#Heritage

The Freep’s Mark Phelan identifies yet another vanishing automotive phenomenon: the six-seater sedan. He notes

The Chevrolet Impala is the only six-person sedan you can buy. Other sedans — regardless of how big they are — have front bucket seats rather than the three-person front bench seat that was once common…

Chevrolet is weighing whether to build a six-seat version of the next Impala. Weighing against it, the car will probably be narrower than the current model. It’s based on GM’s Epsilon II global platform. It’s roomy, but probably not enough to fit three comfortably across up front.

About a quarter of Impalas sold last year were six-seaters…It probably makes sense for Chevrolet to concentrate on giving the next Impala a comfortable and attractive front seat that appeals to the other 75% of its buyers and wins some new customers.

I’m sure that front benches bring back a host of memories for TTAC’s Best and Brightest (mine is of grabbing the Hurst floor shifter in my dad’s 1966 F-100 with both hands and clunking from gear to gear on the way to the dump), and yet somehow I’m guessing that not many will agitate for its return. Like tape decks and carburetor tune-ups, the nostalgia of sitting between two other people in front seat might have a certain appeal in reminiscences, but anyone who actually transports six people regularly these days just buys a crossover. And guess what: the kids might be robbed of valuable future nostalgia (replaced by reruns of Spongebob Squarepants on the rear-seat entertainment system), but neither they nor their parents are likely to choose to go back. And so, we march onward, into an unfamiliar future…

The idea of a “spiritual successor to the E-Type,” has been around since the XJ-S turned out to be anything but, and since 1997 we’ve been tormented with lust-worthy visions of small-roadster loveliness like the XK180 and F-Type concepts. Beyond the realm of ideas, however, the neo-XKE has had a tougher time of things. Jaguar has threatened several times to produce a version of its stunning concepts, but each time the rumors have ended in disappointment. But now Autocar has caught the first physical evidence that a new “E-Type” is actually crossing over into the realm of reality, with these first shots of a test mule.

Serious Civil War reenactors have a term for folks who don’t measure up to those activists’ high standards for authenticity. They call them “farbs”, as in “far be it from me to criticize another enactor but if they want to be authentic they should be wearing hand stitched woolen underwear that hasn’t been changed or washed for two months, not BVDs”. Every hobby has its one-uppers. One of the things that I like about car culture is that it’s a mosaic of subcultures. Diversity can be a good thing and I’m a big tent car enthusiast. You may be a trackday fiend who would never slam a lowrider or restore a Messerchmitt microcar, but you can appreciate the folks who would and you can find common ground with them in your shared love of things automotive. Still, none of us like folks who put on airs. Every hobby, though, has its snobs.

We all love our cars and can bore even other car guys with minutia about our favorite marques and models, but at a car show with prewar Packards, don’t you think that it’s a bit pretentious to put “historical’ license plates on a Chrysler K-car?

Panther lovers, look away! The Detroit News has picked up a story on Bayliff Custom Automotive which… well, let’s just let the words take over where that unforgettable image leaves off, shall we?

“We’ve been custom-building Packard automobiles since 1978,” said [C. Budd] Bayliff, whose Bayliff Custom Automotive of Lima, Ohio, builds old-style Packards (and other cars) from the ground up and offers Packard-inspired customization styling kits for contemporary vehicles.

Bayliff Custom Automotive also does conversion work for another Ohio-based company that specializes in funeral vehicles.

The Packard kit, as shown here on a Ford Crown Victoria, is priced from $15,000 to $18,500 and includes a Packard-style grille and overhood, headlamps, rear fender skirts, an oval rear window, stylized trunk lid, custom two-tone paint, and various changes to the interior.

If that’s a Packard, I’m Enzo Ferrari. Oh, and I have a lovely original 250 GTO to sell you…

General Motors was the largest supplier of war materiel to the American armed forces. Ford famously built B-24 Liberators that rolled off the Willow Run assembly line at a rate of one per hour. Chrysler alone built as many tanks as all the German tank manufacturers combined. With those high profile contributions to the war effort made by the big three automakers, it’s easy to forget that the independent automakers (and automotive suppliers as well) also switched over completely to military production.

To commemorate Memorial Day here in the US, we’re taking a look at how the American auto industry was mobilized into war production for World War Two. Because that mobilization was so extensive, the conversion to military production so complete, a blog post by it’s very nature cannot really do the subject justice. This is only the most cursory review of the topic, which truly deserves a book length treatment. As a matter of fact, historian Arthur Herman is currently working on a book about the “arsenal of democracy”, American industry during the war.

