[Note: This CC is an unused leftover from last week]

This old Suburban, like the old house behind it, has escaped the jaws of the wrecker and is still hard at work. It’s got a yard of topsoil in the back, as its owner gets ready to do a bit of landscaping around this old house he recently moved to this location. Will forty year-old Escalades be hauling top soil?

The boattail Riviera is a fitting finale to Curbside Classics for now. I’ve had a thing for fastbacks since day one, and I’ve been indulging in them this week. This Riviera also represents the difficult ending of an era, where the large luxury coupe, especially GM’s, was the standard bearer for American design innovation and leadership. What started as a revolutionary concept with the 1958 Thunderbird, and was elevated to timeless elegance in the 1963 Riviera, now struggled to regain its former glory in the dying days of the giant car.

The 1971 Riviera was a bold effort by GM styling head Bill Mitchell to recapture the magic that seemed to permeate GM in the sixties. The result was controversial and flawed, but its hulking and brash shape has certainly enriched our streets. For me, CC is about the visual thrill of rediscovering the unique shapes and designs of the past, no matter how imperfect, and the boattail Riviera certainly does that as well or better than any other car in my collection. It’s a car worth stopping for.

Pity the poor Barracuda. It beat the Mustang to market in 1964 by 16 days, but was utterly trounced by that seminal (and genre name-giving) pony car. In their first full year (1965), the Mustang outsold the ‘Cuda by 9 to 1. Well, despite that huge glassy fastback, it was hard to fool anyone that the Barracuda was anything other than a Valiant Signet with a fishbowl grafted on. That hardly made it an inferior car per se, and the fold down rear seat and resulting flat floor made it highly practical for certain uses. But the distinctive long-hood short-deck proportions of the Mustang instantly became iconic and a must-have; a glass-back Valiant just wasn’t going to do the trick, unless of course you found yourself in the right position to fully appreciate the Barracuda’s unique qualities.

[An expanded and updated version of this CC is here]

We’ve had a lot of utilitarian vehicles last week, and even into this Monday, so with yesterday’s Corolla AE86 leading the charge, we’re going savor some delicious sporty coupes. This Alfetta GT coupe is an interesting follow-up to the AE86, for at least two reasons. Designed by Giorgetto Giugiaro, this lovely Alfa was not only a feast for the eyes in that largely vulgar mid-seventies period, but was also an influential one. The Alfetta GT was one of a few key designs of the period that had a profound and lasting effect on styling trends, including the Corolla itself. The other reason: cars like the fast, cheap but ultra-reliable Corolla GT-S helped put Alfa out of business in the US.

Is it a stretch to say that finding this beater Corolla AE86 GT-S on the street is the equivalent of finding an original and beat up 1970 Hemi ‘Cuda? Maybe, but they’re both legends, and while the odds of finding the GT-S are definitely better, they’re not exactly easy to come by either. I’ve had my eye out for one for quite a while, and suddenly this showed up in the neighborhood; a wish fulfilled. Now I’d be happy just to catch that non-hemi beater ‘Cuda I’ve seen driving. Anyway, with all the excitement building about the coming FT-86 coupe and a possibly even cheaper and lighter RWD car, it’s time to take a look at its inspiration.

The horsey car! Sometimes the past reappears for just a moment in all its perfect clarity, like a vivid dream. You shake your head to make sure you’re awake, but yes, there it is, the exact car you brought home in the spring of 1984, in the same color and trim, and it still looks brand new. And suddenly the words of a certain verbally-precocious one-and-a-half-year-old son shouting “horsey car” rings in your ear as fresh and clear as that day when he pointed at the spare tire cover and said it for the first time. If this 1984 Bronco II doesn’t jostle some memories in TTAC’s Editor-In-Chief on a Monday morning, I don’t know what will. To the best of my knowledge, his automotive awareness began right here. And fortunately, a rollover was not part of those memories.

Many new Automotive Histories as well as updated and expanded versions of many of these articles below are at the author’s new Curbside Classic site here]

Suburbans are jacks of all trades. One like this taught me the valuable lessons of the limits of vehicle dynamics on winding country roads that others might have had in their MGs. Does that not define the name sport utility vehicle?

