Car Lust

1957: It Was A Very Good Year!

Continuing the Car Lust lust list of memorable automotive years, whether good or bad, we now come to the era of the Drive-In theater, the Drive-In restaurant, the sock hop, Marlon Brando, leather jackets, greasy hair, Inspiration Point, short skirts, and, oh yeah, some pretty amazing cars and stuff!

•1957 Chevrolet Bel Air• Has there ever been a more iconic American car than a '57 Chevy? You see them now at large and small auto shows, sometimes trailered to the event. They are a favorite restoration vehicle on Hot Rod TV shows.  Today, you can buy a brand new one, ready to roll, for just $180,000.

I guess my favorite '57 Chevy would be the Nomad. It's a big car that looks like a small car, at least to me, anyway. I really wish the Corvette had been offered as a Nomad variant. Speaking of the Corvette...

•1957 Corvette• The 283-cubic inch V-8 was offered with a revolutionary fuel injection system that gave the car one horsepower per cubic inch, maybe more. A full 240 cars were sold with it. A 4-speed manual was offered, and suspension tweaks made the car truly world-class. The Corvette, as a serious sports/performance car, had finally come of age.

•Elvis Presley• Was Elvis a car or even a trim package? No. But he liked them and he had them. 1957 was the year the 22-year-old wrote a $100,000 check for Graceland to shelter his family from the invasion of well-meaning but increasingly overzealous fans. He built a garage behind the mansion to house his growing collection of Cadillacs, motorcycles, a Bronco, Jeeps, a Stutz or two, and eventually a snowmobile with special tracks just for the Whitehaven lawn.

Kymco People 250

When my bud Steve pulled into the driveway on this machine, I had no idea what it was, except that it had two wheels, a motor, and was some sort of scooter. I'm not very well acquainted with these bikes, as I prefer something with a little more va-room!

Steve likes entry-level vehicles, normally Asian or German cars with the lowest possible trim level and the least amount of equipment available. He'll drive hundreds of miles to a dealer to get one. So, it was no surprise that this machine was foreign. In fact, it has the distinction of being the first known motor vehicle on my property of Chinese origin.

But I think he's on to something here. Kymco is getting great reviews! In a recent Consumer Reports survey, the Kymco Agility 125 scooter ranked first, alongside the Vespa LX150, for the best choice in a 150cc scooter. Also, their Venox 250 cruiser was reviewed as one of the best starter cruisers in the U.S. market in one test.

Dec. 28 Weekly Open Thread

As always, this is the venue for discussion that doesn't really fit anywhere else.

- Saab's future is still up in the air, but Saabs United has a good analysis of the situation. I'm not sure what to make of the speculation that the Saab 9-5 might be rebadged as a Buick. Should I be pleased that Buicks might be a little more interesting--sort of the opposite of the Saab Trailblazer 9-7X--or whether I should be annoyed at another bastardization of Saab.

- Over the past week I have been obsessed with this traffic simulator, which simulates how easily traffic backups can form. My favorite mode is the on-ramp, in which you can tweak the volume of highway and on-ramp traffic to generate backups. Call me a geek if you wish--but I have had that traffic moving for about a week straight now, tweaking the traffic volume to simulate high- and low-traffic times. It's a time-waster par excellence.

--Chris H.

Santa Claus' Sleigh

What an amazing vehicle! Used only once a year, this marvelous machine travels at infinite light speeds, delivering a massive quantity of packages unparalleled by any other transport device ever conceived by humankind. It's quite stealthy, too! No actual photos of the sleigh are known to exist--the image here on the right was compiled by an artist from dozens of witnesses' descriptions.

The owner of this airborne transcontinental transport device, a Mr. Santa Claus, registers it at his home at The North Pole. He lives there with his wife, and they tend to a small but talented herd of reindeer; a herd that not only has the ability to propel this craft and its contents through the nighttime sky, but also can achieve quick and safe take-offs and landings. One particular reindeer named "Rudolph" reportedly has a unique ability to brighten the evening skies with an illuminated proboscis. The herd stays in shape all 12 months of the year, as their annual one-night, global circumnavigational mission is quite physically taxing, to say the least.

