BMW has two factory entries in the Hypercar class at this week’s 24 Hours of Le Mans, one of which will be adorned with the art of Julie Mehretu. BMW revealed this M Hybrid V8, its 20th Art Car, at the Centre Pompidou in Paris on May 22nd and subsequently shared it at Concorso d’Eleganza Villa d’Este at Lake Como, Italy later that week. Mehretu met with media at Villa d’Este and talked about her first rolling work of art and how the process gave her a new appreciation for the automotive world.

Mehretu, a New York-based contemporary artist, originally declined BMW’s offer to create the latest Art Car. She was unanimously selected by an independent jury of international museum directors for the role in 2018. During the Covid pandemic lockdown in spring 2020, she reconsidered: I was checking in with a lot of the people that I went to for guidance . . .  I think all of us were doing that around the world to make sense of this time when we [had been] hypermobile. And then the next thing you know, we’re all sheltering in place and under strict quarantine. I was thinking these are the times where you push yourself, and so while we’re all sheltering in place to think about mobility became a really interesting space. I thought, just take this [commission] and open up a new door.

She knew nothing about racing but became a racing fan: I really enjoyed going to the pit stop [at the 2023 Rolex 24 at Daytona] and seeing the numbers of people who work in there that are all communicating in some way or another with the vehicle itself and with the drivers [and realizing] that it is a team sport in that way. Going to Daytona was exhilarating—it was so much fun.

Although the Art Car debuted in May, Mehretu says it will not be done until after it races at the 24 Hours of Le Mans: The car will go through many transformations. Even the drivers you see going in and out of the car will mark up the car, and I made marks in that area thinking about that. There’s all the debris from the [track], the exhaust on the back, the car comes out just looking very different and we’ve discussed leaving it that way—you know, we’ll see what it looks like. If there are too many insects, we might have to do a little bit of hand washing, but we’ll see. I think with all of the [BMW Art] cars, the car has gone through the experience of the painting. The painting has transformed and marked up the car and then the painting—the car—will go through the race as the second major project [the first project being the wrap], and then it will be finished.

Her nephew, a car geek, was instrumental in helping her decide to take the BMW Art Car commission: My brother loves cars, and since my nephew was a child, tiny cars, toy cars, were always in his hands. That would be his meditation: Parking about 100 or 150 different toy cars in different configurations. He’s here with me [in Europe, for the Art Car’s debut] and he’s part of the reason I’ve done this project. He really was like, “please don’t say no, don’t say no. This is one of the things you should do!” And he’s loved it.

How she conceived the BMW Art Car in her studio: I had a scale model [of the BMW M Hybrid V8 race car] in the studio for a long time. I would just push the model around on a cart and it would go in front of different paintings at different times. And I just kept it there while I was working for the whole year. And then, about six months in, I saw this painting in front of it and then just thought of them together—I felt like the car could actually experience the painting. At first, I didn’t know how we were gonna approach that. [My assistant] Jackie Furtado worked with me on the digital sketches that [BMW] gave us, the vector files and the 3D model. And we were able to simulate how the car could go through the painting as a portal.

Mehretu also designed the racing suits and helmets that the three drivers— Sheldon van der Linde (South Africa), Robin Frijns (Netherlands), and René Rast (Germany)—will wear at Le Mans; she is an honorary fourth driver. I worked with another person who used to work at my studio, Minnie, who is now working on her own in fashion and apparel. She came back and we worked together on the driver’s uniforms, or overalls, and then the helmet as well. I know the helmets are very special, so we had a meeting with the drivers on Zoom. Each driver, from the different places that they live, showed their own helmets. And we tried to do something different on each helmet according to who they were.

Mehretu wanted to change the appearance of spare body parts for the race car, but Le Mans regulations prohibited it: One desire I had, and BMW tried really hard to get this to happen, was for the spare parts for the car—I wanted to do them in the ghost of the painting. So, they would be the negative of the car. If a part of the car had to be replaced, it would be replaced by its ghost, so the car would also shift and [change] shape through the race. We couldn’t do that; we tried hard. [It would have made it] part of this active performative painting, but in that sense, it’s ok. I mean, the point is to win, not to be disqualified.

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“I believe it’s important for us to make things our customers can dream of,” said BMW Group global design chief Adrian van Hooydonk last weekend on the shores of Italy’s Lake Como. The occasion was the ritzy Concorso d’Eleganza, a magical little car show on the grounds of the historic Villa d’Este Hotel, and the dream car he was referencing is the BMW Concept Skytop, a gorgeous champagne-colored confection built on the platform of the existing M8 convertible.

Dreams can become realities, particularly when money is no object. BMW, a major presence at the Concorso since it was resurrected in 1999, started introducing design concepts here about a decade ago. In 2022, the 3.0 CSL that debuted at Villa d’Este was so well received by the well-heeled attendees, BMW hand-built 50 of them—to commemorate 50 years of its M division—and had no trouble finding buyers at 750,000 euros (about $800,000) apiece. Van Hooydonk and other BMW officials made it clear that a similar path could be followed for the Concept Skytop.

If BMW, encouraged by informal polling of affluent collectors, indeed decided to pull a few 8-series ragtops from the regular production line at its Dingolfing, Germany, plant and give them the Skytop treatment in a dedicated workshop, deliveries could likely commence in 2025 for about $500,000. “Some people came up to me last night [after the car’s debut],” remarked Van Hooydonk. “They said they definitely want one, and from a technical point of view, it’s very, very feasible.”

He further explained that it’s much easier for BMW to accomplish a very limited production run of a car like the Concept Skytop, something that requires only a few dozen buyers, than to scale up a few thousand examples of a special edition that must be run through the company’s global sales and distribution network. And if the Concept Skytop doesn’t make a lot of money for BMW? He shrugs.

“If you look around here [at the Concorso], you see a lot of fantastic cars,” he said. “And if you dig deeper into their history, often they didn’t sell a lot of them, they were incredibly hard to make, and commercially, they were not very often a success.”

The car is unlikely to be offered officially in the United States, as BMW would be required to submit five examples, or ten percent of likely production, for crash testing. But a keen buyer could potentially import it here under show-and-display regulations, a loophole which, BMW tacitly admits, several buyers of the 3.0 CSL have taken advantage of. 

Although the Skytop is adorned with the slimmest slashes of state-of-the-art LED headlights and taillamps, they are, Van Hooydonk stresses, entirely road-legal and not just styling flourishes. The Skytop’s shark-nose front end nods strongly to BMW tradition, and van Hooydonk cites both the 503 from the 1950s and the Z8, which incredibly is a quarter-century old, as inspirations for his design team. (Consider that the Z8 was itself inspired by the 507 of the late 1950s….making the Skytop a tribute to a tribute, in a fashion.)

In the spirit of the Concorso d’Eleganza, which celebrates the beauty, elegance, and handcraftsmanship of the automotive past, the Concept Skytop is a design and desirability exercise rather than an expression of high performance. Not that anyone will scoff at the twin-turbo 617-hp 4.4-liter V-8 borrowed from the M8 Competition model. BMW artisans wrapped nearly every interior surface with rich, reddish-brown leather, then continued the hides over the roll bar, which contains a power-operated window, and the removable roof panels. As the roll bar structure meets the trunk lid, the leather color continues into the paint, gradually fading away toward the rear of the car. A stunning detail.

Van Hooydonk clearly relishes the opportunity to use the Concorso to introduce cars that might someday appear at similar events. “You feel like this [event] is sort of an island,” he mused during a roundtable discussion with U.S. media. “It’s like it’s not connected to the real world, but for two or three days, it’s okay. Then we go back to solving the world’s problems.” 

Spoken like a man who is one of the principal executives at a carmaker that is, like all carmakers, struggling to plan products for five, ten, and twenty years in the future at a time of technological upheaval and great uncertainly in the global marketplace. “I think, for the brand and also for our customers,” Van Hooydonk continues, “it’s nice if there are some things floating around where they go, ‘I can’t afford it, but it’s nice that the company is doing it.’ So it’s something for [BMW fans] to dream of.”

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When we drive our cars, they collect signs of that use—patina, in collector-car speak. The latest issue of Hagerty Drivers Club magazine, in which this article first appeared, explores the delight found in such imperfect cars. To get all this wonder sent to your home, sign up for the club at this link. To read about everything patina online, click here. 

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Hagerty Drivers Club magazine sat down with member Richard Vaughan, a designer who has 30 years of experience in a variety of automotive product development roles at Ford Motor Company, General Motors, and Rivian, to ponder the question: Will Radwood-era (post-1980) cars develop patina?

Vaughan, a graduate of Detroit’s College for Creative Studies and a lifelong car enthusiast, has written six books on Rolls-Royce, Bentley, and Aston Martin and has been a concours organizer and judge for decades. He currently serves on the Advisory Team for the Detroit Concours as well as on the board of directors of the Rolls-Royce Foundation Museum and the Rolls-Royce Owners’ Club.

Hagerty: Tell us what you think patina means in the classic car hobby.

Vaughan: Patina means worn in as opposed to worn out. It’s like if you buy a Ralph Lauren leather club chair, and over the years it becomes worn in and it looks like you’ve enjoyed it, but it’s still beautiful. That’s different from being worn out. Worn out looks like something you need to throw away and replace.

Cars made before the ’80s have several sensory cues that communicate that they’re worn in: smell, touch, feel. For the interior, leather, fabric, carpet, and wood are probably the four primary materials that create these sensory perceptions. On the exterior, it’s metal and chrome. Acrylic lacquer paint was commonplace from the immediate postwar era through the ’70s. Cars had a lot of paint, and it wasn’t quite as glossy as modern paints. When you polish and polish acrylic lacquer over the years, it gets thinner and thinner, and you get those beautiful areas where you can see that someone has maybe polished through the paint a little bit. It has what I would call a luster. That changes the more you polish it, and the cars can take on a really lovely look of being worn. You can tell somebody’s loved it and they use it.

Radwood cars don’t have it?

Vaughan: You can’t get that patina because the technology just doesn’t allow it. Radwood cars all have urethane, or polyurethane, paint finishes, which is a two-stage paint: base coat, clear coat. When the clear coat fails, it starts peeling off and looks like crap. It never looks worn in; instead, it looks great until it looks bad. You’ll see the paint peeling off the clear coat in sheets.

How will exterior plastic trim age?

Vaughan: Plastics for urethane bumpers and that kind of thing often are painted, but the black-molded-in-color plastics just turn gray and look awful and then you’re trying to put Armor All on it. I mean, if you ever see an old Pontiac Aztek or Chevy Avalanche where half the car is covered in that cladding and it’s really faded—you see these little, like, lines? That’s the mold flow of the liquid plastic as it enters the injection molding tool.

Are there any remedies?

Vaughan: The idea that you could preserve it and it’ll look like it has patina? That is not going to happen. To make the car look good, you’d have to paint the parts, which is kind of weird, as it’s a deviation from the original, but you could paint with a matte finish; it doesn’t have to be a glossy paint. But then it’s not original patina; it’s something else.

So, exterior plastics will not have patina as we know and appreciate patina?

Vaughan: It would be a compromise thing. In the ’80s and into the ’90s carmakers, especially of mass-market cars—this doesn’t apply to a Ferrari or a Bentley—but cars like a Corvette or a Pontiac 6000 STE—they use a lot of PVC—polyvinyl chloride—and a lot of polypropylene, which is the hard material that turns brittle and breaks. In the ’80s, most of that polypropylene, or PP as we call it in the industry, was painted. If you had a beige interior, they would mold the plastics in beige and they would also be painted beige. And, so, two things can happen. You can have the paint starting to separate from, or delaminate from, the substrate, or you can have the plastics getting so brittle that they break and are not repairable. When you’re shopping for a used car from that era, you have to ask: What was the climate where that car lived? If the car came from Texas, every time you take a plastic part off the car, you might as well be sure you have a replacement when you need to put it back on. A car from a place like Seattle where it’s not incredibly hot and there’s not a lot of UV damage, because there’s a lot of cloud cover, might be OK. But eventually time will get all these polypropylene parts.

Is it possible that 25 years from now we collectively might decide that it’s charming when those 1990s plastics turn gray?

Vaughan: I’ve been wrong about a lot of things in life, but I don’t think anybody will value that.

Does that mean that in 2050 we will clearly know the difference between a patina-era and a non-patina-era car?

Vaughan: A lot of it will depend on the car. There may be within a certain car community an appreciation for some aspect of the degradation of the materials, like we do today for cars in the ’50s and ’60s that are original. But it’s going to depend on how those materials were used in a particular vehicle.

Here’s another example: leather, which people value a lot, but which has changed and evolved. If you look at a car from the ’60s or ’70s and into the ’80s, leather seating was literally leather sewn together, which can be repaired. And if it’s a really nice car with a thick hide properly dyed rather than simply sprayed with a topcoat of color, you can get a beautiful patina as the leather wears in and you start to see some of the layers of the material. These leathers didn’t have coatings to prevent moisture from getting in. So you could put a cream on the leather, what we call “hide food.”

But in the ’90s, car companies started laminating the leather to protect it and add softness. The leather is laminated to a foam scrim, or backing, to provide some initial softness when you touch the material. But over time, the foam backing starts to break down and de-laminate. And then the leather seat looks like a sleeping bag. Look at, say, a 2007 Aston Martin V8 Vantage or DB9 or an ’07 Bentley Azure convertible. You peer into the interior and you say: My goodness, these seats look terrible, loose and baggy. It’s because the foam has de-laminated and turned to dust. It’s common across most premium automakers—I have this conversation all the time with the Rolls-Royce community.

What if that coated leather cracks?

Vaughan: Putting hide food on modern leathers is a waste of time and money because the coatings are designed to prevent, to repel, absorption.

The leather that we of a certain generation loved because of the way it looked, felt, and smelled, and its incredible durability? That traditional material is not considered to have a premium haptic anymore. Today’s luxury buyer would find it to be too hard and firm to the touch. That all changed due to the consumer desire for this sensory perception. It’s also worth pointing out that the cost of leather is very high in more than mere dollars. Leather is extremely heavy.

Foam lamination is also used for vinyl. When we say vinyl, what we usually mean in the car industry is a PVC-coated cloth. And when you talk about synthetic leather that you might find in a modern upscale car like a Lucid or Rivian, that typically is polyurethane. In the business, we would always call that “PU” or “PUR” for polyurethane. And the technical term for these treatments, by the way, is polymeric films.

If we say vinyl, that’s internally [inside car companies and suppliers], because we know that the consumer doesn’t like that word, so we don’t use the word vinyl if we’re talking about the higher-end product that’s polyurethane-based, even though it is indeed just vinyl.

Everybody would consider it vinyl, but the industry often draws a distinction between PVC vinyl and PUR by calling PUR “vegan leather”—but they’re both just petroleum-based polymeric films. The main difference is that the PUR feels more like leather.

None of these plasticized interior materials is going to age well?

Vaughan: Well, that’s one benefit of PVC. It looks good and lasts forever. Everybody’s heard of MB-Tex. You can see a 50-year-old Mercedes and the seats look brand new.

Is PVC vinyl a candidate for patina?

Vaughan: No. Patina implies that it has a worn look. This stuff just doesn’t wear; it can last a very, very long time. Now, of course, like everything, there are really cheap versions where you can wear off the topcoat. But, you know, a car that has a really nice PVC vinyl will keep a new look or good condition look for an extremely long time.

You mentioned Corvette earlier. If we’re talking C4 through C8 Corvettes, in 2050, will there be aftermarket replacements for both interior and exterior plastics?

Vaughan: I think the cost of injection-molding tooling is lower and lower all the time, and 3D printing will allow people to replace parts that would have otherwise not been available. But these are going to be like-new spec. There’s no way in 2050 to make a C7 Corvette have patina as we currently perceive patina.

So, back to our earlier thesis, patina may die after 1980 …

Vaughan: I think your thesis is accurate.

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Twenty-five years ago Ford Motor Company split its light-duty and heavy-duty F-Series pickups into two separate platforms and the Super Duty was born. (The name was first used for a Ford pickup engine in 1958.) Since then, the Super Duty has minted money for FoMoCo, exploding in popularity not only among individual customers but particularly in fleets. Ford points to the Super Duty’s massive presence in construction, forestry, utilities, mining, and other industries where heavy-duty pickups and chassis cabs are as common as hard hats.

