As the summer driving season approaches, Hagerty’s new Road of the Year award is meant to encourage Hagerty Drivers Club members and all automotive enthusiasts to get off the freeways and explore a great road in their own region. Our first annual Road of the Year winner: California’s Highway 33. This epic two-lane road is within easy reach of residents and visitors to the Los Angeles area. If you’d like to make your voice heard and discuss your favorite road, comment below and share the love of driving with fellow enthusiasts.

As important as what you drive and where you are going is how you get there. Because any wheel-driven vehicle cannot function without a surface upon which to exert its motive force, the road is as important to a car as oxygen is to the human body. OK, there are a few exceptions, including the lunar rover, but one characteristic shared by almost all automobiles built between the 1885 Benz Patent-Motorwagen and the 2024 Tesla Cybertruck is that they function to their full potential only on a prepared surface. Unlike the USS Enterprise, cars go best where others have gone before.

There are more than 4 million miles of road in the United States, from the Aleutian Islands to the Florida Keys. We’ve built roads over and under mountains, across sweeping spans of water, through the eastern forests and the western deserts, around nearly every island, and over the southern swamps. Picking one to single out as the best is impossible. The best for what? Since Roman times, roads have been engineered to do one thing and one thing only: link points on a map so that travelers may more easily journey between them.

However, as we all know, roads are capable of so much more. They can provoke delight and terror in equal doses. They can be vaults for our memories and incubators of our dreams. They can pay riches and serve as the best schools from which to get an education. Whether you press an accelerator or twist a grip, something is going to happen to you on a road, and there are a few worth recognizing for the extent to which they stir our spirits as much as get us to where we are going.

In our selection, the first of what we plan to make an annual feature, a few rules were necessarily applied to help winnow down the endless possibilities. First, the road had to be no more than a one-day round trip from a major urban center, the thinking being that anyone should be able to access the route easily as a day excursion and while perhaps visiting this urban center for work or vacation (we may change our mind on this point in future selections). Also, the pavement had to be in good condition. Plus, it had to have some dining amenities, and we leaned toward roads with outlets to other roads, such that they could be run in one direction rather than merely to a turnaround point.

The best roads tend to pass through majestic scenery, and majestic scenery tends to have extreme weather. Thus, always check the conditions before departing. It’s a living landscape in which rivers swell and mountains move, sometimes onto roads, making published routes suddenly impassible. Great roads often don’t have continuous cellphone coverage either, so best to bring some tools and an extra set of points if going in an older car. Hagerty Roadside is good, but they’re not psychic; they can’t find you if you can’t call them.

None of which should deter anyone from venturing out onto this or any other road, the one and only place our cars truly belong. “Wealth I ask not, hope nor love, nor a friend to know me,” wrote the poet Robert Louis Stevenson. “All I ask, the heaven above, and the road below me.”

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California is a fever dream that has been riling up folks since well before it became the 31st state back in 1850. Then, people didn’t worry too much about asking permission for stuff—they just went out and did it. Indeed, when the car came along, the state’s public works barons laid out the first highways that way, spreading maps of the still wild and remote state with its serial mountain ranges and yawning valleys and drawing arbitrary lines between the dots of settlements. Then they went out and slashed and dug and bored and dynamited their way through, confronting a rough and merciless terrain that does not give up its miles easily.

Those early road builders were pitted against a formidable foe: the ancient tectonic forces that lurk beneath California’s roiling landscape. The northbound Pacific Plate and the southbound North American Plate are experiencing a slow-motion crash, scraping against each other like two continent-size semis sideswiping over a double-yellow. The movement at their meeting point, the 750-mile-long San Andreas Fault, happens in famously rattling fits and starts, the bigger jerks making the national news.

The hills and granite peaks shoved skyward by this 30-million-year-old collision are like the wrinkles in a crumpled fender, and they are not easy to go under or around. So, California’s first road builders (as well as its current ones) mostly went over them, contouring their routes to the ridges and folds of this messy landscape and unwittingly creating thousands of apexes and on-camber thrillers for later generations to enjoy.

California State Route 33, about two hours’ drive north of Los Angeles (give or take, depending, as always, on traffic), is a perfect example. It squiggles and wiggles its way from the quaint village of Ojai up and over the Topatopa and Pine Mountains, rising to 5160 feet at the Pine Mountain Summit before plunging thrillingly into a gorge created by the Sespe Creek, eventually spilling out into the broad agricultural and ranching valley of Cuyama. If you don’t feel the need to immediately U-turn and run it backward, there’s an achingly beautiful option just to the east that recrosses the mountains to join up with Interstate 5 and the express route back to LA.

This road has everything: technical challenges, gob-smacking vistas, relatively light traffic, generally hospitable weather, a very tourist-friendly walking town as its jumping-off point, and the option of returning to the same bed in LA from which you arose that morning. And if you prefer to overnight in Ojai and make an early start, we can highly recommend it, with accommodation choices ranging from relatively inexpensive motor lodges such as the Casa Ojai and the Hummingbird Inn to the ultra-ritzy Ojai Valley Inn and Spa. There’s even a NAPA auto parts store and a tire shop in town if needs arise, and a main drag fronted by old Spanish-style colonnades and lined with pleasant eateries and shops.

Just west of town, State Route 33 branches off Ojai’s main drag, or State Route 150, and heads north. Take on fuel here or elsewhere in town before heading out, as you won’t see another petrol pump for a long time. After passing a few subdivisions and bar/restaurant establishments popular in summer with the biker crowd, you’ll enter Los Padres National Forest and civilization will disappear in your mirrors.

The view forward won’t look much different than it did a century ago when state planners envisioned a wagon trail to connect the seaside village of Ventura with the inland valleys of the San Joaquin and Cuyama. In 1891, when the first stakes were planted for the route, the obstacles must have seemed overwhelming as the route climbed inland from the coast. From the village of Nordhoff (which sounded too German after the outbreak of World War I and was changed to Ojai, or “Valley of the Moon” in the native Chumash language), the Topatopas tower like a wall, leering over this serene enclave of orchards and horse farms like the mossy ramparts of an ancient castle. Behind this wall lay a vast wilderness ruled by mountain lions and circling condors that was accessible only via pack mules on old Chumash trails. No doubt this is why it took 45 years for State Route 33 to go from planning to reality.

With the Great Depression on and California flush with a substantial share of a $400 million national road-building fund, the state got serious about completing the route. It spent $1.5 million to construct the Maricopa-Ventura Highway, aka U.S. Route 399, aka California State Route 33, finally completing it in 1935. The road’s most ardent supporters (and its primary economic benefactors) were the ranchers of the Cuyama Valley, and they threw an epic barbecue to which 25,000 came to feast on some 67 cattle slaughtered and roasted for the occasion.

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As the condor flies, it’s a mere 36 miles from Ojai to the T-junction with State Route 166 at Cuyama, but as the ’66 Mustang rolls, it’s about twice that distance, meaning you’re in for a lot of twists and turns over the next hour and a half. A series of tunnels bored and blasted through granite spurs welcomes you to Wheeler Gorge and the start of the rough country. One day in 1888, Wheeler Blumberg discovered the hot springs that burble from the rock here when he shot a buck that rolled down and parboiled itself in the warm waters. It’s believed the inhabitants of the nearby Chumash settlement may have cursed the invaders of their private spa, because after founding a successful resort in the canyon, Wheeler went mad, shooting 15 holes in the walls of his hotel before he was captured by a posse. He died in 1907 screaming in a padded cell. Successive owners of the resort have struggled through floods, falling trees, and repeated fires with limited success. After sitting abandoned for years, its latest incarnation is as a yoga retreat.

From Wheeler’s place, the road begins its climb up the long, spectacular valley, hugging the canyon walls and tracing each fold in the earth with lovely constant-radius corners that feed into short chutes that lead to more corners. A circular gravel turnoff 15 miles up from Ojai affords an excellent picnic spot with a stunning view out to the distant Pacific Ocean. Many a car-magazine spread, including photos from our five-generations-of-Corvette feature story back in 2020, has been shot here.

The unusually stormy winter of 2022 may have proved that the Chumash curse still has legs; parts of State Route 33 disappeared under rock slides or simply slid down the mountain, and the road was completely closed for almost a year. Last December, Caltrans, the state highway agency, finally reopened it with five one-way sections controlled by traffic signals. Work with heavy machinery was evidently in progress when we photographed this story, and it’s hoped that the one-way sections will be gone by the time you read this.

Near the top of the Topatopas, the Rose Valley Campground offers tenting and RV options for the hardy. And for the truly adventurous, a foot trail and primitive camping network spreads from here into the vast Sespe Wilderness. This whole untamed area shows that much of California, even with its 39 million people, crowded cities, and astronomical housing costs, remains in many places empty and undeveloped, even this close to Los Angeles.

A descent down into Sespe Canyon leads across some bridges and through the gorge cut by the Sespe Creek, which the road tracks with now gentler and faster curves. Another climb hauls you up to a sign announcing the 5160-foot Pine Mountain Summit, after which it’s all downhill from here. Big-sky views at the turnouts supply grand vistas over the mottled green and brown hills and sandy valleys that form the arid landscape, the single road sluicing through it the only real evidence of human hands.

Eventually the writhing road comes to the U.S. Forest Service Ozena Fire Station, and the option to short-circuit the loop back to Interstate 5 by hanging a right on Lockwood Valley Road. However, this narrow, sparsely trafficked ribbon can be in even worse shape due to ever-present sand in the corners and tire-slashing rock falls. And you may have to wade through Reyes Creek, as it tends to spill over the road during wetter months.

Continue north on State Route 33 through the widening valley and past the pistachio farms and new-age meditation centers and you’ll run into State Route 166. Hang a left and run the few miles into New Cuyama to a restored 1950s roadhouse and inn called the Cuyama Buckhorn for some of its locally famous barbecue. Be aware: Though the bar serves food until 8:30 Monday to Wednesday, the restaurant is closed on these days, as are many hospitality businesses up here owing to the utter lack of traffic on weekdays.

