles. Never again in the history of the Rolex 24 had a winning team completed as many laps.

R91CP Specifications

Overall length / width / height: 4,800/1,990/1,100mm

Wheelbase: 2,795mm

Tread (front/rear): 1,600/1,560mm

Curb weight: Over 930kg

Engine: VRH35Z (V8, DOHC), 3,496cc

Engine Max. power: Over 500kW (680PS)/7,200rpm

Engine Max. torque: Over 784Nm (80.0kgm)/5,200rpm

Engine Turbocharger: IHI twin turbo

Transmission: VGC (5-speed)

Suspension: Double wishbone (front & rear)

Brakes: 14in. carbon (front & rear)

Tires (wheels)(front): 25.5×12.0×17 (13Jx17)

Tires(wheels)(rear): 28.5×14.5×18 (15Jx18)

Tires by Goodyear

Remember Sakura and Fuji, the two tiny Datsun 210s that went to “The World’s Cruelest Rally” and came home with a trophy? This story has a sequel.

In 1958, two Datsuns, named “Fujii” and “Sakura”  entered  the Mobilgas Trial, 10,000 miles all around Australia. Surprisingly, “Fuji” won its class title. “Sakura” finished fourth.

Half a century later, the cars were found in a warehouse in Japan.  A team of Nissan  volunteers set out to restore the cars. The restoration took place at the Nissan Technical Center in Atsugi, 28 miles southwest of Tokyo.

With the resources of Nissan’s engineering center, the restoration should go smoothly, you think? The team ran into the same problems any restorer has to contend with: Parts.

No car company stocks parts for cars made half a century ago.  Help came with James Haupt, usually based at Nissan Technical Center North America. He found some critical parts, for instance a very old ’50s British car speedometer that had been used in the original Datsuns.

“Sakura” was the easier job. “Fuji” had suffered significant wear and tear and was in bad shape. Finally, Fuji was like nw. Well, not quite: The dent in the front fender that came courtesy of a tree that was in the way during the 1958 race, was also faithfully restored.

Finally, in December, the cars were in running condition again. They were shown to 30,000 fans that cam to the annual Nismo Festival at Fuji Speedway. Half a century later, the cars that made Datsun famous and a country proud, were on  a racetrack again. This time, it was smooth and nicely paved, unlike the 10,000 miles of dust and dirt all around Australia.

It was known as “The World’s Cruelest Rally:” The Mobilgas Trial, 10,000 miles all around Australia. In 1958, there were two entries, regarded as a joke by the burly Aussies: A pair of tiny Datsun 210s, named “Fuji” and “Sakura”.

The suicidal idea was had by marketing manager Yutaka Katayama. Aged 102 years, he is still alive to tell the story:

“We didn’t think we would win – we would probably lose. But it wouldn’t matter if we won or lost, as long as we completed the race.”

“Fuji” and “Sakura” rounded Australia for 19 days. Only 36 out of 67 cars managed to complete the rally. Surprisingly, the two Datsuns were amongst the survivors.

Even more surprisingly “Fuji” won its class title. “Sakura” finished fourth.

Back home in Japan, the cars had to hit the road again. This time on a celebratory tour around Japan. The unexpected win helped pave the way for Nissan’s exports to the United States, led by Katayama as president of Nissan Motor Corp U.S.A.

“I don’t know,” Mr. Madeira said recently in an interview at The Times, when asked how many vehicles were in the possession of Harold LeMay, the garbage-disposal magnate whose collection of American automobiles would comprise the majority of the museum’s holdings. Mr. LeMay, who died in 2000, was prone to buying a barn or even a field containing old automobiles just to prevent their contents from landing in a junkyard. “He was not a connoisseur; he was a true collector,” Mr. Madeira said.

Once holding at least 3,500 vehicles, the collection has been cut to “north of a thousand” aimed at representing the sweep of American automotive history. And those will be joined by vehicles from the collection of watchmaker Nicolai Bulgari in order to create an automotive museum that founders hope lives up to the name “America’s Car Museum.” Since it’s right up I-5 from me, I’ll be sure to report on the collection and whether it reaches that lofty goal when it opens to the public next Summer.

One of the earliest iterations of the “Low Speed Vehicle Today, World EV Domination Tomorrow” business model to emerge at the dawn of the electric car era was ZAP. But after being exposed on numerous occasions for its poor product quality, vaporware hype and stock manipulation (most infamously in this Wired story), ZAP disappeared from the EV scene in the US (the company’s official (read: sanitized) history can be found here). Last we heard, ZAP was hyping a venture with the Korean optics firm Samyang, but it seems the firm has spending the last year or so putting down roots in the Chinese market. Having merged with Jonway, the Chinese maker of scooters, ATVs and a CUV that looks suspiciously like the Toyota RAV4, ZAP came back to the US for the Automotive X-Prize, which it contested in a ZAP Alias, the three-wheeled, $38k vehicle that has not been produced in volume although the company is still accepting deposits for it. The Alias failed to finish in the X-Prize, but ZAP says that revenue from Jonway is funding the vehicle’s continued development (including a four-wheeled version)… which was supposed to debut way back in 2009.