Neither GM nor Ram come close to Ford’s penetration of these markets. In economic terms, Ford Super Duty makes its own weather, generating more revenue, Ford boasts, than many Fortune 500 companies.

Ford calls the revamped 2023 Super Duty “all-new,” but it’s better described as a refreshed body with a ton of new software stuffed inside it, including a 5G modem. Okay, that’s an oversimplification, because the Super Duty also offers new versions of its existing gasoline and diesel engines, wider availability of off-road hardware, and more convenient bed access thanks to new bumper steps and a kick-down, two-step ladder just ahead of the rear wheels.

The light touch is understandable. Since its last major redesign—for the 2017 model year, when the Super Duty received a stouter frame and the aluminum body panels pioneered by the F-150—Ford’s big, handsome brute has been an extraordinarily capable machine. Blue Oval engineers and product planners obsessively track real-world usage of their cash cow, though, so they found plenty of opportunities to tweak.

On the software side, the Super Duty has new towing tricks, and Ford is making it easier for third-party upfitters—the folks who transform a raw chassis cab into specific work vehicles—to integrate their equipment with the truck’s software suite. And Pro Power Onboard, a new $985 option, provides 2.0 kilowatts of power inside the truck and in the cargo bed.

The exterior styling changes to the Super Duty are so subtle, Ford publicists created a series of short videos with a 2022 Lariat model morphing into a 2023 Lariat, demonstrating that most changes are to grilles, headlamps and taillamps, door handles, and tailgate badging and trim. From the front, the trademark “C-clamp” LED headlamps are more pronounced (LED headlamps are newly available on all trims), and the front view is a more uniformly horizontal stack of five sections: the air dam, topped by the bumper, two wide chrome rectangles, and the leading edge of the new hood stamping, which spills down a bit farther than before. Tidy.

From the side, note the aforementioned kick-down step to access the bed; the cleaner door handle recesses; and the more elongated “F250” badging in the front fender vents. From the rear, the tailgate’s S U P E R D U T Y lettering and blue oval badge are slightly lower.

Heavy-duty trucks are all about towing and payload, of course, and Ford is eager to point out that the Super Duty now can carry as much as 8000 pounds and tow up to 40,000 pounds, at the extreme ends of the mind-boggling specifications chart. During a media event at Ford’s bucolic proving grounds in Romeo, Michigan, some 40 miles north of Detroit, company operatives set up a series of exercises in a parking lot to demonstrate features, all of which rely on cameras, that ease the towing burden.

First off, I tested Pro Trailer Hitch Assist: remove foot from accelerator and hands from the steering wheel, press a button on the instrument panel, and watch the display screen as the truck automatically backs itself up toward trailer, perfectly positioning hitch ball under trailer coupler. Magic!

Next up was an improved version of Pro Trailer Backup Assist: hands off the wheel, twist a knob to reverse the truck and guide trailer, shown on the truck’s display screen, slowly but surely rearward. And finally, Ford had erected a raised platform to replicate a loading dock and demonstrate its new tailgate camera. Flip down the tailgate (power operated on the top three trim levels) and a camera and sensors in the top of it face backward, allowing you to back right up to a loading dock…or to align hitches on 5^th-wheel and gooseneck trailers. It works as advertised; no spotter needed.

As with the outgoing 2022 lineup, the Super Duty cabin can be a work truck, as seen in the XL, which starts at $45,865, and the XLT, at $52,000. The popular mid-trim Lariat model, starting at $63,305, is the sweet spot for many buyers and is the point where the high-tech 12-inch center display screen becomes standard. The upper half of the lineup, abundantly represented by the test vehicles Ford had on hand at Romeo, is comprised of the King Ranch (starting at $77,870), Platinum ($78,760), and Limited ($97,990), all of which offer ascending degrees of leather-lined luxury. The Limited’s quilted leather interior suggests Mercedes-Benz S-class cabins.

That display screen is the all-important driver command center not just for the usual telematics but also for towing applications and customizable settings for upfitters, via the new Ford Pro Upfit Integration System, which digitally connects the truck to aftermarket equipment. For example, a Super Duty with a snowplow on the front and a salt spreader on the rear can be set up so that each piece of equipment is easily programmed by the driver with a few touches of the display screen to, say, stop spreading salt when the vehicle comes to a halt. Upfitters no longer have to reverse-engineer the Ford electrical system; it’s simple plug-and-play.

Specs: 2023 Ford Super Duty

• Price range: $45,865 (XL) to $97,990 (Limited), including destination
• Powertrains: 6.8- and 7.3-liter gas, 6.7-liter regular and high-output turbodiesel, 10-speed automatic transmission
• Output range: 405 to 500 hp, 445 to 1200 lb-ft
• Layout: Two- or four-door body-on-frame pickup truck
• Maximum towing: 40,000 lbs
• Payload:  8000 lbs
• Rivals: Chevrolet Silverado HD, GMC Sierra HD, Ram 2500

The new 6.8-liter gasoline V-8, with 405 hp and 445 lb-ft of torque, is a short-stroke version of the existing 7.8-liter V-8 and a value play for lower trims. The 7.8-liter bumps output to 430 hp/485 lb-ft and is a worthwhile $1705 upgrade for most personal-use buyers. The 6.7-liter PowerStroke diesel, at 475 hp and 1050 lb-ft of torque, is a longtime favorite of the towing crowd and costs $9995. New this year is a high-output version making 500 hp and 1200 lb-ft of torque, made possible by an upgraded fuel system and a stainless steel exhaust manifold to better handle higher operating temperatures. The high-output PowerStroke costs a cool $12,495.

When I wheeled an F-250 Platinum with the new diesel (cued by red “6.7L” fender script) onto the country roads outside the proving grounds, I was immediately struck by the quietness and refinement of the powertrain. The Super Duty cabin is super quiet. The real revelation comes at about 50 mph: hit the go pedal and the acceleration to 80 mph is stunning, the 10-speed automatic transmission ripping smoothly up the gears. For a few seconds, you might think you’re driving a sports car, not a 7000-lb truck riding high above the tarmac. Later, I drove an F-250 Lariat with the bigger gasoline engine and, with no payload or trailer, it also sailed down a two-lane with ease.

Back inside the proving ground, I climbed behind the wheel of a F-350 Crew Cab King Ranch equipped with the high-output PowerStroke. A 36-foot enclosed fifth-wheel trailer loaded with enough ballast to reach 30,000 lbs was attached to the bed. With surprisingly little effort, the long rig ascended steep hills, although there was no forgetting that there was 15 tons of trailer tagging behind. On cue, the cooling fans kicked in. During the downhill portions, the engine braking was effective, reassuringly scrubbing speed.

Finally, it was time to check out the Super Duty’s off-road chops. A new, relatively modest off-road package is available for the entry-level XL trim on F-250 and F-350, offering 33-inch tires, skid plates, and an electronic locking rear differential, but I went straight for a King Ranch with the Tremor off-road package. As before, Tremor includes a front-end lift, a Dana front axle, 35-inch Goodyears, and selectable drive modes. This year, Tremor boasts Trail Turn Assist and newly tuned dampers, and the front and rear camera views, which used to extinguish over 25 mph during off-roading, now stay on at higher speeds. Shades of F-150 Raptor, anyone?

With a few careful applications of throttle and a spotter directing me, the big truck crawled up a steep hill strewn with boulders, each rock coming into view on the center screen as we lurched upward. Then I bounded merrily along rutted trails, up sandy hills, through tight, boggy corners. The Tremor’d truck simply shrugged, as if to say, “is that all you’ve got?” Later, in a muddy field, I pirouetted around a pole thanks to the Trail Turn Assist feature. Dial the steering wheel to the left, the left rear wheel brakes, and you’re pivoting around that braking tire. Fun!

As noted, Ford practically has a cultural anthropology perspective on the Super Duty and its use in the real world, particularly in the trades. What works for the miner, the farmer, the forest service worker, the utility line worker, and the commercial fleet manager, Ford figures, also works for the weekend recreational user who tows a boat or camper trailer, just with additional creature comforts on top.

2023 Ford F-Series Super Duty

Highs: A model and specification for every possible purpose; a remarkable balance between everyday usability and towing and off-road capabilities; beautifully integrated powertrains; an unfailing sense that you are part of the American cultural landscape when you’re behind the wheel.

Lows: Huge, heavy, expensive; diesel fuel isn’t cheap.

Takeaway: If you need, or simply want, the capability of a heavy-duty truck, Ford has perfected the formula.

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Seventy-five years ago, former car salesman Preston T. Tucker was on the verge of changing the automotive world with a “Car of Tomorrow” that challenged not only Detroit but the U.S. government. We chronicle his rise and rapid downfall, examine his legacy, and celebrate the Tucker motorcars that survive. This article first appeared in Hagerty Drivers Club magazine. Click here to subscribe and join the club.

The summer of 1948 should have been a victory lap for Preston Tucker. The Tucker 48 sedan was finally starting to come off the assembly line at a gigantic former airplane engine factory on the South Side of Chicago. He had been riding a wave of tremendous publicity from an adoring public, who were dazzled by the vision of this singular man to put them behind the wheel of something new and different, a better car than the warmed-over versions of prewar designs that Detroit was peddling. His stock offering had been a tremendous success, 44,000 Americans buying into his dream and helping the Tucker Corporation raise some $15 million in development funds.

Tucker was just getting the taste of that success when, on June 6, 1948, Drew Pearson, a well-connected muckraker in Washington, D.C., told listeners of his widely distributed radio show that the Securities and Exchange Commission had launched an investigation into Preston Tucker and his stock plan that would “blow Tucker higher than a kite.” Four days later, Pearson followed up in his national newspaper column, The Washington Merry-Go-Round, declaring that “the ax is falling on Preston Tucker, the revolutionary automobile man, and falling hard.” The War Assets Administration, Pearson gleefully wrote, had denied Tucker’s bid to purchase a steel factory in Cleveland, which the automaker desperately needed to provide sheetmetal for its cars, and that Tucker the man and Tucker the company were also being investigated by the FBI, the SEC, and a U.S. Senate committee.

This was the beginning of the end of the Tucker Corporation, which had been formed only two years earlier, but Preston Tucker, ever the optimist, went on the offensive, continuing to advertise the impending mass production of “the Car of Tomorrow—Today!”

It was not to be. Only 51 cars were produced. Tucker, rather than overthrowing the automotive establishment, became the cautionary tale—worse, a footnote—of what happens to those who try.

But he was clearly onto something. Seventy-five years later, 47 of his 51 cars remain, including car No. 50, photographed here. Looking back, we can now see that the Tucker legend is as much about Preston Tucker the man as it is about Tucker the car.

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Born in rural Michigan in 1903, Preston Thomas Tucker was fascinated with the emerging world of cars and spent much of his childhood hanging around service stations and garages. He was, for a brief stint, an office boy at Cadillac. After graduating from Detroit’s Cass Technical High School (which would later produce another automotive upstart, John DeLorean), he spent his 20s bouncing from job to job, including as a police officer for the Detroit suburb of Lincoln Park. Like so many young men in Detroit at the time, he served on an assembly line, at Ford. But at the age of 22, he landed on his innate skill: selling. First in Detroit and then in Memphis, he hawked Studebakers and Chryslers using on-the-street methods such as setting up a fleet of cars and collaring passersby with sales pitches. By his late 20s, he was a zone manager for Pierce-Arrow in Buffalo, New York.

Later he moved his family to Indianapolis for a job with Packard. Tucker began hanging out at Indianapolis Motor Speedway with Harry Miller, whom he’d known for years. Miller had transformed the Speedway with a series of brilliant, all-conquering engines, but he was not much of a businessman. Tucker’s natural salesmanship and promotional acumen complemented Miller’s engineering skills, and by 1931, when the two floated the idea of a four-wheel-drive race car for Indy, news reports referred to Preston Tucker as Miller’s manager.

The relationship continued to flourish, and the pair even flirted with the notion of taking over Marmon, an Indianapolis-based carmaker that was on the verge of bankruptcy. (A Marmon Wasp won the first Indianapolis 500 race in 1911.) In 1935, Miller and Tucker formed their own company, Miller-Tucker, and Tucker persuaded Henry Ford himself to fund the development of 10 race cars for the 1935 season. The project was a disaster, with Tucker’s initial budget of $25,000 ballooning to $117,000. Only four cars qualified and all DNF’d in the race. The failure was serious enough to cause Henry to forswear racing sponsorship for the rest of his life. For Preston Tucker, it was merely a bump in the road, but the long-standing relationship with the highly regarded Henry Miller was a crucial pedigree for his future endeavors.

By the late 1930s, Tucker and his wife, Vera, had settled in Ypsilanti, Michigan, not far from Detroit, where he established Ypsilanti Machine and Tool. These were comfortable and productive years, the family living in a splendid house on Park Street, with a two-story garage behind that was “bustling with draftsmen,” mechanics, and engineers, according to one report. From this successful but modest base, Preston T. Tucker launched multiple entrepreneurial efforts to help with the war effort, including a rear-engine aircraft, a gun turret for B-17 bombers, and a high-speed combat vehicle. None made it beyond the prototype stage, but his ideas received fair hearings from various branches of the government.

As the war was ending, Tucker hoped to become a carmaker, capitalizing on his visceral understanding of car buyers plus the technical knowledge he had gained in the racing world. A less ambitious man might have been deterred by his lack of money, education, or experience in the auto industry. That industry, by 1948, had firmly evolved into an all-powerful Big Three of General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler, and a few secondary players like Packard and Studebaker, with little room for newcomers. But Preston Tucker would not be thwarted by such conventional concerns.

***

It is worth pausing here to reflect on the scale of Tucker’s ambition. Since Tucker, the only significant new attempts at creating an American automotive brand have been by John Z. DeLorean in the 1970s and, more recently, Elon Musk with Tesla.

Then, as now, it was nearly impossible to start a new automaker from scratch. It simply takes too much start-up capital, not to mention the right combination of brand, marketing, engineering prowess, manufacturing might, and, quite frankly, an undefinable coherence with the zeitgeist.

Musk managed to succeed where Tucker did not. But even Elon recognizes how unlikely that success is and what it can take. When I interviewed him in 2012, as the Model S was just hitting the market, he emphasized the dough he had already burned through. “It’s an extremely capital-intensive industry,” he said. “So, unless [you] have some compelling non-monetary reason to create a car company, as I did, then this is not a good use of capital.”

Tucker ultimately lacked for cash. But non-monetary motivation? He had that in droves.

***

Preston Tucker, like Elon Musk, had no desire to build just a car. He would conceive and construct one that, in his words, “opens a new era in motoring”—a comfortable, efficient, safe, and affordable sedan with technological leaps in suspension, body engineering, and powertrain efficiency.

Tucker brought on George Lawson, an experienced Buick designer, to draw up a sleek sedan. One of the signature elements was to be fenders that turned with the front wheels of the car to illuminate the way through corners. Lawson made a quarter-scale clay model, which was photographed against a background to look realistic enough to be full-size. With photos and drawings in hand, Tucker began his publicity campaign, cozying up to a sympathetic automotive journalist named Charles T. Pearson, who sold an article about Tucker and his proposed car, known as the Tucker Torpedo, to multiple magazines.

Tucker had correctly assessed the mood of the American public—they were starved for new cars after the wartime production shutdown. Throughout 1946, word spread across America of the impending “Car of Tomorrow—Today!” It would feature disc brakes, independent suspension, streamlined styling, and, most notably, a center headlight. And the engine would be in the rear, mated with a new “hydraulic fluid drive” transmission with a torque converter at each rear wheel.

That was the easy part. Raising the capital to manufacture at scale would be a much bigger task. Floyd D. Cerf, a Chicago financier, was enlisted to handle the stock prospectus. “Preston, you are selling yourself,” Cerf advised Tucker. “But we also need a car and a plant.”

Tucker Corporation was officially founded on July 8, 1946. The federal government was sitting on a plant it had built in Chicago for Dodge to build B-29 bomber engines. Now idled, the plant, with its tool shop, foundries, and forging facilities, was ideally located, with ready access to a workforce and close enough to Detroit to tap industry suppliers. The War Assets Administration agreed to lease the plant to the smooth-talking Tucker at favorable terms, with only $25,000 down.