Tanks refueled, you can either return to Ojai or keep going via our optional route back to Interstate 5. If you choose the latter, continue heading east on 166, past the State Route 33 junction you just came from (166 and 33 actually merge here, 33 eventually turning north, at times merging with other roads to finally terminate near Stockton, east of the Bay Area). Just a few miles on, hook a right turn at Hudson Ranch Road. This rural byway romps through empty meadows and shoots along high ridges, then roller-coasters around the fringes of 8800-foot Mount Pinos. Lofty views of California’s Central Valley to the east are in the offing on clear days, and when you turn around, you’ll see the mountains to the west that you just drove through on State Route 33, now from a new perspective.

The road plunges into a pine forest and passes through the Pine Mountain Club, a cluster of week-end-getaway-type homes (though surely some are year-round residences) centered on a small commercial strip with a general store, some cafes, and a bed and breakfast. If you’re here in winter, carry tire chains and be prepared for icy conditions. The mountainous section of Interstate 5 known as the Grapevine isn’t too far ahead, but even that mighty and vital thorough-fare is subject to closure by the California Highway Patrol during snowstorms, lest the traffic be stalled on the black ice of its steep grades.

There’s no end of adventure on this route, even once you reach the freeway. Which is why we selected California State Route 33 as our 2024 Hagerty Road of the Year. Now it’s time to go find your own best road, and if you can beat this one, tell us all about it. We need some ideas for next year.

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Although people travel to the Bonneville Salt Flats in western Utah to drive fast, there is really no place quite like it on Earth to make you feel slow. The broad, incredibly flat salt playa that hosts the annual Bonneville Speedweek (as always, weather permitting) is a featureless moonscape that has no reference points to indicate motion. The surrounding mountains are so distant that their bases are concealed below the arc of the horizon, and except for the course markers at every milepost that whisk past, there’s no sensation of motion save for the plink-plink of salt crystals spraying in the wheel wells.

Back in 2003, some sharp minds at Toyota figured out that of the 600-plus classes at Bonneville, none was for gasoline-electric hybrid cars such as its hot-selling Prius. Further, as long as the Southern California Timing Association (SCTA), which hosts Speedweek, was willing to create a class, a car could go 300 mph or 30 mph and still set a record. I was then an editor at Car and Driver magazine and having drinks one night with Bill Reinert, then Toyota’s U.S. manager of advanced technologies. He let slip the Bonneville plan and I volunteered, without asking my boss, a full spread in Car and Driver if Toyota let us drive it.

While negotiations commenced with SCTA, a team in Los Angeles headed by Chuck Wade, who built special vehicles for Toyota including all of its Toyota Pro/Celebrity race cars, was tasked with modifying a stock 2003 Prius for Bonneville. Which involved gutting the car, lowering it, and fitting huge Mickey Thompson salt-flat tires and disc wheels.

It sounds simple enough, but it proved to be incredibly complex thanks to the Prius’s hybrid powertrain. The entire transmission had to be “clocked” relative to the engine to bring the driveshaft power-takeoffs lower, or else the CV joints would be eaten by the extreme angles. That created a rat’s nest of interference issues that had to be worked out. A large fluid tank in place of the passenger seat would be filled with ice and water just before the run in order to cool the car’s power electronics, and a bar was fixed to the back bumper so the Tacoma push-truck could nudge the Prius off the line.

Only a few months later we were out on the salt flats sweating under the intense sun as the lowered, gutted, and striped Prius was made ready for its first run. I would take the first pass, followed by Prius chief engineer Shigeyuki Hori, and then Toyota vice president Fumiaki Kobayashi. All three of us shared billing on the side of the car, above prominent Car and Driver logos. 

Belted in, I looked down the five-mile short course while I awaited our turn off the line. As we rolled up to take our run, the car suddenly refused to shift from neutral to drive. Our crew chief, Bonneville veteran and Toyota engineer Jim Leininger, yanked open the door and barked commands: “Press the brake once! Floor the gas three times! Press the brake again and try it!” Nothing worked, and while the starter grew impatient at this larval computer pod stalled at his line, we frantically rebooted the car and tried again. Finally, the Prius’s five-or-so computers reached agreement and the car shifted into drive. The Tacoma pushed me off the line and, when Jim honked the horn at 40 mph, I floored it.

While the stock Prius back then was computer-limited to 104 mph, the goal was to squeeze the Bonneville Prius over 130, a figure calculated based on its horsepower and very slippery drag coefficient. The car accelerated fairly lazily and without drama, and I had time to look around at the sun-drenched salt, the bustling pits that were passing way in the distance off to the left, and the mountains rising from the horizon. The narrow tires sounded like skis whisking through fresh snow, the salt clattering against the bottom of the car. Crossing the line, the in-car radio reported the speeds: 130 mph at the start of the measured mile, 131 mph a quarter of the way through, and 129 mph out the back door, for an average of 130.794 mph.

Later, for fun, because it was illegal for the purposes of setting a record, the team taped up the front-end openings and got 134 mph out of the Prius. Smiles and “banzais” all around. The Prius was shipped back to Japan, where Hori managed to crash it while showing it off on a racetrack (because of the oversized wheels, the steering was never able to turn more than a few degrees). Toyota thought it would crush it then, but back in Los Angeles, Wade volunteered to rebuild the car and it was shipped back to the U.S. Following the rebuild, the Prius lived a quiet life in Toyota’s museum in Torrance, California, before the company moved it to Texas.

The best part of the whole thing was that Toyota purchased full-page ads for its feat in all of the major car magazines, which meant that readers of our competitors at Motor Trend, Automobile, and Road & Track at some point came across a large Car and Driver logo emblazoned across the side of the Bonneville Prius in each of those magazines. Not that it got me a raise or anything.

Now the car has been marked for destruction by Toyota and spotted in a recycling yard outside Dallas. The conditions at Bonneville are extremely hard on a car, and corrosion has likely done a number on this racer. The Prius is also potentially un-registrable due to being built from a car that might never have been prepped to sell. Regardless, we say kudos to you, brave hybrid, and may you set a record on that first run at the salt flats in the sky.

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

Once upon a time, industrialists and educators came together to form a national organization for the advancement of artisanal craft skills among young boys. It was heavily promoted in high schools, youth groups, auto shows, and car dealerships across the country. It annually paid out thousands—and then millions—of dollars in college scholarships, and it grew to become second only to the Boy Scouts of America in membership. Its board of directors included the most powerful and influential industry leaders of the day, and invitees to its annual awards banquet in Detroit were flown in first class and chauffeured around in limousines.

And all a kid had to do to take a shot at securing his educational future was to build a miniature model. Not a plastic job out of a box, as most of us have attempted at one time or another, but an exacting replica of an ancient carriage or a wholly unique creation of their own design, conceived, sketched, measured, clay-modeled, and then constructed entirely from scratch. No help from Dad allowed.

From 1930 until 1968, the Fisher Body Craftsman’s Guild, so named for the coachwork firm that became a General Motors division in 1926, ran an annual nationwide talent search disguised as a model-building competition. The goal was to identify from among America’s teeming ranks of teenage youth the truly exceptional, the kids who had the artistic eye, the crafting skills, and the stick-to-itiveness to complete a phenomenally rigorous craft project.

Regional competitions fed winners to a national finale in Detroit, where a four-day pageant culminated in the awarding of scholarships that topped out at $5000 for the overall winners, a mighty sum in the era. The event also exposed the top echelon of young model builders to the wonders of the American auto industry at a time when it was at its imperial zenith. Naturally—and in accordance with the plan—many of those kids returned as college graduates to work in that industry.

It’s hard to imagine in the modern age when most people spend their day tapping keyboards or swiping screens that at one time, there were enough boys aged 11 to 19 in America willing to create thousands of model cars every year entirely from scratch. “When I look at my model today, I think, ‘How the hell did I do this?!’” said 1961 junior national winner Tony Simone, now of Bartlett, New Hampshire. “I have to give the Guild credit for giving us skills to use in life. Even today, that attention to detail is still with me.”

“The people who won had mastered discipline before the age of 20,” said Robert Davids, who was a 19-year-old Venice, California, pinstriper and surfboard shaper when he won the 1963 senior national award and a $5000 scholarship by carving a dramatic three-seat bubble-top coupe out of yellow poplar wood. For a year, Davids said, there was no girls, no dates, not even haircuts, only work during the day and then the model at night, typically until 3 a.m. “Every single disciplined person who entered was going to do OK in life, but the winners excelled at an early age.”

Then, as now, there was free money around if you could throw a ball or converse in mathematical theorems. Sports and academic scholarships have long been familiar avenues for teenagers from disadvantaged backgrounds to access the realm of higher education. The Fisher Body Craftsman’s Guild stood apart by being a scholarship program based mainly on manual skills of the type one learned in the shop classes that were once commonplace in high schools.

“Here was a take-home, industrial arts aptitude test that identified teenagers with innate artistic ability, creativity, imagination, spatial relationship acuity, manual dexterity, aesthetic eye, good taste, a propensity for perfection, and high intellect,” wrote John Jacobus, a Guild member in the 1960s whose later historical research for the Smithsonian Institution resulted in a book on the subject, The Fisher Body Craftsman’s Guild: An Illustrated History (upon which our story is heavily dependent). The skills that the model competition prioritized, he added, “were all qualities sought after by the auto industry.”

The inspiration of William A. Fisher, one of the seven Fisher brothers who had transitioned the family carriage business into a hugely successful vehicle-body supplier, the Fisher Body Craftsman’s Guild launched on August 25, 1930, with radio and print ads and large posters plastered to the windows of Chevrolet, Buick, Viking, Oldsmobile, Cadillac-LaSalle, and Oakland-Pontiac dealerships. The posters as well as promotional booklets lured boys with the promise of a share in the unimaginable sum of $75,000 (about $1.3 million today). Nearly 150,000 signed up the first year, just over 400,000 the second, records Jacobus.