Now Consumer Reports says the firm is focusing on selling electric RAV4 knockoffs produced by Jonway as it continues to work on the Alias. But the firm seems to have burnt too many bridges in the US, as it says it will focus on selling the EVs in China and other world markets… despite the fact that developing market EV sales are going nowhere.  But ZAP has left something of a legacy in the US: Senator Mitch McConnell, a critic of government loans for Solyndra, apparently pushed for a quarter-billion dollar federal loan to ZAP, opening him to charges of hypocrisy. Now, as ever, ZAP remains a fascinating fixture at the margins of the EV scene. And though it’s an interesting company to watch, it’s best when viewed from a safe distance…

Axle and transfer case-maker Marmon-Herrington is still around, supplying OEMs and the aftermarket alike with up-rated drivetrain components. But back in the ’40s and ’50s, the firm designed its own vehicles as well, from an air-droppable tank, to a South African armored car, to monocoque electric trolley buses. Its predecessor company, Marmon Motor Car Company, even built the first car to win the Indy 500, the Marmon Wasp. Sadly this beast, an experimental amphibious off-road (on-marsh) vehicle called the Rhino (more here), was never produced. Otherwise, the Marmon name might have been exhumed during the ’90s SUV boom by a bespoke coachbuilding firm, offering specially-bodied medium-duty truck chassis bearing the brand name that won the first Indy 500 and parachuted into Nazi Germany. Imagine the possibilities…

The Quandt family, major shareholder of BMW, and one of the richest in Germany, is finally and belatedly confessing to its Nazi-past. Patriarch Günther Quandt was an early member of the Nazi party, he joined 1933, after Hitler’s election. During the Third Reich, Quandt company empire was kept running by more than 50,000 slave laborers. Many businesses that were taken away from Jewish owners ended up in the hands of Quandt. He even had odd family ties with the Nazi elite. His second wife Magda, which he had married when she was half his age, divorced him eight years later, only to marry propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, with Adolf Hitler as a witness. While other German carmakers, first and foremost Volkswagen, came to terms with their past, the owners of BMW denied it until recently. When the German Forced Labor Compensation Program was established, the family declined to make a contribution, claiming they had no reason to do so.

In 2007, a documentary aired on German TV and linked the family to the Nazis. The film revealed not only the slave laborers, but also that Günther Quandt had convinced Nazi contacts to send a Belgian competitor to a concentration camp after he refused to sell his company to Quandt. The documentary created only a minor scandal in Germany, because Quandt’s Nazi past had been known. A family spokesman said the allegations were “not incisively new.” However, the Quandts had up to then steadfastly denied all allegations.

The documentary prompted the Quandt family to do what other German companies had done many decades ago: Employ a historian to examine the family’s history during the Third Reich.

A Bonn historian received access to the family archives and concluded in his 1,200 page report that “the Quandts were linked inseparably with the crimes of the Nazis. The family patriarch was part of the regime.”

Hundreds of slave laborers died or were executed. At the end of the war, Günther Quandt’s former wife Magda killed her six children in the Führerbunker, then committed suicide with her husband Goebbels.

But as we reached the area showing the roots of the Volkswagen Beetle, full of KdF cars and early Beetle prototypes, I realized something was missing. If Volkswagen were sophisticated enough to give credit where credit is due to, say, Citroen for the DS, surely there would be at least one Tatra in the joint. After all, Ferdinand Porsche has admitted to at least being inspired by Hans Ledwinka’s Tatra designs. And even if he hadn’t admitted a thing, it’s tough to deny that the Beetle design wasn’t on some level influenced by the contemporary Tatra V570. So I asked my guide, a slick young Dutchman who had probably spent half his life with the company: “are there any Tatras in the Zeithaus? Where are they?”

My guide gave me a peculiar Dutch look that didn’t betray a thing. “Tatras?” he asked. “What’s a Tatra?”

