Ate Up With Motor

Certain cars become emblematic of a time and a place, perfectly encapsulating the values, priorities, and obsessions of their eras. For America of the fifties, it's the 1955-57 Chevrolets and the '59 Cadillac; for the sixties, the Mini, the Beetle, and the Mustang. For the seventies, we'd make a strong case for this week's car. Generally reviled by critics, staggeringly popular with the public, and much imitated, the Chevrolet Monte Carlo remains as powerful a symbol of the period as disco balls, platform shoes, and The Brady Bunch.

This week, we look at the origins of the Monte Carlo, and consider the reasons for its immense -- and ultimately ephemeral -- popularity.



( The 1970-1977 Chevrolet Monte Carlo. )

Note: This is a bit of a rerun, since we ran an earlier version of this article in July 2008. We've revised it with new photos and new information while preparing next week's story on the Grand Prix's cousin, the Chevrolet Monte Carlo.

Thirty years ago, the watchword of the auto industry was downsizing. Driven by high oil prices and ever-increasing emission standards, American automakers were forced to dramatically reduce the size and weight of their cars. Today, with spiraling oil prices and concerns about global warming, a new wave of downsizing can't be far off.

Downsizing can be risky. Customers have been indoctrinated for decades in the idea that bigger is better, and you have to be careful that smaller size isn't perceived as poorer value. Do it wrong, and you can end up with a sales disaster that could put you out of business.

Let's look at an early example of downsizing that succeeded: Pontiac's sporty 1969 Grand Prix.



( The 1969 Pontiac Grand Prix. )

For most people, the words "Ford Mustang" evoke one of two things: the original 1964-66 icon of sixties Americana, or the boxy Reagan-era "5.0s" so beloved of amateur hot rodders. This week, we consider how one evolved into the other, examine the origins of Ford's ubiquitous Fox platform, and take a look at the most unusual of all Mustangs: the high-tech, turbocharged, four-cylinder SVO.



( The 1979-93 Ford Mustang and 1984-86 Mustang SVO. )

If you're an American over 30, you may have some hazy, not necessarily happy memories of Renault's "Le Car," sold here from 1976 through 1983. To Europeans, who will need little introduction, it was known as the Renault 5, the ubiquitous French subcompact that helped to popularize the supermini genre. Although it never sold very well in the States, Renault moved more than five million of them in other markets, making the "Cinq" one of the best selling French cars of all time. It also spawned a fearsome little rally car, the entertainingly deranged Renault 5 Turbo.



( The Renault 5 and Renault 5 Turbo. )

You've probably heard it said that modern cars are designed as much in the wind tunnel as on the drawing board. This week, former GM designer Gary Smith, webmaster of the site Dean's Garage, takes a look at the insides GM's own wind tunnel. You can read about it here.

Dean's Garage is a very interesting site, with a lot of first-hand recollections from Gary and other automotive designers about their work and careers; last week, for instance, he presented some of the cartoons the GM design staff drew during his tenure there, like Andy Hansel's caricature of former Styling VP Irv Rybicki.

We think that primary histories like these are invaluable. Automotive designers are among the world's least-known artists; their work reaches millions of people, but many are little known outside the field, and when they retire or pass on, memory of their contributions quickly fades. (We should also mention that Gary has been very generous in helping us research some of our upcoming articles, putting us in touch with surviving designers to help sort out how certain designs came to be.)

If you're interested in the people behind the machinery, check out Dean's Garage -- we recommend it highly.

By 1963, Studebaker was already doomed, but its dynamic president, Sherwood Egbert, was not yet ready to admit defeat. Not only did he launch the Avanti, he hired Andy Granatelli to develop a series of hot engines that transformed Studebaker's humble compact Lark into a ferocious -- and unlikely -- performance car.

This week, we look at the final days of Studebaker and the birth of the Super Lark.



( The 1959-1966 Studebaker Lark, Commander, and Super Lark. )

New article this evening, but in the meantime, you can now follow Ate Up With Motor on Facebook.

It sounded so promising at the time. After years of dismissing imported compacts as cars for kooks, GM was finally going to build an attractive, sophisticated small car, featuring the latest advances in manufacturing technology. To follow that, Chevrolet going to offer a sporty version with a racy twin-cam engine built by the legendary English firm Cosworth. It was the car that was going to save America for American cars -- that is, until it all went wrong.



( The 1971-77 Chevrolet Vega and 1975-76 Cosworth Vega. )

In February 1954, Mercedes-Benz introduced its first postwar production sports cars. One was the remarkable "Gullwing" 300SL, the street version of the race car that won Le Mans in 1952. The other was this compact roadster, a pretty and competent tourer that offered a civilized alternative to contemporary open sports cars.

This week, we examine the origins of the 190SL, and consider the career of the legendary (and infamous) importer who inspired its creation: Max Hoffman.