The need was great. The Great Depression was already beginning to grip the country following the October 1929 stock market crash. The ranks of the unemployed were swelling, and fewer and fewer families had the means to offer anything more to their children beyond a life of hardscrabble toil from the earliest age. Amid the bread lines and the whispers of worker revolt and communist revolution, big ideas floated around about the very nature of work and the role of individuals in societies that were rapidly urbanizing and industrializing. “It is the sincere desire of the builders of Bodies by Fisher,” extolled a 1930 ad for the Guild in The Saturday Evening Post, “that tomorrow shall see this country peopled by men to whom honor can be given for their ability to design well and build soundly whatever their generation may require.”

The competition’s challenge was as daunting as the prizes were lavish. Early competitions required entrants to produce a detailed wood-and-metal replica of the ornate Napoleonic carriage that appeared in the “Body by Fisher” logo (ubiquitous on GM cars produced from the 1920s through the 1980s). Builders had to construct an 18-inch-long, 10-inch-high scale model complete with metal filigree, opening doors, and upholstery-lined interior using only blueprints and a 25-page instruction booklet that the Guild provided. It’s believed that two master models were produced over six months by craftsmen at Fisher’s Pennsylvania-based Fleetwood Metal Body division and that their time estimate to make a copy from the plans was 1600 hours.

Which helps explain why out of the millions of boys who signed up to the Guild in those early years, receiving their free pamphlet, membership card, and diamond-shaped Fisher Body Craftsman’s Guild pin, only a few thousand coach models were ever actually produced. Enterprising model companies developed kits to speed the builds, but even those were crude by today’s standards—just a few blocks of unshaped wood and some metal—and they still required enormous skill and patience to turn into viable entries. By the time the coach idea was dispensed with entirely in 1948 (the Guild paused its activities during World War II), it’s thought that only around 7000 carriage models had been built.

As it happened, the contest that replaced it wasn’t much easier. It asked entrants to build a 1/12th-scale concept-car model entirely of their own design. Believed to have been heavily pushed by GM’s first and renowned styling chief, Harley J. Earl, the concept category debuted in 1937 and the Guild fully pivoted to it in 1948. According to the late Charles E. “Chuck” Jordan, who won the 1947 competition and went on to become vice president of design at General Motors, the coach project was handicapped by the fact that “no individualized characteristics or personal creativity were sought—the coach was in the strictest sense a craft project, with no variation sought or accepted, saving excellence in detail or finish.”

That was fine in 1930 when, as the author Jacobus notes, car bodies still employed lots of timber as well as hand-finishing. Originally, the Guild was created to ferret out promising pattern- and toolmakers. But as the industry evolved, stamped-steel mass production took over and styling rose in importance. The talent need shifted away from an increasingly low-skill and automated production floor and toward the newly created styling studios, where designers and clay modelers were tasked with envisioning tomorrow’s vehicles. It’s no mere coincidence that the Fisher Body Craftsman’s Guild turned its attention to futuristic concepts almost at the same time Earl unveiled the industry’s first concept car, the 1938 Buick Y-Job.

In an age before the time sucks of television and computers, when more families made their living doing manual labor in factories or on farms and college seemed like a faraway dream, plenty of kids were willing to gamble their free time and their sweat on a long shot like the Fisher Body Craftsman’s Guild. And it was indeed a long shot. Though the posters advertised the riches available to winners, fewer than 400 scholarships were awarded over the 34 years the Guild was active (though smaller prizes were distributed at the regional level). During that time, 10 million American boys signed up—girls were allowed only in similar programs run by GM’s European and Australian subsidiaries—from which about 33,000 models were produced.

Despite the odds, it was worth it to kids who saw little opportunity elsewhere. “My father was a machinist and a toolmaker during World War II,” said Tony Simone, the ’61 winner. “One night, he came home and told my brothers and me to come to the dinner table, and he said, ‘I can put a roof over your head and food on the table, but I can’t afford to send you to college.’ [The Guild] was a lifeline, and I’m just one story out of thousands and thousands.”

Davids, the ’63 winner, was born the son of a soybean sharecropper in Franklin, Missouri. “My mother told me, ‘You don’t have a chance. People like us don’t win things like that.’”

Keenly aware of the challenges facing its members, the Guild produced a booklet called “How to Build a Model Car” with illustrated step-by-step instructions, starting with the basics of vehicle design. Cartoons showed readers how a low, curved roof and a long wheel-base was more aesthetically pleasing than a short wheelbase under a tall, boxy roof. It encouraged doodling of headlights and taillights, of fins and windshields and different types of exterior decoration such as hood ornaments and faux jet exhausts. It gave instructions on how to make a clay model, a wood model, or a plaster model from your drawings, how to get the wheel-to-fender clearances right, how to curve a piece of translucent plastic to make a windshield, and the best ways to apply paint. It included plan drawings of coupe and sedan/wagon cockpits, giving builders an accurate size template to sketch around.

In addition, a bimonthly newsletter, called the Guildsman, was full of tips as well as profiles of working designers and interviews with past winners. Typical headlines: “Four Hundred Pleasant Hours of Work: How Ken Kaiser built a $2000 Winner.” And, “Use Proper Plaster—Avoid Breakage; Hydrocal and Dental Plaster Good.”

“Headlights can be made from the ends of small, inexpensive screwdrivers,” read one how-to column from 1959. “The end of the handle is sawed off, filed, and mounted. The parabolic shape of the end looks much like an actual headlight.” To make things easier, aspiring builders could send to the Guild for a free set of prefinished wheels (sans hubcaps, of course, as those were up to the builder). The newsletter reminded builders not to forget rule No. 7 of the 13 compulsory rules, which required the models to have provisions for license plates front and rear.

David Courtney, now of Lomita, California, remembers as an aspiring car designer in small-town Illinois reading in the Guildsman a tip that taillights could be cut from the ends of toothbrushes there were made out of transparent red plastic. “I had those red toothbrushes for years,” he said. But like a lot of aspiring entrants, Courtney never completed the two models he began, one of which, an attractive Camaro-like roadster crafted from wood, he still has. “I had a handsaw, a file, a drill, and a 4-inch vise. That was it. As a result, my designs were pretty limited, and how to go about making it, I had no idea.”

Davids, the ’63 winner, attributes at least part of his success to knowing some past winners personally, and to obtaining a mailing list of others so that he could write them. Thus, he learned before starting the high standards that were expected. “One of the things you heard was detail, detail, detail. And you had to be authentic; you can’t polish aluminum until it looks like chrome. It has to be chrome.”

Most kids didn’t have ready access to chrome shops or much else that was needed to build a winning model from scratch, so the Guild encouraged its teenage members to be resourceful. Davids knew he wanted to put a fully enclosed bubble-top roof formed from 1/16th-inch-thick plastic over a fully finished interior, a feat that had never successfully been attempted in the competition. Not only that, but in his design, the car’s rear had a dramatic duct-like channel molded into the roof that carried through the rear glass into the trunk, an absolute showstopper—if he could pull it off.

To make a roof from his hand-carved molds, Davids needed a vacuum former, but having no money, he hit the scrapyards and salvaged an electric motor from an old refrigerator and a surplus vacuum pump from a B-52 bomber, kluging a working machine together. “I made 20 to 24 attempts to make the roof, from which I got two, one that was perfect and one that was almost perfect. I put the perfect one on the shelf and used the almost perfect one to build the model around. When I was ready, I finished the model with the perfect one.”

Ron Pellman, who entered four competitions from 1956 to 1960, the final year taking second place and a $4000 scholarship, remembers scouring his native Buffalo, New York, for materials. A local lumberyard was willing to plane him some 7/16th-inch-thick poplar boards into which he cut, piece by piece, the rough outline of his car in sections. He then glued the sections into a multilayered sandwich, dripping india ink into the glue so that the seams would help act as guides as he began chiseling, planing, and sanding the model to its final form.

Finding a chrome shop willing to finish Pellman’s tiny bumpers to competition standard proved fruitless. Finally, a tradesman in a shop down by the Niagara River that did hard-chroming of engine parts for Great Lakes freighters was willing to give it a try—and spent a solid week chroming, filing, filling, and re-chroming the parts until they gleamed with smooth perfection. Recalled Pellman with a chuckle, “I asked him what I owed him, and he put his hand on my shoulder and said, ‘Son, you could never afford it.’”

The Guild had a few family dynasties, including Simone’s who, with his two brothers, entered a total of 15 models, winning a combined $10,000 in scholarship money. He credits part of his win to getting insider intelligence from his older brother, who was treated to a tour of GM’s design studio while attending the 1959 awards. “He came home from Detroit and said, ‘Forget the tailfins—they’re gone.’”

In order to ensure a geographic and age distribution of winners, the Guild divided the nation into regions and its entries into junior (11–14) and senior (15–19) divisions. In order to be eligible for the national scholarship competition, you had to do well in the region, then box up and mail your model to Detroit—instructions were included in the newsletters on the best way to safely crate it for shipping—to be judged for the national competition on a points system that split the criteria between the quality of the design and the workmanship of the execution.

Special telegrams notified the 40 finalists for the scholarships—20 each in the junior and senior divisions—who were invited on an all-expenses-paid trip to the Fisher Body Craftsman’s Guild National Convention and Banquet. Parents were not allowed; the Guild members traveled from the far-flung corners of America on their own, with GM personnel detailed as escorts to help the kids transit at layover airports and train stations.