Cerf would seek $20 million in investment as soon as Tucker had a prototype in hand, so speed was of the essence. Alex Tremulis, former styling chief of Auburn Cord Duesenberg, refined the Lawson drawings into a more production-ready design. He also convinced Tucker that the steerable front fenders were unsafe. Tucker gave him 60 days to come up with a prototype, a near impossibility, but Tremulis and his team built one in metal straight from his drawings in 100 days, using the chassis of a junkyard Oldsmobile (there was no time to sculpt a full-size clay model).

An air-cooled, six-cylinder horizontally opposed engine displacing 589 cubic inches, based on each cylinder having a bore and stroke of 5 inches by 5 inches, was cobbled together and installed, with great difficulty, at the rear of the prototype. Tucker claimed the 589’s massive dimensions were recommended to him by Harry Miller when the engine designer was on his deathbed. Whether that truly reflected Miller’s final wishes or Tucker’s love of a great pitch is hard to parse.

The prototype, which became known as the Tin Goose, was unveiled to the public at the Chicago factory on June 19, 1947. The car was rough, with body panels that required hundreds of pounds of lead solder. The front bumper was made of wood, painted black, with metal inlays to give the appearance of chrome. The engine could not easily be started, and the presentation was delayed to the point that the crowd grew restless. Finally, four gowned models sounded a trumpet fanfare, and the curtains were drawn to reveal the Tin Goose.

The crowd went wild. Sure, the car wasn’t ready for the road, but it was real, and it was stunning and looked like no other car of the period. Tucker’s break-neck pace in developing the car was essential to getting distributors and dealers to sign up and investors to write checks.

Not that the SEC, which had issued strong cautions about the unknown company, wanted to make it easy for Tucker or investors. But at no time was Tucker trying to understate the challenges that his fledgling company still faced before mass production could be achieved. “Though the SEC seemed to think its negativity was a necessary counterbalance, the Tucker Corporation’s own assessment was hardly starry-eyed,” wrote Steve Lehto in his superb 2016 book, Preston Tucker and His Battle to Build the Car of Tomorrow. As Lehto relates in detail, Tucker’s prospectus makes clear the “risks and difficulties” in the company’s plans to make a “radically different” car.

The stock prospectus also laid out the technical details of the car: It was to be a four-door, six-passenger vehicle weighing about 3000 pounds, with a 128-inch wheelbase and a selling price of between $1800 and $2000. It would have a 24-volt electrical system rather than the standard 6-volt. Further, the rear-mounted engine would be easily replaced in service, rather than repaired. The prospectus concluded, realistically, with the warning that “Some of the major features representing departures from the conventional automobile have not been tested sufficiently to demonstrate their performance characteristics.”

At the time of the stock offering, Tucker already had 49 distributors and 363 dealerships in the United States, with plans for 100 distributors and 2000 dealerships within two years. By June 1947, the company already had 725 employees.

Preston Tucker decided to take the Tin Goose on a promotional tour to drum up interest in stock sales. This was a delicate balancing act: trotting out a rough prototype (which had to be flown or trucked everywhere) in hotel ballrooms, fairs, and other venues, in a sort of traveling circus—all while engineers, designers, fabricators, and draftsmen frantically developed an actual car back in Chicago. But the roadshow was crucial for implanting the seeds of desire in American consumers. In August 1947, New York’s Museum of Science and Industry displayed the Tin Goose, and as many as 15,000 people per day paid 48 cents to view the Car of Tomorrow. Among the visitors was a man named Carmine Coppola, whose son Francis was with him.

Back in Chicago, a young designer named Philip Egan went to work on interior drawings and concepts. Tucker wanted to emphasize safety. Some of his ideas were, to modern eyes, quite zany: He demanded a “safety compartment” under the dash so a passenger could dive into it in the event of a crash. Yet other features, such as a pop-out windshield, a padded dash, and simple controls within arm’s reach of the driver, were groundbreaking and innovative. There was no time to design and develop a custom steering wheel, but a batch of Lincoln Zephyr steering wheels were sourced from a friend at Ford Motor Company. Seat belts were considered but rejected because it was decided that their mere presence could telegraph to buyers that the car was not safe.

Meanwhile, the 589 engine, despite its enormous displacement, made only 83 horsepower, and its hydraulically actuated valves were not ready for prime time. Preston Tucker set up a skunkworks engineering team back at Ypsilanti Machine and Tool. Among the crew was Preston Tucker Jr., then an engineering student at the nearby University of Michigan. Tucker gave them 90 days to come up with a powertrain, then as now a ridiculously short time frame but a common theme at the Tucker Corporation.

The team evaluated various engine manufacturers, seeking a boxer six-cylinder, and eventually chose a helicopter engine made by Aircooled Motors, formerly Bell Aircraft, of New York. It was known as the Franklin engine, after H.H. Franklin, who had developed a car with an air-cooled engine back in 1902. The crew purchased and tore down four Franklin engines, then rebuilt and re-engineered them for use in the sedan, reconfiguring from air cooling to liquid cooling. Miraculously, the Franklin engine worked so well that the Tucker Corporation purchased Aircooled Motors outright.

There was still the not-insignificant challenge of getting the Franklin’s power to the wheels. The rear location of the engine presented packaging problems for a transmission, and the fluid drive transmission remained more fantasy than reality. The short-term fix was a Cord transmission that had been developed to sit in front of the engine in a front-wheel-drive, front-engine configuration. The team scavenged 22 such Cord gearboxes from junkyards, tore them down, and built 18 transmissions from the parts pile. This was a “pre-selector” gearbox, wherein the driver would operate a delicate lever on the right side of the steering wheel, then depress the clutch, then wait for an orchestra of electromagnets and a vacuum system to shift the gears.

So, with steering wheels from Lincoln, engines from Aircooled Motors, and transmissions from 1930s Cords, the Tucker factory was ready to build its first real car, No. 1001, in time for the first shareholders meeting on March 9, 1948. As with the Tin Goose, the final fittings for No. 1001 came down to the wire, but the mad scramble to develop a powertrain paid off. The Franklin engine produced 166 horsepower and 372 lb-ft of torque.

During this period, dealers and distributors who had signed up with Tucker Corporation were kept abreast of the company’s progress in a series of monthly newsletters called Tucker Topics. These lavishly produced brochures trumpeted Preston Tucker’s executive leadership and the company’s media coverage and made fervent, but often vague, promises about production plans. As noted in the April 1948 issue of Tucker Topics, an assembly line was starting to take shape inside the vast halls of the Chicago factory, and the 52 pieces of stamped sheetmetal required to assemble each car were being positioned. The same issue reprinted an article from the industry trade magazine Automotive News in which the reporter practically genuflected at the altar of Preston Tucker:

“No. 1, of course, is Preston Tucker himself—ebullient, tall, good-looking—he gives the impression of a long knight taking on the giants of the industry. At times he sounds crazy as a loon. After looking over the layout [of the factory], you wonder if maybe he isn’t crazy like a fox.”

Against this backdrop of optimism loomed yet another hurdle: Tucker needed a steady inventory of steel. Fearing that the Detroit makers could easily shut him out of the supply chain, he decided to buy his own steel plant and made a competitive bid for one owned by the War Assets Administration in Granite City, Illinois. Denied that plant, Tucker set his sights on another in Cleveland, which was also being offered by the WAA. Although he was the high bidder, beating out Republic Steel, his bid came to the attention of Senator Homer Ferguson of Michigan, who had previously created obstacles to Tucker getting the Chicago plant and was no friend of the Tucker Corporation. This time, Ferguson went after the WAA itself, accusing it of “gross mismanagement” of government properties. It was clear even then that Ferguson was simply acting to protect the interests of the Detroit Big Three.

On May 28, 1948, the WAA advised Preston Tucker that his bid for the Cleveland facility was “inadequate.” Later, the Cleveland plant would be awarded to Kaiser-Frazer, another fledgling automaker whose co-founder, Henry J. Kaiser, had built Liberty ships for the U.S. Navy. On the same day, Preston Tucker learned that the SEC was launching an investigation into his company.

With time and money running out and a key source of production materiel denied him, Preston T. Tucker was feeling the noose tightening around his neck. Less than two weeks later, the Drew Pearson smear campaign pulled the thread that caused the entire Tucker Corporation tapestry to unravel. Author Lehto succinctly summarized the effect of the negative publicity: “June 6, 1948, marked the end of America’s love affair with Preston Tucker.”

The unraveling was swift. Tucker Corporation stock fell by half, with investors immediately losing some $10 million in value. Banks froze credit, and on June 14, the SEC subpoenaed the Tucker Corporation’s records.

Despite those setbacks, on the factory floor, work continued apace on the first 50 Tucker 48s, and development was underway for an automatic transmission. A prototype called the R-1 was demonstrated to media in Detroit.

With SEC investigators swarming his factory and Ypsilanti Machine and Tool, Tucker went on the offensive, writing an open letter to the automobile industry and publishing it in several national newspapers in mid-June. Without naming Homer Ferguson, Tucker clearly lay the blame at the Michigan senator’s feet:

“Most of the political pressure and investigations we have had to face these last two years can be traced back to one influential individual, who is out to ‘get Tucker.’ If he acts from honest conviction in his efforts to prolong the motorcar shortage and block the introduction of a new and better motorcar, then I hope he will have the courage to tell the public.”

One could view the thinly veiled attack on a powerful senator as foolhardy, or one could view it as the action of a man who was backed into a corner through no malfeasance of his own and who knew that the collective forces of both the American auto industry and its friends in Washington were now fully in league against him. Making his case in the court of public opinion was his last hope to stave off these unwarranted attacks and return to the business of getting the Tucker 48 into production.

There were glimmers of positive media coverage amid that summer’s sea of crushing blows, including an enthusiastic review by the then-dean of auto writers, Tom McCahill. “Tucker is building an automobile! And brother, it’s a real automobile!” McCahill, never one to hold back on the purple prose, effused in the August issue of Mechanix Illustrated. “I want to go on record right here and now as saying that it is the most amazing American car I have seen to date; its performance is out of this world.”

Few would ever experience it. By Thanksgiving 1948, Preston Tucker had idled his plant completely while he looked for a financial savior. Rumors that Howard Hughes was interested in bailing out Tucker were false, but Francis Ford Coppola could not resist a minor Hughes storyline for his 1988 movie, Tucker: The Man and His Dream. Meanwhile, the legal forces being marshaled against Tucker culminated in the announcement on February 14, 1949, that a federal grand jury would begin investigating Tucker.

On June 10, 1949, the grand jury indicted Preston Tucker and seven of his associates on charges of mail fraud, conspiracy, and SEC regulation violations, alleging that the Tucker Corporation had raised $28,000,000 but had spent it all on promotion and building a car while making “false and fraudulent statements.” Tucker, according to the Associated Press, responded, “I have a clear conscience, a marvellous car and the will to fight to success.” He continued, “When this case comes into an open court, I will reveal startling information which will call for an explanation from Detroit and many of our public servants.”

Yet the media piled on, with the influential Collier’s magazine publishing a Tucker takedown on June 25 containing information clearly gleaned from the SEC report, which was supposed to be a sealed document and which Tucker and his attorneys had never seen. Anti-Tucker fever was pitched by the time the federal trial in downtown Chicago began on October 5, 1949. The previous day, a judge had voided the Tucker Corporation’s lease on the Dodge plant. When it rained bad news on Preston Tucker, it poured.

The prosecution called 73 witnesses in a case that dragged on into the new year, but on January 22, 1950, Preston Tucker and the other defendants were found not guilty of all 31 counts. The trial was reenacted in the highest dramatic fashion in the Coppola film, which was highly sympathetic to Preston Tucker, painting him as an automotive David against the Goliaths of Detroit and Washington.

There’s no glossing over the fact that Goliath won. Although Preston Tucker was acquitted of all charges, he was a vanquished man. A bankruptcy court began picking over the remains of the Tucker Corporation, and the physical assets, including the fleet of fully and partially assembled Tucker 48 sedans, were sold at auction in October 1950.

Preston Tucker spent the rest of his life trying to clear his name and floating other automotive production capers, including one in Brazil, but failing health and his lingering reputation scuttled such plans. A heavy smoker, he died of lung cancer in December 1956.

The Tucker factory, which was so huge its kitchen could feed 27,000 people a day, went back to building aircraft engines, under Ford Motor Company, during the Korean War. By 1965, part of the site on Cicero Avenue had been turned into the huge Ford City Mall. Today, the north end of the complex is a Tootsie Roll factory, while the mall, like so many in America, is in decline, with a weedy parking lot encircling a long-closed Sears store.

As for the Tucker cars, Florida hotelier Nick Jenin began collecting them and by 1960 owned a fleet of 10. He took them on tour, charging admission to see “the Fabulous Tuckers.” In the 1970s, a Virginia collector, David Cammack, bought and restored three Tuckers and became a veritable Tucker guru. When he died in 2013, he left his collection of Tucker cars, powertrains, factory blueprints, and other archives to the AACA Museum in Hershey, Pennsylvania.

After the Coppola movie was released in 1988, interest in Tucker cars increased, as did values. (It’s also worth remembering that by this time, upstart Japanese automakers had largely achieved what Tucker had aimed to do four decades earlier—building more innovative cars than the complacent American giants.) Today, Tuckers routinely change hands for more than a million dollars. If you are buying, selling, or restoring a Tucker 48 in modern times, chances are good you’ve crossed paths with Mark Lieberman, a Michigan-based Tucker savant and owner of Nostalgic Motoring Ltd., which specializes in the restoration of Tuckers, Chrysler Turbines, and other low-production treasures. Lieberman has owned six different Tuckers over the years, buying his first, No. 1006, in 1991, which he owned for 15 years. The car photographed here, No. 1050, is his latest and is also the last to be built and the one with the lowest mileage, with only 29 miles on the odometer at the time of our photo shoot in Rochester Hills, Michigan, last November.

“No one had done the research to restore one of these correctly,” Lieberman recalls of his first car. “And although the Tucker movie accelerated interest and value, the Tucker 48 still hadn’t proven to be concours-worthy. I was the first person to restore a Tucker so the concours world and the collector car community would embrace it.” Indeed, a Tucker class appeared at the Pebble Beach Concours in 2018.

Lieberman collaborates with restorer Rob Ida, who was profiled in the November/December 2020 issue of HDC magazine, and Mike and Sean Tucker, twin great-grandsons of Preston, to help interested parties buy, restore, and maintain Tucker 48s. The Tucker twins recall visiting collector David Cammack when they were kids and have drawn heavily on his archival materials to become remanufacturers of Tucker 48 parts such as interior knobs, upholstery, fasteners, weather stripping, hoses, wiring harnesses, and various and sundry other secondary components.

“Our hands-on involvement really started with Tucker No. 44, Howard Kroplick’s car,” Sean Tucker, an industrial engineer, told us. “He loved the fact that the family was involved.” Kroplick bought his Tucker from none other than Lieberman. Stunning in Andante Green paint, it’s known as one of the best Tucker restorations to date and further established that the quartet of the Tucker twins, Lieberman, and Ida is indeed, as Lieberman likes to say, “the Tucker dream team.”

It’s cool when you can engage the knowledgeable great-grandchildren of a carmaker’s founder who, primarily as a passion project to honor their forebear, will ensure your car is as historically accurate as possible. “We’re not millionaires,” Mike and Sean hastened to tell me. “Because [the laborious restoration research] is certainly no way to make a living. Every single one of the cars was different from the others, and we’re very intent on making sure our work is authentic and correct.”

Sean and Mike, whose paternal grandfather, John Tucker, was the youngest of Preston’s five children, are now 42 years old. (Their father, John Jr., was the longtime president of the Tucker Automobile Club of America.) Mike’s three sons, 12, 15, and 18 years of age, “are all very much into what we do,” their father said, and the eldest is being trained in automotive collision at a technical college. If their great-great-grandfather did not live to see his vision vindicated, his heirs are determined to keep the Tucker flame burning. “If you aren’t old enough to have seen the [1988] movie,” Sean said, “the story was kind of dying. We want to get our generation more interested in Tuckers. We want this thing to stay relevant.”

