Car Lust

1953-54 Studebaker "Loewy Coupes"

Whenever one of the buff books runs a "most beautiful cars of all time" feature, or someone puts out a big honkin' coffee-table book on the subject, the car we will be looking at today usually makes the list, alongside such lovelies as prewar Talbots and Bugattis, boat-tail Auburns and Cord 810s, curvaceous Italian sports cars, E-type Jaguars and 1961 Lincoln Continentals. We could debate which of them is the absolute loveliest all day and into the night and halfway through tomorrow's breakfast and never settle the question, but I would submit that today's subject stands out from the rest of this elite category in one respect.

A prewar Bugatti or a Cord looks like something from the 1930s--beautiful, yes, but clearly a creation of a particular era. Likewise, the Ferraris and Maseratis on the list, they all have that late-60s-early-70s groovy-mod jet-set thing going on. The E-type is clearly a product of the late 50s and early 60s, while the Continental's styling practically screams "Kennedy administration!"

In contract to these, today's subject isn't quite so obviously tied to a particular year. It was designed as a show car and was clearly "ahead of the curve" when it rolled out nearly 60 years ago--and if it's not quite "ahead of the curve" today, that's only because the "curve" may have finally caught up with it. Take out the triangular vent windows, dial back on the chrome, give it headrests, three-point seatbelts, cupholders, and power remote mirrors, slap on a Honda or Toyota badge, and you could plausibly pass it off as a 2010 model.

Ladies and gentlemen, fellow Car Lusters of all ages, I give you the stunningly beautiful Studebaker "Loewy Coupes," the 1953-54 Starlight and Starliner:

Great Commercials--SsangYong Rodius

We recently had our fun mocking the bizarre looks of the SsangYong Odious--er, I mean Hideous--no, no, I mean Rodius!--a Korean-built SUV whose ah, challenging styling almost makes the Aztek look normal. That posting included a surreal Korean TV commercial in which the very oceans themselves rage against it.

That's not the only Rodius commercial to appear on Korean television. In the course of writing that article, I watched the others, and some of them are--you won't believe this, but it's true!--they're quite good.

I'm not being ironic. The commercials are very good. The car is hideous, but the commercials do an admirable job of making it look ... dare I say it? ... not just normal but ... almost (but not quite) ... desirable.

Don't believe me? Keep reading.

SsangYong Rodius

Some cars are beautiful, and some ... well, not to put too fine a point on it, some cars are not beautiful. The proportions are off, or the detailing is overwrought, or a prominent design element clashes with the rest of the styling, or it's bland and boring, or something's just ... not quite right.

And then there are those select few that are total aesthetic disasters. Not just ugly, but dog ugly. Butt ugly. Warthog-beaten-with-an-ugly-stick ugly. Cars it hurts just to look at.

Today's subject is such a car. It was voted "the ugliest car ever made" by the readers of CarData, Whether that's exactly right or wrong--I can think of a few other contenders for that dubious honor--this car is nevertheless one whose body panels insult the very steel they were stamped out of. Continue reading only if you be men and women of valor, for the styling of this automobile is so just plain wrong that it would make even an Aztek owner recoil in horror. So, brave readers, if you do doubt your courage or your strength or the durability of your retinas, come no further, for true hideousness awaits you all with ...

The Chevy Volt Dance

Submitted for your consideration, this video taken at the L. A. Auto Show of a promotional song and dance routine for the upcoming Chevy Volt plug-in hybrid:

Words fail me.

Great (???) Commercials--Wartburg 1000

We have previously discussed in these pages the Trabant 601, East Germany's sorry excuse for a "People's Car." Homely, hapless, and mechanically helpless, yet somehow lovable in spite of it all, the "Trabi" has rightly come to symbolize the epic failure of communism in Eastern Europe.

What is generally not known is that the Trabant wasn't the only car built in East Germany. There was also an upscale make, the Wartburg. With steel body panels instead of the Trabi's pseudo-plastic, a bigger three-cylinder two-stroke engine instead of a two-banger, and seating for five instead of four, the Wartburg was by any measure a better car than the Trabi--not that that was a hard trick to pull off. It was also more expensive and even harder to get than the overpriced and under-produced Trabi, and tended to be owned only by Communist Party officials and other people with "connections."