Simone vividly remembers his trip in 1961 from his home in Rhode Island. “I have to admit, I was in shock. I didn’t know nothin’, I was 15 and had never been out of Providence before.” He flew in a small plane to the old Idlewild Airport in New York, where a GM representative met the wide-eyed teen and walked him to his next flight. “The Boeing 707 had just come out, and they put me on a brand-new 707 jetliner—and here’s the kicker: We went first class.”

Following a dinner of filet mignon, they flew to Detroit, where Simone was directed to a Cadillac Fleetwood limousine that whisked him and some other arriving Guild members to the downtown Book-Cadillac Hotel. There, the group was intercepted by a team of tailors that measured the kids with military efficiency. “Overnight,” remembered Simone, “they made me a whole suit with the Fisher Body Craftsman’s Guild logo on the jacket.”

The next day, after a sightseeing trip around Detroit, the finalists were ushered to the banquet hall where Fisher Body gathered around 800 managers from GM’s vast design, engineering, and manufacturing organizations as well as top scientists, newspaper writers, politicians, and celebrities. Guild members in their matching new jackets sat in rows on a long, terraced dais while the event was presided over by emcees who were luminaries of the day, including Father Knows Best actor Robert Young, broadcaster Lowell Thomas, and TV newsman Walter Cronkite.

Seated in the crowd were typically some of the towering figures in GM history, including Alfred P. Sloan and Charles F. “Boss” Kettering. Judges included Harley Earl, his successor Bill Mitchell, Chrysler design director and tailfin czar Virgil M. Exner (a Guild winner himself), and rising young design star Chuck Jordan. The evening culminated in the scholarship awards for the top three models in the junior and senior divisions plus five honorable mentions each, usually announced by the president of GM or his second-in-command to uproarious cheers from the audience.

For the next few days (as GM photographers quietly snapped detail photos of every model to be studied later for possible inspiration), the young Guild members were squired around the region, visiting GM’s gleaming Technical Center, touring its design studios, and seeing and touching the dream concepts they had only read about in magazines. Dinners were lavish affairs at local country clubs. Pellman remembers going to a furniture factory and taking a Detroit River cruise to the Boblo Island Amusement Park. There were informational presentations by officials from the FBI, visits to Fisher Body assembly plants, and trips to the nearby Selfridge Air Force Base to sit in jet fighters and meet their pilots.

“If you won, you were on a roller coaster ride for a week,” said Davids. Winners were interviewed in newspapers and on the radio, and even appeared on TV talk shows. Their high schools received their own towering trophy, and their models went on a national victory lap of dealerships, corporate offices, and exhibitions, at times aboard GM Futurliners that once roamed the country touting the corporation’s industrial exploits. Many builders didn’t see them again for two years.

“It opened up a lot of doors for me,” said Davids, who went on to live a number of lifetimes, including fabricating body panels for Craig Breedlove’s 526-mph Spirit of America land-speed car, earning several college degrees, doing a stint running GM’s experimental design studio, operating a casino, launching a company in the late 1970s to design and manufacture some of the first hand-held electronic games sold in toy stores, and starting a winery specializing in pinot noir.

Other Guild alumni, like Jordan, Exner, Richard Arbib, who worked for years at GM as Harley Earl’s right-hand man, and Pontiac, GMC, and Hummer design chief Terry Henline, forged long and successful careers in the auto industry, often after Guild-funded degrees from the famous ArtCenter College of Design in Los Angeles. Still others went to work in aerospace, academia, product and packaging design, and varied pursuits in engineering and manufacturing. William A. Fisher’s plan to seed the American economy with capable, tenacious, hands-on thinkers had worked brilliantly.

However, even in 1963, the end of the Guild could be predicted. “It was a happy moment,” said Davids, “but the Beatles came out the year after I won, everything was changing, and kids were getting kind of crazy. There just weren’t enough who were disciplined.” Entries dropped precipitously through the 1960s, records Jacobus, from more than 4000 in ’63 to fewer than 2000 in 1967. Model quality also declined. Besides the social changes, which included more distractions and time demands on young people, GM was eyeing the multimillion-dollar costs of the program as new safety and emissions regulations threatened to squeeze Detroit in a financial vise.

And so, along with the fading of the program’s originator and patron, William A. Fisher, who died in 1969, the Fisher Body Craftsman’s Guild expired as well. A reunion of Guild members at the ArtCenter College in Pasadena in 2016 led to an effort by former members to conserve as many models as possible, and there are now permanent displays in several museums around the country (see below).

As time thins the ranks of the Guild’s surviving members, it’s worth remembering an era when so many teenagers dreamed of a career designing cars. And when the auto industry was clever enough to devise a productive scheme to harness and focus that youthful energy, simply because it recognized that its future, as well as the nation’s, depended on it.

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On Display: Where to See a Fisher Body Craftsman’s Guild Model

Petersen Automotive Museum

30 models, 1 coach

Los Angeles, CA | petersen.org

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Gilmore Car Museum

50 models, 1 coach

Hickory Corners, MI | gilmorecarmuseum.org

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AACA Library & Research Center

26 models, 1 coach

Hershey, PA | aaca.org/library

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Piston Palace

20-plus models, 1 coach

Warwick, RI | pistonpalace.com

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National Route 66 Museum

8 models, 1 coach

Elk City, OK | elkcity.com

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National Automotive & Truck Museum

5 models, 1 coach

Auburn, IN | natmus.org

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National Museum of Transportation (Coming Soon)

10-plus models, 2 coaches

St. Louis, MO | tnmot.org

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This past summer, with supply chain issues resolving and factories once again humming, electric vehicles started piling up on dealer lots. Between January and July 2023, reports the trade paper Automotive News, the “days’ supply” (an industry metric used to measure unsold inventory) jumped for EVs, rocketing from a brisk 59 days to a worrisome 111 days. Meanwhile, the inventory of internal-combustion vehicles remained relatively flat in the mid-50s, proving that there were buyers out there, just not for electrics. (As of December 2023, EV days’ supply was 114 days, versus 71 days for the total market.)

An industry that only 18 months ago was rushing head-long to expand battery manufacturing and race to market with full electric product lines suddenly nailed the brakes. Ford, simultaneously reeling from a costly UAW strike, said it will slow-roll an earmarked $12 billion in electrification spending, delaying product launches, cutting production of its Mustang Mach-E electric crossover and F-150 Lightning, and pushing back construction on one of two planned battery plants. GM and Honda likewise said they are scrapping an agreement to jointly produce compact electric crossovers.

On the front lines, Mercedes-Benz dealers were in open revolt over the factory’s unwillingness to put incentives on its slow-moving EQ line of pricey electrics, saying they are losing customers to rivals. Meanwhile, back in 2020, GM offered its Buick and Cadillac dealers a choice: Either invest upward of $200,000 in electric infrastructure for their dealerships or sell their franchises back to GM for cash. Almost half of Buick dealers and one-third of Cadillac dealers took the buyout.

Is the EV transition over before it ever really began? Probably not. The hasty 180 on EV investments likely says less about the long-term viability of electrics and more about present dilemmas. The industry is nursing fresh wounds from strikes and previous bad bets, including Ford’s write-off of $1 billion following the implosion of Argo AI and GM’s staggering $8.2 billion loss (and counting) on its Cruise autonomy division. Add in the turbulence caused by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which places restrictions on EV tax credits so that they apply only to American-made vehicles with U.S.-sourced components, and it’s easy to see why the industry is unsettled.

The ride into an electric future was bound to be bumpy. Now that early adopters have rushed out and purchased electric vehicles, sales growth was certain to slow as the industry gets on with the laborious task of convincing a wider (and more cautious) buying population that EVs are for them. The timing could be better; the market is currently suffering from high interest rates that make new-car purchases more expensive, and there’s a surplus of high-end EV offerings costing $70,000 and up.

Currently the pricing gap between EVs and internal-combustion-engine (ICE) offerings in the hot compact SUV segment is almost $20,000, with electrics retailing above $50,000 while comparable ICE crossovers are $35,000. Sure, tax rebates help close the gap, but the numbers look daunting to buyers watching their dollars. At the same time, older, more affordable EV options, like the Chevrolet Bolt and VW e-Golf, have been taken off the market and their replacements are still on the drawing boards.

Richard Shaw, a retired airline captain in Los Angeles, is an example of the disconnect between consumer demand and industry supply. Four years ago, he bought his first electric car, a new Volkswagen e-Golf, for $19,000 after rebates and incentives. “If you have two cars in the household, you’d be crazy not to have one be electric,” says the EV convert. “They are much cheaper to operate and perfect for local trips, and we find we take the electric way more than the other car.” However, the e-Golf has since gone out of production, as has the similarly priced Chevy Bolt, leaving the base Nissan Leaf as the lone sub-$30,000 electric.

Some buyers may have deferred their purchases in 2023 owing to changes in the Clean Vehicle Credit, the $7500 federal tax credit that, as of this year, allows buyers to use the credit directly as a down payment.

EV sales growth has slackened, but electric cars are still selling—at a rate of about 1 million per year. If EV sales aren’t proving to be a tidal wave, they are definitely still a rising tide.

***

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Los Angeles is a town with a well-earned reputation for a short attention span. You’re only as good as your last 90 minutes, goes the old saying in the movie business, and the hook is always waiting to yank off stage anything or anyone who isn’t killing it. That rule applies to race tracks, too. The Los Angeles Motordrome, a board track erected in 1910, lasted just three years, and Beverly Hills Speedway, which opened in 1920, only four years until the real estate developers got it. Riverside Raceway managed an unforgettable 32-year run before it was plowed under to make way for a shopping mall. Perhaps the ghost of Ken Miles still haunts the place; after years of decline, the mall boasts hundreds of thousands of vacant square feet.

