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I am pretty sure this is the first car from my childhood that I can explicitly remember, though if it's not, it's a damn good guess, because Ford sold a boatload of these land yachts. Measuring nearly 19ft long (to put that in perspective, that's longer than a current Chevy Suburban) and weighing two and a half tons, and available with a 460cid V8, these disco era toddler barges were whales even by the standards of the day. The coolest features by far were the 3-way magic doorgate and the flip up third row seats. Although the "wayback" was big enough to host a threesome, The magic 3-way tailgate wasn't as kinky as it sounds. Though undoubtedly a double entendre, the 3-way referred to the ability of the tailgate to open like a door, or fold down like a pickup - which given my age at the time seemed magical enough. At the drive in we would park backwards, drop the tailgate down and the three of us kids would lie in the back in sleeping bags to watch the movie. As well as sledding innumerable families to the movies, the Country Squire appeared in well over 100 movies and TV series, and seems to have been especially popular with the producers of "CHIPS". |
Local Motors is a Wareham Mass. based startup with a very cool, novel and perhaps paradigm changing model for building cars. The basic idea is crowd sourced car designs based on a spec chassis and then built in a regional micro factory. As I understand it, there would be a design contest within the local motors online community with the designers getting feedback and assistance from the community - the online community also selects the winning design. The designs are based on a spec chassis and Local Motors seems to be partnering with Factory 5 racing, a well established custom car builder. I believe, thought the site is a little vague here, the details of the design such as the doors, tail lights, dash etc. are then designed by the community and I believe they are paid for their work. The Rally Fighter above is their first "production" model, based on community design. It's powered by a BMW engine and has an adjustable ride height suspension. They have built a real, in the flesh, prototype that garnered significant buzz and enthusiasm at this years SEMA show. It's kindof fun looking at the details of the various components to figure out where there were sourced. I am 99.97% sure they are using the trunk struts from a VW Phaeton and the tail lights look to be Honda Civic sourced. They are taking deposits on the Rally fighter now and have 40 some odd folks in line to get theirs at around $50K. I have got to go down and check out their operation, they are really small right now, but I bet they could use a top flight PM, and I would love to be involved with an effort like this. Here is a link to their web site: Local Motors |
 Giotto Bizzarrini was(is) an Italian Engineer who has done work with a number of Italian car manufacturers; Ferrari (where he was chief engineer responsible for the GTO - and here I don't mean the Pontiac), Iso Rivolta, Alfa Romeo and Lamborghini (he designed the V12 still in use today). Clearly talented but apparently unable to get along with anyone, he decided to start his own company. Naturally he named it Bizzarrini SPA and he set about building and selling the 5300gt a design originally done for Iso. The 5300 used a Chevy Corvette drive train and despite it's good looks and reliable powertrain, Bizzarrini only made like 140 of these. Apparently, the engine is set so far back in the chassis that partial dash removal is required to adjust the timing - he should have gone with a Ford 351 Cleveland, then the distributor would have been on the front. Anyway a very cool car. |
Check out their site, the ICON FJ really needs to be seen to be believed. Link : ICON 4X4 |
This pretty, little roadster was crafted at the behest of an American Porsche dealer by the Italian Design company Bertone, possibly best know for their out of this world Lamborghini Countach & Alfa Romeo BAT designs. In the end, only one of them was built and none were series produced, which is a shame, because I think it's a very nice design. To me, it looks to have influenced some of the 914 design elements (it came a few years later). VIA: Coachbuild a very neat site with lots of interesting articles and pictures-check it out, you will be glad you did. Update: Turns out Fiat just bought Bertone |
| In the late 70's and early 80's, these were the genuine old school preppy family vehicle of choice and they just oozed class (and smoke). People of lesser means (like our family) had to make due with Diesel Vdubs or Volvos. While comparable American cars were adding chrome, brougham and opera roofs, the period Benzes were ostentatious in their plain-ness. Detroit went to great lengths to make their hubcaps look like all manner of wire wheels, or alloy wheels, the W123's understated Fuchs alloy wheels seem to have been styled to resemble cheap hubcaps. It is the distinctive sound of the Mercedes diesels that I remember most about these cars, and to this day, I can still identify a Benz diesel of this vintage with my eyes closed, and no, not from the smell - "Ladies and Gentlemen, Pop Your Collars". |
| When I was in college, I had a grey 1969 MG BGT that I had purchased off an acquaintance for somewhere on the order of a few hundred $US that had a bad clutch. In a nutshell, here is what happened; I acquire said imported British sports car at some point in the summer, and get everything apart to replace the clutch and then have to return to college. Meanwhile the garage space occupied by the B and it's transmission is required by my brother (not in school at the time) who needed to perform some similar mechanical transplantation. So, he rolls the B out of the garage and boots the tranny and other assorted pieces parts off to the side to make room for his car, and here is where things begin to go pear shaped (as they say). More...I had put all the bolts, nuts washers, pins etc. into a bowl pilfered from the kitchen. My Brother, upon finding said nuts and bolts, dumps the whole kit and kaboodle into what we referred to as the "Bolt Box". The Bolt Box was wooden box about half as big as an US Army footlocker that was filled with about three generations of nuts and bolts left over from various mechanical endeavours. The total population of nuts and bolts must have numbered in the tens of thousand. The Bolt Box was a priceless source of ass saving spares for the inevitable stripped, lost, broken or tapped out nut or bolt that would otherwise derail any mechanical project. Suffice it to say that after my Father and Brother had spent a winter digging through the Bolt Box for spares, my British nuts and bolts were thoroughly mingled with thousands of similarly sized U.S. bolts and nuts. The problem of course being that British Whitworth and American