Also, like with the Trabi, the government felt compelled to make commercials for the Wartburg--even though, in East Germany's centrally-planned command economy, neither car had any real competition. This clip advertises the 1966 Wartburg 1000 sedan. My comments are below the fold.

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home--Ford Probe

We are going to attempt ... time travel.

I am painfully aware of the fact that it has now been more than one month since the last entry in the Star Trek cars series--my attempt to tie the Hyundai Genesis sports coupe to Star Trek III. I deeply regret the delay--if I could get this post up earlier by taking a Klingon Bird of Prey around a local star to initiate time warp, I would.

A joke... is a story with a humorous climax.

Following the somber (though excellent) space opera of the previous two movies, filled with poignant losses, space battles, and themes of mortality, Star Trek went in a much more light-hearted and mainstream direction with Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. Or, as most people remember it, the one with the whales.

STIV might have proved a dramatic change of pace from the earlier movies, but it was still clearly Star Trek--its time-travel plot and goofy, cheerful energy captured the appeal of the original TV series. STIV didn't feature a clear-cut villain, or hyper-kinetic space battles, but its willingness to poke some fun at itself and its characters proved to be a powerful breath of air for the franchise.

Kirk didn't spend the movie locked in a struggle to the death with a super-villain; intead, he was struggling to properly incorporate "colorful metaphors" into his speech. Chekov wasn't under the thrall of a brain-sucking parasite; he was frantically searching for "nuclear wessels" and getting called a "Rooskie" (and worse) by a bemused Navy interrogator. Spock wasn't enduring death and resurrection; he was mind-melding with whales, silencing punk-rockers and being referred to as having done "too much LDS."

This combination of fish-out-of-water humor and the characters' natural chemistry proved a powerful elixir--STIV was a crossover hit and a box-office smash, and the mainstream success of the film helped launch the Star Trek: The Next Generation TV show. Perhaps the most telling indicator of its appeal is that STIV is the only Star Trek film that my wife will even consider watching with me.

Star Trek III: The Search For Spock -- Hyundai Genesis

The word? The word is no. I am therefore going anyway.

Thus begins the best sequence in Star Trek III: The Search For Spock, and one of the greatest scenes in all of Trekdom--the scene in which Admiral Kirk and his officers steal the USS Enterprise from space dock to rescue their ambiguously deceased shipmate and friend Spock. I'm not totally clear what they were rescuing him from--evidently some sort of ill-defined post-mortem Vulcan mental trauma--but that doesn't change the fact that it's a tremendous sequence in an outrageously underrated film (a film underrated even by Car Lust sister blog Armchair Commentary).

Now for the whiplash segue and the forced comparison between car and movie that is becoming de rigueur in this series. I would argue that the Hyundai Genesis is the automotive world's version of that scene--a tremendous car from an outrageously underrated car manufacturer. That's convenient, since the Genesis name links the car to the tremendously powerful terraforming device central to the plots of Star Treks II and III (as well as, it must be said, the Phil Collins-led musical group, the Sega gaming system, and of course the first book of the Bible).

It might help my analysis if I knew what Genesis is, beyond the biblical reference.

 The Genesis Coupe represents Hyundai's coming-out party--a top-flight performance coupe from a company known for its small front-wheel-drive economy cars and that has steadily grown from past ignominy into unspectacular but extremely competent respectability.

The Genesis Coupe is a rear-wheel-drive sports coupe with 306 horsepower V-6 (or a tuner-friendly turbo four) that runs off the 0-60 sprint in 5.7 seconds and tops out at more than 160 mph.

Let that sink in for a moment. It wasn't long ago that this kind of performance was restricted to Corvettes, Porsches, and exotic Italian cars. Now a sub-$30,000 coupe from Hyundai can do the same thing. That's pretty remarkable given Hyundai's, well, checkered history.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan--Plymouth Reliant

How we deal with death is at least as important as how we deal with life.