Given the long odds, Auto Club Speedway, aka California Speedway, did pretty well—26 years from the day the 2.0-mile D-shaped banked oval opened to host 240-mph Indy-car laps to the day the wrecking ball arrived. Drone videos surfaced in November of chomping excavators tearing away at grandstands. In posterity, it joins the “Indianapolis of the West,” the short-lived Ontario Speedway (10 years, ending in 1980) which was just up the freeway. Its land now hosts a CarMax, a Benihana, and an El Torito, among its other pearls of suburban banality.

Auto Club’s demise leaves a metro area of nearly 13 million with only one circular track within its environs: Irwindale Speedway, a strictly amateur venue, which somehow has dodged decade-old plans to convert it into a mall. Likely because the mall business, thanks to Amazon, etc., is in even worse shape than the racing business. Vows by NASCAR to eventually replace Auto Club with a half-mile oval on what remains of acreage that has mostly been sold off to a developer intent on building logistics warehouses (for Amazon, etc.) have no firm timetable.

It’s a sad fact that in places, racing struggles to pay the bills for the increasingly expensive land that it occupies, and the forces of redevelopment never sleep. To the north, Monterey County, the deed holder of Laguna Seca, was in December sued by locals aiming to curtail or eliminate the famed track. You can shout until you are blue in the face that the circuit, opened in 1957, predates all of the surrounding McMansions. But those people don’t care who was first, they really don’t. They have money and lawyers and they are game to try their luck in court.

It’s a challenge that race tracks share with local municipal airports. The airport where I keep my Cessna is a former U.S. Army Air Corps training base built in 1939, now under attack from a small but vocal clique of residents who wish it gone. They have already tasted blood in nearby Santa Monica, where an airfield that opened in 1923 and supplied thousands of Douglas Aircraft during World War II is set to close in 2028 so that developers can dine on its bones.

Once upon a time, a bolder America accepted and even celebrated these facilities as proof that the world’s greatest economy produced vital and thrilling pursuits that enriched our lives and supplied a creative outlet to our energy and industry. Now, a more flaccid nation that prefers to sit at home streaming and shopping foreign-made junk online sees nothing in these venues but noise, pollution, and risk. They are unwittingly being stoked by gimlet-eyed developers who are salivating over the land and willing to fund legal teams and sympathetic council candidates. Replacing a track or an airport with warehouses or 20 to 30 high-density housing units per acre will line the pockets of the developers, but it won’t do much for noise and pollution in the community. Everyone is bound to be disappointed—except the developers of course.

But the relentless demand for more housing drives cities to flatten anything in their path that appeals only to a minority. And like it or not, we are a minority. Unless we fight, unless we write letters and go to council meetings and support candidates who believe there should be recreational room for everyone, we will end up like the misfits in medieval times, hounded out the city gates and banished to the countryside so that we can continue enjoying activities that were once popular in an earlier, more energetic age. At least, until the city inevitably sprawls in our direction.

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There are many gobsmacking vehicles out there that make no rational sense. The Lamborghini Huracan Sterrato is one of them. I mean, really, if you were picking something to drive across Africa would you go with one that barely holds a suitcase and gets 15 mpg on a good day? And, stunning as it is, the deep Sahel is not known for its abundance of gas stations. Nor Neiman Marcuses.

The jacked-up, cladded-up Lamborghini Huracan Sterrato has such a narrow usage case that you might call it the automotive equivalent of a diamond-encrusted waffle maker. At first glance, anyway. What purports to be a supercar for the bush, in fact, turns out to be a supercar for all occasions, which is as much a revelation as it is a contradiction in terms. Do you want your hyper-exotic to be as capable of handling potholed, frost-heaved, possibly salt-encrusted roads as it is at banging off 3.4-second zero-to-60 sprints? Well, uh, hmmm.  

With its acres of black plastic butch-armor, the Sterrato looks like a Merrell trail moccasin, which is to say a supercar built by Subaru. Underneath it’s a regular all-wheel-drive Huracan, except that the intake plumbing to the 5.2-liter V-10 has been routed from the roof to reduce the dust uptake. That cuts horsepower by 30 horses to 602, though peak torque of 413 pound-feet remains unchanged. Still, as the old salts at Rolls-Royce used to say, the power of this car is “adequate.” Indeed, very adequate.

Elsewhere, the Sterrato is denoted by another 1.7 inches in ground clearance and a wider track front and rear. Besides the cladding, exterior telltales include a pair of black blisters on the hood that house LED driving lights, and relatively blocky and fleshy (for a supercar) Bridgestone Dueler AT002 tires. This set of rubber is made specifically for the Sterrato because, obviously, no tire company keeps a design on the shelf for a two-seat, 600-hp, 49-inch-high off-road wonder wedge.

Specs: 2023 Lamborghini Huracan Sterrato

• Price: $301,439/$373,216 (base/as-tested)
• Powertrain: 5.2-liter, DOHC V-10, seven-speed dual-clutch automated manual
• Output: 602 hp at 8000 rpm and 413 lb-ft of torque at 6500 rpm
• Layout: Mid-engine, all-wheel-drive, two-door, two-passenger coupe
• Competition: Porsche 911 Dakar, Mercedes G63 AMG, running the Baja 1000 in any reasonably competitive vehicle.

The Huracan’s rear glass (handy for seeing rearward), is gone, replaced by a race-car-like beetle back with slots for heat extraction that are too small to provide meaningful rear visibility. If The Man is chasing you through the dust, you won’t know about it until they start shooting.

Our test car’s base price of $301,439 (with gas-guzzler tax and an eye-watering $26,162 delivery charge) was boosted by more than $71,000 in options. We could have happily forsaken many of these, including the $16,500 matte white paint (called Bianco Phanes), and the $7600 sport seats, which look fabulous with their deeply bolstered and elegantly stitched contours but wear like suits of iron tailored for grotesquely misshapen people. The seats put such a pressure point on the lower back that a half-hour was all we were able to manage before throbbing pain set in. So, don’t get the sport seats; like ski boots, they only feel good when you step out of them.

Lamborghini’s loan agreement specifically forbade off-road driving. However, thanks to recent landslides in waterlogged California, we were able to experience off-road-like conditions without ever leaving the pavement—or indeed, Los Angeles—thus observing the letter if not the spirit of the agreement. The Sterrato, around 3400 pounds fully fueled, romped over buckled and side-shifted pavement, the suspension with its magnetorheological shocks eating the bumps and ruts with astounding indifference while keeping the car on path. The extra suspension travel provides a welcome break from the jaw-rattling ride most exotic cars deliver over rough patches, and you begin to wonder if this isn’t the best urban runabout you’ve ever driven.

Let’s face it: Thanks to chronic under-maintenance, American infrastructure isn’t what it used to be. The Sterrato is perhaps the perfect middle finger to this sad fact. Things get stiffer if you move the drive mode selector on the wheel from Strada (street) to Sport. The third mode option, Rally, which loosens the stability control intervention even further, makes no appreciable difference if you’re just tooling around and not actually rallying and going for lurid slides in corners.  

Meanwhile, the blessedly turbo-free V-10 burbles and wails behind you, providing slingshot acceleration to its howling 8500-rpm redline whether you leave the transmission in manual mode or kick it down manually with the paddles. When you want to boil through corners, the steering is quick and connected if somewhat isolated from the road (see the McLaren dealer if you demand steering that stiffens and sags with the camber changes) and the grip is locked down. A race track would be the only place most people might notice that the tires are slightly compromised for both on- and off-road duty. Otherwise, they’re plenty sticky. 

Lamborghini’s center touchpad, with its blizzard of menus, is clearly designed for people who have lots of time on their hands (i.e., not while driving). Changing the radio volume is a two-step process and Lamborghini doesn’t deign to include a volume control on the steering wheel among the many buttons there. Ditto adjusting the climate control. You can, however, trigger the high beams from the steering wheel, which is the only way to also illuminate the LED driving lights (operated by a separate switch on the center console). Turn off the high beams and the LEDs turn off too. No doubt having the driving lights available to work at all times violated some dull sub-paragraph of the federal rules.

Even so, and despite the horrendous seats, the Sterrato is a joy to motor around the urban hellscape in because it just seems so unbothered by it all. The company is only committed to building 1499 examples of it, but we’d love to see this rally/Dakar concept make its way into less expensive vehicles. A Subaru BRZ or Toyota Corolla GR or even a Supra with the same treatment? Yes, please!

2023 Lamborghini Huracan Sterrato

Highs: Doesn’t look like your ordinary Lamborghini, a usable supercar even on crumbling roads, eats speed bumps for breakfast.

Lows: Optional sport seats are tortuous, clunky infotainment interface assures distractions, delivery fee is preposterous.

Takeaway: A purchase that seems at first glance to have a very narrow justification, in practice, greatly broadens the justification for purchasing a Lamborghini.

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It’s barely been 15 years since the house of Bruce McLaren reinvented itself by plunging into the business of two-seat mid-engine road burners. What a glorious ride it’s been. In that brief time, the Woking works has continuously advanced the state of the art in supercars, putting the heat to archrival Ferrari with both sublime production models such as the 570 and 720 and with limited hypercar offerings like the hybrid P1, the Speedtail, and the Senna. McLaren’s next opus, the 750S is fusion cuisine of sorts, attempting to merge together two outgoing models into one while still improving on both. It’s a tightrope that McLaren has strung for itself, but the new 750S walks it with aplomb.

Those two outgoing models are the 720S, which wrapped last year after a six-year run, and the 765LT, its limited-production (765 units) banshee twin targeted at rich berserkers who like to bang and crash over city streets in full-zoot track machines. The 765LT, offered from 2020 to 2022, took all the velvety comfort and elegant subtlety that made the 720 such a sweetheart and ground it off with a power sander. It was loud, harsh, brittle, and generally obnoxious. It also sold out rather quickly, even at its optioned-up price of around half-a-mil.