The Tucker Automobile Club of America, in association with the AACA Museum, will celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Tucker 48 the weekend of June 16–18, 2023. The event will draw Tucker family members, Tucker cars and owners, family members of Preston Tucker colleagues, and other marque specialists and enthusiasts to Hershey, Pennsylvania (an easy drive from the NYC, Philly, and Washington metro areas). Of course, there will be a special screening of the Coppola film. See aacamuseum.org for details.

***

Further Reading

Preston Tucker and His Battle to Build the Car of Tomorrow — Steve Lehto

Steve Lehto’s 2016 book is a well-written and comprehensive history of Preston T. Tucker and the short-lived Tucker Corporation. An attorney by trade, Lehto does an especially good job of explaining the months-long legal proceedings that Tucker and his associates endured at the hands of the feds.

Design and Destiny: The Making of the Tucker Automobile — Philip S. Egan

“Preston Tucker was a dreamer; he had courage, conviction and an idea,” Philip Egan penned more than 40 years after he designed the Tucker 48’s interior. Egan was a member of a consulting design firm called Lippincott & Margulies and later was hired directly by Tucker design chief Alex Tremulis. Egan’s account of the frenetic formation and rapid demise of the Tucker Corporation was published in 1989, shortly after the release of the Coppola film.

The Indomitable Tin Goose — Charles T. Pearson

Pearson, the magazine writer whose friendly early articles helped build public awareness of the Tucker motorcar, later served as Tucker’s PR man, and his 1960 book is another fascinating insider’s account. (He is not to be confused with Drew Pearson, the nationally syndicated columnist whose takedown of Preston Tucker was key to the automaker’s demise.)

tuckerclub.org

The website of the Tucker Automobile Club of America has information and photos of each of the Tucker 48 cars, three of which are on permanent display at the AACA Museum.

***

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This amorphous hatchback is likely the most important car debut of 2020. Just as the Model 3 upended the segment for compact luxury sedans once ruled by the BMW 3-series, the Model Y is poised to rewrite the playbook for compact luxury crossovers, which are, like it or not, one of the chief breadwinners of the modern auto industry.

Although the Model Y shares most of its componentry with the Model 3, it enjoys some significant under-the-skin improvements, such as new processor chip that will underpin future autonomous functions and a more efficient aluminum rotor, rather than copper, for the front induction motor. The Model Y’s 75-kilowatt-hour battery pack consists of thousands of cylindrical cells that are cheaper and easier to package than the prismatic cells used by other EV makers. Last but not least, Tesla engineered a new component for the Model Y called the Octovalve, which allows the HVAC system to efficiently heat and cool the cabin without as much drain on battery range (remember: there’s no engine to heat the cabin or spin an AC compressor).

In Long Range trim, like our well-equipped, $63,190 test car, the Model Y’s estimated range is 316 miles, just slightly short of the Model 3’s 322 miles. The standard $50K model provides a 230-mile range. (The promised $40K model was dead on arrival, but Tesla makes vague statements about introducing it sometime in 2021.) Standard dual electric motors provide all-wheel-drive capability. Also baked into the price is Tesla’s Supercharger network, with nearly 1000 locations and 9000 chargers across North America, but charging isn’t free for the Y like it is for the bigger Model S sedan and Model X SUV. Some locations feature 250-kilowatt V3 chargers, which can deliver 158 miles worth of juice in only 15 minutes. It still can’t beat the convenience of just pulling into a gas station, but it’s years ahead of the charging network for any EV competitor.

The Model Y is not a pretty car. The Model 3’s pure lines, when bloated to crossover proportions, become a visual blob. “It’s like shooting a chrome egg,” noted photographer Cameron Neveu. This is where the striking new Polestar 2, from Volvo’s new EV sub-brand, beats Tesla. (It doesn’t, however, beat Tesla in range, with a maximum of only 250 miles.)

There’s no traditional key for the Model Y. You get a credit card-shaped electronic key, which you must press against the door pillar or place just so on the center console. Or, more conveniently, you just use your smartphone and the Tesla app. The door handles themselves are annoying, as they require you to release them on one end, then grasp the other end to actually open the door. Too clever by half.

Depending on your outlook, the Model Y’s cabin is either a sleek, modern space in complete congruence with the state-of-the-art technology of the electric drivetrain hidden beneath, or it’s a grim, built-to-a-price, soullessly clinical environment that has all the charm of a hospital waiting room. We tend to think of it as the latter; one of our editors likened it to a kit car’s interior. Audi changed the luxury-car interior game a quarter-century ago, with painstakingly crafted assemblages of texturally and visually rich materials, and all other luxury makers followed suit. The Model Y feels like a step backward. But for a populace raised on IKEA furniture and less-is-more smart-phone interfaces, the sanitized aesthetic won’t be a deal breaker and may even be welcome.

The cabin is, at least, very bright, thanks to a well-crafted panoramic glass roof that joins beautifully with the windshield. Headroom, at 41 inches in front, is on par with the BMW X3 hybrid and exceeds the Honda CR-V hybrid. The front seats, clad in fake leather, adjust easily and the driving position is ideal. Rear-seat legroom is much improved over the Model 3, and the rear seats recline. A plank of faux wood spans the entire instrument panel, and the climate control vents are hidden behind it, so on a hot summer day, cool air seeps out as if by magic. A neat touch.

You’ve probably heard Tesla owners rhapsodizing about how quick their cars are. They’re not exaggerating. Our Model Y Performance was no exception. Hit the go pedal and you and your passengers are slammed against the seatbacks. Tesla claims a 3.5-second 0-to-60-mph time for the Model Y with Performance pack, which feels about right. You learn to modulate the pedal so your passengers don’t get annoyed. It’s not just off-the-line power, either; the Tesla rockets from 60 to 100 mph, useful for drilling through freeway packs.

The ability to accelerate like you’re headed to the moon is a great parlor trick, especially in an unassuming SUV. What impresses us more, though, is how Tesla has mastered the subtler traits of vehicle dynamics. The Model Y belies its curb weight of up to 4475 pounds with the sort of crisp steering and incredible body control that has made the Model 3 what the BMW 3-series was to enthusiast buyers 20 years ago. The sharp handling is compromised by the harsh ride, though, especially with our test vehicle’s 21-inch wheels.

Regenerative braking, which has two available levels of effort, takes some getting used to. Lift the accelerator, and the car slows, almost as if you have shifted into a low gear. Once you’re accustomed to it, you barely use the traditional brake pedal at all. Tesla’s infamous Autopilot adaptive cruise control system promises to do most of the steering, but it frequently issues alerts for the driver to grasp the wheel. Still, it’s useful, if not noticeably better than similar systems from Mercedes-Benz and Cadillac. 

Tesla’s 15-inch touchscreen, central to the brand’s ethos, controls just about all vehicle functions except the hazard lights. The graphics are too small to read easily when you’re in motion, but the screen responds instantly to your fingertips and doesn’t wash out in bright sunlight. The screen’s ability to display your car’s position relative to its surroundings, relying on the car’s exterior cameras and sensors, is impressive, with quick-acting graphics that represent surrounding vehicles, detailed as pickups, minivans, motorcycles, semis, et cetera. This system allows you to set the car to automatically stop for traffic lights, but we’d leave it off, as it’s annoying. Some decisions are best left to the driver, at least until Tesla perfects that bit of software with one of its common over-the-air updates.

There’s no Android Auto or Apple CarPlay for the big screen—Tesla instead forces you to use its own navigation system and internet radio, although you can log into Spotify. The stereo itself is awesome, and the hands-free dialing function worked flawlessly.

The Tesla Model S and Model 3 revolutionized the luxury car game, turning electric powertrains from oddities into a feature that’s equally compelling to enthusiasts and environmentalists. As a consequence of that success, the Model Y enters a field that will soon be thick with competition. The Polestar 2, Audi e-tron, and Jaguar I-Pace are already on sale, and practically every luxury car maker, from Mercedes Benz to a reborn Hummer, are working on electric SUVs of their own. The Model Y also begs comparison with the forthcoming Ford Mach-E and Volkswagen ID.4.

Nevertheless, it’s safe to say the Model Y will be the luxury SUV to beat—and not just for those set on an EV. By packaging the power and range Teslas have become famous for in the popular small-SUV package, the Model Y will likely win even more electric vehicle converts.

Highs: Class-leading acceleration from any speed, safety features galore, control screen is a techie’s delight, good cargo room between front and rear trunks, Tesla still has the best charging network in the world.

Lows: Anonymous exterior styling, boring interior bordering on cheap, at-home charging remains a challenge for the garage-less; where’s the entry-level, affordable model?

Sum-up: The Model Y will almost certainly be the best-selling Tesla, and the best-selling luxury car, in the world before long.

The post Review: Tesla Model Y Performance appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Cadillac’s V division celebrated its 15th anniversary in 2019. If the high-performance V hardware has been largely successful, and it has, Cadillac’s repositioning away from a desirable brand for generations of Americans who’ve been brought up to think of German automotive performance as the holy grail has been less so.

Which is why it’s bittersweet to be behind the wheel of the Cadillac CT6-V, which we photographed in downtown Detroit not far from the factory in the Motor City hamlet of Hamtramck where the flagship Cadillac sedan is built. But this is not the car’s natural habitat.

The CT6-V is a high-tech, aluminum-intensive sedan hot-rodded with a new, state-of-the-art, Cadillac-exclusive twin-turbocharged V-8 known as the Blackwing. This 4.2-liter DOHC engine—with its twin-scroll turbos stuffed inside the V of the engine—is lovingly hand-built at the Corvette factory in Bowling Green, Kentucky, then installed under the hood of the CT6 in Hamtramck, mated to a 10-speed automatic.

This is Cadillac’s latest salvo in its longstanding attempts to equal the prestige and panache of the hot-dog sedans from Mercedes-Benz, BMW, and Audi. Yet, as you might have heard, the car is basically dead on arrival. Cadillac has moved back to Detroit after its study-abroad years in Manhattan, none the wiser nor more cultured, and is belatedly hurrying crossovers to dealerships like every other automaker clawing for sales. Its finely executed sedans and coupes of the past decade, including the CT6, are drawing little interest. In fact, the CT6, introduced only four years ago with considerable fanfare, is currently slated to end production in early 2020. So this Blackwing-powered V machine, positioned above the 500-hp Platinum trim and 550-hp V-Sport, is essentially a flash in the pan.

A shame, because as we depart Detroit and point north on the interstate toward Traverse City (a resort town that also happens to be the location of Hagerty’s corporate offices), we find a lot to like. The CT6 doesn’t wear its engine on its sleeve the way previous supercharged V-8s in the CTS-V lineup (coupe, sedan, wagon; those were the days!) did. In touring mode, you’ll barely know what the car is capable of, with only muffled sounds reaching the cockpit. Given the quality of the CT6’s body structure and chassis, which of course were engineered for a luxury sedan’s quietness and isolation, this is not a surprise.

Toggle the driving mode switch in the center console to Sport and the display turns white and gray, as if to indicate that it, like the engine, is waking up. Mash the gas and the gearbox downshifts instantly, smoothly, and there’s a phenomenal rush of power. Grasp the shift paddles—big, nicely finished, attached to the steering column—to toggle through the 10-speed transmission, just for fun. Because the gearbox shifts so smoothly and quickly on its own, the paddles are largely extraneous.

Toggle to track mode to hear a satisfying exhaust note thanks to valves in the exhaust exclusive to the CT6-V. (The CT6 Platinum has no exhaust valves but, unlike the CT6-V, is offered with Cadillac’s highly praised Super Cruise, a hands-free, semi-autonomous driver-assist system). Cadillac amplifies the engine sounds through the car’s sound system. “We really worked on the in-cabin sound enhancement,” notes Chad Christensen, the CT6’s lead development engineer, CT6. It was all part of tuning the car to be both luxury grand tourer and sports sedan. “We wanted a quiet, crafted ride in tour mode, and a car that’s capable of tearing up the canyons in Track mode, with Sport mode being in the middle of that,” he says.

The desire for refinement to go along with the performance explains why there’s not a small-block, pushrod V-8 here, as in the old CTS-V. “We wanted a refined, high-tech engine that packages easily,” explains Christensen. “It’s the first time we’ve done a hot-V, reverse-flow design. We had a lot of talent from GM Powertrain working on that.” The mill produces 640 lb-ft of torque and up to 20 psi of boost. Serious hardware, indeed.

As impressive as the Blackwing engine is, if Cadillac really wants the match the Germans, it might have saved all that money from developing a new engine and spent it on the CT6’s interior, which falls far short in materials and execution compared with both the Germans and with Cadillac’s traditional cross-town rival, Lincoln. In fact, although the automotive journalism establishment has spent the past 15 years cheerleading Cadillac’s V efforts, with particular love for the CTS-V wagon with manual gearbox, Lincoln chose not to worry about Nürburgring lap times and instead decided to make fast, pretty vehicles with exquisite interiors. It didn’t hurt that they had a huge head start on crossover development over Cadillac.

All that said, the CT6-V is an alluring vehicle, an opportunity to own something rare and special, although for the privilege you’ll spend close to $100,000. You can take it to any cars-and-coffee event, open the hood to reveal one of the more attractively packaged engines from GM this side of the new mid-engine Corvette, and point out the signed plate from the dedicated engine builder in Bowling Green, just like an AMG Mercedes mill. Because Cadillac is still chasing the Germans, even if it should go back to chasing Lincoln.

The post The CT6-V is Cadillac chasing AMG, when it should be chasing Lincoln appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Thirty years ago today, on November 8, 1989, the Infiniti Motor Company began selling the Q45 sedan at U.S. dealerships. It was a very promising start for Nissan’s new luxury division, which launched at essentially the same time as Toyota’s Lexus. The two Japanese automakers hit the luxury-car establishment in its collective solar plexus, and nothing about luxury cars and how they are sold and serviced would ever be the same. Traditional purveyors of automotive luxury, performance, and prestige, led by the arrogant Mercedes-Benz, were initially dismissive of the upstarts from the Far East. The Lexus LS400, in particular, and the Q45 soon proved that the Japanese were very capable of competing in this arena—at prices that undercut the Germans by tens of thousands of dollars.

Despite the promise of the 1990 Q45, it hasn’t been smooth sailing for Infiniti these past three decades. Hoping to reverse its recent sales slide, the automaker has big plans for its fourth decade ahead, most of them involving electrification. At a media event at Spaceport America in New Mexico last week, Infiniti announced it will unveil five new vehicles over the next three years:

1. QX55, a new crossover built on the existing QX50 platform, with aggressive new styling featuring a severely sloping rear end. Debuting in 2020.
2. QX60 replacement: The three-row crossover is Infiniti’s bestseller. As represented in a CGI preview video, the replacement will be beautifully proportioned, with design cues seemingly borrowed from Range Rover and the Jaguar F-Pace crossover.
3. A flagship sedan that apes the Q Inspiration concept, with a variation of Nissan’s new E-Power drivetrain which Infiniti is loosely calling “gas-generated electric.” 
4. A so-called “neo” sedan following the Qs Inspiration, also with the gas-generated electric setup.
5. A crossover, inspired by the QX Inspiration concept, offered either as a full electric or with gas-generated electric.

Vehicles No. 3-5 will be the first to employ Infiniti’s new “two powertrains, one platform” strategy. This vehicle architecture allows for two variations of “e-AWD”: either a pure electric application, with a large under-floor battery pack powering front and rear motors, creating all-wheel drive; or the gas-generated electric setup, essentially a hybrid system with a smaller battery pack that’s paired with a turbo 1.5-liter three-cylinder version of Nissan’s existing variable-compression gasoline engine. 

In either case, the compact powertrains will allow Infiniti designers to rethink traditional luxury-sedan design principles, with roomier interiors, radically different exterior proportions, and higher seating positions. This new design direction is laid out clearly by the trio of sleek, futuristic “Inspiration” concept cars that Infiniti has unveiled recently.

The gasoline-engine powertrain is not a plug-in hybrid, and Infiniti hastens to point out that the gas-generated electric system is 100-percent electric drive; power from the engine goes not to the wheels but to batteries which power the electric motors, which in turn drive the wheels.

