Car Lust

Round Table--Pontiac Post-Mortem

I'm sure you've all noticed that what was meant to be a week-long tribute to Pontiac following the news of its demise has turned into something much longer and more drawn-out than intended. So, as our grand finale wrapping up the topic, we've all put together our thoughts on the passing of Pontiac.

Anthony Cagle:

My own experience is limited, although I have always rather favored the brand. The first car I remember as a child was my parents' maroon 2-door Catalina. I vaguely remember taking trips in it down to Alabama from Wisconsin during the summer. We'd leave at like 4 a.m. and drive all day to get there. I think that was the car I crawled into as a young lad and removed the parking brake and let the damn thing roll backwards down the driveway. I still have nightmares in which I am trying to mash down brake pedals on cars trying to get them to stop. There's at least one driving around Seattle (parked, actually, I don't know if I've ever seen it moving) and I have visions of getting into it and applying the brakes to a full stop just as a cathartic way to assuage the terrors of my youth.

The funny thing about my parents and the Catalina is that they never owned another Pontiac again (though they kept buying GM products), but that was the only car they ever talked about. They would always say, "Remember that old Pontiac we had? What a great car that was."

I always preferred the Trans Am and Firebird to the Camaro myself. That probably started with the Bandit edition because I really loved the way that car looked. It always seemed a bit more younger/sportier and maybe a bit more upscale than the Camaro, though this may be projection on my part ("*I* like it, so it must be more sophisticated"). And I remember liking the whole "Wide Track" ad campaign. To be honest, that was about the only generation I really liked of the T/A. The follow-on seemed a bit too contrived to me, and the earlier versions just lacked any real styling. Give me a black '76 with that enormous, ridiculous screaming chicken, and I would never need another car.

Wagon Queen Family Truckster

It's hard to imagine a car more divergent from yesterday's Ford Fiesta than the Wagon Queen Family Truckster. For one thing, the Fiesta was a real car with real significance to the automotive industry; the Truckster was fictional, significant only in the degree of anguish it inflicted on the Griswold family in National Lampoon's Vacation, the 1983 movie paean to family road trips. The Fiesta was a simple small car that excelled at doing more with less; the Truckster was monumentally excessive and yet completely hapless.

The Truckster might be fictional, but it's still worth discussing--if only because it is right at the center of one of the funniest movies of the 1980s. Captain Ahab rode to inexorable and tragic disaster aboard the Pequod; Clark W. Griswold did the same thing much more entertainingly aboard the Wagon Queen Family Truckster.

Everybody knows the Family Truckster is funny; what is not as well-understood is the fact that the Truckster's disgusting excesses make it intelligent, incisive, pitch-perfect satire of the dismal state of American cars in the 1970s and early 1980s. It was certainly over-the-top, the Truckster is so well-aimed that it's not hard to imagine it being real. Don't believe me? Let's step through the ways in which the Truckster satirizes the typical 1983 American LeBehemoth Brougham.

2009 Chevrolet Cobalt

"I tell ya, I'm all right now, but last week I was in rough shape, ya know! Are you kiddin'? I got the worst car in the world! Why just once, I'd like to see somebody pass me without pointing to one of my tires. No matter what lane I'm in, it ends in 500 feet. Ya know, the other day, I bought the perfect second car... a tow truck. I mean, every Sunday, I take my family out for a push! I tell ya, I get no respect... no respect at all".

Thank you, Rodney Dangerfield, my hero. He was one of the few comedians to make fun of himself or his fictional family, which made his humor so special to me. I sort of met him one time; he did a performance at The Grand Ole Opry House in Nashville, and we were so exhausted from laughing that we could barely talk on the way home. As his encore, he took questions from the audience; I was lucky, he heard and responded to mine. It was instantly forgettable for him, but I'll remember that moment forever!

When we talk about a car getting little or no respect, next to the Trabant, the Chevy Cobalt (and its lesser-known twin, the Pontiac G5) usually comes up. Why does this happen? Is the Cobalt deserving of the bad rap? Does it spend so much time on a service rack that it has more miles on it vertically than horizontally? I thought maybe it was time to mosey on down to the local Chevrolet dealer to find out.

Lamenting the Dodge Demon ...

Submitted by Dale Chang

Since the Dodge Demon hasn't hit the production floor, let alone the showroom floor, lamenting its demise might seem a bit odd. However, there was so much promise in the Demon's design concept, and it seemed so perfect a candidate totransition into a production vehicle, I couldn't help but keep an eye on its development. Its clean, muscular lines, light weight, rear-wheel-drive chassis, and a surprisingly understated interior made this little roadster less a concept vehicle than a pre-production mock-up. Or so it was assumed by everyone at the time.

According to Autoweek, last year Tom Lasorda of Chrysler indicated that in order to "broaden its global appeal" and meet stricter emission standards all in one fell swoop, Chrysler would base the Demon production vehicle on a Chinese front-wheel-drive platform designed by Chery.

Someone please explain to me the logic in this.