Great Cars of Song: Red Barchetta

For those of a certain age--namely, anyone who came of age in the late 1970s to early 1980s--and of a certain musical proclivity (i.e., hard progressive rock), this song by the Canadian prog-rock band Rush will bring back memories. Or not, depending on how you spent your misspent youth. The track is off of Rush's 1981 Moving Pictures album, which was the group's biggest-selling U.S. album, although for Rush fans (that would be me) it was kind of after its heyday in the early-late 1970s.

Still, it's one of the 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die (along with 2112). This particular song, Red Barchetta, is still a staple of Rush's live shows and is probably the only place most people ever even heard of a Barchetta, let alone a red one. Speaking only for myself (though I suspect many others), I never really knew what a Barchetta was other than that it was a sports car, probably of Italian origin, and left it at that.

Of course, now that we have this here Internet thingie, you can finally answer all those "I wonder what such-and-such is?" questions that have been simmering in the lower parts of your consciousness for years and years. Thus, I decided to look into it. Not only the car on which the song is based, but also the song itself--its inspiration, how its "predictions" hold up today, and what it looks like going on 30 years down the road, so to speak. For those unfamiliar with the song or the group, a video for the song appears at the end of this post. And, for car lovers, a great song it is:

Well-weathered leather, hot metal and oil
The scented country air
Sunlight on chrome, the blur of the landscape
Every nerve aware

Mad Science, Cincinnati Style

My law school classmate Jeff sent me a photo of a car for sale which he saw on the streets of Cincinnati:

Bargain hunters, take heed: to judge from the sign on the window, the seller is what they like to call "motivated." We do not know what motivated this individual to trick out a fourth-generation Camaro with a monster truck lift kit, hip-hop donk wheels, and a two-tone scheme from The Wacky Races, but the results are clearly...um, er...epic. I'm not sure, though, if it's "epic win" or "epic fail."

One wonders what might be under the hood. You'd expect something like this to get a blown big-block V-8 with a "shaker" air scoop popping up in front of the windshield, but no, no air scoop here. Given the stock hood, it could be powered by nothing more than the base V-6--but somehow that doesn't seem right. If you're going to indulge your inner Frankenstein at this level of intensity, you need to put something interesting in the engine bay. Otherwise, why bother?

If it were up to me, I'd give it a hybrid drivetrain stripped out of a Prius. It would go nicely with the ecology-themed color combination, add an extra measure of absurdity, and you could tap power from the battery pack to give the subwoofer an extra kick.

--Cookie the Dog's Owner

Dec. 21 Weekly Open Thread

As always, this is the venue for discussion that doesn't really fit anywhere else.

- Saab still has a flicker of hope, in the form of a last-minute bid from Dutch specialty carmaker Spyker. GM's deadline for a decision is end of day today, so this is most certainly a Hail Mary attempt. I'm not getting my (already dangerously overstressed) hopes up.

- As part of my ongoing effort to raise my daughter with an appropriate sense of values, I sat down with her this weekend to watch the 1976 Claude Lelouch film C'était un Rendezvous. For those of you unfamiliar with Rendezvous, it is an eight-minute-long short film with no dialogue, no immediately apparent plot, and no characterization. Rather than any of those tiresome elements, Rendezvous keeps things simple--it's about an unseen driver piloting an unseen car flat-out through sleepy, unsuspecting, pre-dawn Paris.

The movie might seem dull at first to eyes jaded by modern car chases and racing video games, all of which make outrageous speed commonplace. Rendezvous isn't outrageously fast, but it enthralls me because it's all real. The camera car blasts through a completely uncontrolled urban environment, blowing through red lights, jinking onto the wrong side of the road to clear slow traffic, scattering pigeons, and nearly clipping startled Parisians. Only the last 10 seconds of the movie are scripted; the rest is all fraught with uncertainty and danger.