There’s a lot of linguistic sleight-of-hand at work here. Infiniti wants to avoid using the dreaded “hybrid” descriptor; in consumer clinics, the company’s marketers found it to be a dirty word, one associated with commodity Priuses rather than luxury vehicles. In fact, Infiniti is going to great lengths to disguise the gasoline engine’s very existence, with plans to encompass completely both it and the electric motors to quell noise, and to employ what the company calls a “world-first independent mounting system” for the engine. (Which, by the way, Infiniti prefers to call a “gasoline generator.” Tortured language, right?)

Infiniti isn’t ready—or yet able—to go all-electric, so these two sedans are a stopgap measure meant to provide the instant torque and strong acceleration and quietness of an electric car, the attributes that so charm Tesla owners, but with a gasoline engine that extends range up to 500 miles. “Customers will barely be aware of the engine’s existence,” says Eric Rigaux, Infiniti’s global general manager of product strategy and planning. Rigaux describes these vehicles “as a bridge to full electrification, setting the tone for our upcoming zero and ultra-low emission cars.”

So the sales pitch is: Hey, Luxury Car Buyers! You can have all the attributes of an electric car, but with no range anxiety and no need to install a charger in your garage. When you hit the accelerator, you’ll feel like you’re in a Tesla. One catch! You still have to stop at a gas station. Right. 

30 years ago: Infiniti’s promising beginning

From the start, Infiniti took a different path from Lexus. Infiniti gave its Q45 a restrained, sleek, minimalist design, famously with no grille and no interior wood trim, even as it developed a stunning 278-hp, quad-cam V-8 engine and fine-tuned the car’s high-speed handling. The Lexus LS400 more obviously copied the Mercedes-Benz S-Class in styling and refinement but with far superior build quality to anything the Germans were capable of producing at the time. From the beginning, the Q45 was widely known as the enthusiast’s car of the two Japanese flagship sedans, the connoisseur’s choice. A Japanese BMW, if you will. The attentions and obsessions of Nissan’s engineers, tasked in the mid and late 1980s with creating a new luxury division that would offer automobiles that one would want “to take on an endless drive,” bore fruit.

The big Infiniti certainly had lots of DNA from Nissan, which had spent the previous two decades charming Americans with innovative sports cars and sedans like the Z-cars, the Maxima, and even the Pathfinder SUV. That this company which had carved a unique spot in enthusiast hearts would now come forth with a high-performance luxury sedan that eschewed traditional Western thinking in favor of Japanese aesthetics, with an obsessive attention to every detail of design, engineering, and assembly, made all sorts of sense. 

At speed in the first-generation Q45

It made perfect sense to me when I first drove a Q45 in 1990. I’d grown up in a small town in rural Michigan where my idea of a luxury sedan was informed by the big Cadillacs and Lincolns that people who’d “made it” were driving. Having landed an entry-level gig at a national car magazine that year, I was immediately exposed to cars, and ways of thinking about cars, that were utterly foreign to me. One weekend the gods looked favorably upon me, and the keys to a 1990 Q45t landed on my desk. (In truth, all the more senior editors at the magazine must have been out of town.) 

On a cool Sunday morning in late autumn, I was at the wheel of the Q45 on my way to visit my mother when an empty stretch of interstate opened up, far as I could see, the oncoming lanes hidden by forest. I checked my mirrors, sat up straight in the Q45’s smooth leather seat, grasped the steering wheel firmly, and buried my right foot. The 4.5-liter V-8 was clearly working hard but sounded happy in its increasingly frenetic thrum. In a rush I was at 100 mph, and the speedometer needle seemed to dig in for the long haul. One hundred and ten. One hundred and twenty. One hundred twenty-five. One hundred thirty brought me into a new realm, and I would have been happy with that, but that V-8 had more to offer. The Q45 was utterly calm and unflustered. My palms were sweating into the smooth leather of the steering wheel, cut from the same hide as the piece of leather surrounding the gearshift lever.

One hundred forty miles an hour, and then the long, slow, but inexorable climb to 150, which I touched, magically, for a few seconds before letting off on the gas. I’d gone somewhere I’d never gone before, in a car that could comfortably seat four adults and which looked like nothing else on the road. I was hooked, and thereafter forever took an outsize interest in the fortunes, or lack thereof, of the Infiniti Motor Company.

Straying from its mission

It’s easy to recap the history. As groundbreaking as the Q45 was, and as unorthodox as its initial “rocks and trees” advertising campaign, which pointedly showed scenes of nature rather than a car, was, the Q45 remained an oddity. Panicked, Infiniti slapped on a traditional grille in 1993, but the flagship sedan would never be what it had been, and the second generation was so lost in its execution, Infiniti doesn’t even mention it in its official history. 

The slope-back J30 sedan continued to show that Infiniti would beat to a different drummer, at least stylistically, but by the end of the 1990s, when Lexus had gone from strength to strength and introduced the all-conquering RX crossover, Infiniti was lost. 

Back on track

Redemption came in the form of two very different but complementary vehicles, the FX crossover and the G35 sedan and coupe, both in the 2002–03 timeframe. The FX was a game-changer, a high-performance crossover with aggressive, “bionic cheetah” styling, huge, 20-inch wheels, and a distinct sense of purpose. The G35, for its part, brilliantly capitalized on Nissan’s new corporate F/M, for front/midship, rear-wheel-drive platform, which underpinned the resurrected 350Z sports car. I once conducted a comparison test between the G35 coupe and a BMW 3 Series, and the Infiniti came out on top courtesy of its more exciting driving style. 

Recent struggles 

In recent years, though, Infiniti has lost its way. The G35 morphed into the G37, which was still a desirable alternative to the 3 Series, Audi A4, and Mercedes C-Class, but the M35 and M45 sedans, attractive as they were, found no audience. The Q50 sedan which replaced the G37 suffered from poorly tuned electric steering at launch and although it’s a much better sorted vehicle today, along with the Q60 coupe and its hot Red Sport 400 variant, the action for Infiniti has been in crossovers. That is particularly true of the three-row QX60, which launched as the JX35. 

Present and future

If the traditional European and American luxury brands were easy targets for Lexus and Infiniti three decades ago—and they were—it’s far more difficult for a luxury automaker to distinguish itself today. Infiniti, lacking the consistency in product execution that Lexus has enjoyed, struggles mightily to do so. 

Today, brands like Hyundai’s Genesis and Volvo’s Polestar are the upstarts, and Infiniti has been lost in the murky void and utterly failed to cement itself in the collective consumer imagination. That said, Infiniti is not the only automaker struggling to define its electrification strategy, and although the brand’s approach seems unorthodox, who knows? It might turn out to be just the unique selling proposition that the once-vibrant luxury marque needs to lift itself, finally, out of a second-tier rut.

The post Infiniti at 30: The glorious beginning, ignominious present, and hopeful future appeared first on Hagerty Media.

After his stint as Cadillac design chief ended in 1991, Dick Ruzzin was asked to become director of design for GM Europe. Preparing for the move from Detroit to Germany, he inventoried his drawings from his long career at GM Design.

[This article originally ran in Hagerty magazine, the exclusive publication of the Hagerty Drivers Club. For the full, in-the-flesh experience of our world-class magazine—as well other great benefits like roadside assistance and automotive discounts—join HDC today.]

“I had a really bad feeling about leaving my stuff,” Ruzzin recalls about packing up his things. “So my boss, Dave Holls, wrote me a pass, and I took 200 pieces home, about a third of my collection.” Five years later, Ruzzin returned from Europe to become director of design for Chevy. He soon learned the rest of his drawings had been sent to a warehouse in Pontiac, Michigan, that GM had closed while he was in Europe. The other two-thirds of his collection had been thrown away.

To hear this story today is to be dismayed by his loss yet grateful that Ruzzin had a hunch to save a good chunk of his work. We present some of it here, with commentary in Ruzzin’s own words. The drawings are a peek into one man’s work at GM Design in the 1960s and 1970s, when it was the undisputed global design leader.

As you can see, conceptual renderings of future cars are not just product-design drawings; they are themselves pieces of art. Ruzzin’s work is colorful, imaginative, fanciful, and dramatic: “I like Calder and Miró,” Ruzzin says. “I like to do high contrast and bright colors.” His drawings are precise, professional, and full of movement. In them we see ideas and forms that made it to showrooms.

After graduating from Michigan State University in 1959 with a degree in industrial design, Ruzzin joined Fisher Body, the longtime body assembly company for GM, where he worked in the Trim and Hardware Styling Department. From there, he made the big leap to GM as a junior designer in the Oldsmobile Exterior Studio. It was the beginning of a four-decade career in which he worked at all the domestic GM brands except GMC and also at overseas brands including Opel, Vauxhall, Holden, GM do Brasil, and Bitter.

It was the Bill Mitchell era at GM, when the legendary vice president of the Styling Section presided powerfully over a variety of studios and held sway over major product decisions. The Preliminary Design Studio, where Ruzzin worked for years, created concepts for the various GM divisions to consider, and ambitious designers competed with one another in the hope of creating something that would catch the attention of Mitchell—or a division chief—and perhaps see their ideas turned into sheetmetal.

“I liked to have fun with sketches,” Ruzzin says. “I often put glasses on the drivers of the cars in my sketches, because in the 1930s, guys wore divided goggles. The only guy in the building who knew that was Bill Mitchell.”

In 1988, Chuck Jordan, vice president of GM Design, gave Ruzzin the most important assignment of his career: Take over the Cadillac studio and deliver two sensational cars. “If these cars don’t succeed, I was told, the corporation is going to shut Cadillac down,” Ruzzin recalls. The resulting 10th-generation Eldorado and fourth-generation Seville sedan for 1992 were a striking duo that reaped awards and recognition while saving GM’s luxury division and setting it on a path to success that continues today.

The post GM designer Dick Ruzzin sketched the future with imagination and drama appeared first on Hagerty Media.

During Volkswagen’s Los Angeles auto show press conference this week, Volkswagen of America’s new president & CEO Scott Keogh bragged that the VW Group would, globally, have 25 full battery-electric vehicles by 2025. But even as he enthusiastically showed the audience a video of the VW I.D. R electric-powered race car—which set a Pikes Peak record last summer—to illustrate the company’s fierce devotion to the future of electric propulsion, he was gesturing to a mint-condition 1964 Beetle sitting on the edge of the stage and reminiscing about his childhood, when his parents would stuff all five Keogh children into the family Bug. That’s right, seven people in a Bug. Scott and his sister were stuffed into the cargo shelf behind the rear seat.

Thus is the emotional tug of the Beetle on Americans. It’s something that filmmaker Damon Ristau, who made the documentary The Bug: The Life and Times of the People’s Car is very familiar with. His Beetle documentary, which premiered at the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival in 2016 and is now available on Amazon, iTunes, and other streaming platforms, is a loving homage to the greatest automotive cultural icon of the past century.

To mark the end of production of the New Beetle, Volkswagen of America brought Ristau to Los Angeles to explain his passion for all things Volkswagen to a group of media. Ristau also made a documentary about the Microbus (called, appropriately, The Bus) and is now working on a narrative feature film about the life of John Muir, who wrote How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive: A Manual of Step-by-Step Procedures for the Compleat Idiot, the famous how-to book that helped millions of members of the counterculture keep their Bugs on the road and became its own cultural touchstone.

As Ristau sees it, the Beetle is as famous as it is because of a unique confluence of historic, technological, design, political, and cultural events:

• Collective human genius set out to solve a problem (mass affordable personal transport)
• Ferdinand Porsche created a practical, endearing design (others were attempting to do a streamlined people’s car at the time as well, including Hans Ledwinka with his Tatra)
• Brilliant advertising (the famous Doyle Dane Bernbach ads, both print and television, in the USA)
• Countercultural movement embraced the car as a symbol of personal freedom
• Hollywood blockbuster franchise, The Love Bug (Herbie), debuted in 1968 with perfect timing
• Worldwide mass production
• The end of production, particularly of the Type 1 in 2003, grabbed people’s attention

The film is a series of interviews with Beetle uber-fans, collectors, historians, journalists, and celebrity owners such as Ewan McGregor, whose first car as a teenager in Scotland was a lime green Beetle. (The McGregor family photo album pics showing a young Ewan sitting behind the wheel, moussed hair and all, are priceless.)

Ristau splices in lots of vintage footage of Beetles being transported by rail out of factories, TV ads, and film clips. There’s even a picture of a Beetle parked in the midst of the crowds at Woodstock. Volkswagen sold only two Beetles in America in 1949, and Ristau explains how the company was selling millions of them by the end of the 1960s.

More than 21 million Type 1 Beetles were produced through 2003, when the last one rolled off the production line in Mexico. The New Beetle, which launched in 1997, was built alongside the last examples of the Type 1 at the same plant. Of course, only serious Beetle fans call it the Type 1; Ristau points out that 75 countries and cultures have each come up with their own affectionate name for the Beetle. We Americans, of course, call it the Bug. In Germany, they call it the Kafer; in Brazil, the Fusca.

“There’s always an organic connection to the car in the nicknames it’s given, all over the world,” says Andrea Hiott, author of Thinking Small: The Long, Strange Trip of the Volkswagen Beetle. She’s interviewed extensively in the film.

The current Beetle is soon to be dead, and whether there will be a replacement in the near future isn’t clear. The Beetle is a symbol of Volkswagen’s past, though, and the company wants us to think about its electric-vehicle future. Ristau’s not so sure. He grew up in the 1990s, long after the Beetle’s heyday, but he sees a special place for this car, this name, “Beetle,” not just in VW’s past but in its future.

“I bet money that in 20 years there will be a fully autonomous Beetle,” he says, grinning. “They’ll bring it back.”

The post Why the Volkswagen Beetle is still a cultural icon after 80 years appeared first on Hagerty Media.

A hybrid powertrain that pairs a battery pack with a twin-turbo V-6 to produce at least 450 hp and more than 600 lb-ft of torque? Yes, that’s the chief bragging right for the all-new Lincoln Aviator mid-size crossover that debuts this week at the Los Angeles auto show. That’s the official news, anyway.

What’s not official is that Ford’s all-new rear- and all-wheel-drive architecture for the Aviator and the next Ford Explorer (which is itself expected to debut at the Detroit auto show in January), is also likely to underpin the next Mustang, expected in 2021. This vehicle architecture, known internally as the CD6 platform, is part of Ford’s future plan to simplify production and development.

Lincoln officials are mum about other plans for the CD6 platform but acknowledge that it has great flexibility for future Ford and Lincoln applications, which is about all we need to know, especially since Ford has made it clear it wants to shrink its number of vehicle platforms as it phases out all cars in North America except the Mustang in favor of crossovers, SUVs, and pickups. The CD6 platform also accommodates a battery pack under the passenger compartment floor in the Aviator Grand Touring model, lending credence to recent rumors that the next Mustang will also be offered as a hybrid.

In the meantime, when it goes on sale in summer 2019 as a 2020 model, the three-row, six- or seven-passenger Aviator will slot beneath the gargantuan Navigator and above the Nautilus and MKC crossovers in Lincoln’s SUV lineup. Pricing and detailed specs will be announced closer to production, but we’ve seen the new Aviator and it ought to give some of the German and Japanese competition something to worry about. Not to mention Cadillac, which still doesn’t have a midsize three-row crossover SUV, only the big Escalade.

Lincoln design director David Woodhouse says the Aviator’s styling is, big surprise, inspired by aviation, particularly the way the sides of the vehicle taper toward the hatch, like an aerofoil. Lincoln has recently compared its vehicles to ships and planes, and although the analogies are getting tired, the Aviator is indeed a handsome piece of kit. It sits wide and low, the lines are strong but clean, and the aluminum hood (other body panels are steel) wraps handsomely toward the grille. The whole front of the vehicle looks much lower than most mid-size SUVs, providing almost a wagon effect. The Aviator is much more visually appealing than the oversized Navigator, more in the mold of the handsome Nautilus.

Every version of the Aviator comes heavy with performance potential. The base powertrain will be a twin-turbocharged 3.0-liter V-6 making about 400 hp and mated to a 10-speed automatic, with either rear- or all-wheel drive. Lincoln is positioning the Grand Touring model’s hybrid powertrain as a luxury option as much as a performance upgrade, touting its ability to effortlessly whisk the Aviator’s occupants in speedy serenity. We’d rather envision it doing four-wheel burnouts, but to each his own. Combined with standard all-wheel drive, it ought to make the Aviator quite an all-weather express.

