Car Lust

5th Birthday Week--Chris Hafner's Greatest Hits

As Car Lust's fifth birthday party continues--please celebrate responsibly!--it falls to me to talk about our founder Chris Hafner's contributions to the last five years.

Chris is, of course, the man who started Car Lust the blog (he told the blog's origin story in our 1,000th post), and he's written more of our content than the rest of us put together. He also deserves recognition as the codifier of "car lust" the idea: the notion that a car doesn't have to be an unattainable exotic or a 100% restoration to be desireable, interesting, or simply something we love.

Following, with apologies to David Letterman, are my picks for the Top Ten Chris Hafner Car Lust Posts:

An Introduction to RV Week

Recreational vehicles have been around in one form or another since before the internal combustion engine, and not long after cars and trucks became widely available for retail sale, enterprising owners began putting homebuilt structures on them that we'd call camper bodies today.

We don't know who the first RV builder was, but we do know for a certainty who was the inventor of the modern travel trailer....

Great (?) Moments in Badge Engineering

"Badge engineering" occurs when an automobile manufacturer sells what amounts to the same car under two different brand names.  It's not to be confused with "platform sharing," where two or more different cars share some or all of their basic engineering. To illustrate the distinction with an example: the first-generation Chrysler minivans shared the K-cars' platform, but a Plymouth Voyager was a completely different vehicle from the Plymouth Reliant--that's platform sharing.  On the other hand, the Reliant and its Dodge Aries counterpart were identical in all but minor decorative touches--that's badge engineering.

Economically, it makes sense to use as many common components as possible across multiple product lines, and carmakers have been doing this ever since Benz & Company Rheinische Gasmotoren-Fabrik started offering two model lines way back in eighteen-ninety-something. Platform sharing is so common we almost don't notice it anymore, and VW is taking the concept a step further by developing a "construction set" platform that all of its vehicles will eventually share. 

The problem arises when the manufacturer gets too focused on keeping costs down (or too lazy, take your pick) and shares more than drivetrain components or platforms between cars. Share too much, like, say, all of the outer body sheetmetal, and soon what are allegedly "different" cars become indistinguishable, whether viewed from twenty yards away or from the front left seat. We look down on the practice today as the bane of automotive variety, but the first recorded instance of automotive badge engineering was actually welcomed by consumers.

Stick With It!

A couple of weeks ago, David Sirota, a writer for the "digital magazine" Salon, took to the keyboard to ask one of those burning questions only magazine and newspaper feature writers ever think to ask, and only when they're running up against deadlines and can't think of anything better to write about: "Is It Ethical to Drive Stick?"

No, I did not make that up. Click the link if you don't believe me.

How could one's choice of automotive transmission possibly be a matter of ethics? Performance, fuel economy, mechanical reliability, initial cost versus marginal utility and other microeconomic particularities, physical dexterity, personal preference, certainly--but ethics??

This is just WRONG....

In a misguided attempt at a highbrow publicity stunt, BMW gave over one of its precious M1 supercars to some artsy-fartsy guy from Pittsburgh, who proceeded to assault--there is no other word for it!--assault the M1's lovely fiberglass bodywork with cheap house paint and six-inch brushes. The English language lacks the words to fully convey the utter wrongness of what happened to that poor Bimmer.

Caution: those of you with weak constitutions, or who are easily offended, or have high standards of artistic taste combined with a history of hypertension, should not watch this video. Parental discretion is advised.

100,000

Dad and I were in the "Battleship," the grey '76 Ford LTD, somewhere on I-76--I don't remember where we were headed. For the last couple of miles, Dad had been paying very close attention to the instrument panel. "Instrument panel" is kind of too strong a term for what the LTD had: a CinemaScope wide-screen speedometer, a gas gauge, and a bunch of dummy lights, none of which were lit up. The engine sounded normal, the car was tracking straight and true, but Dad was very intently focused on something. "What's wrong?" I asked.

"Nothing," he replied. "Just hold on."

He started slowing and pulling off into the median, extremely attentive to his speed and rate of deceleration. He came to a precise stop and pointed at the odometer, a very satisfied look on his face.

"00000.0", it read. All zeroes.

At Dad's insistence, we got out and stood in front of the car and shook hands, a modest ceremony to commemorate what was, at that time, something of an accomplishment: getting a 1970s Detroit car to hold together for 100,000 miles.

March 19 Weekly Open Thread: 3 Things I Wish All Cars Had

Welcome to this week's Weekly Open Thread where we talk about most anything automotive-related. This time, may I suggest a few features that I'd like to see on all new cars, and possibly retrofitted on all vehicles.

1) Brake lights that work when the car in front of you slows down. Now that seems logical, right? But wait... the driver has to hit the brake pedal to make this happen, so what about the smarty- pants in front of you that grabs the hand brake or shifts down "enthusiatically?"

That car is rapidly decelerating, and you may not know it in time. That driver may be trying to get rear-ended. But if we had decelerator indicators, devices even as simple as mercury switches, we'd know that the vehicle is rapidly losing speed... and we could prepare better.

Test Drive--2012 Chevrolet Volt and Cruze Eco

While Car Lust is not charged with keeping up with current events, when I got an opportunity to plug in to a Chevy Volt test drive it sparked my curiosity. While I'm resistant to GM in general, I was amped up at the chance to get my hands on the much-touted Volt and see for myself if it truly lives up to its hype.

Did I have a positive or negative reaction? The answer will shock you.

It's the end of the Saab as we know it...(and I feel fine...)

The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, The Truth About Cars, Saabs United, and various Swedish news outlets are reporting that Saab filed for bankruptcy on Monday. Unlike the last time Saab stood on the brink of doom, there is unlikely to be any last-second rescue this time around the way there was in January of 2010. I'm sure Chris Hafner, Car Lust's resident Saab enthusiast, will have more to say on this when he gets back from vacation; in the meantime, I'll try to fill the gap.

Cars of the Comic Books

In the course of researching my post on the Facel Vega Excellence, I came across some scans of European "graphic novels" (comic books) featuring Facel Vegas, posted at the website of the Amicale Facel Vega owners' club. Seeing those got me to wondering what other Lust-worthy cars may be lurking in the back issues at your local comic book store. Turns out there are quite a few.

We'll start with the Hot Wheels comic, which ran for six issues in 1970. As you probably already figured, it was a book with car-centric action-adventure stories and not much else. Though the people were drawn a little "cartoony," the cars themselves, like the Cord 810/812 that made the cover of #5, were rendered realistically, with fanatic attention to detail. This particular cover was drawn by illustrator Alex Toth, who had a long career in comics and animation. Among his many accomplishments, he designed the character of Space Ghost for Hanna Barbera.

As I was writing this post, I remembered actually reading this particular issue of Hot Wheels back when it was published--either one of my playmates had it, or it was one of the comic books the barbershop on Mahoning Avenue had lying around so you could kill time while waiting your turn to get clipped. That was when I first learned of the existence of the legendary "coffin-nose Cords," and it was the beginning of a life-long fascination with those particular cars.