SAE threads are extremely similar and sometimes interchangeable to a point, but fundamentally different. The US bolt might screw in a 1/2 inch or so and bind ever so slightly, leaving the wretched wrencher to have to decide, is it seated and ready to torque down or about just about to strip. How much this sucked cannot be sufficiently conveyed. To add to the issues, the BMC Corp used a real mish mash of fasteners to fit any single component. While an American transmission might be attached with 1 or possibly two bolt types and sizes, the MG might mix fine and course threads of differing lengths. Needless to say, it took me the better part of the summer to locate all the needed fasteners to put the old B together again. I loved to drive that car, and not because it was a great car, it wasn't, but rather, simply because it was fun in a way that transcended the mundane act of driving. It reminded me of nothing so much as a WWI biplane. Between it's Sopwith Camel like, loping idle (accompanied by the lively motion of the Smiths dash gauges) and it's unique odor of hot oily metal, moldering wool and leather, the whole vehicle was unmistakeably a human "contraption" in the best sense. A contraption in that every moment that it ran was like a minor miracle brought forth by human sweat and toil, both of which the car required more regularly than it did gas or oil. Driving that MG was like discovering that the cable company left HBO on from the previous tenants, you felt lucky and a little giddy knowing that at any moment it might come to an abrupt and possibly unpleasant end. And so it did, all over my future mother in laws pristine suburban driveway. |
There are plenty of obscure cars, but few can match the Goggomobile Dart for sheer improbability. The original Goggomobil was a post war German microcar with a 2 cycle 250cc 15hp motor. So what about the Dart? Well, believe it or not the Dart originated in Australia,by way of Dingolfing Germany. More... At the time, Australia had prohibitively high import taxes imposed on foreign cars. Bill Buckle of Sydney discovered that he could circumvent the tariffs by importing the chassis and mating the chassis to an Australian made body. Apparently Goggomobil maker Hans Glas was the only manufacturer which would go along with this scheme, and Buckle Motors became the sole purveyor of fiberglass bodied Goggomobil clones down under. Not content with the rather pedestrian Goggomobil Sedan & Van, Buckle also had a sports car body designed for the tiny Goggomobile chassis by a race car engineer. The result is the Goggomobil Dart, the knee high 750lb door-less Micro Sportscar pictured above. |
I am one of the few unabashed 928 fans out there, having spent the better part of puberty lusting after one. Sure, I would have a few crushes on the odd Italian or British cars, but the 928 was the first car I absolutely loved. Part of that is it's impeccable timing, the 928 came into being as I entered the vulnerable age of 13. What really popped my cork about the 928 however was the styling, keep in mind the 928 debuted in 1978, when brown Cordoba's (see below) roamed the earth and cars still had names including the words "Brougham" and "Squire" and Les Nesmond anchored the news at WKRP. There was NOTHING that looked like the 928, it was the future embodied, like Barbara Bain in a space 1999 jumpsuit, it somehow managed to be both plain, futuristic and sexy. It's no coincidence that the movie poster for Risky Business featured Rebecca De Mornay draped on the hood of a 928. I saw one on the street the this morning and I swear to Christ it felt like I was 13 again. |
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| RIP Ricardo |
I personally think the VW Karmann-Ghia is one of the prettiest cars around, and I would love to have one. I believe the example above is a pre-61 example because the headlights are mounted lower than in the ones in the US (Though the Karmann-Ghia was first made in 1955 it didn't come to the State until 1967) VW should have left well enough alone, I think the original is considerably better looking than the ones we got here. The name Karmann-Ghia refers to the Karmann coachworks, which built the cars, and Ghia, the Italian design firm who styled the car. There were actually 2 completely different Ghia's, the kind most people know and love, and a bigger fuglier one based on the type 3 VW, but only sold in Europe (pictured HERE). The Ghia was actually hand made at Karmann where the body panels were welded together and polished by hand because the complex curves of the body could not be mass produced at the time. Powered by the wheezey Beetle motor, the Ghia never really lived up to it's sporty image. How slow was it? Slow enough that VW made a T.V. commercial which poked fun at how underpowered the Karmann-Ghia was (I am so old I actually remember seeing it) Those young or memory challenged can see it below |
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| In the early 1980's, gas prices, the Truckin' fad and Monster Truck phenomenon gave birth to the jacked up mini truck craze. For a time it seemed like every cool kid had one of these, just like Marty McFly. Sure there were jacked up full size pickups, but the mini pickup was the new cool. FWIW: Marty's truck pictured above is a fairly mild version, many of these trucks were jacked WAY, WAY, WAY up and sported monster Dick Cepek tires. The K.C. Daylighter lights mounted on the roll bar were de rigeur, though Marty's would have been cooler if it sported the KC Smiley Face covers. Eventually (because too much is never enough) things got so out of hand that various agencies started putting limits on the height of the bumper to limit the damage one of these would do to cars. You have to remember the Ford Pinto was still fresh in the memory of most people and without airbags the small cars of the day were literally death traps. Maybe with the death of the SUV craze, mini trucks will experience a revival- Just in time for Marty's mid life crisis. |
| The L'il Red Express Truck was produced during the height of the CB/Trucker obsession that held America firmly in it's thrall in the Late 1970's. Although I generally get most cars, this trucks target audience remains a mystery. I understand the stack exhaust, it was a popular modification back then and was nothing unusual. But what's up with the old timey script and logo ? Who is at the intersection in that Venn diagram? Wilfred Brimley ? John Denver? General Store owners? Cooter from Dukes of Hazard? I just don't get it. In any case, the very next year saw Chrysler's first brush with bankruptcy. Coincidence? I think not. >Free Bonus Puzzler: This is not the weirdest 1978 Chrysler truck, for my money, that the honor is bestowed upon the black and gold Dodge "Warlock". Seriously look it up, WTF? was it the coke talking? |
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