Honda CRV, Toyota Rav4, Audi Quattro, VW Syncro, and the whole host of all-wheel drive cars, crossovers and CUVs: they all trace their roots back to this skinny and ugly little Subaru 4WD wagon. Is this the most revolutionary and influential modern car?

Detroit has a long list of sins it committed over the decades, but one of the more pernicious ones is name debasement. Think of the Chrysler K-cars wearing the once proud names of New Yorker and Imperial. GM’s history of name debasement and other crimes in naming is extensive. But it’s difficult to come up with a more egregious one than what was done to the Cougar. Better pop a Zoloft, because this is a depressing CC: beige, boxy, generic, feeble, padded half-vinyl roof and tin foil wire wheel covers. But the crimes against names and humanity must be documented for future generations.

Having recently done the Ultimate CC Truck, what would its passenger car counterpart be? Let me ask it this way: how many cars have their owners replace their V8 engines with a slant six? If you understand the true attraction of Chrysler’s A-Bodies with the slant six as the ultimate long-life American car, you’ll understand why. There are several dozen A-bodies in Eugene, and I have shot many of them, and yet I still keep uncovering new ones. Many are still used to some degree or another, although most are clearly slowing down in their old age. Not this ’65 Valiant: it’s in full front-line duty, as the business vehicle for an energy specialist that regularly takes him all across the North West. Needless to say, he’s also the ultimate A-Body owner, with his type-A attention to modifying his Valiant in a way to keep it suitable for his preferences and today’s conditions. This baby is good to go for the long haul.

GM’s final peak in US market share was in 1978, before it began its long decline. For the fifty years prior, only two men oversaw the styling of GM during those golden decades. The hand off from one to the other was was hardly smooth in the end, with a painful transition for the 1959 models that were a essentially a hybrid of the two. But for the 1961 models, Bill Mitchell was now completely in control, and few cars show his love for sharply sculptured surfaces and a restrained use of chrome than the very handsome 1961 and 1962 Cadillacs.

The precise evolution of the SUV, like all car genres is debatable, but there’s no question that the International Scout is the critical link between the military Jeep and the modern SUV. It was the first vehicle of the genre to be designed from scratch to meet the anticipated growth in the off-road capable civilian market, and it clearly was the template for its many imitators: Ford Bronco, Range Rover, Chevy Blazer, Dodge Ramcharger, as well as the Mitsubishi Pajero/Montero (and others). True to its name, the Scout led the industry into the land of milk and SUV profits, even if it bowed out early.

I walked well past this Corvette before I stopped and gave it a backwards glance, suddenly remembering that it is yellow convertible week. I wavered momentarily, gauging my feelings. Yes, it was fast and pulled impressive numbers on a skid pad. But numbers alone do not make the car. And my feelings meter just wasn’t moving one way or another, so I almost moved on. Call it the Madonna of sports cars? Then it hit me: this is the most soulless sports car ever, the ultimate antithesis to the TR-6. The C4 Corvette sold its soul to the devil of numbers. And in my cartechism, that’s a Deadly Sin.

“If you’re going to do something wrong, do it big” (Jayne Mansfield)

Can you blame me for thinking of a certain larger than life blond bombshell of the era while looking at this big topless Buick? But then I said to myself, no, it’s wrong; been there, done that. But googling to find the vital statistics of this Buick turned up the fact that Jayne Mansfield was killed in an Electra in 1967. Holy coincidence! Or did I subconsciously remember that? Whatever. So despite the risks, I’m forging ahead, hopefully for the best, because frankly it might be a stretch to write much about this overstuffed Buick. Like Jayne, it was meant to be looked at, not analyzed.