The lesson McLaren drew from this: It needed one car to rule them all, both the folks who want a little calm and compliance with their butterfly “billionaire doors” and 2.7-second zero-to-60 sprints, and the crazies who like it straight to the face with a baseball bat. Behold the 750S, which could be McLaren’s last completely gas-powered vehicle. It’s really more of a mid-cycle refresh of the 720 than a whole new car. McLaren boasts that 30 percent of the 750S is all new, which means 70 percent is carryover. To be clear, we’re not complaining; exotics like these have ten-year lifespans (or more) and given how good the 720 was, it seems a bit early to fully retire it.

Specs: 2024 McLaren 750S Coupe/Spider

• Price: $331,740/$352,740
• Powertrain: 4.0-liter, turbocharged DOHC V-8, seven-speed automated manual
• Output: 740 hp @ 7500 rpm; 590 lb-ft of torque @ 5500 rpm
• Layout: Mid-engine, rear-wheel-drive, two-door, two-passenger coupe or convertible
• EPA Fuel Economy: 15 mpg city/19 mpg hwy
• Competition: Aston Martin DBS, Ferrari 296 GTB/GTS; Lamborghini Huracan STO, Maserati MC20

As chief engineer Sandy Holford explained over dinner at the Wynn Las Vegas hotel, where McLaren recently opened a brand store that sees as many as 800 people a day cross its threshold, the goal was to stretch the car’s envelope. That meant moving up its performance threshold from even that of the 765 while not moving the baseline comfort of the old 720, then giving buyers the option of leaning their car one way or the other depending on the options. A copious, Porsche-like option sheet with 114 separate a la carte items ranges in price from an ashtray ($250) to an orange-and-blue Gulf paint livery ($90,556). Buyers can spec exactly the car they want.

Also—and this was considered critical—McLaren wanted to make the car more engaging. Because there’s no point in going fast if you’re not having fun (right, Bugatti?). Besides a quicker steering ratio, slightly shorter gearing amps up the throttle response as well as the sense of speed. At one point, my co-pilot on the test drive spotted a Nevada trooper and nervously asked how fast we were going. A just-over-the-limit 82 mph was the answer, but it indeed felt much faster. Which is a good thing in a world of speed limits and consequences.

The way McLaren accomplished the performance push was by boosting the power a smidge in the 4.0-liter twin-turbo V-8, to 740 horses and 590 pound-feet. A few of the engine mods include higher turbo pressure, a triple-layer head gasket to handle the higher cylinder pressures, and a second fuel pump that builds in a comfort layer in the juicing capacity at full power.

Elsewhere in the carbon-fiber tub and aluminum crash structures, the engineers widened the front track by a hair (6mm) and sped up the steering ratio. McLaren is one of the very few car companies still using hydraulic power steering units, with everyone else having switched to electric systems. But until electric is as organic-feeling as hydraulic, McLaren won’t switch, Holford says.

Engineers took advantage of technological improvements to the hydraulic accumulators that govern the dynamic dampers, dubbing the 750’s suspension the “third generation” of their Proactive Chassis Control system. The claim is that it broadens the damper range, making the softs softer and the firms firmer while better-supplying everything needed in between. Revised spring rates (slightly softer in front, slightly stiffer in the rear) are meant to sharpen up the 750’s steering response.

On the outside, the self-deploying rear wing is 20 percent larger while also lighter by 3.5 pounds, part of a ruthless effort to cut mass and bring the base car’s curb weight to just a hair over 3000 pounds (3062 pounds for the coupe, 3170 for the Spider)—a phenomenal feat in this day and age. The 750’s styling changes are subtle and headlined by revised headlight openings and a wall-to-wall mesh screen across the back that evokes the 765’s butt.

Inside, a revised instrument cluster conveniently tilts and telescopes with the wheel (though it doesn’t fold into an F1-style rev display as in the outgoing 765) and handy twist paddles governing the transmission and drive modes now bracket the display—a vast ergonomic improvement first adopted by the hybrid Artura. On the redesigned center stack, strengthened to reduce vibration, a “Speedy Kiwi” button lets drivers instantly access their own self-programmed drive mode, in which the driver can individually spec the aero, handling, powertrain, and transmission settings.

We nervously unhinged the butterfly doors and sank into the carbon bathtub that forms the center of the 750. Nervous because we were worried that McLaren had pushed the 720 off the deep end, robbing it of its comfort and daily useability in a mad pursuit of tenths of a second in lap times. Our particular test car was optioned with the cush power seats, the comfiest of the three buckets offered, and while they are by no means soft, they did prove accommodating and fatigue-free over the next few hours of driving.

Turned loose on open roads, the 750S proved that McLaren has once again made some excellent choices. The car has lost none of the divine balance of the 720 while offering a taste of the bull bravado of the 765. It accelerates instantly when prodded, like a 1-liter superbike, and sucks in the horizon as if it’s on an inertia reel, while the carbon brakes push it back into place again with a rigid pedal that feels like it’ll stop an oil tanker. A new exhaust, lighter than the previous one and part of the car’s weight-trimming program, pushes a little more snarl through the noise-suppressing wall of the turbos.

Of course, you expect a car whose six-digit price starts with a 3 to be quick. What we didn’t necessarily expect was the most natural and organic steering available on a production car. The way the wheel perceptibly stiffens and sags with the changes in cornering loads puts a modern Porsche to shame, while still not being the hyper-reactive go-kart wheel of, say, a Lotus Elise. McLaren seems to know intuitively what information to telegraph up the column to its customers and what to filter out; the compromise is pretty much perfect.

In Comfort mode, the 750 is as silky as the 720 was, so mission accomplished there. Move it up to the Sport or Track settings and the fangs come out. Not that it becomes a 765—it doesn’t, and surely another hyper-performance model is planned based on the 750—but it definitely becomes a potent track tool. Though due to a paperwork snafu we weren’t actually able to try it on the track. We did learn that some of the shift and suspension logic used in the Comfort and Sport modes to make the car feel more engaging actually works against setting lap times, so the varnish gets totally stripped off in Track mode, which is not nearly as pleasant as it is ruthless. When they say Track, they mean track.

As with the 720, 360-degree visibility is excellent, and a revised nose jack is a one-button operation that cuts the raising time from 10 seconds to four while working with the steering almost fully locked (the old system required the wheels to be more or less straight). The downsides of the 750 are common complaints with McLarens in general: Nobody gets in or out of this tight little capsule gracefully, and the passenger legroom is a bit short.

Still, the 750S is a convincing display of McLaren’s engineering prowess as well as its enthusiasm for high performance. So much so that we’d love to see the company partner up with another automaker as it did with Mercedes on the 2003-2010 SLR and produce something besides a mid-engine two-seater, something based on a more mass-market component set. Well, maybe not an SUV, but who wouldn’t want to see what McLaren could do with an E-Class-sized sedan? Or a wagon? The imagination reels.

2024 McLaren 750S

Price: $331,740/$352,740 (Base Coupe/Base Spider)

Highs: Loses none of the comfort or subtlety of the near-perfect 720S; gives buyers wanting more, more; scores of options let you build what you want.

Lows: Getting in and out is a comedy for some body types, never graceful for anyone; not much passenger legroom.

Summary: In perfecting the two-seat supercar—yet again—McLaren raises the question: What else can it do?

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Tiny McPherson College in central Kansas, with its 850 students and 27-acre campus, may never go to the Rose Bowl or get a team into the NCAA Final Four. But it has achieved milestones that no other institution of higher learning can boast: It has put a car on the lawn at Pebble Beach, and it has taken a class award there. For the eager young minds enrolled in the school’s Automotive Restoration Technology program, there is no better trophy to stick in the case. Or, indeed, no better line to put on a résumé.

Among the cars entered in the Postwar Luxury class at the 72nd Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance this past August was an obsidian-black 1953 Mercedes 300S Cabriolet. It represented the culmination of a 10-year plan by McPherson’s staff and students to enter a student-restored car into the world’s most prestigious concours. The plan was audacious in its conception and unique among plans in that, except for the unplanned class award, it went exactly according to the plan.

“Back in 2013, we did a strategic planning retreat and set a goal of being at Pebble Beach in 10 years,” said Amanda Gutierrez, McPherson provost and vice president, of the auto restoration program. It enrolls about 150 students in a four-year undergraduate degree program that instructs pupils on everything from chrome plating to torquing connecting rods to automotive history, valuation, business accounting, and project management. Alumni go on to jobs in top restoration shops, in museum curation, at auction houses, and as managers of private collections. (Hagerty editor Kyle Smith is a McPherson graduate.)

The next step was to find the right car, one to “challenge the students but not break them,” said Gutierrez. That meant no French art deco bolides with electronic preselector gearboxes and hide-away sliding roofs, but a car elegant and distinguished enough to qualify for Pebble as well as eligible for one of the event’s classes. That narrowed the list of potential candidates. One of the program’s longtime advisors, Massachusetts-based restorer and Pebble Beach regular Paul Russell, suggested the relatively straightforward Mercedes 300S as a good candidate.

“It was Mercedes’ first clean-slate design after the war and their statement that they were back,” said Brian Martin, McPherson’s director of automotive restoration projects. The imposing 300S sold new for $14,000 in 1953 and, like most other cars eligible for Pebble Beach, is now mostly the province of wealthy collectors. “We were attempting to do Pebble Beach on a ramen budget, but we couldn’t wait for someone to donate a car,” Martin said.

A three-year search culminated in a 35,000-mile candidate that was complete and came with spare parts and a spare engine, but it needed a thorough overhaul. The sellers, Richard and Mary Hopeman of Pennsylvania, were attracted to the idea of a student project and offered a good price, and a donor stepped in to cover the purchase as well as provide seed money for the project.

The car appeared in unrestored condition at a McPherson event at Pebble Beach in 2016. “It presented much better than it was,” quipped Matt Kroeker, a 2023 McPherson grad from Longmont, Colorado. He was a freshman in high school when the project started and completely unaware that a 70-year-old Mercedes would come to dominate his young life and launch his career. He heard about McPherson from a Fox News item, and when he arrived at the school in 2019, the car was in bare metal and bits were scattered all over the school’s workshops.