I bring this up not to shame Volkswagen, let alone my otherwise highly competent guide. After all, there’s no shame in admitting that one, or one’s company, owes some kind of intellectual debt to an inspired predecessor… but it can be difficult. My point, rather, is that history is delicate… and always written by the victors. One reason I’m less than entirely enthused about creating a National Register for historic automobiles is that many of the most important automobiles in history are well preserved. And yet the majority of preservation is done by automakers themselves, which have the resources to create whole museums depicting the evolution of the automobile… and the motivation to curate them selectively. Sure, a handful of influential automotive museums exist, but they tend to focus on assembling the most rare and beautiful vehicles ever made, rather than faithfully depicting the evolution of the automobile.

Does any of this warrant hyperventilation on a weekend evening in September? Of course not. But it’s worth considering. Just as placing a Tatra or two in the Zeithaus would be worth considering for Volkswagen’s curators. After all, history is like a rambunctious child: difficult to sanitize and resentful at the mere attempt.

You may not have heard of the Historical Vehicle Association before, but it’s a 30,000-member advocacy group that actually emerged from a special insurance plan for historic cars offered by Hagerty Insurance. Now ratified by the Fédération Internationale des Véhicules Anciens, the HVA offers commissions on History, Skills and Trades, Technical Issues and Legislative Affairs, as it seeks to fulfill its mission of “Keeping Yesterday’s Vehicles on Tomorrow’s Roads.” One of its more laudable legislative tasks of late has been raising awareness about the damage caused by ethanol-blended gasoline and seeking to ban mandatory blending. But now it’s got another goal, as reported by Automotive News [sub]

The federal government has national registries for historic buildings, boats, airplanes, railways — you name it. But not for cars. And the Historic Vehicle Association is trying to change that…

A concern among enthusiasts is that government initiatives — such as the 2009 federal cash-for-clunkers incentive — could send many vintage cars to the crusher. Legislation might prevent cars from being destroyed. Or it could allow gas guzzlers to remain on the road if other laws preclude them.

As it so happens, my significant other is an Architectural Historian who spends her days evaluating buildings that could be impacted by federally-funded projects… so I hear about this issue (in terms of the Register of Historic Places) more often than you can even imagine. And it’s not as simple as it might seem…

If my lovely life partner deems a building that’s in the way of a federally-funded project eligible for listing on the National Register, the project must seek to limit or mitigate its impact on it. Federal law requires that federally-funded projects determine the eligibility of buildings in their area of impact, but the level of protection offered to eligible buildings is actually relatively low. If the building in question is listed on the register, which can only be done voluntarily by the owner, it receives full protection. This matters for buildings, which are difficult to move and can be part of a historic district or landscape.

Though it’s possible that future legislation could seek to ban gas-guzzling historic vehicles from the road, in which case a National Register could offer effective protection, the basic protections for a car are a lot less necessary than for a structure (which can not easily be moved or stored). In short, if someone chooses to destroy their mint-condition Packard in the next Cash-for-Clunkers program, there’s nothing in the National Register model to stop them… the system supports, rather than trumps, property rights.

In other words, I don’t have a problem with people being able to register a vehicle for historic protection, but let’s not pretend that it will offer more protection than the owner’s property rights already do. And it does open a can of worms in regards to drawing the line between historic and non-historic vehicles (although most “truly historic” cars are already in museums). If legislation comes forward to ban certain cars from the road, I’m all for fighting it outright… but I’m not convinced that a National Register of Historic Cars is the way to do that. This feels more like a way for owners of Concours-level cars to feel even snootier about their garage queen.

But, as it turns out, there’s no need for a separate register. The NYT reports

Carmel Roberts, director of government relations for the [HVA], said in a telephone interview this week that the association was not pushing for any such legislation. Instead, she said that the association merely encouraged owners to list their vehicles on the National Register, the country’s official list of cultural resources worthy of preservation.

Automobiles are already designated as structures in a National Register bulletin outlining the application process to have artifacts or structures listed, Ms. Roberts said. Little, however, has been done to explore the potential of the National Register as it related to automobiles.

“We’re just at the talking phase,” Ms. Roberts said.

Welcome to Bob Lutz week at TTAC! I spent several hours recently with the auto industry’s most notorious executive, and elements of that interview will be the basis for much of my writing this week. We’ll also be capping the whole thing off by voting on the 2010-2011 Lutzie award for most unfortunate quote by an auto exec. And rather than jumping right into the meat of the interview, I want to kick off Lutz week by looking at a few cars that came up in our meandering conversation. After all, these are not just vehicles… when Lutz brings them up in an interview, they become stories, little encapsulations of his philosophy or the state of the company that made them. Let’s start with a car that I literally had never heard of before he mentioned it almost in passing: the Dodge Dakota Convertible. Eat your heart out, Murano CrossCabriolet… the Dakota was the original “WTF-vertible.”