Does this Thing ever speak to me. In German, undoubtedly; which may well have something to do with the affinity I feel with it. I’m going to try to not be too chauvinistic, but there is something intrinsically Germanic, brilliant and adaptable in the basic Volkswagen design, which facilitated more permutations than any other car ever. The same basic underpinnings that created the Porsche 356 are here at work in the Type 181, the descendant of the WWII Kübelwagen. Even though you haven’t seen the last two yellow convertibles this week, if I had to choose one from all five, this Thing might well have be the one. Figure it. But where else can you get a four door rag top that will last forever, can go off-roading, and you don’t have to worry about putting up the top when it rains.

For decades, British roadsters had a spell on Americans. And the rivalry between the MG and Triumph, the two leading exponents of the genre, was legendary. They each had loyal adherents to the respective marques, and the stiff competition kept the improvements coming, even if not exactly at a breakneck pace. But by about the time this TR-6 first appeared in 1969, the race was essentially over: the new MGC was DOA, and the MGB was quickly slipping into its ossification period, while the Triumph reveled in its final incarnation of the classic formula: old school, but with a healthy kick of life in it yet.

Welcome to yellow convertible week at CC. Intimations of summer are in the air, and what better way to immerse oneself into its mood-enhancing, Vitamin-D generating goodness than in a convertible, especially in a yellow one? We’re going to sample a highly diverse lot, starting with the smallest and ending with the biggest. And for true top-down motoring, its hard to be in something with four much smaller than this Metro.

Here’s a mighty fine example of one of my all-time favorite trucks, hard at work on the job site. It probably won’t come as a great surprise to you that there a dozens of these vintage Chevy trucks still earning their keep hereabouts, but this is a particularly nice one. And for some reason, the first year ’67s aren’t that common. Although I’m quite fond of my ’66 F-100, I’m not very partisan when it comes to American trucks of this vintage: they’re all just about equally attractive, hard working and easy to keep running. I’d take this turquoise beauty in a heartbeat (of America).

The original 1960 Corvair Monza coupe (1966 shown) introduced and pioneered a European category to the US: the sporty compact coupe. The formula: a new roof line, maybe some other body changes like the Monza’s enlarged rear wheel openings, bucket seats and tasty interior trimmings, upgraded engine performance. Most of all, it had to have style, at least more than the donor sedan it sprang from, otherwise it defeated the whole purpose. The formula has been applied endlessly, to greater and lesser effect. But sometimes it’s just abused; probably never more horribly so than with Fords EXP and its stablemate, the Mercury LN7.

You wake despite the hope that you would never awake, in fear that the wildest night of your life with Corvair was all just a dream…ooops; never mind. But if a car ever inspired one to emote and wax poetically, it was the Corvair, especially the 1965. So I’ll try hard to restrain myself: the 1965 Corvair was the best European car ever ever made in America. And if that alone doesn’t explain the Corvair’s inevitable failure, lets just say that in 1965 Americans were eating a lot more Wonder Bread than baguettes.

Ooo, what a cute little car. Yes it is, if the pygmy look is your thing, but this A40 carries the weight of some serious world financial history on its skinny little tires. Like as in our trillion dollar deficits. Seriously. This Austin was the first import car bought in significant numbers right after WWII, which at the time was a godsend to Great Britain, helping to bail them out of their horrible debt load, the price of winning the war. But in the process, the Austin was the forerunner of an overwhelming import boom that hasn’t ended yet, and which has significantly affected our own economy and its crushing debt load. Was the cute little Austin A40 an economic Trojan Horse?

You wake despite the hope that you would never awake, that it was all just a bad dream. But you know she’s there in the bed next to you. In the early gray light of morning, your bleary eyes reluctantly open and fall on her mottled and pallid white skin. She seemed so hot and glamorous last night, in the sparkly beams of light on the dance floor at the Rockin’ Rodeo. Everyone always raved about Camaro, what a hot number she was, and how you just had to have one some day. And last night there she was, and you finally screwed up your courage to ask her for a dance. At the time, all you could see were those hips, those glorious bulging hips. You just knew they promised action, despite the fact they weren’t hardly moving at all. Oh yeah; she was saving her energy for the big run, the final blast, you kept telling yourself. But it never came.

