Thirty years ago, the watchword of the auto industry was downsizing. Driven by high oil prices and ever-increasing emission standards, American automakers were forced to dramatically reduce the size and weight of their cars. Today, with spiraling oil prices and concerns about global warming, a new wave of downsizing can’t be far off. However, downsizing can be risky. Customers have been indoctrinated for decades in the idea that bigger is better, and you have to be careful that smaller size isn’t perceived as poorer value. Do it wrong, and you can end up with a sales disaster that could put you out of business. This week, we take a look at an early example of downsizing that succeeded. This is the history of the 1969 Pontiac Grand Prix.
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Stuck in the Middle: The Mid-Engine Porsche 914
Sometimes there’s nothing worse than having an iconic, instantly recognizable product. How do you follow up an icon? Both Volkswagen and Porsche faced that problem in the 1960s. Volkswagen had the Beetle, Porsche the 911, but both companies knew that these highly successful products weren’t going to be enough to sustain them into the next decade. In 1967, they decided to collaborate on a new, affordable sports car that they hoped would expand their market. Unfortunately, they found out the hard way that the public had some very firm ideas about what a VW or a Porsche was supposed to be. This is the story of the 1970–1976 Porsche 914.
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One Hundred from Zero: The 1936–1942 Buick Century
While the Pontiac GTO is often considered the first muscle car, 25 years earlier it was Buick, not Pontiac, that set the pace as America’s leading purveyor of speed and style, offering the fastest production sedan in America: the 1936–1942 Buick Century. This is its story.
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The Unlikely Studebaker: The Birth (and Rebirth) of the Avanti
Once upon a time, a venerable and well-known automaker, realizing the end was nigh, tried desperately to show the public that while they might be down, they were not yet out. They called on the world’s most famous designer and asked him to design them a sports car: something so striking and unusual that buyers would come running back to dealerships just to see it and thus breathe life into a dying business. It failed, but the designer’s sports car rose from the ashes and went on to outlive its parent company by more than 40 years. This is the story of the Studebaker Avanti.
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Getting the Lead Out: The 1970-1981 Chevrolet Camaro and the Rise and Fall of Leaded Gasoline
Pity the second-generation Chevrolet Camaro. Born late — a delivery fraught with complications — it was nearly snuffed out in adolescence. Although it survived to a ripe old age, the second-gen Camaro has never inspired the same nostalgia as its beloved 1967-1969 predecessor, perhaps because it arrived in the fray of one of the most contentious public debates of the 20th century: the battle over automotive emissions and the use of lead as a gasoline additive. This is the story of the 1970-1981 Chevrolet Camaro and the rise and fall of leaded gasoline.
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Dollar-Store Decadence: The Luxurious Ford LTD
The epoch-making success of the Ford Mustang and Thunderbird tends to leave other Ford cars of its era looking like poor relations, but in the 1960s Ford really led the pack when it came to new product development. One of the least-acknowledged — but most lucrative — new concepts was the Ford LTD: Ford’s cut-price luxury car.
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Understanding Gross Versus Net Horsepower Ratings
There are a lot of misunderstandings among car enthusiasts and historians about vintage horsepower ratings. It’s easy to assume from a casual glance at ads or spec sheets that even quite ordinary American family sedans of the sixties were overwhelmingly powerful, with 300 horsepower or more, and yet by 1975, many of those same cars were down to 150 hp or less. When asked the reason for the huge difference, gearheads tend to shake their heads and mutter about emissions controls and anemic, low-octane unleaded gasoline — which is true, but only partly.
What complicates the issue and makes apples-to-apples comparisons difficult is the fact that those pre-smog horsepower ratings were not calculated in the same way as modern engines. “A horsepower is a horsepower, right?” you say. While a horsepower, pre-smog or post, remains 746 watts (or 736, for metric horsepower), the way that output was measured has changed quite a bit. Let’s explain:
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What is a hardtop?
What is a hardtop? Naturally, it connotes the opposite of a soft top or ragtop, and it’s sometimes used simply to describe a closed coupe (what the British would call a fixed-head coupé) but it’s a term that has multiple permutations. Read on:
The Strange Tale of the Buick Special, Buick-Rover V8, and 3800 V6
From the “what tangled webs we weave” department comes this odd tale of how Buick’s efforts to build an economy car in the early 1960s gave birth to the premier British hot rod engine and a V6 that was still powering new GM cars some 45 years after its original demise. This is the story of the 1961–1963 Buick Special and Skylark, the aluminum Buick / Rover V8, and the long-lived GM 3800 V6 engine.
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Romeo and Julietta: The 1954–1958 Alfa Romeo Giulietta
It might be easier to overcome the various stereotypes that pervade the auto industry if they weren’t so often true, something of which Italy’s Alfa Romeo has long served as a case in point. Alfa’s products are generally attractive and compelling to drive, but they often have a well-deserved reputation for being temperamental and undependable and the politics behind their creation have often been the stuff of comic opera. Such was the case of one of the firm’s loveliest creations, a car named for a Shakespearean tragic heroine: the 1954-1958 Alfa Romeo Giulietta.
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Das Boattail: The 1971–1973 Buick Riviera
Bill Mitchell, styling chief of General Motors from 1958 to 1977, presided over quite a few hits and a number of duds in his long career. Some of those designs still spark controversy — few as much as this one. Critics were divided on this design when it first appeared and even today, there’s a love-it-or-hate-it attitude toward it. This week, the history of Buick’s infamous 1971–1973 “boattail Riviera.”
NOTE: This article, originally written in 2007, was revised extensively in November 2010 to correct a number of factual errors.
Mercury Falling: The Mercury Breezeway Sedans
What’s a Mercury? For the past 30 years or so, the Mercury badge has generally meant a re-trimmed Ford product with slightly different styling and features, offered mostly to give Lincoln-Mercury dealers something to keep them alive between Navigator and Town Car sales. Other than the “electric shaver” grille treatment of recent cars (reminiscent of the 1967 Mercury Cougar), there’s little of substance to differentiate a Mercury from its Ford sibling. Throughout Mercury’s roller-coaster 68-year history, however, FoMoCo has made periodic stabs at giving its ill-starred middle-class division a unique product to sell — like the 1963-1968 Mercury Breezeway sedans.
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