Car Lust

Tata Nano

You knew this was coming. Is it gutless? You betcha. Is it cheap? Of course--it's designed to be the cheapest production car on the planet. Does it prove, like so many before it, that necessity truly is the mother of invention? Absolutely. 

So, Car Lust material? Well, yeah. I mean, c'mon - it even comes in hot pink! How lusty is that?

But wait - it gets better. As numerous news outlets are pointing out, Tata is planning on bringing this little bastion of affordable motoring to the United States. Naturally, this begs the question--will it follow the path laid down by the VW Beetle, burrowing a place into our automotive hearts, or will it simply rust out of our consciousness like the Citroen 2CV?

Great Commercials--Mister Ed for the Studebaker Lark

I am just barely old enough to remember Mister Ed being on TV in prime time.  One thing I didn't appreciate until many years later was that Studebaker was the show's prime sponsor from 1961 through 1963. (I was a toddler in 1962-63, so cut me a little slack please.) The sponsorship included a product placement deal: Mister Ed's family, the Posts, drove a Lark convertible, and their nosy neighbors the Addisons had a swank Avanti in their driveway.

In this commercial, Wilbur Post (played by Alan Young) and Mister Ed (voiced by old-time cowboy star Allan "Rocky" Lane) took a break from the wacky situations and madcap hijinks of the show to shoulder the important burden of convincing the audience to buy Studebaker Larks:

Pontiac 6000STE

I have absolutely no idea what to make of the Pontiac 6000STE. At its heart, it is simply a Chevrolet Celebrity clone; which itself was an outgrowth of the much-maligned Chevrolet Citation. I have already described the misery inflicted upon my car enthusiast father by the 6000STE's A-body sibling, the Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera. I can't imagine a less promising foundation for a sports sedan than that.

And yet ... and yet, there was a period of time in the early 1980s when the 6000STE was regarded by the leading automotive journalists as the finest sports sedan in America. Like the Cadillac CTS-V today, the 6000STE was considered GM's credible BMW imitator, a world-class sports sedan that melded American attitude with European driving dynamics.

In fact Car and Driver named the 6000STE one of the 10 Best Cars of 1983. The rest of the list was made up of such luminaries as the Porsche 944, Mk. I Volkswagen GTI, Toyota Supra, Honda Accord, Ford Mustang, Mazda RX-7, Mercedes-Benz 380SEL, Chevrolet Caprice (the revolutionary downsized version), and, um, the AMC/Renault Alliance. Hey, nobody's perfect. The point is, C&D thought the 6000STE was one of the best cars in the world; it made a list that included no BMWs, a list from which C&D reluctantly bumped the excellent Porsche 928.

Volkswagen Karmann Ghia

I saw a news item the other day linking to a German language article about independent coachbuilder Wilhelm Karmann GmbH which related a bit of shocking news: Der Cabrio-Spezialist meldet Insolvenz an! Karmann, which once built convertibles for Audi, Ford, Mercedes, Porsche, Renault and VW, fabricated convertible tops for those and many other manufacturers, assembled AMC Javelins for sale in Europe, and built its own line of "Mobil" motorhomes, has filed the German equivalent of a bankruptcy petition and is going out of business.

That seems to make this an appropriate time to spend a bit of Car Lust bandwidth on Karmann's best-known product: the Volkswagen Karmann Ghia--or, as one writer rather cleverly described it, the "Beetle in a Cocktail Dress." That description is appropriate because beneath the Karmann Ghia's attractively curvaceous styling is the heart and soul (and floorpan, engine, transmission, suspension, and other miscellaneous mechanical parts) of a humble Volkswagen Type 1 Beetle.

The story behind the Karmann Ghia is a fascinating one, with a surprising (to me, anyway) connection to a member of our own Car Lust family.

Revolutionary Efficiency

(Note from Chris: We're very proud to welcome Virgil Exner Jr. as an official Car Lust contributor. Mr. Exner is of course the son of famous designer Virgil Exner of Forward Look fame, and a distinguished automotive designer in his own right. He previously contributed a rebuttal to Cookie the Dog's Owner's original Stutz Blackhawk piece.)

Hello Car Lust readers, I'm very happy to be aboard as a contributor to the blog and hope you will enjoy my input.

My wife and I recently returned from a short vacation in St. Martin in the Caribbean, and I had an opportunity to rent a virtually new India-produced Hyundai i-10 four-door hatchback. It had all of the accessories as our 2008 two-door Ford Focus, and both of us thought it was really great. It got 27 mpg for more than 200 miles around that hilly and traffic-jammed island and drove and handled just as well as the Focus. Our Focus gets 19 mpg in more favorable traffic and on flatter roads. I thought the Hyundai would make the Focus feel heavy when we returned to our car, and it did.

Datsun B210

When I think about the Datsun B210, I like to think that, sometime before its introduction in 1973, various Nissan engineers were sitting there, staring at an unwieldy wedge-shaped piece of clay, and said to themselves, "Y'know, we could do that ... but we're going to need to paint it avocado green, burnt orange, turquoise, or pale white. Oh, and put on honeycomb hubcaps. It's the only way it'll come together." Then, they invited the marketing people out for drinks.

Unbeknownst to the marketing department, however, when the engineers were buying themselves drinks, they were just asking the bartender for glasses of water that only looked like sake. Once the marketing department was good and drunk, well, pictures were taken, and blackmail ws performed. The result was the fine piece of automotive history gracing our pages today, the Datsun B210. In an attempt to clear its inventory of this misbegotten son of drunken debauchery and engineering hubris, Nissan proceeded to grant it cut-rate pricing, with the seemingly vain and misguided hope that somebody somewhere might actually buy the danged thing.

Ford Fiesta

It was a frightening time for the domestic auto industry. American automakers had been caught off-guard by volatile gas prices, an uncertain economy, and a customer base that was rapidly turning its emphasis from flash to thrift. The domestic manufacturers' most profitable products--the huge, outdated, gas-guzzlers that had sold like hotcakes for more than a decade--were suddenly out of step with consumer demand.

The market’s turn to smaller, more efficient cars exposed the domestic small-car catalog as obsolete and uncompetitive compared to the more refined and better-engineered offerings from the imports. American consumers reacted by purchasing the imports and excoriating the domestic offerings for their inadequacies.

Confronted with shrinking market share and even the threat of bankruptcy, the domestic automakers were under pressure to respond quickly with potent, up-to-date small cars of their own. Luckily for Ford, a contemporary and competitive subcompact was already available from its European division to bolster its sagging American small-car fortunes. Enter the savior ... the Fiesta.

Great Commercials--KONISHIKI for the Daihatsu Move

Today we're going to look at some Japanese home market commercials featuring American-born sumo wrestler "KONISHIKI" (he is required to spell his Japanese name in all-caps Romanji by sumo wrestling's governing body) pitching the Daihatsu Move kei car. Our first example is KONISHIKI and Daihatsu's homage to disco:

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.

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.