It’s a good thing I came across this car. There’s a point in life where one starts to prune away the excess, getting rid of the stuff in the closets and basement that hasn’t been used in thirty years or more. And I admit that’s what I had done with the Dodge Royal Monaco: it just kind of got swept away with the detritus of the seventies. If one is going to have room for new car facts and impressions, it’s cars like this that get hauled off to the memory dump first.

Welcome to Havana, Oregon. Back in the eighties, living in tony Los Gatos, I used to gaze longingly at photos of old American cars and trucks still hard at work in Cuba. But within days of moving to Eugene in 1993, I came across this very truck, hauling its daily cargo of recycled cardboard. And it planted a seed in me, to document the old vehicles still earning their keep, which finally came to fruition with Curbside Classics. Although we’ve strayed from the strict interpretation of that mission a few times along the way, no other vehicle more perfectly embodies the original ethos than this 1956 F-350.

So just how exactly does one become the best selling car in America? The only reliable way one becomes number one in just about anything: doing your homework and practicing every day. And it really does helps if the competition has forgotten that formula.

[Three related Checker posts: An Illustrated History of Checker Motors; Vintage Checker Ads; and Tomorrow’s Checker?]

If you hadn’t seen the title, and I told you I had found a rare 1966 Beijing Sedan (aka: “The East Glows”) or a GAZ-13 “ Chaika” would you believe me? Maybe, if you were under a certain age and hadn’t lived in a big city with lots of taxi cabs, or were just gullible. OK, the Checker is iconic. But there’s something so distinctively un-Detroit about this Checker; well, lets just say that it’s all too obvious that Harley Earl, Virgil Exner or their kind had nothing to do with it. It looks a crappy commie imitation of a real American car, drafted by a civil engineer while gazing at some car ads in old US magazines and assembled by political prisoners in a little brick factory to fulfill the specialized fleet needs of the party bosses. Paint it black, put a couple of red flags on the front fenders, and no one under thirty-five will be the wiser. Welcome to Checker-land, the car that snubbed its nose at Detroit, and perpetually made money doing so.

Since we overdosed on Eugene-mobiles yesterday, we’re going to have to hold off on that other definitive official local car, the Volvo 240 series until we’ve recuperated and the flashbacks die down a bit. But we’ve given Volvo short shrift here, so let’s do a car that takes me straight back to Maryland circa 1968, but in the most positive way possible: a 142S, decked out just like a young enthusiast of the times (me!) would have done (minus the non-vintage lip spoiler). This is a car that I seriously lusted after then, and it still works on my limbic system today.

Welcome to Eugene. Feel free to stay on the bus, either literally or metaphorically. If it’s the former, no hard feelings; Eugene is not for everyone, and we’ll be back in fifteen minutes or so. But if you’re “On The Bus”, then let’s step out here in the center of downtown, also known as Kesey Square. There is the statue of Ken Kesey, Eugene’s hometown cultural and literary hero, reading from his most famous book “One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest”. And what’s that across the street? How serendipitous indeed: a vintage VW bus, the official transporter of Eugene.

Yes, when it comes to GM, there were definitely more than seven deadly sins. Actually, there were tens of millions of them. And while this is perhaps one of the less conspicuous and pernicious ones (I didn’t label it as such until I put up the first picture and had to rewrite the title), it is one nevertheless. And what is the sin this innocuous sedan embodies? Thou shalt not take thy godly names in vain.

Thirty hours in NYC, with wife, sister and two kids who’ve never been. How best to turn a potential burn-out into a rejuvenation of the creative juices? The NYIAS? No; leave the world of new cars totally aside, and focus on the source of inspiration, not the end product: Art. So while my daughter and younger son happily spend the second day on an eight-hour guided NYC tour, the three of us go to MoMA (Museum of Modern Art). After almost seven blissful hours soaking up Kandinsky, Picasso, Matisse, Gaugin,Van Gogh, and Monet, we exit via the sculpture garden (background in photo), and I look back and see it beckoning me from the third floor: the Pininfarina. Back in we go.