Rendezvous would be fun even at legal speeds; I love soaking in the sights of 1976 Paris, particularly the cars. There are a few nice Citroen 2CVs on offer, and I'd swear that I saw at least two Citroen CXs. The soundtrack is engrossing as well; the glorious engine sound is from Lelouch's Ferrari 275GTB, but current speculation is that the actual camera car was a beastly Mercedes 450SEL 6.9 and that the Ferrari engine noise was overdubbed. Either way, the sound is stirring.

I'm happy to report that my daughter loved Rendezvous so much that we watched it twice.

--Chris H.

It's Official--Saab to be "Wound Down"

This isn't a surprise, but it's incredibly depressing all the same. Merry Christmas, everybody! To borrow Bill Simmons' shtick, I will now go light myself on fire.

As usual, Saabs United is all over this.

--Chris H.

Ford Model T

It is with some trepidation that I enter into this post. Following my recent excursion into early 20th century racing my interest was piqued in some of the cars from that era, roughly the period before WWII, but really pre-1930s. This is a new area for me since my interest in cars has mainly been restricted to the post-war years generally, and largely only the 1960s and later. Like many, I have a somewhat limited knowledge of pre-war cars. First there are the high-end models that we see annually at Pebble Beach and other concours d'Elegance-level car shows--the Duesenbergs, the Bugattis, etc. I have little expertise in this area, but the cars I usually see seem to have been expensive to begin with and have just increased in value since. Most of these cars have inhabited the rarefied air of the rich and famous since their initial purchase and hence us common folks can only eye them from afar with something of a detached interest.

Second, apart from the occasional classic car show, I know most of the lesser forms--Model Ts, Model As, Dodge, Chevy, etc.--from either old movies or more recent period films. This seems to lend something of a 2-dimensional cartoon quality to them, a sort of Keystone Kops version of automotive history. When someone mentions "Model T" we probably get a mental image mural involving the Marx Brothers and Ma & Pa Kettle together with modern enthusiasts sporting goggles and long leather coats dutifully cranking up their Model Ts and puttering off down the road.

We all know the significance of the Model T in terms of introducing mass production on an efficient moving assembly line, and the distribution of cars to the masses rather than the toys of the elites that automobiles largely were previously. What we rarely get is a feel for what these cars actually did. After all, out of the 15+ million Model Ts sold over its lifespan, I daresay most weren't used by comedians or road racers and they didn't just move off those magic assembly lines and simply disappear into the mist. Like the Pinto, and most other cars we here at Car Lust regularly feature, they were bought mostly by regular people to just go about their daily business, becoming a part of the very warp and weft of the fabric of American society. People lived in them, went to work in them, and more than a few amorous couples probably ... well, we won't go there. But the everyday lives of these cars are what I would like to highlight here and perhaps move the venerable Model T out of the realm of the fanciful and back on solid ground.

Our Cars--Uncle Bob's Thunderbird

A few weeks ago I discovered a marvelous piece of music I'd never heard before: "Silver Thunderbird" by Marc Cohn.

As you might have guessed from the title, "Silver Thunderbird" is a ballad about an old car. Actually, it's much more than a ballad. It could be the theme music to Car Lust: The Movie. It's as good an example of the love of automobiles set to music as anyone could ever write. If Marc Cohn had e-mailed the lyrics to Chris Hafner during Our Cars Week, Chris would have run it as a guest post.

Don't gimme no Buick
Son you must take my word
If there's a God up in heaven
He's got a silver Thunderbird...

At first I was not completely paying attention, and I heard those last two lines as "Uncle Bob's up in heaven/He's got a silver Thunderbird"--which was a little spooky because my Uncle Bob, who died about twenty years ago, not only drove a T-Bird, he collected them. In fact, he even gave me one.