Herman will have a lot of material to work with.Today we’ll be looking at the role of the Big Three automakers in war production, starting with General Motors.

Memorial Day is a time set aside to remember those who gave their lives in military service to the United States. Today, even as we are fighting two wars and have men and women in harms way in yet other places, though, a relatively small fraction of Americans serve in the military. Few civilians, except military families, understand the sacrifices necessary to protect our country. There was a time, though, when the military conflict was genuinely existential and just about every able bodied man was drafted or enlisted, while virtually the entire civilian population was directly involved in the war effort, either through their jobs in military production, or more personally, because just about everything was rationed giving the military a higher priority for things like vehicles, tires, fuel and food. With the dawn of total war, the plants and proving grounds of Detroit became a new kind of battlefield, in which the tools of economic prosperity were turned into munitions and machines that would change the course of history.

SB Medien may call the forthcoming FT-86 a “Celica replacement,” but in this first video of the latest near-production prototype, the budget rear-drive coupe nearly runs into a Supra which apparently belongs to the development team. The Supra shows up once more in the video’s ‘ring testing footage (about 1:55 in), suggesting again that it’s somehow involved in the testing or benchmarking process. How and why? Your speculation is as good as mine…

As a Detroiter I hate ruin porn. I particularly hate it when lazy journalists, bloggers, editors and video crews shoot photos or video, or worse, use stock footage and pics, of the Michigan Central Station and the old Packard plant. So I’m a little reluctant to share these photos that I shot just south of State Fair, east of Woodward. Ultimately, the photos were just too good, so emblematic of Detroit’s decay, that I had to share them. Also, it’s an opportunity to share some hope about the city.

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

Additional video after the jump.

Within weeks of becoming Editor-in-Chief here at TTAC (and through a truly unexpected twist of fate), I was given the opportunity to interview Jaguar’s head of Design, Ian Callum on the occasion of my first-ever visit to Detroit. True to our industry-centric mission, I was in town for Chrysler’s Five Year Business Plan, and to be perfectly honest, I struggled with the challenge of interviewing a chief designer, especially one who had recently rejuvenated the aesthetics of such a storied brand.

As I was fumbling through our breakfast interview, we were joined by a GM executive who happened to live at the hotel where Mr Callum was staying, and when I got the most unexpected answer of the interview, it’s safe to say this exec jumped as high out of his seat as I did. I had asked Callum what his favorite new car was, and to my complete surprise he answered “Chevrolet Stingray Concept.” That answer actually played a surprisingly important role in my subsequent career, as it earned Mr Callum and myself an invitation to GM’s Heritage Center (once we had scraped the GM exec’s jaw off the floor), where we spent three hours wandering around and taking in the best of GM’s glorious past.

No, the G-Wagen isn’t gone for good… but let’s face it, we all know nothing lasts forever. Having been built with only one major technical change since 1979, the G-Wagen’s inevitable ride into the sunset is beginning with the end of production for the short-wheelbase, two-door version that we’ve never (officially) received here in the US. A complete shutdown of Graz, Austria production has been whispered about since (at least) 2005, when Mercedes nearly stopped shipping Gs to the US (according to Wikipedia, only an order from the US Marines [ Devil Dog G-Wagens FTW!] stopped Mercedes from cutting America off from the G-loving). But, according to Auto Motor und Sport, the convertible and four-door versions will continue to be built… for the moment. Think of this as an opportunity for a bit of proactive mourning….

1903 Columbus Electric Model 1000 on display at the 2011 SAE World Congress. From the collection of Peter Fawcett.

Photos courtesy of Cars In Depth

The theme of this year’s SAE World Congress was “Charging Forward Together”. In case you haven’t noticed the electrification of the automobile industry, to make the phrase even more obvious the logo includes an electric plug. Keeping with that theme the automotive engineers’ professional association put a couple of early electric cars on display, a 1915 Detroit Electric and a 1903 Columbus Electric.

The Mercedes-Benz 450 SLC 5.0 isn’t a dream car, because it’s obscurity and touring car blueprint is a relative buzzkill. But this Bauhaus-worthy super coupe is a homologated racer much like it’s 300 SL forefather. I’ll skip the basics to focus on unit #1576: a grey market import from a USAF officer stationed in Germany. The current owner, Leif Skare, let me drive this meticulously kept, nearly stock (period correct 15” wheels and AMG front spoiler aside) SLC 5.0 before it heads back to Europe. Perhaps the SLC 5.0 is a dream car, when viewed in the right light. In the right place.