They say you can’t go home again. True enough, but as you read this, Edward and the rest of my family and I will be winging our way to Baltimore for a long overdue family reunion. My father recently turned ninety, and my mother will be eighty-seven soon. So what is the obvious choice of today’s Curbside Classic? The Niedermeyer family car from the early sixties, a black 1962 Fairlane, and in every way exactly like this one, except that ours was the base stripper, not the deluxe 500 like this one. That alone tells you something about the old man.

Powered By Ford. There’s something special about those words, something iconic, something that evokes nightmares of an uniquely American scope, from our first family cross-country trips in a 1954 Ford that perpetually overheated and stalled from vapor lock (when it actually started) to the last one, Mother’s craptastic 1981 Escort (replaced by a Civic) that could barely do seventy wheezing unsteadily along the rain-soaked I-70 straight. Powered by Ford. It’s the peeling logo hastily slapped onto the valve covers of this five-liter Mustang II, but you won’t need to raise the hood to understand what it means. The first time this pathetic lump of an engine tries to suck air through its tiny two-barrel carburetor and wheezes its feeble exhaust through soda-straw sized tailpipes, it will be more than crystal clear.

My only experience with Quaaludes was highly memorable. Yet I struggle to elicit any memories of my only drive in a Honda Quaalude. Or did I just dream that (the drive)? So just how did this Honda get that nickname anyway? Well, let’s just say that Quaaludes have more than one effect, and while the Prelude may well have induced sleep, its fairly unlikely that it was ever very successful as an aphrodisiac. I’ve certainly never heard it referred to as the Honda Viagra, despite its very close ties to the Honda Vigor.

There’s not much doubt that this is the rarest find Curbside Classics, at least so far. And there it was, right under my nose, on Main Street. In fact, it’s so rare that I didn’t really recognize it at first. I’d caught a glimpse of it once before, in the back of a typical used car lot in Springfield, Eugene’s blue-collar neighbor. Given its location, size, shape, and paint job, I initially thought it was some kind of amusement park ride car, or a former Shriner-mobile. Or at best, some kind of garage-built sports car special from the fifties. I drove on, but made a mental note, and on my next sojourn to the inspiration for Homer Simpson’s hometown, I decided it was worth a quick stop and closer look. What I found totally blew me away: a Panhard Dyna Junior Roadster.

It’s nice to see someone still deeply in love with their pristine eighties time-capsule 300ZX. It’s hard for me to put my finger on it, but it’s always been a bit difficult to muster any warmth for Nissan’s Z cars after they turned the truly remarkable original 240Z into an ever more porky and ugly caricature of itself. The 300ZX was an attempt to ditch the over-wrought original styling cues for a clean new look, but by then the ZX was severely tainted by image issues, the price of its success.

What are the odds of still being married to your first sweetheart from high school? And of still owning your other first sweetheart, the car you bought for $15 about the same time you met her? And what are the odds of me running into him as he was sitting in his 1950 Ford across the street from South Eugene High School, gazing at the very building where the three of them bonded in 1964? (he was waiting for his grandson). Well, luck may have something to do with the last one, but I give this man credit for having a big and unwavering heart and good judgment. But there’s got to be more. Well, I uncovered his secret.

What a difference twenty years makes. The eighties was the Japanese decade, when they were going to take over the US, if not the world. They bought prime real estate assets like Rockefeller Center and Pebble Beach. They wrote books telling the US how to fix its problems. And their car makers were swamping the US like a tsunami. The last of the holdouts, Daihatsu, finally showed up on our shores at a rather inauspicious time: 1988, one year before the great Japanese stock market collapse. Did Daihatsu’s failure and retreat in 1992 have to do more with Japanese hubris in trying to sell a “BMW quality” Geo Metro, or was the Charade just an overpriced charade? Or is there a difference?

