I fully agree with your assessment of CAR LIFE. They never had any personal agendas and gave the good, the bad, and the ugly lowdown on all of the cars they tested. I always felt that MOTOR TREND, specifically in the early to mid 60s, was somewhat soft-handed when it came to reporting the negatives of several cars. And the “CAR OF THE YEAR” issue was always inundated with the winning cars advertisements, hmmmm. But they always had plenty of great pictures!

No hard feelings

bye bye

CIAO

But you perplex me, argentla. You find McCahill and his contemporaries of the time gauche,yet you googled his name. How many other “corny” writers do you not respect? Your haughty tone seems to be better suited to “ROAD &TRACK”, and I can’t think of anything any of their editors is writing today that will be discussed with fond memories 50 years from now.

TALLY-HO!

I laughed at that one, too.

But I have a very hard time believing that ANY Chrysler product built in 1957-58 had a stronger, more robust body than a competitive GM product. Something is fishy about that test.

Even though their objectivity is seriously in question, I can believe the way the Buick, Olds and Caddie wallowed and bounced, as did Lincoln. Fat ladies on parade, indeed! I laughed out loud seeing the Cadillac’s rear door and trunk lid pop open on the rough road test. It wouldn’t have passed back in the 20’s, when cars were driven across plowed fields to see if the doors would stay shut.

The 1957 Mopars were rushed into production, and, as a result, panel fit and body integrity were terrible. The windshields and rear windows, in particular, leaked. Much of this water found its way into various nooks and crannies, which meant that rust would appear within a year or two after purchase. Chrysler also cut corners in body construction – the front fender peaks on those sleek new Plymouths, for example, had no protection, so mud and dirt would accumulate, hold water and cause rust.

Chrysler never really corrected these problems. Instead of making sure that the windows didn’t leak, the corporation installed a complicated series of rubber tubes that were supposed to funnel the water away from the interior to a metal tray. Unfortunately, the tubes became clogged or deteriorated.

Chrysler plants were also poorly managed. At a car show, the proud owner of a 1957 Dodge Coronet told of speaking to a man who toured a Chrysler plant when the 1957 models were being built. He noticed a worker who was supposed to be applying undercoating to the cars.

The worker was waving the machine wand under each car as it came down the assembly line, but no undercoating was coming out of the machine! When asked about this, the worker replied that the union contract required him to make 12 sweeps per car with the undercoating machine. If there wasn’t any undercoating material in the machine, that wasn’t his problem!

I don’t know about Japanese steel, but the bottom line is that the 1957 Mopars were rushed to market, corners were cut to save money, and quality control in the plants was very lax…all of which resulted in a quality disaster that sent Chrysler sales into a nosedive for years.

GM cars were built like a Lexus compared to a Chrysler product…and it showed in the used car market. By 1961, a 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air was worth twice as much as a comparable 1957 Plymouth Belvedere!

“Had it not been for the steel scarcity, we would have had the best fourth quarter in Imperial history.” Chrysler and Imperial general manager C.E. Briggs, December 1959.

I have to wonder about whether Chrysler did have any “japanese steel” in 1957 or 1958 cars, and I doubt it. Mostly because I recall reading Nissan’s history in which it was noted that even through the early 1960’s, Japanese steel mills really were not rolling sufficiently thin steel for auto production; it was actually TOO THICK and heavy for car use but they had to use it anyway. It made the cars too heavy and sluggish, not rust-prone.

Perhaps the better reasoning for Chrysler’s 1957 and 1958 “quality fiasco” was the fact that the all-new, super-low 1957 cars were rushed into production – and that all US produced cars had abysmal production quality control in this era, as well as virtually no rustproofing.

Seems to me that had Chrysler bought Japanese steel in 1957 and 1958, the cars would have actually been BETTER than they were in reality.

I actually doubt that the gummint would have directly “forced” any company to buy anyting from anywhere back in the 1950’s unless it related directly to a military vehicle contract (I know that when Studebaker-Packard were “given” a contract for 2 1/2 ton Studebaker trucks, they were forced by contract to purchase Reo engines for said trucks instead of casting/manufacturing them in-house, which they still had the capabilities to do at the time).

Put another way, we’ve fallen a long way since the 1950’s. I COULD see the current government forcing a company to buy steel from somewhere in particular nowadays… especially since the imbeciles in DC now control GM and Chrysler through partial nationalization.

Who would have thought even 10 years ago that US automakers would be owned and run by socialists in Washington DC while the Russian Lada car company would be owned by private industry?! Not I.

Very true…in 1958, Chrysler was practically forced by the government to purchase a quantity of imported steel, as part of a trade agreement with a small Asian country. Unfortunately, this steel was far inferior to what was produced in the U.S. at the time.

Oh, and the name of that small Asian country? It was Japan.

One of those 60’s mags did it.

Can’t remember if McCahill had that info in his reviews.

I also read Popular Science and remember the Norbye and Dunne reviews and Smokey Yunick’s repair advice, but Uncle Tom was my favorite.

These ‘paraphrases’ of familiar sayings by Uncle Tom are from memory, so if they don’t hold together, blame me not Tom. :)

The early bird catches pneumonia.

A penny saved is a penny saved.

Early to bed and early to rise and you won’t meet anyone I know.

Frank B

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBNWBHYp41w&feature=PlayList&p=772B2BDE147E3D9A&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=1

And part 2:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrKAVfS3Ui0&feature=PlayList&p=772B2BDE147E3D9A&index=2

About 10 minutes each, but worth every vintage second (wasted) watching it.

The Mopars would be my choice too in ‘58, but this is so not credible; given all the variables and driving techniques when you’re getting paid to make one car look better than the other.

The video compares that year’s Chrysler and Imperial with their GM and Ford competition (thus, no Plymouths, Dodges or DeSotos).

If you enter “Comparison of 1958 cars” into the search feature, the video segments (the video is divided into three parts) should come up.

I recall reading one story about Tom McCahill – a new car was dropped off at his Florida home for him to review. When the car was collected, it turned out that it hadn’t been moved the entire time it was at his house. But his review was written and ready to be published!

Tom tested some spectacular cars in addition to the mundane Detroit stuff. Two of them were the original 260 inch Cobra and the Lotus Elan. I remember his comment that few drivers had the skills to properly appreciate the Elan’s handling.

A GTO owner wrote to him asking why Pontiac would put a $5 jack in a $4,000 car. (Remember, this was the ’60s.) Tom replied that they must have run out of $2 ones.

Another reader asked what would happen if a full-size ’60s sedan, with 6 passengers, going 60 mph, hit a cow square on. Tom replied that it would total the car and kill all the passengers. Then, as an afterthought, “Be tough on the cow, too.”

I’ve always found McCahill too corny for my tastes, but if you compare his contemporaries, his appeal is pretty clear. He was kind of the poor man’s Ken Purdy. (Ken W. Purdy, author of The Kings of the Road and many other books, was the flowery dean of automotive writers, and a strong influence on an entire generation them.)

My favorite testers were those of Car Life in the sixties. Car Life was founded by the publisher of Road & Track, as I recall, to talk about the domestic cars R&T normally disdained. In the fifties, it was a thoroughly ordinary Motor Trend knockoff, but in the sixties, John R. Bond and Roger Huntington made it perhaps the most lucid of the American magazines — technically savvy, unmoved by PR hype, and with a dry sense of humor that would fit well into the heyday of CAR or other snotty British magazines. It was not as irreverent or audacious as Car and Driver, but it also resisted David E. Davis’s flair for self-serving hyperbole. Sadly, Car Life didn’t sell, and it perished around 1970.

Wonderful stuff, and thanks for the initial posting.