1958 Edsel

We recently celebrated Epic Fail Week Week and a Couple Days Fortnight here at Car Lust, our tribute to vehicles (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8) that, for whatever reason, failed miserably on the roads and in the marketplace. In all that celebration of failure, we failed (get it?) to mention the big one, the one everybody's heard of, the one the Washington Post called "the most colossal, stupendous and legendary blunder in the history of American marketing," the Alpha Dog, Queen Mother, and Undisputed Heavyweight Champion of Epic Automotive Fail.

You know exactly what car I'm talking about.

Cimarron Toilet Humor

Proving that there is no low that Car Lust will not reach, I'm proud to present the first verifiable bit of Car Lust-themed toilet humor:

If you don't get the joke, this will help.

Dodge Aspen/Plymouth Volaré

This is a compact. That Family Truckster-colored monstrosity to our right is a compact on drugs. 

Any questions?

One of the stranger facts in American automotive history is that, in 1976, Chrysler was able to sell the F-body Dodge Aspen and Plymouth Volaré as "compact cars" with a straight face. To put these cars into a more modern perspective, the coupe version of the Aspen is 198.8 inches long. A brand new Chrysler 300C, on the other hand, is only 196.8 inches long--the "compact" Aspen is two inches longer than a modern full-size luxury car. That station wagon to the right, meanwhile, checks in at 201.2 inches, which is only an inch shorter than a base trim Escalade.

At the time, of course, none of this was unusual. A year later, GM would release the New Chevrolet, spearheaded by the "downsized" 212-inch long Caprice, and people would marvel at how small it was.  Indeed, this collective hallucinatory perception of space-time would eventually lead to Disco Demolition Night and the War on Drugs.

Kaiser Henry J

The ill-fated Hudson Jet has been called "The Car That Torpedoed Hudson." However, it's not the only car from the 1950s that can legitimately be charged with patricide against its manufacturer. There's a fair case to be made that the "Henry J" compact of 1951-54, intended to be the Model T of its day, was a major contributor to Kaiser exiting the passenger car business in North America.

Chevrolet Citation

If a research company conducted a scientific survey of Americans' opinions of the worst cars ever sold in this country, I would bet the top results would be made up of some combination of the usual suspects--the Yugo; the AMC Pacer and Gremlin; the Chevrolet Vega and Chevette; and the Ford Pinto. Those six stinkers are justly famous for their automotive ineptitude and would likely dominate the list. But I would guess that, trailing just behind those all-stars, the Chevrolet Citation and its General Motors X-car brethren would slot in a solid seventh on the definitive list of automotive awfulness.

My head tells me that this popular disapprobation is well-justified. The X-cars were deficient in many of the criteria that cars are judged upon--namely, they drove poorly, they weren't well-built, and the design was fundamentally flawed. Add to that list of negatives the huge investment GM made in the X-car, the public's sky-high expectations for the car, and, paradoxically, the X-car's strong sales early in its life.

The net result was that GM paid billions of late-1970s dollars to give an entire generation of American car buyers an incredibly convincing first-hand lesson that American cars weren't worth buying. If, as I've argued, General Motors spent three solid decades trying to dissuade customers from buying its family sedans, the X-car can be seen as the most effective effort in that campaign. By any logical set of criteria, the X-car deserves its inclusion in Epic Fail Week. In fact, it should arguably be the headline act in this tuneless concert of shameful failure.

Regular readers of Car Lust can feel free to begin rolling their eyes here, because what's coming next is as predictable as chilly weather in Antarctica. You see, while my head is convinced, my heart thinks the Citation and its much-maligned siblings are interesting, pretty little cars that don't deserve the level of abuse they have endured. The court of popular opinion has already tried and convicted the Citation, but I'd like to reopen the case and defend the poor, cringing X-car.

Ford Pinto/Mercury Bobcat

Ah, the early 1970s. Gas was cheap ... maybe 20 cents a gallon during price wars. The terms "Oil Embargo" and "Energy Crisis" had not been coined yet. We could put a dollar's worth of gas in the car and drive around town all night. Big cars were everywhere, muscle cars were still being made. But there was a storm on the horizon. For about five years, these funny little cars from Japan were popping up, Volkswagen Beetles were everywhere, and even though the Corvair had been a disaster, Americans were turning to smaller cars. The U.S. automakers responded with the first generation of home-grown import fighters.

So General Motors, American Motors Corporation, and Ford Motor Company launched, almost simultaneously, their assault on the imports. GM had the Vega, AMC touted the Gremlin, and Ford introduced the Pinto, somewhat unique to this group by being the only car to have rack-and-pinion steering, which we all take for granted today. All of these little cars were unibody, had rear-wheel drive, and were introduced in the glory days of no Five-Mile-Per-Hour-Bumper or Unleaded Fuel requirements. When the tougher bumpers were required, starting in the 1974 model year, the initial car styles took a turn for the worse as "Guard Rail" bumpers made the cars look heavy and awkward.