History does tend to repeat itself, especially in the car business. Detroit’s more recent efforts to compete with import compact trucks was once a serious undertaking, and is now quickly dwindling away to nothing. The same thing happened once before, in the early sixties. In response to real (or imagined) incursions into the light truck field by imports, Detroit launched a barrage of new compact vans and trucks. Ford was the most prolific in the 1960-1961 period, offering no less than three distinct types of pickups. The most creative and nontraditional one was the Econoline pickup. Not surprisingly, it was the least successful (of Ford’s three types), and petered out after a few years. Americans know how they like their Ford trucks, and the Econoline was not it

After a record mild winter, the grass is calf-high, and its time to bring out my fine vintage mowers from the shed. I don’t know about you, but lawnmowers were a critical childhood gateway to satisfy my childhood lust for cars and internal combustion devices. My first mowing job came at the age of eight, when a neighbor inquired if anyone in our household was willing to make fifty cents. My mother had to start the Briggs and Stratton, and I was off on a long career of mowing, with an easy-to-push mower like this one.

But I hate the evolution of mowers; they parallel that of cars: they’re full of safety devices and cheaper materials that have made them heavy and inefficient. I gave up on my crappy new mower years ago, and have assembled a mini fleet of the finest, lightest aluminum and magnesium deck best-mowing mowers ever. These are the equivalent of old Porsches and Bugattis. And the price was right: I found them sitting at the curb with “Free” signs on them.

The legend of how Carroll Shelby was inspired by Ford’s very compact new V8 to create the Cobra by stuffing it into an elderly and underpowered little British roadster is well known. The fact that it had a copycat is not quite so legendary. That probably has everything to do with the choice of the car to be the beneficiary of the Ford V8 engine transplant:

There’s nothing truly original in the car business. Everyone begs, steals and borrows from everyone else. Or sometimes, the same (and usually obvious) idea ferments for years in various heads or companies, and then suddenly appears in the same format at the same time in totally different places. How about the modern FWD mini-van? It first bubbled up in two totally different branches of Chrysler, sat for years,and then suddenly sprang forth, one in the US, the other in France, both at the same time. Coincidence, or is it just that every idea has its day in the sun? For the minivan, that would be 1983. In France, it was the Espace; in the US it was the Dodge Caravan/Plymouth Voyager.

[Note: this car does not have the original rectangular taillights. Someone mounted some sixties round lights in an attempt to confuse our readers, at least some of them]

In our recent visit to 1976, we virtually pitted the Accord against the Malibu. One garnered the title of “The Most influential Modern Car in America”, the other was disgraced as a “GM Deadly Sin”. Lots of folks said the two would never have been cross-shopped; they’re probably right. By the time a buyer stepped into a Honda dealer, a Malibu had already fallen of the list. But what about the Nova? A hatchback Nova with the options to make it comparable to the Accord’s standard fare would put it right around the Accord’s price. Let’s pit America’s most popular compact against the upstart challenger from Japan for round two.

There’s a powerful sense of urgency in getting this Curbside Classic written. It’s to document the remarkable horde of old Mercedes W123 diesels hereabouts, most of them proudly sporting a biodiesel sticker. But the biodiesel fad was already waning substantially when I shot this car a year ago. And since the $1/gallon federal subsidy for biodiesel disappeared with the new year, biodiesel itself is at risk of becoming a CC (canola classic?). Congress is currently considering a renewal, but regardless, Mercedes W123s will still be around. In fact they may well be the last internal combustion engine cars running long after Peak Oil is a distant warm and fuzzy memory. Without being uncharitable, these cars are the automotive cockroaches: they’ll eat the grease out of your dirty frying pan, and you can’t hardly kill them.

Finding Andy Griffith’s cop car on the streets of Eugene wasn’t exactly high on my predictability scale. But I’ve finally thrown that away, and nothing surprises me anymore. As far as I know, Deputy Barney Fife grew a ponytail, headed to Eugene and is using his old Mayberry cruiser in a ruse to keep the cops away from his grow operation. But there it sits, and it being Cop Car Friday, it’s now yours to ponder its existence on a side street off 1st Ave. But since its light isn’t flashing and might not hold your attention sufficiently, let’s also do a mini-history of the cop car.