As is the case with the restoration of any special, limited-production car, there were problems. It took three years to find a replacement windshield. There was trim that didn’t fit, U-joints that unexpectedly failed, electric windows that wouldn’t wind, and sheet metal perforated by rust and damaged in long-ago accidents. The school deemed it important to pay the students for their work, so it was treated as an extra-curricular internship rather than as classwork.

Once the restoration was completed, there was the monumental task of getting the car accepted to Pebble Beach. The selection committee is notoriously finicky as it winnows down hundreds of applications to a field of around 220 cars. Only six spots were allocated to the Postwar Luxury class. “We were told there was no preferential treatment,” said student Jeremy Porter, who is due to graduate in 2024. “We were on pins and needles like everyone else waiting for the word. We kinda bet the house on it.”

The bet paid off, and the Mercedes was driven by students onto the lawn at dawn last August 20 among a fleet of peers ranging from priceless Figoni-bodied Delahayes to Murphy-bodied Duesenbergs to short-wheelbase Ferrari 250 Berlinettas. There were two other Mercedes 300s in McPherson’s class, as well as a one-of-two 1953 Ghia-bodied Cadillac and a one-off 1955 Chrysler Imperial convertible built for the then-president of Chrysler. When the judges in their straw hats and blue blazers came to poke and prod the Benz, students showed them the car as an unusually large crowd looked on, at least some of it composed of 120 parents as proud as any you would find at a big-time college football game.

At Pebble Beach, all cars are awarded 100 points and the judges deduct from that for mechanical issues, restoration errors, or preparation oversights. The sweat and effort of all the students were good enough to win the Mercedes a second-in-class, which did not make it eligible for Best of Show—only class winners have a shot at that—but is nonetheless a high honor for which many aspiring Pebble Beach entrants have liquidated much greater fortunes without success.

Nobody at Pebble beat the McPherson team on enthusiasm and spirit, which thankfully still counts for something even in an event as fueled by money as the Concours d’Elegance. Speaking of which, the school, which launched its automotive tech program in 1976 but ramped it up considerably with the help of Jay Leno in 1997, recently announced that it has raised a startling $1.5 billion in endowments. Ideas being floated are a second campus and an engineering program.

The Mercedes will be a gift that keeps on giving for those who worked on it. Some 200 students contributed to the restoration over seven years, 40 or so at any one time. The car was challenging enough, even with help from school advisors and the Mercedes-Benz Classic Center, and the students learned skills that will serve them well after graduation. Indeed, several said they were being recruited by shops even before they had graduated.

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Today, Enzo Ferrari graces the silver screen in a new biopic, titled Ferrari. The film recounts Enzo’s risky bet on the 1957 Mille Miglia, the 1000-mile sports car race whose outcome could determine the fate of his namesake company. In celebration of the big debut, which features Adam Driver, Penelope Cruz, and Patrick Dempsey (read our exclusive interview with the actor here) we’re resurfacing this October 2022 article. —Ed. 

They called him the Old Man, Il Commendatore, or simply Mr. Ferrari. But Enzo is said to have preferred the title of l’ingegnere, the engineer. Few would argue that he deserved the label, though Enzo Ferrari washed out of technical school and only adopted the honorific after the University of Bologna conferred on him a ceremonial degree in 1960. It was just one pantomime in an operatic tale of struggle, cunning, triumph, carnage, and ego warfare that were the pillars of Enzo’s life and empire.

To outsiders, he was an inscrutable, 6-foot-2240-pound golem of stone hiding behind dark glasses. To insiders—at least those who wrote books about or spoke of their days in Ferrari’s orbit—he was an often-exasperating puzzle, a confusion of contradictions and emotions propelled by a bunker-like insecurity informed by a worldview firmly fixed in 19th-century Italian masculinity.

Was he a genius? Well, he knew brilliance when he saw it. In engineers, such as Vittorio Jano, Gioacchino Colombo, Giotto Bizzarrini, and Mauro Forghieri. In designers, from Battista “Pinin” Farina to Sergio Scaglietti. And in drivers, from Tazio Nuvolari to Juan Manuel Fangio to Mike Hawthorn to Phil Hill to John Surtees to Niki Lauda. He turned proud, ambitious, and gifted men into fawning supplicants willing to devote their careers and risk their lives for the splendor of the Scuderia. Then he often drove them out, or mad, or into early graves with relentless pressure tactics applied through endless political intrigues.

People said Enzo Ferrari preferred his cars and his mechanics to his drivers and his customers. According to Ferrari biographer Brock Yates, somebody once asked Luigi Chinetti—who cracked open the hugely lucrative American market for Ferrari—if Enzo deserved the reproach. After considering it for a moment, Chinetti replied, “I don’t think he liked anyone.”

It’s no accident that the history of Italy’s auto industry is largely confined to a crescent on a map defined by the Po River and the broad plain it bisects in Northern Italy. The region has been known for its metalworking since the Middle Ages and for its sophisticated design and engineering since the Renaissance. Enzo’s father was a metalworker, starting with a dirt-floor workshop next to a dirt-floor house in Modena, an ancient gray burg that swelters in summer and is often enveloped by a dismal, greasy fog in winter. When his second son, Enzo Anselmo Giuseppe Maria Ferrari, was born on February 18, 1898 (the exact day is a matter of dispute and speculation), Alfredo Ferrari was busy growing his business into a thriving workshop that supplied the national railway with bridge and canopy iron.

Though Enzo would claim later in life that he came from rags, his father bought the family its first car, a single-cylinder De Dion-Bouton, in 1903, when many Italians still dreamed of a donkey cart to call their own. Young Enzo’s romantic visions of his future drifted, from opera singer to Olympic sprinter to sportswriter. However, Italy, more than any other European nation, had gone mad for the automobile. Every region, practically every town, hosted a hill climb or a trial or a circuit race, and Ferrari was caught up in the fever.

World War I and the untimely death of both Enzo’s father and older brother, Alfredo Jr., or “Dino,” delayed events and decimated the family business. In November 1918, Enzo was rejected for a job at Fiat, sparking a grudge that would endure until 1969, when he extracted millions from the Agnelli family in exchange for Fiat’s half interest in Ferrari. However, rather than head home from Turin, Enzo started to pal around with the drivers and mechanics who infested the backstreet garages and pubs of Italy’s burgeoning motor city.

His results as an amateur racer drew the notice of the Alfa Romeo team, which invited him to join the squad as a journeyman driver in 1920. Despite modest success as a piloto, though, Enzo longed to return to Modena, where he saw more opportunity as an Alfa Romeo dealer and racing-team manager than as a driver, which was a filthy, bare-knuckled profession in those early days that routinely racked up a horrific butcher’s bill. Racing laurels brought fame, money, and women, but Enzo had an innate sense of both his limited driving talent as well as his true calling, which, given the bleak odds back then, probably saved his life. After he founded Scuderia Ferrari and began building his own cars in 1947, he rarely drove himself, preferring to be driven by his former riding mechanic and longtime valet and chauffeur, Peppino Verdelli. His fate was to wear a tie instead of leathers, to sit behind a desk rather than a steering wheel, and to die in bed at the age of 90 rather than against a tree or upside down in a burning wreck.

Seasoned racers say their chosen sport brings the highest of highs and the lowest of lows. Such was true of Enzo’s entire life, a melodrama of glory and bitter personal and professional grief, the latter often coming hard on the heels of the former as chronicled in his aptly titled autobiography, My Terrible Joys. For the most objective reading on Ferrari, see the two best biographies, Enzo Ferrari, the Man and the Machine, an amusingly sardonic take by the late Car and Driver editor and Cannonball Run founder Brock Yates, and Enzo Ferrari: Power, Politics, and the Making of an Automotive Empire, which, at nearly a thousand pages, is a more academic (and less deliberately iconoclastic) undertaking by Luca Dal Monte, a former Ferrari PR man.

One walks away with an impression of a figure who saw himself as a David constantly in battle with one Goliath after another for the honor of his little duchy of dedicated artisans and, by extension, Italy itself. From Nazi-funded Germans before the war to the chastened but still very potent Germans after, followed by his hated crosstown rival, Maserati. They were replaced by a band of British innovators such as Cooper and Lotus—Enzo dismissed them as the garagiste because they operated out of small garages and didn’t build their own engines—followed by the mighty Glass House presided over by a spurned and vengeful Henry Ford II. After Porsche arrived with 917s that could top 220 mph on the Mulsanne Straight at Le Mans, Ferrari retreated from sports car racing to focus its limited resources on Formula 1.

Subterfuge was a tool that never got rusty in Enzo’s box. In September 1953, he summoned the Modena police to the factory, claiming that plans for a new grand prix car had been stolen and sold to a rival. The brouhaha hit the press and suspicion immediately fell on Ferrari’s nemesis, Maserati. Company president Adolfo Orsi called his lawyers, and Enzo was compelled to appear and sign a witnessed statement saying Maserati was not a suspect. As with so many of Ferrari’s little opera buffas, the controversy evaporated as quickly as it erupted.

In response to some perceived slight or to gain some small advantage, Enzo threatened to quit racing entirely so many times that journalists lost count. In 1953, he announced that he was retiring and closing the factory “for delicate personal reasons,” adding that “racing no longer interests me.” That September, Enzo amended his list of unbearable injuries to include the supposed theft of the blueprints. By December, the press reported Ferrari’s plans to continue into 1954. End scene.

