Off With Their Headers!

I remember a conversation I had with an older fella back in the Seventies. He claimed that, growing up, he could sit on his front porch with his eyes closed and identify the make of nearly every automobile that passed by, simply from the distinctive sound of its engine and exhaust note. I had no reason to doubt him. I had been a semi-serious motorhead from grade school, and believed I could reliably discern, if not a Chevy from a Pontiac, at least six- from an eight-cylinder-powered car. (And maybe a GM product from a Ford from a Chrysler.) Of course there was no problem blindly identifying the loose-chain flatulence of a VW.

There were a few weirdoes in junior and high school who posted on their bedroom walls photos of foreign “sports” cars. Those cars were OK I guess, but never gained mental prominence among my peer group, certainly in part because we rarely if ever saw them in our small town. (I don’t think I saw a real Ferrari or Maserati until I was in my twenties, when I moved to the Big City.) No, to those of us who wore out our copies of Car Craft, Hot Rod and the JC Whitney Catalog (with its extraordinary line art), there was nothing like Detroit Iron.

The cars we loved had names, not cold Teutonic model numbers. Quien es mas macho? Super Bee or Super Bird? ‘Cuda or Cobra? Charger or Challenger?

What grabbed at my loins were the rough trade twins Horsepower and Torque. 

The modest little 1997 European sports sedan (with just a model number) I now drive to the store for pinot gris comes within a half-blink of the quarter-mile time of a 1969 335-horsepower Cyclone Cobra Jet (Cyclone Cobra Jet! Can you imagine being in the meeting where they decided on that name? They must have been doing flaming shots of pure testosterone) and would quickly lap it on a road track. But back when I had lots more testosterone, I didn’t care one whit about shit like braking and steering. What grabbed at my loins were the rough trade twins Horsepower and Torque.

I clearly remember getting into the passenger seat of a friend’s canary yellow Challenger. It had the optional Hurst shifter with the faux-wooden handgrip. As he released the clutch, I looked over at the instrument cluster. The tachometer needle rushed toward redline. The speedometer showed we should be moving at forty miles per hour or so. But we weren’t. Instead, we were nearly stationary, scraping hundreds of miles of tread off his Wide Ovals, creating an opaque cloud of brilliantly white smoke. The tires didn’t squeal like some whussy girl. Instead was a submissive “whoosh” nearly masked by the roar of air entering three two-barrel carburetors (a “six pack”) and passing through glass-packed mufflers and exiting from dual exhaust tips, each of which could swallow a dozen of those puny chrome fifes that stuck out the back of a Bug.

Mach 1? Hurst/Olds? 

Boss 351 (with “Shaker” hood)? 

We hardly knew ye.

Just as guys like me were beginning to land jobs where we might possibly be able to afford the payments on a used Road Runner, the oil embargo and Earth Day happened. And Detroit did something for which we never forgave them: they stopped making the cars we wanted.

Now, let me clarify something: With few exceptions, Detroit never made really good cars, at least not during the fifties and sixties, the period with which I was obsessed. We knew that a Mustang was just a Falcon with a different body style, and that a Camaro and Firebird were twins. Hood scoops were rarely functional and plastic wheel covers weren’t magnesium. We recognized the hideousness of the tonneau roof and the ridiculousness of stuffing a 426 cubic inch Hemi into what would have otherwise been our parents’ Dodge Satellite. We saw the misaligned body panels of even new cars and the doors on two year-old models already beginning to sag. Didn’t all cars squeak?

But this was the time of planned obsolescence. I knew many successful people who traded-in and bought a new family car each and every year. My high school parking lot was full of Buick, Oldsmobile and Studebaker hand-me-downs.

Most important, Detroit was giving us what we wanted. Big cruisers for the old people. Plain vanilla boxes (Falcons, Novas, Darts, Ambassadors, etc.) for the plain vanilla people and muscle cars for those with unthinking passion.

I don’t remember anyone asking Chevrolet to build the Vega and Chevette or American Motors to bring us the Pacer.

Whether Detroit and Madison Avenue were jointly responsible for creating that market is a separate (very interesting, maybe even important) question. But the reality was: We asked, and we received.

However, come the Seventies, I don’t remember anyone asking Chevrolet to build the Vega and Chevette or American Motors to bring us the Pacer. Or for the Corvette to be emasculated (better it should have been discontinued than to suffer the indignities of the Seventies.) I swear I saw Mercury Marquis (single the same as plural?) and Ford Fairmonts disintegrate before my very eyes. No, I don’t recall market surveys indicating that Americans wanted overweight, underpowered, filigreed, unreliable and just plain ugly cars. Was the best solution to meeting C.A.F.E. standards improving gas mileage or bolting on a bunch of heavy, performance-killing anti-smog devices? Just how disconnected from reality do you have to be to produce an abomination such as the Cadillac Cimarron? The answer: Pretty goddamn disconnected.

And they never woke up. Even with the Japanese and Germans openly pilfering their lunch, a seemingly comatose Detroit continued to produce the cars we never asked for and never wanted. Instead of looking to innovation to provide long-term profitability, they cut quality even further and rode the gravy train of legislation that gave suburban soccer moms driving humongous SUVs tax breaks intended for truck-driving farmers. Why come up with a new car, when it seems all you have to do is put different body styles on the same old chassis and drivetrain? Have you driven a Ford lately? I have, and it feels remarkably similar to my first car, a 1956 Victoria. (Which shouldn’t surprise me, as there’s a likelihood that many of the parts are identical.)

I read an article recently about the 2009 New York Auto Show. The pretty girls hired to add eye candy to the displays were having to field the chides of hecklers. One attendee, in front of a Chrysler electric car display, exclaimed: “Why now? How come you’ve got to nearly go bankrupt before you come out with a car like this?”

Me? I think there have always lonely voices deep within the halls of Chrysler, Ford and GM. Voices that proposed ways to beat back the invaders through clever use of domestic brain- and manufacturing-power. But these voices weren’t in a position to lead. And the leaders never listened.

As far as I’m concerned, the trust is broken and at this point I honestly can’t think of a way that The Big Three can get it back. Maybe they should be combined and reorganized to produce something such as bullet trains. You know, big, heavy things that carry a lot of passengers and go really fast.