David Colborne: It's difficult to understate the importance of the Reliant. It single-handedly revived a moribund franchise, one which made some truly disastrous decisions in the late '70s. It made its parent brand interesting again--sure, the quality wasn't as high as some of the competition out there, and you could tell that the Reliant and its contemporary kin were put together on a budget, but it was still far better executed than anything that preceded it. It wasn't as slow, as heavy, nor as ponderous as its predecessors--in short, it proved that somebody finally got "it." Were it not for Reliant, the Star Trek movie franchise would have died, never to return.

Oh, you thought I was talking about the K-car, didn't you?

It was only the fact of my genetically engineered intellect that allowed us to survive.

Chris Hafner: In the early 1980s, two American institutions, the Chrysler Corporation and the Star Trek franchise, were teetering at the precipice of failure and irrelevance. Chrysler, perennially a distant third among the Big Three domestic car manufacturers, was on the verge of bankruptcy and had been forced into the indignity of groveling for its solvency in the form of loan guarantees from the federal government. The company badly needed a big hit to repay those loans and to assure its future.

Likewise, while Star Trek had created an enthusiastic fan following with the famous TV show and lightly-watched animation series in the late 1960s and early 1970s, by the beginning of the 1980s its future was in doubt. Based on the fan loyalty inspired by the original series, Paramount had spent $46 million to produce the 1979 film Star Trek: The Motion Picture. That movie, dubbed "The Motionless Picture" by the cruel and cynical, made money but was critically panned and sucked the energy out of the franchise. Given the cancellation of the original show after only three seasons and the relative lack of success of the animated series and the movie, the enthusiasm for more Star Trek appeared to be at a nadir. It would have been very logical to conclude that Star Trek was winding down its run.

As David intimates above, it was Reliant time. Chrysler's recovery depended on its 1981 launch of its pivotal K-car platform, represented most prominently by the Dodge Aries and Plymouth Reliant. Star Trek's ongoing relevance hinged on the success of the 1982 film Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, starring Chrysler pitchman Ricardo Montalban and his commandeered starship, the USS Reliant.*

1957 Chevrolets

The 1955-57 "Tri-Five" or "shoebox" Chevrolets are among the most recognizable of all classic cars. The 1957 iteration, with its tail-finned rear quarter panels and available powerful small-block V-8, is probably the single best-known and loved American car of all time. 

Go to any old-car show or cruise-in anywhere on the North American continent this summer and I guarantee there will be at least one '57 Chevy on display--probably two or three. Whether meticulously restored to car-show perfection, or tricked out with side pipes and slotted mags and a jacked-up rear end, any '57 you see in these circumstances will be an obvious source of joy for its owner and an object of affection and wonder to those who gather around it. Even non-pistonheads love the '57 Chevy. My wife, who is as far from a "car person" as one can be and still have a driver's license, remembers kissing her father's red hardtop goodbye when he traded it in.

How beloved are these cars? There is an urban legend that claims that after the newly-styled '58 Chevrolets were introduced, a renegade group of GM employees continued building unauthorized copies of the '57s in a secret factory for another ten years out of sheer unadulterated car lust. That didn't really happen, at least not the way legend has it, but if you want a new 1957-design Chevrolet Bel Air with all zeroes on the odometer, you can get one--there is enough demand for them that exact replicas are being manufactured today, some using NOS parts for that extra measure of authenticity.

Personally, I just don't get what all the fuss is about.

RIP, Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett

I'm not sure if you're aware of this, because it's gone under-reported by the news media, but we lost both Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett yesterday. While their families, fans, and the rest of the entertainment world will miss Jackson and Fawcett, we won't be dwelling on their lives or their influence in this space beyond offering our condolences--no doubt a disappointment to those who come to Car Lust for comprehensive hard-news and entertainment coverage. No, we'll be doing something almost as important--focusing on their impact on the world of vehicle advertising.

Of course, their impact in the world of car commercials was vanishingly small compared to a car commercial regular like Ricardo Montalban, but I did find a few commercials to share.