Despite the fact that I’m not superstitious or religious, I’ve learned to gracefully accept that certain things seem to happen as if a bigger hand were at work; as though some things were preordained. One year ago exactly, I stumbled on this old Cadillac (actually a ’72, it turns out), and it inspired my first Curbside Classic. It started out about the year I turned eighteen and left home, and hitched a ride in one just like it. But it ended up as a rambling reflection on the fall of Cadillac, the economic circumstances of 1971, and how they’ve changed since then. One year and a hundred Curbside Classics later, I decided to revisit the old DeVille, to see what it might have to say to me now, and to indulge in some more musings. And what has taken up residence with it? A 1976 Toyota Corolla. A mere coincidence, of course. But one that is mighty pregnant with symbolism.

Risky business. That defines the car business, and never more succinctly so than in the case of this car. Rarely has a desperate last-minute gamble paid of so handsomely as the “Neue Klasse” BMWs. Today’s new owners of Saab can only dream (hallucinate) about turning their business around so quickly and definitively as this BMW did. But having the guts and money to back the risk taking is only part of the equation. Most of all, it’s a matter of being at the right time with the right product, and having the smarts to recognize it. In 1962, the seemingly impossible wasn’t. Today? Good luck.

You want to know why the Honda Accord took the country by storm in 1976? You’re looking at its ugly face. That grille looks positively unreal, like something cobbled up by a high school shop class with some leftover extruded sheetmetal. Where were you, Bill Mitchell, when this abomination was approved? In the Accord CC I said Detroit didn’t just open the portcullis with its obese “mid-sized cars” of the seventies. It actively invited the invasion, and Honda led the charge. Well, here are GM’s gates swung wide open. And the problem wasn’t just the front end, but a face does reveal much of what’s behind it. And this mug wasn’t lying.

This is the companion piece to the Most Influential Modern Global Car: the 1975 VW Rabbit/Golf. Now if I had the same photographic luck as with the Rabbit, there would be a big American car in the same shot, say something like this. Well, the Florence Apt’s [sic] will do fairly well as a stand-in, with its traditional architecture. Because if any one car can take credit for re-inventing the traditional “American” car, it’s this Honda Accord.

Let’s hold our nose and consider the decline and fall of the Chrysler New Yorker. Twenty years earlier, that name typified the grace, comfort, style and performance that New Yorkers had been know for since the first New Yorker ran off the lines in 1939. The energy crisis and the decline of the big car brought on a prolonged slide that should have ended with its retirement in 1982. But Lee Iaccoca would have none of that: the New Yorker would be reinKarnated! Add three inches to that infinitely malleable K-car platform, and slap on a healthy dollop of all the usual faux-luxury car trappings of the time, and presto: a mini-me New Yorker. Just in case you forgot what it looked like in its prime, here’s the before and after:

Always hankered for a Citroen? The Subaru SVX is the closest thing we’ve gotten to one these past few decades. I find the resemblance to the XM more than coincidental. Which is a bit odd (or not) considering that the XM beat the SVX to the market by a few years (1989). And the XM was styled by Bertone, while arch-rival Giorgetto Giugiaro’s Ital design did the SVX. A case of great minds thinking alike? Or just the styling cliches de jour? Given the Subaru’s “aircraft-inspired glass-to-glass canopy” with the very unusual windows within windows, the SVX was actually more “Citroen” then the real thing. No wonder it’s such a curious oddity today.

It’s morning on a bright summer day in Iowa City in 1962. I may have fallen asleep with pictures of Marilyn and the Corvette, but now they’re lost somewhere in the folds of my sheets. The fantasy is over, and its time to face a reality of rampant Rambler Classic wagons with wheezing sixes piloted by boozy but anything but sexy Moms. Instead of a fancy night club where a jazz band is playing, we’re off to the pool, and if we’re lucky a stop at the Purple Cow drive-in for milkshakes and floats afterward. The distinctive pattern of Rambler upholstery seared into the backs of my thighs and the stain of artificial strawberry on my trunks will be the tell-tale of having crowded in with half a dozen other hot (the wrong kind) and sticky kids in the back seat. Why did I have to find you, Rambler Classic Wagon? I was so enjoying my fantasy memories.