“Think of it as a twin-turbo V-8 [powertrain] that gets really good fuel economy,” quips the Aviator’s chief engineer, John Davis, equating the hybrid system to two extra cylinders under the hood. Two special drive modes were developed especially for the Grand Touring: Pure EV, which allows the vehicle to be driven mostly on battery power; and Preserve EV, which allows the owner to save battery power for later, such as when the vehicle is in the city rather than on the freeway.

Inside, the Aviator continues Lincoln’s recent stellar work in cabin design, as seen particularly in the Navigator and Nautilus. A new three-spoke steering wheel, with a dedicated button at the 10 o’clock position for voice commands and a couple of attractive toggle switches for various secondary functions, debuts. The Black Label series brings some particularly fetching leather-and-trim combinations, such as “luggage tan,” a saturated cognac that is reminiscent of a Range Rover interior. The Black Label leather is particularly supple, not the usual overprocessed automotive leather.

Lincoln, unencumbered by a desire to out-do BMW in the dynamics department like Cadillac, sees that its mission is to out-luxury Mercedes and Lexus, so its engineers and product planners are always looking for some new feature to make life easier. The air suspension automatically lowers the vehicle to its lowest setting when the driver approaches (total range of movement is 80mm, or about 3 inches), to ease entry. You can use your smartphone in lieu of a key fob. Two optional Revel stereos, with 14 or 28 speakers, tempt audiophiles. Lincoln even partnered with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra to create custom symphonic chimes, in three levels of intensity, to replace the usual electronic chirps and beeping reminders. The 30-way Perfect Position seats that debuted in the Navigator are also available. And of course there’s a full suite of the latest passive and active safety equipment, such as Evasive Steer Assist, which helps steer the car around an obstacle if a collision cannot be avoided using braking alone.

So, even if you’re not in the market for a luxury three-row crossover, the debut of the Aviator as the first vehicle on Ford’s CD6 platform is notable, as it most likely points the way to the next Mustang. As good as the current Mustang is, the notion of an all-wheel-drive Mustang with a rear-wheel bias and a hybrid battery pack creating upward of 600 lb-ft of torque is a tantalizing thing to contemplate.

The post The 2020 Lincoln Aviator is a 450-hp hot-rod SUV appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Bob Boniface is the son and brother of surgeons, so no one in his big Catholic family from Ohio would have been surprised if he’d gone to medical school. Instead, he went into finance, landing a job in Boston after attending Vanderbilt University, but he soon tired of spreadsheets and realized he wanted to make a career out of his family’s shared passion. Not medicine—automobiles. Bob’s dad, Raymond, is a serious car guy, particularly an Italian-car guy, and all of his kids caught the bug. Even though cars became a lifestyle for most of them and their families, Bob, the youngest of eight children, decided to make cars a vocation.

In 1989, he packed up his Alfa Romeo GTV6 and headed to Detroit to study automotive design at the College for Creative Studies. After graduating, Bob joined Chrysler, the hottest design shop in Detroit at the time, where he helped design the second-generation Dodge Intrepid sedan, the first Jeep Liberty, and the Stow ’n Go fold-into-the-floor seating in Chrysler minivans. During this period—12 years in all—Bob restored a 1960 Alfa Romeo Giulietta Spider his dad had bought for $300 as a parts car. “I repainted it myself in my driveway,” Bob says. “It’s a ball to drive. The steering is sublime.”

Today, the two Alfas are part of a collection of Italian cars—four Alfas, two Ferraris, one Lancia—stuffed into Bob’s two garages. Bob joined GM Design in 2004, and the ATS coupe sitting in his driveway on this warm spring afternoon is a product of his recent stint as head of the Cadillac exterior design studio. We’re on his big back lawn, where he’s artfully arranged his fleet, each car a reflection of his tastes and his sense of product design and mechanical beauty. You might be wondering how a man who makes his living designing American cars has no collectible American iron. When asked whether this has ever been an issue, Bob shrugs. “No one’s ever said anything about it.”

Nor should they, because Detroit designers have looked to Europe, especially Italy, for inspiration since the days when Harley Earl established the Art and Colour Section at GM. Any automotive designer who doesn’t understand the grand traditions of Italian automotive design is akin to a chef who doesn’t appreciate the fundamentals of French cuisine. Bob, who headed the team that designed the 2006 Camaro concept car, speaks passionately on the subject. “Pininfarina understood the ratio of wheels to body,” he says, pointing at the Giulietta. “They always had a wheel-opening shape that was sympathetic to the wheel.”

But it’s not all Italy for Bob, who acknowledges a hankering for an air-cooled Porsche 911. “The Germans have a more cerebral way of designing than the Italians,” he observes, then pivots to the Chinese, who, he says, are making huge strides in their auto industry. Bob is currently the director of exterior design for Global Buick, which is a big player in China, so it’s his job to keep tabs. “The quality of the interiors at this year’s Beijing auto show,” he says, “was amazing. And now many [Western] designers go straight to China out of design school.”

The conversation returns to Italy, and Ferraris, and Alfas. “My father bought a 250 Lusso for $9000! It was the best one in the country. I still think it is the most beautiful Ferrari ever made. It’s painfully pretty.” Bob’s father also bought a 1962 Ferrari 250GTE that was originally owned by actor Peter Sellers. “I still remember the day it showed up at the house, in 1973,” Bob recalls. He was eight years old, so you can imagine the impression this sleek coupe made on him. “My dad drove it to work and occasionally on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. He had it for two years and sold it for $4800 in 1975.”

A few years ago, Bob decided to find the Sellers 250GTE and began asking around in Ferrari circles, but no one knew its whereabouts. In December 2016, he posted on the Ferrari Chat forum and a few weeks later received a message from the car’s owner, Mike Bodine, who lived in Joplin, Missouri.

“Who tipped you off that I was looking for the car?” Bob asked.

“Nobody,” Bodine replied. “I haven’t shown it since the late 1970s. No one knows I have it. I don’t drive it anymore and decided I wanted to sell the car. I joined Ferrari Chat, and there you were.”

Kismet. The two struck a deal, and now the 250GTE, which was originally white but was painted red long ago, is sitting on Bob’s lawn. He opens the hood to reveal a tidy bay and the 3.0-liter V-12, then describes in detail the Rube Goldberg setup for the brake booster, which increases the pressure on the front wheels by acting as a proportioning valve. Bob hasn’t done much to the car other than add new Pirelli Cinturato 185 tires, but he’s girding himself for the inevitable. “A Ferrari is like a free horse,” he jokes. “You’re just getting started.”

Bob’s other Ferrari is a 1988½ 328GTS, which his 23-year-old son occasionally sneaks out of the garage. The young man clearly has good taste, like his father. A 1982 Alfa Spider, mainly used for errands, is the most modest car in the collection but is attractive with its ivory paint over brown interior. A 1991 Lancia Delta HF Integrale 16V, a recent addition, is a touchstone for any car enthusiast Bob’s age (52). “It was the coolest performance car in the world,” he remembers. “Amazing chassis, 0 to 60 in 5.0 seconds. And talk about a design solution! Here’s an econobox. How are you going to integrate all the performance functionality—the flares, the vents? Design is not all about beauty. A lot is about presence. The Integrale has stance.”

Speaking of stance, Bob spent a lot of time getting his 1975 Alfetta to sit just so on its Ronal wheels, endlessly tweaking the torsion bars. “The front one has 36 splines and the rear, 37. It was difficult to fine-tune, but I’m a stickler for ride height,” he says. “This is probably the nicest Alfetta sedan in America,” Bob jokes. “And of all my cars, this one gets the most attention. It’s very nonthreatening.”

But it’s the car of his youth that is the most valuable to Boniface: the 1984 GTV6, modified with a 3.0-liter engine from an Alfa Milano Verde in place of the stock 2.5-liter. “If I had to sell every car but one, I’d keep the GTV6,” he says. “I bought it in October 1988 in Boston for $5400, and it was my daily driver for three years.” A parking permit for the 1990–91 school year at CCS is still visible in the hatch glass, evidence of a young man’s crucial decision to toss aside one life plan for another. Worked out pretty well for him, we’d say.

The article first appeared in Hagerty Drivers Club magazine. Click here to subscribe to our magazine and join the club. 

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While the hoity-toity The Quail: A Motorsports Gathering was taking place on the other side of the Carmel Valley, a much more egalitarian gathering of cars was happening Friday at the Nicklaus-Club Monterey near Laguna Seca racetrack: The 10th annual Legends of the Autobahn.

BMWs dominated the event, as they always do, with a huge flock of 2002s celebrating the 50th anniversary of the seminal sedan. There were plenty of Mercedes-Benzes and a decent smattering of Audis, but no Volkswagens. And, of course, there were no Porsches, as the Porsche Werks reunion split off from Legends a few years ago. The Werks takes place the same day, at another golf course nearby, making it easy for German car fans to get a full fix with a quick drive between the two events.

Legends is the antithesis of many of the stuffy events held during Monterey Car Week: it’s informal, friendly, cheeky, and intimate, with the vibe of a really big Cars and Coffee, but with an excellent PA system. The registration fees to display a car are a fraction of what it costs just to be a spectator at The Quail. (Spectator admission to Legends is free, although you pay for parking.)

This year, former Motor Trend video personality Jason Cammisa was the MC, and his announcements throughout the day and during the awards were both jovial and in-the-know. Cammisa is quick with a lighthearted insult, whether it be directed at an unsuspecting owner or at a car itself, but they’re all in good fun, and it was clear he knew a lot of the owners whom he poked fun at. While the finalists for all the various judging categories were being driven to the awards stage, he called on his encyclopedic knowledge of German cars to spout off esoteric facts and figures—and opinions!—on every car.

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All afternoon on the Sunday of the 2018 Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance, finalists from the various classes the competition crossed the podium stage in front of the Lodge at Pebble Beach. Class winners—including Motor Cars of the Raj, Tuckers, OSCAs, Prewar Preservation, and Packard—were announced, trophies were awarded, and many happy owners drove down the ramp and back onto the green. By 5:00 PM, three cars, each a finalist for the coveted Best in Show trophy, were poised to drive up the ramp—a 1937 Alfa Romeo 8C 2900B; a 1929 Duesenberg J Murphy Town Limousine; and a 1948 Talbot Lago T26 Grand Sport Figoni Fastback Coupe—but only one would be summoned to center stage.

After the crowd quieted and the trumpets blared, concours director Sandra Kasky-Button stepped to the podium, opened the envelope, and, to no one’s surprise, announced that the 1937 Alfa Romeo 8C 2900B Touring Berlinetta would be crowned concours champion. 

Owned by longtime Los Angeles Alfa Romeo collectors David & Ginny Sydorick, the black-over-caramel Alfa Romeo was on the short list for Best in Show according to nearly everyone who’d strolled the concours lawn earlier in the day. The black bombshell hits all the high notes that tend to favor Pebble winners: prewar; European; stunning coachwork (in this instance by Carrozzeria Touring). Racing provenance certainly doesn’t hurt either.

This 8C is—as an ebullient David Sydorick noted after winning—essentially a Grand Prix car under an elegant Touring body. It was a technical tour de force in its day and a watershed design for both Alfa Romeo and Touring, which draped the 8C chassis with stunning Superleggera coachwork for the 1937 Paris Auto Salon. The car ended up in Germany and was brought to the United States in 1956. It was restored in the 1990s and was named Most Elegant Closed Car at the 2001 Pebble Beach Concours, so it already had a Pebble Beach pedigree. 

As yet another Pebble Beach Concours comes to a close, and there’s naught but stray champagne flutes and a dusting of confetti left on the lawn, we take our hats off to the Alfa 8C and its proud owners.

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We’re in a 2019 Chevy Silverado RST Crew Cab with a 5.3-liter V-8 and eight-speed automatic, and the all-new body structure is immediately apparent. There is a oneness between the cab and the bed, and the truck feels solid. Planted to the pavement. The steering effort is just right, and the ride is smooth without being floaty. The interplay between the V-8 and the transmission is exceptional. Hit the gas and the truck surges forward, building speed fluidly, with butter-soft upshifts. Now in its second century of making trucks, Chevy has shown with the new Silverado just how far it has come from its days making simple, humble work vehicles.

The connectedness between driver and truck is created partly by the responsiveness of the drivetrain. You also sit closer to the front of the vehicle than before, thanks to a shallower instrument panel and a shorter distance between the front wheels and the front bumper.  

Later, we drive a Silverado High Country Crew Cab with the 6.2-liter V-8, a $2495 upgrade, and its 10-speed automatic. The big engine dishes out its 420 horsepower and 460 lb-ft of torque—figures unchanged from the last-generation Silverado—in a relaxed but reassuring way, the transmission delivering the V-8’s gobs of go to the axles with calm, one gear handing off to the other as smoothly as sprinters and a baton.

The muffled mechanical sounds seeping into the cabin are as much those of a sport sedan as a pickup truck, and indeed this fully loaded, $65,655 High Country is essentially a high-riding, all-wheel-drive luxury sedan, just one that also happens to have the utility, durability, capability, and desirability of a pickup truck.

Chevy sold its first truck, a far more primitive creation, 100 years ago this past January. To celebrate the centennial, it introduced its new Silverado at the Detroit auto show, presenting the biggest changes to the Chevy (and its GMC Sierra cousin) in two decades. Stung by criticism that its last truck re-do, for the 2014 model year, was staid and too derivative of the 2007–13 models, GM encouraged its designers to think big and boldly for the 2019 Silverado.

Growing evermore

The overall proportions have changed considerably, as the new body structure allowed designers to give the Silverado a shorter hood and a shorter front overhang even while stretching its wheelbase by four inches. Overall length is up about an inch and a half, the driver sits more than an inch higher, and the hood and roofline are both about an inch taller than on 2018 models. Interior volume also increases, with the highest-volume model, the Crew Cab, getting three additional inches of rear-seat legroom.

Cargo volume also increases, with a 63-cubic-foot cargo box for short-bed models, versus 53 cubic feet in the outgoing model. The standard bed rises from 62 to 72 cubic feet; the long bed, from 75 to 89 cubic feet. These improvements were made possible by stamping the wheel well and inner bed body panels separately, rather than as one, thereby shrinking the amount of space between the inner and outer sidewalls while increasing the maximum width of the bed by nearly seven inches.

Leaner and meaner

Even with those increases, the 2019 Silverado weighs an average of 450 pounds less than comparable 2018 models. That’s due to thinner but higher-strength steel in the bed, which itself shaved some 80 pounds; more aluminum in the suspension, which saves another 88 pounds; and aluminum for the tailgate, doors, and hood. “We think we have a more effective way of mixing materials [steel and aluminum] than Ford,” says Chevy marketer Hugh Milne. “We used aluminum on the easy-to-replace body components.”

If the last Silverado’s conservative lines can be attributed to the somber atmosphere at GM at the beginning of this decade, when the company was in the throes of a government-led bankruptcy and reorganization, the 2019 model’s atomic-robot face speaks to a newfound exuberance and a play for younger buyers.

“When my 10-year-old son first saw the Silverado,” recalls Gary Ruiz, a member of the exterior design team, “he said, ‘Dad, that truck looks like it’s for the zombie apocalypse.’ That’s when I knew we had succeeded.” Ruiz also says that the line workers at GM’s plant in Fort Wayne, Indiana, who are usually nonplussed by a model changeover, were astounded by the differences between the new and old trucks when the 2019 Silverados started coming down the line, mixed in with the last examples of the old model.

The lineup

There’s no describing the Silverado’s styling in one blanket statement, because the lineup has expanded from five to eight models, and they differ greatly. At the lower end of the scale, we have what Chevy marketers call the “High Value” trio: The Work Truck, starting at $29,795; the Custom, at $36,095; and the Custom Trail Boss ($40,095, new for 2019; more details below). All three have C H E V R O L E T stenciled into their grille crossbar, with a demure bow-tie badge below. Although a modern look, it’s a nod to the schnozzes of C/K pickups from the 1960s and ’70s.

The upper five trims, which place different versions of the traditional bow-tie badge front-and-center, are divided into two more tiers. The “High Volume” trio starts with the $38,395 LT, which has chrome bumpers and door handles; then moves to the new-for-2019 RST, with body-colored bumpers and door handles, at $40,295. Chevy expects these two trims alone to comprise 50–60 percent of Silverado sales. The LT Trail Boss, also new for 2019, starts at $47,395.