( The 1955-1963 Mercedes 190SL. )

If you remember the American Motors Corporation -- and we recognize that some of our younger readers may not -- you probably don't associate it with muscle cars. Indeed, for much of its existence, AMC's focus was on compact economy cars, a cause that the company once promoted with missionary zeal.

How, then, do we explain this car? Not simply a Supercar, but a bona fide street rod bearing the well-known name of performance-parts guru George Hurst -- and the last car to wear the Rambler nameplate. Read on...

[Note: A much shorter version of this article originally appeared in 2007. It has been expanded and revised considerably.]



( The 1969 Hurst AMC SC/Rambler. )

Todd Ruel of Torq-O, a site about "orphan" car brands, contacted me earlier today with this rare find from his extensive archives: a 1950 television commercial for the Nash Rambler Custom Landau, the subject of our recent article.

Click here to see it.

Every ten years or so, the American market rediscovers the compact economy car. This "discovery" is inevitably treated by both company PR flacks and credulous journalists as a revelation, as is the idea that a small car might not be a sluggardly automotive hair shirt.

Our younger readers, not yet hardened to the predictable, dimwitted banality of carmaker press releases and press-release journalism, may be surprised to know that the idea of a small, luxurious economy car goes back at least to this primordial American compact: the original Nash Rambler.



( The Nash Rambler and AMC Rambler American )

Because there's no escaping it, Ate Up With Motor is now on Twitter:

http://twitter.com/ateupwithmotor

I'll be using this for site update announcements, random sightings, bits of trivia, and perhaps photos du jour. Check it out.

I've been concerned that I didn't have enough European articles (although I do have one coming up on the Mercedes 190SL). And then on Saturday I spotted this:



A rare find even in Europe, much less here.

Look for an article on this in a few weeks.

This car, another of Lee Iacocca's many product planning brainstorms, was one of Ford's greatest successes in the late sixties and early seventies. A gaudy, overstuffed personal luxury car that critics aptly described as "a senior Thunderbird," it was nonetheless a hugely profitable exercise, and one of the most stylistically influential cars of its era.

This week, we look at the history of the Lincoln Continental Mark III and the Mark series.



( The 1968-1979 Lincoln Continental Mark. )

Captured at the recent El Segundo show:



Ford offered this attractive greyhound hood mascot on both Fords and Lincolns in the mid-thirties. I think they cost around $5 at the time, although originals are worth a good deal more than that today.

I had a two-hour phone conversation this afternoon with Jim Wangers, former ad executive with McManus, John & Adams and one of the originators of the Pontiac GTO, about my recent GTO article. He provided extensive feedback on the article, correcting a number of factual errors, clarifying some ambiguous points, and offering some new insights into his involvement with Pontiac.

I've revised the article accordingly, which (as before) you can read here:

http://ateupwithmotor.com/model-histories/sports-cars-and-muscle-cars/184-three-deuces-pontiac-gto.html

I have an appointment to talk to Jim Wangers later this afternoon about my recent Pontiac GTO article. (Yes, the same Jim Wangers.) He discovered it last week and sent me an e-mail the other day, saying he wanted to discuss it.

We'll see how this goes.

Best known today for the "Fabulous Hudson Hornets" of 1951-1954, the Hudson Motor Car Company merged with Nash in 1954 to form the American Motors Corporation, and effectively ceased to exist in 1957. This week, we look at the history of Hudson, and their most famous models, the "Step-Down" cars of 1948-1954.



Click here to read more about the 1948-1954 Hudsons

Note: I've been having some server response issues tonight; my host is having a DoS attack issue. If the page won't load, please wait a few minutes and try again -- sorry for the trouble.

To explain my somewhat hasty post of the other day, this is the situation.

For a while, I had been posting links to these articles on the Wikipedia pages of the specific models, on the rationale that anyone who read a Wikipedia page to the bottom and actually paid attention to the references and links might be interested in the content.

Someone at Wikipedia took great offense to this. Posting external links is apparently now verboten by what passes for the current Wikipedia administration, and posting links to a site one has one's self written is deemed a conflict of interest. Furthermore, the fact that my site contained AdSense ads, and was thus nominally commercial content, was particularly offensive. They issued a warning that I had been declared a spammer, all links were deleted, and I was warned that if I posted any such thing to Wikipedia again, I would be banned.

They apparently went a step further and filed a complaint with Google AdSense, which today canceled my account, referring to "invalid click activity." I've filed an appeal, but my hopes are not high. (There is, of course, no recourse to appeal to Wikipedia.)

I have no intention of taking down the site, but the fact that what appears to be a single Wikipedia administrator seems determined to destroy my ability to run advertising or make any sort of revenue from it has given me pause. This has always been a labor of love, but this is ridiculous.

I can continue to post links to new articles here, if anyone cares, but you can understand that this has been quite a downer.