The Trooper II deserves some serious respect and love. It was among the very first, perhaps the very first of the “compact” SUVs that took the US market by storm in the eighties. It was eminently practical, durable, rugged, and good looking. And it’s one of the cars on the list that I wish I had bought. Did it have any faults? Probably, but as far as I’m concerned, someone should still be making this Trooper.

Seductive, voluptuous, hot, fast, flawed, sexy, modest beginnings, all-American, iconic, hits the big time in 1953, gone forever in the fall of ’62, immortal, unforgettable. My apologies if others have gone down this road before, but when I re-opened these Corvette pictures last night, that’s what came to mind. And I’ve learned to just go with it. Want to come along for the ride? If so, NSFW alert!

The current fad for “four door coupes” like the Mercedes CLS and its Passat mini-me are a revival of a trend that this Buick helped usher in: the four door hardtop. It actually arrived mid year 1955, on the junior Buicks and Olsmobiles; but just like the 1949 GM two-door hardtops caught the rest of the industry off guard, so did these. Once again, everyone had to scramble and follow GM, until the four door hardtop became the victim of safety regs and changing tastes.

TTAC’s Steve Lang recently documented the historical “leaning” of the Camry beginning with the 1997 model here, and EN’s recent editorial on the transition from “fat” to “lean” quality standards documented Toyota’s rationale and its consequences. So when a neighbor asked me if I wanted to check out and drive a used 1990 Camry she was buying, I figured it was an opportunity to indulge in some genuine Toyota fatness. Little did I realize I was about to have the automotive equivalent of a banana split.

The Pacer is the poster child of how questionable ideas and good intentions go awry. In 1971, scrappy little AMC was faced with a dilemma: how to capture buyers looking to downsize, when they were incapable of actually building a truly downsized car. Yup; there was no way AMC could tool up to build a genuine compact car, like the Vega and Pinto. So the solution was to stop pretending, like the execrable Gremlin that preceded the Pacer. The answer was to build the world’s first wide-body compact, a segment nobody had ever identified before, much less pined for. To add to its zestiness, break all the styling molds with acres of glass and asymmetrical doors. And then just for good measure, stick a rotary engine in it. As we’ve seen repeatedly, desperation is the mother of (bizarre) inventions.

Zing! That word encapsulates the RX-7. The only vocabulary the little coffee-can rotary had was zing! (snick) zing! (snick) and zing again! Sooner rather than later, it zinged you for a couple of Gs when its rotor seals gave up the zing! But that didn’t come as a surprise, and it never zinged you for anything else. That is, unless you got a little too frisky in certain corners, and the live rear axle might toss you a nasty little over-zing. As long as you could live on a torque-free diet, the RX-7 was one of the best friends an enthusiast driver could hope for in its day. And there are still loyal devotees of Zing-Buddhism today.

The Mark VII and the Mark VIII get a passing grade for effort, but that’s not good enough in the car business. There was no way these coupes could could begin to offset the damage that was simultaneously being done to the brand by that lame-assed 140 hp V6 powered Continental sedan. Dressing up this Taurus to compete with the Mercedes W124 and Lexus LS 400 was just a revival of the deadly sin they committed with the Versailles. There may have been enough suckers to buy this pig in a poke v.2, but they were all over seventy years old. Not the way to build a viable brand, especially in the face of the most withering competition for luxury car dollars ever.

Deception (and self deception) is a very significant factor in the automobile business. Unless we buy a stripper Corolla (so conveniently parked here) or the like, we’re happy enough to pay more to feel like we’re not just getting transportation, but something that enhances our sense of well-being and social status. One of the biggest questions for automobile executives forever is how much of a premium folks are willing to pay for that. What’s the upper limit you can charge strictly for the sizzle when there’s little or no steak? It somehow seems fitting that we consider the most extreme real-world test of that question on Honest Abe’s birthday: the Versailles, the ultimate pig in a poke.