Offered on both Custom and LT trims, the Trail Boss gets you a two-inch suspension lift (better to let the factory do it than the aftermarket, Chevy engineers point out, although your Chevy dealer can also install it on other Silverado models; either way, it’s under warranty) and the Z71 off-road package, which itself has become a GM truck sub-brand and here includes a locking rear differential, skid plates, Rancho shocks (which sound like they should be served with eggs and hot sauce), 18-inch wheels, and Goodyear Duratrac off-road tires.

Trucking on the trail

For the media drive program in Wyoming, Chevy set up an off-road course with logs, boulders, mud, and whoop-de-whoop gulleys where we enjoyed thrashing an LT Trail Boss. On the subject of off-roading, Chevy insists that it has no plans to build an extreme off-road Silverado to compete with the Ford F-150 Raptor. “For us to spend time, money, and energy developing a low-volume Raptor-fighter?” asks marketing man Milne rhetorically. “We will see how the market reacts to the Trail Boss first.”   

At the top of the heap we find two “High Feature” Silverados: the chrome-laden, $44,495 LTZ (which can also be outfitted as a Z71), and the luxurious High Country, which starts at $54,495. A new power-up/down tailgate that’s controlled by the key fob or interior and exterior buttons is optional on LTZ and standard on High Country.

Exterior lighting treatments vary by model, with a mixture of incandescent and LED bulbs, heavy on the latter the farther up the Silverado food chain you go. Designer Ruiz refers to the boomerang-shaped daytime running lamps (DRLs) as “light curtains” in the LTZ and High Country and as “light pipes” in the mid-level models. Whatever you want to call the Silverado’s exterior lights, we imagine it won’t be long before truck aficionados can distinguish the eight models from each other on nighttime roads. At the rear, the 2019 Silverados get C H E V R O L E T stamped into the tailgate, another reference to past glory.

Four-cylinder joins the family

On the powertrain front, Chevy’s first four-cylinder pickup engine, a brand-new 2.7-liter turbocharged inline four paired with an eight-speed automatic, produces 310 hp and 348 lb-ft of torque. It isn’t yet available for test drives but engineers stress that it was developed from the ground up to be a truck engine, meaning it’s not a car engine that was beefed up for truck use. The 2.7-liter’s fuel economy numbers haven’t been released, but figure on a reasonable improvement over the 5.3-liter/6.2-liter V-8 figures of 23/20 mpg highway, respectively.  

For lower trims, the carryover 4.3-liter V-6 with a six-speed gearbox and the 5.3-liter V-8 mated to an eight-speed still feature GM’s Active Fuel Management, which shuts down half the cylinders at a time. But new versions of the 5.3-liter V-8 and the 6.2-liter V-8 have a more advanced system, Dynamic Fuel Management. DFM’s 17 different cylinder-firing patterns react more efficiently to the driver’s torque demand, as perceived by accelerator pressure. These efforts are said to improve city fuel economy by about 1 mpg.

With the Max Towing Package and the 5.3-liter V-8, the Silverado’s tow rating is up 400 pounds from 2018, at 11,600 pounds. The 6.2-liter V-8, which is now exclusively mated with four-wheel drive, has a maximum tow rating of 12,200 pounds, up 500 pounds. A 5.3-liter Silverado made easy work of towing a 6000-pound enclosed trailer through the Snake River Canyon near Alpine, Wyoming, at an elevation of about 6000–7000 feet. The Max Towing Package’s quartet of cameras—one on each side view mirror, one on the tailgate, and one mounted on the back of your trailer—make it easy to back up to and hitch your load and then keep your eyes on your entire rig through the in-cabin screen. It’s all part of a trailering app that’s optional on the LTZ and standard on High Country.

Now that we’ve had our first chance behind the wheel, we can say that the Silverado is definitely worthy of carrying Chevy into its second century of truck-making. Production of the new models just started, and they’re trickling into dealerships. There’s more to come, including not only the 2.7-liter four-cylinder engine but also a new Duramax 3.0-liter inline six-cylinder turbodiesel engine mated to the 10-speed automatic, in early 2019.

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On a Saturday evening last august, I stepped outside my hotel on Cannery Row in Monterey, California. Finn Horsley and his wife, Brennen Jensen, were standing curbside next to their exquisite 1964 21-window Microbus, my ride to a Volkswagen dinner some 15 miles away. During the drive up Highway 68 out of Monterey, I leaned over the front-row seatback to hear more about how Finn, who runs a dental laboratory, and Brennen, an environmental consultant, ended up as chauffeurs and tour guides during the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance weekend for a group of Volkswagen executives and media folks from Germany and the U.S.

Turns out the world of beautifully restored old Volkswagens that reside within driving distance of the Monterey Peninsula has only a couple degrees of separation. Finn’s VW mechanic, Jim Fowler of Get Hot Bug Shop, worked with noted Monterey VW collector Rick Clark to assemble a fleet of buses to shuttle Volkswagen’s corporate guests. The fleet was also intended to draw attention to VW’s official announcement that it will, finally, make a modern version of the Microbus, an electric-powered vehicle based on the I.D. Buzz concept car. Finn and Brennen happily signed up to share their bus on their home turf, figuring they’d have a good time and maybe gain admission to some of the swank car events happening around the peninsula.

Finn enthusiastically relayed this story to me over his shoulder while he flogged the 1.5-liter air-cooled four to get us up and over the 1261-foot Laureles Grade. I was astonished to learn their bus was rehabbed 14 years ago. The restoration, done by ISP West, a Los Angeles shop specializing in Volkswagens, has held up well. Finn bought the bus in 2005 from the parent company of Mentos, which had used it for a 10-city tailgate tour during the 2003 college football season. He hit the jackpot, scooping it up, sans the Mentos-branded shrink wrap from the tour, for only $20,000. “I bought it sight unseen,” Finn recalled, “but I had it appraised by a gentleman, and he said, ‘Oh, this is an amazing find.’ ”

All seven of the buses in the courtesy fleet were fine specimens, but Finn’s took pride of place next to the I.D. Buzz during Volkswagen’s press conference on the concours ramp at Pebble Beach. With that exposure, Finn said, “the pedigree of the bus has gone through the roof. VW says it might have other uses for it.”

This bus is just one member of Finn and Brennen’s diverse vehicular family. Finn recently replaced his 1988 Porsche 911 Carrera, which he’d owned for 11 years, with a 2017 Ford F-150 Raptor. “It’s black, same as the Carrera!” Finn grinned. “I just turned my Porsche into a truck.” Brennen rolled her eyes. “I kid Finn that he had his midlife crisis early, in his 20s, and bought the 911,” she said. “Now he’s got the Raptor.”

Finn was quick to defend himself. “I just felt like the Raptor was so cool. It has a 10-speed transmission! I love it so much. Hey, I plant trees, I recycle!”

Brennen recently turned in her leased Fiat 500e and is wait-listed for a Tesla Model 3. “I have to offset his Raptor’s carbon footprint with my electrics,” she said, deadpan. She also owns a 2002 Suzuki SV650S; Finn’s preferred two-wheeler is a 2007 Ducati 1098. The couple share an Aprilia RS250 two-stroke and a 2010 Ural, a Russian-built sidecar motorcycle with a custom Sahara Sand paint job. Finn sometimes uses the Ural to make deliveries from his dental lab to dentists’ offices around Monterey. “What’s great about the Ural is that it’s flat, it doesn’t lean,” said Finn. “And the sidecar is like having a trunk.”

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Chevy has expanded its lineup of compact Colorado pickups with a juicy off-roader called the ZR2. This highly specialized model is far more than a trim package of decals and big tires. It’s a real-deal, rock-climbing champ and, as such, an outlier in the Chevy stable.

The ZR2 uses the stock Colorado frame and suspension pickup points but rides two inches higher and has a track that’s 3.5 inches wider. The front bumper’s chamfered corners allow the Goodyear Wrangler DuraTrac tires to nose into tight off-road situations, and an aluminum skid plate protects the radiator and the engine oil pan. Suspension reinforcements include cast iron control arms, but “what sets the ZR2 apart from any other off-road truck,” claims Chevy ride-and-handling engineer Brad Schreiber, “is the damper system.”

Squat down, peer over the Goodyears and into the ZR2’s wheel wells, and there they are in their gold-toned aluminum beauty: Multimatic DSSV dampers, similar to the ones used by Le Mans endurance race cars. “[During development] we set thresholds for ‘absorbed power,’ ” explains Schreiber, “which is how much energy and acceleration are being transmitted to the driver, and how good the chassis is at absorbing it.” He also notes that the compactly designed Multimatics “reject heat like mad.”

For a truck that can tiptoe carefully over boulders, blast through sand, and clamber up steep muddy hills with ease, the ZR2 still drives great on-road. It feels like a truck but is smooth and predictable. The 308-hp, 3.6-liter V-6 with eight-speed automatic that’s optional on the regular Colorado is standard here, and the 2.8-liter four-cylinder turbo-diesel with six-speed automatic, optional on the standard Colorado, is also available. With it, the ZR2 is the only off-road diesel compact pickup sold in America. Like we said, an outlier. We like outliers.

We also like the ZR2’s ability to let you kick up your heels. Select the off-road mode, lock the rear diff with a rocker switch on the center console, dial in rear-wheel drive, and you can do donuts, sending roostertails of mud (or snow) flying. Try that in the family Silverado.

At a starting price of $40,995, the ZR2 is some 20 grand more expensive than a base Colorado, but its specialized engineering and equipment easily justify the cost. GM has not traditionally been a place for people seeking off-road trucks, but the Colorado ZR2 changes that. It also, we predict, establishes a solid foundation for an off-road variant of the next-generation full-size Silverado that will gun for the Ford F-150 Raptor. Maybe you’ll be doing donuts in a Silverado after all.

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There was a time—specifically four years ago when General Motors introduced a new generation of mid-size Chevy Colorado and GMC Canyon pickups—when the people at Ford insisted they didn’t need a mid-size pickup. The F-150, with its many variants, covers the pickup needs of all buyers, they claimed. There’s no market for mid-size pickups, they claimed. At least no market in which we can make money.

Today, the people at Ford are singing a different tune, having watched the Colorado and Canyon find many buyers and add many dollars to GM’s coffers. The success of the latest Toyota Tacoma surely got their attention, also. So, at this week’s North American International Auto Show in Detroit, Ford unveiled the 2019 Ranger, which goes into production at a suburban-Detroit plant at the end of this year. If you don’t care about mid-size pickup trucks, you might care that the Ranger will, in 2020, also spawn a modern Bronco. Cue applause.

The Ranger disappeared from Ford’s U.S. lineup years ago but is still sold in many other markets. That truck, originally designed at Ford’s Australia studios, forms the basis for the upcoming North American edition, which gets a fully boxed ladder frame with six crossmembers; a new powertrain; and a suite of available off-road equipment. For us Yanks, Ford is understandably positioning the Ranger as the little brother of the F-150 and, in fact, claims it subjected the Ranger to the same durability testing as the F-series.

The Ranger’s design chief, Max Wolff, is a Detroit-based Aussie who’s a veteran of Holden (GM Australia), Cadillac, and Lincoln studios. He and his Ford design team wrapped the Ranger in natty new sheet metal featuring an aluminum hood with dual power bulges, muscular wheel arches, and big, bold letters spelling RANGER stamped into the tailgate.

“You need some visual strength in a hood,” Wolff says, admitting that the bulges are for looks, not to accommodate some beastly big engine underneath. He also points out the wide, frame-mounted steel bumpers and the more steeply raked windshield as signature elements that give the new Ranger a strong stance. One of the launch colors, Saber Orange, is new for North America. “We have some history with this family of color,” Wolff notes, “with the Ranger Wildtrak sold in Australia.” Down under, it’s called Pride Orange. Whatever, it’s a nice break from black, gray, and blue.

The sole engine at launch, a 2.3-liter EcoBoost (turbocharged and direct-injected) four-cylinder, will be paired with Ford’s new 10-speed automatic transmission that was co-developed with GM. The 2.3L EcoBoost in the Ford Mustang makes 310 horsepower and 350 lb-ft of torque, and Ford promises that, in the Ranger, it will deliver best-in-class torque. The Chevy Colorado has 308 lb-ft from its 3.6-liter V-6 and 369 lb-ft from its 2.8-liter turbo-diesel, so we’d guess the Ranger will produce about 375 lb-ft. Beastly. Ford has previously mentioned their plans to sell 40 hybrid or electric models by 2020, so expect Ranger to follow suit with a hybrid powertrain in the coming years.

Remember the bare-bones, regular-cab Ranger? You still see tired but honest examples on the road today, but you won’t see anything like them in 2019. Like most pickups, the new Ranger will start with an extended cab, called SuperCab, and there will also be a SuperCrew with four full-size doors. And like most modern trucks the Ranger will have a cabin that’s as luxurious and well equipped as anything in a comparably priced car, especially in top Lariat trim.

Ford says that full-size truck owners use their trucks for work, whereas people buy mid-size trucks for fun, especially the off-road variety. The Terrain Management System in the optional FX4 off-road package is inspired by the one in the F-150 Raptor and includes four drive modes: normal; grass, gravel, and snow; mud and ruts; and sand. Ford also introduces an off-road form of cruise control called Trail Control that maintains a very low speed to allow drivers to concentrate on steering. Both systems are similar to existing setups in the Toyota Tacoma. The FX4 also gets off-road shocks, a steel front bash plate mounted to the frame, skid plates, and all-terrain tires. Approach and departure angles, we’re told, will be “very competitive.”

So, Ford isn’t blazing new ground here, but the Ranger looks like it will be a worthy little brother to the F-150, and its off-roading hardware bodes well for the Bronco, which is the mid-size, body-on-frame Ford that we are really excited about.

Be patient. You have two years to wait.

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The day began at 4:30 a.m., with the Hagerty Dawn Patrol, distributing free coffee and donuts to early arrivals at the 2017 Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance. Twelve hours later, the fog had lifted, the sun was out, and the field of ridiculously beautiful cars— including a staggering collection of road and racing Ferraris that marked the 70^th anniversary of the brand—was down to three finalists:

1957 Ferrari 315 S Scaglietti Spider—Owned by John and Gwen McCaw of Seattle, this is the only remaining example of two 315 S sports racers that Ferrari built to take on the Jaguar D-type. Piero Taruffi drove it to victory in the final Mille Miglia in 1957. “This Ferrari is pure sports racer,” said Hagerty Historian Jonathan A. Stein. “It screams speed and is aggressively good looking, but it has two marks against it: it’s postwar and it isn’t elegant.” But in Ferrari’s 70^th anniversary year, it was great to see a car from Maranello among the finalists.

1932 Packard 906 Twin Six Dietrich Convertible Victoria—Owned by Chip Connor of Reno, Nev., this Packard is a beautiful restoration, but the shape is quite traditional and nothing really stands out to make it rise above the other finalists. Still, score one for Team America.

1929 Mercedes-Benz S Barker Tourer—Owned by Bruce McCaw, older brother of Ferrari-owning John, this blue and silver boattail racer is simply stunning. Everything about it suggests power, speed, and beauty, always a winning combination.

The winner was indeed the supercharged Mercedes-Benz. With gorgeous tourer coachwork by Barker of London, it’s the sort of prewar car that even people who dismiss prewar cars can love. It was delivered to Mercedes-Benz of London for Earl Howe, a well-known British racer and co-founder of the British Racing Drivers’ Club. Howe, driving an Alfa, won Le Mans in 1931. Bruce McCaw brought the car to Pebble Beach several years ago, unrestored, and the reaction it got convinced him it was worthy of a full restoration, which was completed by Steve Babinsky.

“I’ve been to Pebble Beach 20 times, but not often with cars serious enough to win the major awards,” McCaw said after the concours. “I don’t think we ever entered a car that had potential for Best of Show, and when I looked at today’s field, well, everyone was eligible. This is a special car, and I’m happy it’s being recognized. Lord Howe gets the credit, not me. We just put the car back to what it was when he had it, as best we could.”