Given his reputation for over-the-top vehicles like the Viper and Volt, and his general fondness for drop-tops, you might think that the Dakota ‘vert was one of Bob Lutz’s “babies,” but if that were the case his enthusiasm for the truckvertible has waned considerably. And, the way he tells the story, the Dakota’s topless conversion was not a gut-call for a strong niche product, but the outgrowth of Chrysler’s brief infatuation with “brand management.” But let’s let Lutz tell the story himself, which opens sometime around 1988, when Hal Sperlich was forced out of the company and Lutz began taking over more responsibility:

Like many other companies at the time, Iacocca got himself talked into ‘brand management’ by a board member, a guy by the name of Paul Sticht who was with RJR Nabisco. And so we had the famous Jerry York running Dodge brand and they were going to dictate product priorities to us. Jeep was intelligent enough to just say ‘hey, we’re on the right track. We’ll do the V8 Grand Cherokee and all the other stuff that followed on.’ But Jerry York wanted to make a mark, so he wanted a a Dodge Shadow convertible, for which we didn’t have the money, and he wanted a Dakota pickup convertible. *laughs* There’s a few around. I think we sold like a thousand. Maybe.

I saw one the other day at an airport out in California. Slammed. I think the Dakota convertible had to be the leakiest convertible top of all time… we had it done by ASC down in Mexico. It would be fun to have one just because they’re so rare… but once Iacocca saw that brand management wasn’t working, I became the real President.

My initial curiosity about the story was based wholly in the fact that I hadn’t been aware of the existence of a convertible pickup other than the SSR. But, having reflected on the story, I realized that this anecdote actually shows an interesting side of Lutz’s character. Though best known as the father of all kinds of outlandish machinery, Lutz is not the kind of guy to champion anything that’s out of the automotive norm simply because of its unusualness. Though Lutz clearly likes the idea of a rare convertible pickup, his dismissive attitude towards the Dakota Convertible’s genesis says a lot about his  attitude towards new product development: in short, when an idea comes from “product guys” he tends to like it, but when it comes from “brand managers” he tends to be less supportive.

The problem with that attitude? By emphasizing problems in product conception rather than the product itself, Lutz opens himself to repeating mistakes that others have made, in the belief that a more product-oriented process (rather than a brand-oriented process) will have more success. The obvious example of this is the SSR truckvertible that Lutz championed into production at GM. Though it sold considerably more than a thousand units (estimated volume: 24,150 between 2003 and 2005), the SSR was still ultimately a flop. Would Lutz have pushed the SSR into production when he arrived at GM if the Dakota Convertible hadn’t been pushed on him by Jerry York’s Dodge “brand managers”? York and company certainly provided an easy scapegoat for one of the weirdest vehicles ever produced. And with the benefit of hindsight, it now seems fairly clear that drop-top pickups are a problematic proposition whether they come from “product guys” or “brand managers.”

The Detroit News reports that former Vice President Dick Cheney claims to have opposed the decision to bail out GM and Chrysler, writing in his forthcoming memoir:

“The president decided that he did not want to pull the plug on General Motors as we were headed out the door… Although I understood the reasoning, I would have preferred that the government not get involved and was disappointed — but not surprised — when the Obama administration significantly increased the government intervention in the automobile industry shortly after taking office.”

Cheney notes he had voted against the 1979 $1.5 billion loan guarantee for Chrysler Corp. in the House. “I had continued throughout my career to be philosophically opposed to bailing out specific companies or industries,” he wrote.

But lest you think the 1979 vote makes Cheney a model of consistency, consider his defense of the $700b TARP expenditure:

Providing sufficient support to avoid the collapse of our banking system was something only the federal government could do. But, all things considered, companies in the private sector should be judged in the marketplace. Having the government intervene was not, in my opinion, a good idea.

I’ve been thinking about the bailout era a lot recently, as GM’s stock slumps towards an inevitable and significant government loss in the near future. I’m sure that when the government finally writes off the $14b+ loss, a political knifefight will ensue with all sides seeking to justify their positions on the matter. But where will that get us? After all, both political parties bear some responsibility for the decision, and it’s impossible to say what would have happened without the bailout. And if politicians and partisans make the final chapter of the auto bailout about politics, they’ll have missed the entire point… and provide a smokescreen for the real culprits.

GM and Chrysler have to live with their outstanding moral (if not legal) debt to the American people, and all eyes should be on those companies rather than the posturing politicians. How these private firms relate to the taxpayers who bailed them out will be the defining issue of their post-bailout existence, and one that should be taken extremely seriously in Auburn Hills and the Renaissance Center. I’m not sure I can say exactly what they should do about it, but the first step is to not run from reality (as has already happened too often in the past). The final tallying of the bailout bill will be a defining moment for these two companies… let’s hope they realize it, and act accordingly.