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Today, at the Lodge at Pebble Beach during Monterey Car Week, Volkswagen officially announced the return of the Microbus to America. The all-electric, modern-day Bus will be based on the I.D. Buzz concept vehicle, which VW displayed at this year’s Detroit auto show, and it will be electric-powered, part of a series of all-new electric vehicles VW will sell in America beginning in 2021.

Yes, the most egalitarian of all people movers was announced on the same lawn where the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance, with its hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of rare exotic and collector cars, is held. If this seems ironic, Dr. Herbert Diess, global head of the Volkswagen brand, points out that “Pebble Beach is so important to the emotional part of our industry, and the Microbus is the most emotional car, the most iconic car, Volkswagen has ever built.”

The modern Microbus will be built on Volkswagen’s new global electric platform, called MEB, for “Modular Electric Baukasten,” with Baukasten meaning, simply, toolbox. “Our previous attempts to reinvent the Microbus [for America] never worked out due to platform issues,” explains VW’s North American chief, Hinrich Woebcken. “The beauty of the I.D. Buzz is that the vehicle is scalable. The interior can be stretched as we wish, as we aren’t having to make room for an engine and transmission.” Hence the production version of the Microbus, as yet unnamed, might have slightly smaller exterior dimensions than the I.D. Buzz concept.

But the electric Bus will not be the first electric vehicle that Volkswagen will offer Americans. VW will kick off MEB-platform production with a vehicle for China in 2020, followed by at least one electric car for America in 2021, most likely a small crossover. The Bus will debut in 2022 as a capstone for Volkswagen’s initial efforts to transform its fleet to electric propulsion, a crucial goal for the automaker as it tries to put its diesel powertrain scandal behind it.

Ahead of today’s announcement, Volkswagen assembled a fleet of T1- and T2-generation Microbuses that drove in convoy from Cannery Row in Monterey, through the village of Pacific Grove, along the famed Seventeen Mile Drive, and onto the eighteenth green of the Pebble Beach golf course, and the Volkswagens got more attention than any priceless Ferrari ever would. Everybody loves the Microbus, even if everyone doesn’t love Volkswagen.

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What’s going on here? The Concours d’Lemons is supposed to be a ragtag collection of automotive excrement, the antithesis of a Concours d’Elegance and its exquisitely perfect vintage and exotic cars. Walking through a Concours d’Lemons field should make you want to retch, right? That’s what we thought.

But at this year’s Michigan event, held in conjunction with the Concours of America, we saw more vehicles that we’d like to take home with us than we’d like to see towed to the scrapyard. Chalk it up to evolving tastes and desires, we suppose. The 1970s and ’80s metal that looked like beater trash just a few years ago is starting to hold new appeal.

1976 AMC Pacer

“It’s a Pacer,” Gilbert J. Pepitone says of his 1976 AMC, “so by default, it qualifies as a Lemon.” Truth is, Pepitone’s Pacer is in fine shape, and he’s made it more livable by installing cruise control, XM radio, a CD player, and power windows and locks. “Everything that this car needed in order to be usable, I’ve done to it,” says the retired engineer, resplendent on the Concours green in his vintage AMC windbreaker. “I drive it all over. I just came from New York, and I drove it there from my home in Florida.” Pepitone proudly scored the Worst in Show Trophy, but this car doesn’t deserve that description.

Audi 50 GL

Bret Scott imported his tiny old Audi from Serbia after finding it for sale on a UK used-car website. The license plate—IN HW 86—signifies Ingolstadt, the German city where Audi is based; Hartmut Warkuss, former Audi design chief; and 86, the internal Volkswagen/Audi designation for the platform upon which the 50, Audi’s version of the VW Polo, was built. “I drove it back to Michigan from the port in Baltimore very, very carefully,” Scott says, “as it was riding on 1980s tires.” Warkuss did great work; check out the crisp line where the hood meets the grille.

1981 DeLorean DMC-12

When asked how his pristine DMC-12 qualifies as a Lemon, Joe Vitale chuckled. “In some circles, the DMC-12 is considered an exotic dream car. For some people, especially people who are into the whole Back to the Future thing, it’s like meeting your hero. In other circles, it’s considered a lemon.” Vitale bought his DeLorean a decade ago and is only the second owner. He cleans it with stainless steel polish, the kind “like you’d use on a refrigerator.” But the car is no appliance. “The joy I get from my DMC-12, is sharing the car, seeing it through the eyes of someone who’s never seen one before.”

1975 Cadillac DeVille

“My parents had a 1973 Cadillac when I was growing up in Philadelphia,” Scott Werst says, “and I wanted something from the same era.” His mandarin orange four-door hardtop, with medium saddle Maharajah cloth interior, certainly speaks to mid-1970s ideals of luxury and comfort, at least as interpreted by General Motors Design. Werst, who now lives in Ann Arbor, Mich., said the baroque pile lasted 42 years because it spent most of its life in Texas, where it sat unused for 15 years. He is the fourth owner of the Sedan de Ville, which is decked out in brocade upholstery and new-for-1975 hinged interior door pulls. Werst points out the half-height B-pillars and laughs. “When you close the doors, the entire body of the car shakes! I wouldn’t want to flip this thing!”

1966 Panhard 24BT

Ken Nelson planned to bring his 1962 Humber Super Snipe, a British curiosity, to the Concours d’Lemons, but it broke down on the way, so he returned home and selected another weird old foreign car from his garage. After parking his 1966 Panhard 24 BT, he lifted the hood and exposed the air-cooled, two-cylinder Hemi—single carburetor sitting majestically on top, perfectly centered in the engine bay. “It makes 60 horsepower,” Nelson says. “Good for 100 mph.” Nelson’s Panhard was one of the last of the breed, as Citroen bought the automaker, a competitor, only to put it out of business in 1967.

1965 Chevrolet Corvair

There were at least a dozen Corvairs at this Concours d’Lemons, and many of them were in great condition, but Pete Kohler’s was not among them. His is truly a Lemon. Both the windshield and rear window are sealed into their frames by blue “flying pig” tape. The rear seat is missing, there is a tow strap in the passenger footwell, and the trailer that hauled the Corvair was conveniently parked nearby.

1989 Honda Acty

This tiny blue Honda, a Japanese Kei truck with the happy H logo on its grille, looks more like an outcast from the Island of Misfit Toys than a Lemon. Utility vehicles of this ilk are a common sight in Japan, as they’re small enough to negotiate the narrow streets and alleys of Japanese cities. Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA) designer Adam Hubers, who worked on the exteriors of the ACR Viper, the SRT Dodge Durango, and the new Dodge Demon, was attracted to the outright “otherness” of the little Honda. He plans to replace its 550-cc three-cylinder engine with the engine from a 2008 Honda CBR 1000RR. “That’s going to take power from 42 horsepower to 180 horsepower,” he says with a grin. “In a vehicle that weighs 1,400 pounds.” We approve.

1984 Oldsmobile Cutlass Calais Hurst

Mary Beth Tacy and her husband, Peter, clearly understand the ethos of Concours d’Lemons. Their tired old Olds looks like something they dragged out of a junkyard. No wonder it won (lost?) the American Class. “We bought it two years ago and almost immediately had to replace the entire powertrain,” Mary Beth admits. “And, of course, it has no air conditioning. But we’ve driven it a lot because it drives really well.” If you say so, Mary Beth. The couple also owns two Saabs and a 1927 Packard roadster. We’d better not see any of those cars next year.

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Wherever money and car collectors converge in the United States, fancy-car shows—known as Concours d’Elegance—are sure to pop up. Each concours attempts to replicate at least a fraction of the prestige and panache of the famed granddaddy of them all, the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance held each August on California’s Monterey Peninsula. The Concours d’Elegance of America, held at the Inn at St. John’s in Plymouth, Mich., is not one of those young upstarts.

Now in its 39th year, the concours (formerly known as the Meadow Brook Hall Concours d’Elegance) has been the Golden Globes to Pebble’s Oscars for nearly four decades, serving up a fine blend of cars, collectors, fans, and related activities in the shadow of America’s automotive hometown a few weeks ahead of the California event. The Concours of America sits high on the list of most important concours in North America, along with Amelia Island in March.

Although Concours of America has expanded the field in recent years to include more postwar metal, particularly racing and muscle cars and a Modern Collectables class, this is still very much a traditional concours with a decided prewar bent, emphasis on the 1930s. Yes, judges spread the love with a variety of trophies across classes, but when it comes to the two Best in Show trophies—one American, one foreign—contenders are predominantly prewar cars, if the list of past winners is any indication.

1938 Talbot Lago T150C

Bias toward any era aside, this year’s winners were deserving of the honors. The American Best in Show was a 1931 Stutz DV-32 Convertible Victoria owned by Joseph and Margie Cassini of West Orange, N.J. Mr. Cassini gave us a synopsis of the Stutz while sitting in the passenger seat, his new trophy proudly displayed on the running board.

Arturo Keller’s 1932 Alfa Romeo 8C 2300 Viotti coupe

“The car came from Argentina in the 1960s, but it sat in Cincinnati for more than 30 years,” he explained. “When I got it in 2010, it was in pretty rough shape, because the fellow who’d owned it had substituted some SV-16 engine parts; it had the wrong carb; and there were many other issues.” After plenty of research to correct the misguided repairs, the Stutz received a full makeover from RM Auto Restoration in Chatham, Ontario, and was a finalist for Best in Show at Pebble Beach last year.

The foreign Best in Show trophy went to an Italian car owned by Jim Patterson of the Patterson Collection in Louisville, Ky. The gorgeous 1924 Isotta Fraschini Tipo 8A won Best in Show at Pebble Beach in 2015, so it arrived at this competition with a clear edge for the big trophy. The sleek drophead coupe came to America from Europe in 2014 and was also restored by RM.

The two winners, with their exquisite coachbuilt bodies and blue-chip pedigrees, epitomize the celebration of the automobile as a mechanical piece of art. That theme of automotive beauty was further expressed this year by noted collectors Arturo and Deborah Keller, who brought five breathtaking cars from five countries: 1938 Mercedes 540K (Germany), 1932 Alfa Romeo 8C2300 (Italy), 1938 Bentley 4 ¼ litre (England), 1937 Duesenberg Model J (USA), and 1937 Talbot Lago T150C (France). Late in the afternoon, all five streamliners were driven off the show field and onto the roads in the surrounding area, proving that even in its most beautiful form, the automobile looks best in motion.

Best in Show winners 1924 Isotta Fraschini Tipo 8A (left) and 1931 Stutz DV-32 Convertible Victoria (right)

Other classes of interest included a collection of Can-Am Cup racers, 16 Cobras, mid-1960s muscle cars, and a “Jet Age Juniors” class of seldom-seen early-’60s small American cars like the Virgil Exner-designed Valiant. The Hagerty “Best Driving Award,” presented to a car we would like to drive home, went to Chuck Ungurean’s 2015 McLaren P1, which had a custom “Professor Blue” paint job with red accents. Part of the Hyper Cars class, the hybrid P1 is the kind of car we can imagine seeing at the 2067 Concours of America.

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One hundred and thirty-one years ago, on the banks of the Flint River, William Crapo “Billy” Durant and his partner Josiah Dallas Dort opened the Flint Road Cart Company in downtown Flint, Mich., to build horse-drawn carriages. No one could have known they were creating the birthplace of what would become General Motors.

The brick building on Water Street eventually became known as the Durant-Dort Carriage Company, and its success as one of the largest carriage companies in America was the springboard for Durant to take control of Buick Motor Co. and, in 1908, to form General Motors. In 1911, Durant co-founded Chevrolet Motor Company with Louis C. Chevrolet and other Flint investors. Dort, for his part, went on to found the short-lived Dort Motor Company, but a highway in Flint still bears his name.

Factory One, as the brick building became known, had fallen into disrepair by 2012, when Mark Reuss, GM’s executive vice president for product development and a man keenly aware of General Motors history, launched a campaign for GM to buy the building. In a statement, Reuss noted that “Factory One sparked the global auto industry and was a catalyst in the formation of General Motors. It preserves the stories of the early visionaries who built a brand-new industry in this city, within the very walls of where it happened.” During today’s announcement, Reuss was presented with a framed copy of a 1978 Motor Trend cover featuring his father, Lloyd Reuss, former GM president, Buick chief, and father of the Regal GNX. No wonder Mark Reuss recognized the significance of Factory One: The man has GM in his blood.

After a thorough restoration that showcases the building’s original wood ceiling rafters and brick walls, Factory One officially reopened today as a repository of GM history, including the papers of William C. Durant, Charles F. Kettering, and many other GM executives; a community event space; and the home of the nearby Kettering University’s (formerly General Motors Institute) GM archives.

Singer, songwriter, and Virginia farmer Daniel “Duke” Durant Merrick, great-grandson of William C. Durant, was present.

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Dodge set the muscle-car world on its ear three years ago with the 707-hp Challenger and Charger Hellcat. But those cars are tame kittens compared with the new Challenger SRT Demon (its official name), which debuted with great fanfare last night at a party on Manhattan’s west side.

“We have a duty to unleash Demon,” boasted Dodge’s Tim Kuniskis during the unveiling, when the angry red Demon broke out of a crate and burned rubber down the concrete floor of Pier 94 on the Hudson River. “To go all out, to literally leave our mark on the streets and strips of America in the most technologically advanced, street-legal, production drag car ever.”

The Demon’s list of performance bragging points is like none we’ve ever seen for a street-driving car. Here are just a few highlights:

• Fastest quarter-mile production car in the world, with an elapsed time of 9.65 seconds @ 140 mph
• World’s fastest 0-60-mph time for a production car, 2.3 seconds
• Highest-horsepower V-8 production engine, 840 hp
• Highest g-force acceleration of any production car, 1.8 g
• First-ever production car to lift its front wheels at launch, setting a world record wheelie at 2.92 feet, as certified by Guinness World Records
• The Demon is officially banned by the National Hot Rod Association (NHRA) for being too fast to run at a drag strip without a cage

Clearly, Dodge set out to make not just headlines but history here. And Hagerty makes some history of its own: Dodge has appointed Hagerty as the official insurer for the Demon, the first time Hagerty has established such an association for a brand-new production car.

Dodge engineers essentially transformed the Challenger coupe into a street-legal dragster and the most powerful muscle car ever made. Although the Demon is street-legal, everything about it, from the weight savings achieved by jettisoning all but the driver’s seat (you can add passenger and rear seats back for a dollar each); to the street-legal 18-inch Nitto drag radials; to the ability to run on 100+ unleaded high-octane gasoline; to the TransBrake lock for the output shaft of the 8-speed automatic transmission; to Drag Mode suspension tuning and launch assist; and numerous other engineering modifications is designed for the dragstrip. Make no mistake, this car was invented with one main mission in life: to smoke the quarter-mile. (And rubber.)

The Demon’s new version of the Hemi 6.2-liter supercharged V-8 produces 840 hp and 770 lb-ft of torque. Compared with the Hellcat’s 707-hp Hemi, the Demon Hemi gets 50 percent new componentry and has a larger supercharger (2.7 liters vs. 2.4 liters); increased boost pressure (14.5 psi vs. 11.6, all of it available within six feet of the starting line); two dual-stage fuel pumps rather than one; a 6500-rpm rev limit versus 6200 rpm; and a larger induction box that sucks in air from three sources: the Air-Grabber hood; the driver-side Air-Catcher headlamp; and an inlet near the wheel liner. Combined air-flow rate is 1150 cubic feet per minute, some 18 percent more than in the Hellcat. Dodge boasts that the Air-Grabber hood is the largest functional hood scoop in the industry, at 45.2 square inches.

SRT also developed a Power Chiller, another production-car first, which diverts air-conditioning refrigerant from the SRT Demon’s interior to help get the SRT Demon ready for the next drag run as quickly as possible. Charge air coolant, after being cooled by ambient air passing through a low-temperature radiator at the front of the vehicle, flows through the chiller unit, where it is further cooled. The chilled coolant then flows to the heat exchangers in the supercharger. Drivers can monitor supercharger coolant temperature, plus various other drag-specific performance metrics, via “Performance Pages” in the UConnect display screen on the dash. No word whether the Performance Pages include a driver-talent measurement mechanism.

Demon production begins this summer and is limited to the 2018 model year and only 3000 cars for the United States and 300 for Canada. Buyers receive a full day of instruction at the Bob Bondurant School of High-Performance Driving in Arizona. Pricing will be announced this summer.

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