And so it went; the Royal Automobile Club of Belgium canceled the 1957 grand prix at Spa because Ferrari refused to come unless the starters’ fees were increased. By then, wrote one reporter, staging a race without Ferrari was like staging Hamlet without the prince. In 1960, Ferrari pulled out of Sebring because of a dispute over the fuel sponsor (the cars were instead sent to Chinetti, who campaigned them under the North American Racing Team—NART—banner). In 1976, having lost an appeal over two contested grands prix, Enzo again said Ferrari was done with Formula 1.

“Withdrawals and threats of withdrawal used to be a regular feature of Ferrari’s end-of-season press conferences,” observed Eric Dymock, for many years the racing correspondent for Britain’s The Guardian newspaper, in a 1976 column. “For some reason or another, the 78-year-old autocrat, who has been connected with motor racing for nearly 60 years, took the huff over something and said his beautiful cars would never run again. Always he changed his mind.”

Experts seem to agree that Enzo sold road cars to pay for his racing mania. And that he scorned his customers, the dandies and poseurs and idle rich who groveled for his attention and threw reckless sums at him for cars. You can just imagine some of the characters who bought a Ferrari in the 1950s, when European cities still showed the scars of war and there were shortages of everything. One had to be a particular sort to want to flash wealth in that environment. In the 1960s and ’70s, their kids came back for their own cars, putting Enzo in a unique position to observe a particular kind of generational human folly.

But the tycoons and the toffs couldn’t help themselves; the exquisite driveway jewelry assembled behind the famous red gate on Via Abetone in Maranello set hearts aflame across all classes and nationalities. With Pininfarina’s growing involvement beginning in the early 1950s, Ferraris developed a more familial look in an expanding product catalog that was slowly becoming more organized, planned, and marketed. The factory’s output rose from dozens in the 1940s to hundreds in the 1950s to thousands in the 1960s. Enzo’s hidebound allegiance to solid axles, drum brakes, wire wheels, and front-engine configurations left him open to competitors, but nobody who ever bought a Ferrari was asked why. It remains a blue-chip purchase to this day.

Enzo surely had his eccentricities, but it’s hard to judge a man whose life was so equally blessed and cursed. He was at his son’s bedside in June 1956 when the 24-year-old, long suffering the slow erosion of muscular dystrophy, said, “Dad, it’s over,” and slipped into a coma and died. “I have lost my son,” Enzo wrote in a journal he kept of Dino’s illness, “and I have found nothing but tears.”

It was a ghastly period for Enzo and the Scuderia. Alberto Ascari had been killed in 1955 while he was taking a few quick practice laps at Monza in teammate Eugenio Castellotti’s 750 Sport. Castellotti himself died at Modena in March 1957. Luigi Musso and Peter Collins were both killed the following year at the French and German grands prix, respectively. And Phil Hill’s 1961 world championship–sealing win at Monza was clouded by the fatal crash of the popular and affable Count Wolfgang von Trips, which also massacred 15 spectators.

But it was the disaster at the 1957 Mille Miglia that was to haunt Ferrari for years. Alfonso de Portago, the handsome, athletic, and fabulously wealthy son of an Irish heiress and a Spanish count, was the sort of aristocratic playboy whom Ferrari derided and distrusted. Enzo always claimed to not have favorites, refusing to rank his drivers as other teams did. But he took the best shine to poor, up-from-their-bootstraps gunners such as John Surtees, whom he affectionately called “Giovanni,” and Gilles Villeneuve.

However, the 11th Marquess of Portago could drive, having earned his chops competing in the Carrera Panamericana and winning the Tour de France Automobile as well as the Nassau Governor’s Cup. Though Portago was infamously hard on his equipment, Ferrari assigned him as a last-minute substitute to one of the factory’s state-of-the-art 335 S roadsters. Enzo then turned the screws. He pointed out to the 28-year-old Portago that the Scuderia’s more experienced drivers, Piero Taruffi and Olivier Gendebien, had been given less powerful cars. Enzo then sniffed to Portago that it didn’t matter, that they would probably beat him anyway. Such were the standard mind games at Ferrari.

Near the end of the Mille, Portago’s 390-hp, 4.0-liter V-12 rocketed him and co-driver Ed Nelson, an American bobsled racer along for the ride as part of Portago’s clique of hangers-on, to 180 mph on the long straights across the Po Plain toward the Mille’s finish in Brescia. At the final rainy fuel stop in Mantua, Portago was running fourth behind both Gendebien and Taruffi, but he was told that the leaders were having mechanical trouble and that he was closing on Gendebien. Portago was offered a fresh set of Englebert tires to replace his badly worn skins, but he refused, taking a swig of orangeade and roaring off in haste toward Brescia.

Some 17 miles up the road, the slimy and battered Ferrari shrieked toward the village of Guidizzolo at around 130 mph. A front tire exploded. The car jinked left, clobbered a stone kilometer marker, and spun violently into a ditch, emerging 15 feet in the air as a pinwheeling, shrapnel-spraying buzz saw of death. It sailed over one line of spectators, hit the road, tumbled, and plunged into the crowd. Portago and his co-driver were killed instantly, as were nine bystanders, five of them children. The mayhem was so grisly that police had trouble identifying the bodies.

Italy erupted in rage. Protesters thronged the crash site and, later, the Ferrari factory, shouting, “Assassins! Criminals!” The conservative newspaper Il Tempo joined a media chorus denouncing the race, labeling it “an absurd fight between defenseless crowds and a small group of irresponsible men.” Enzo was brought up on murder charges, and the Vatican issued a statement calling him “a modernized Saturn devouring his own sons.” The Mille Miglia was finished but the legal wrangling lasted four years, until Enzo was dragged into court, where he broke down in tears after the first question from the prosecutor. He was soon acquitted, as it was estimated that up to a million people had lined a route with zero crowd control. The Scuderia soldiered on.

Italians obviously forgave Ferrari. The armies of tifosi swarmed to the tracks to cheer their nation’s gladiatorial heroes, even as Italian drivers appeared less and less frequently on Ferrari’s roster. It didn’t matter; if you drove for Ferrari, you were an Italian. Niki Lauda, who won two world championships with the Scuderia, wrote in his memoir, My Years With Ferrari, that after he flew his own plane to Italy in 1977 to end his stormy relationship with the team, the control tower at Bologna airport refused him clearance to leave. “You’ve got a delay of two hours,” Lauda recalled the tower radioing him. “No more priorities, no more VIP treatment. You left Ferrari, you bastard.”

As Enzo’s stature grew, so did his isolation. He never attended races, only the Saturday practice at nearby Monza. His sparse office was likened to a tomb, the walls bare except for a giant portrait of Dino looking down above a small shrine of flowers. His desk drawers were stuffed with trinkets to give away to the few visitors granted entry.

One such visitor in May 1963 was Ford Division assistant general manager Donald Frey, who had come to settle the question of Ford’s purchase of Ferrari. Enzo was content to let the road-car operation go for a relatively modest sum, but control of the racing team was a sticking point. Enzo began, “If I wish to enter cars at Indianapolis and you do not wish me to enter cars at Indianapolis, do we go or do we not go?” Frey’s immediate response was: “You do not go.” The meeting ended abruptly, with Enzo presenting Frey as a parting gift an autographed copy of My Terrible Joys.

Enzo regularly held court for his inner circle in the bar of the Hotel Real Fini in Modena, across the street from his house, then conducted his many liaisons in the rooms above. Family life was never simple or easy. His wife, Laura, whom he married in 1923, feuded endlessly with his widowed mother, Adalgisa, who lived with them until she died in 1965 at the age of 93. Laura’s increasing involvement in the factory was said to have contributed to a mass walkout of the top engineers in 1961. After that, she stepped back to a solitary life defined by a lost son and a wandering husband.

Over time, the question of the role of Piero, Enzo’s son by his longtime mistress Lina Lardi, became more pressing. Born in 1945, Piero began working at Ferrari in the early ’70s as Enzo’s personal translator, then moved into an assistant manager role of the F1 team. But it was awkward and not widely discussed until Laura died in 1978. Piero then adopted the Ferrari name and, after Enzo died, inherited his 10 percent share of the company along with a vice-chairman title.

The irony of Enzo Ferrari is that this famously unemotional man, who lived a virtual hermit’s existence in his later years when his dynasty was at its peak, evoked the greatest passion in everyone around him. “He was,” concluded Brock Yates, “exactly what he repeatedly said he was: an agitator of men.” The company bearing his name maintains no resemblance to the one Enzo left behind when he was laid to rest in the family crypt in San Cataldo. Years of modernizing by successors, especially Luca di Montezemolo, under the supervision of Fiat produced a publicly traded and thoroughly advanced engineering and marketing machine that Enzo would not recognize.

But there, on the next F1 grid, will be two blood-red Ferraris bearing the black Cavallino Rampante, the Scuderia showing up as it has for over seven decades to write history one lap at a time. Ferrari the man and Ferrari the company remain as inseparable today as they were when Enzo was alive. And as we all know, you can’t stage Hamlet without the prince.

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I first met Jack Riddell—aka Lambo Jack—over the phone back in 1996. We had much to bond over, including a shared interest in music and pet parrots, but it was his knowledge of old Lamborghinis that I needed the most. The parts for my car, a 1969 Espada that I had just bought for 10 grand, were scattered among three different buildings in Reading, Pennsylvania, the stripped and upturned engine block serving as a rubbing post for a cat.

“It’s not really that complicated,” said Jack reassuringly of the four-cam, six-carburetor V-12 that looked exactly that complicated. “Go slow and take your time. And call me anytime if you have questions.” His reassuring words were the first puffs of wind in my project’s sails, and I would come to need a lot more to keep the ship moving over the next seven years of the restoration.

Raised in the Montana outback, Jack first saw a Lamborghini on the cover of Road & Track in the mid-’60s, and that was it. He bought his one and only, a 1967 400 GT, out of a pennysaver paper in Seal Beach, California, in 1972. The guy wanted $8000. Jack, then a U.S. Navy chief warrant officer, had less. They settled on $6250, and he had to borrow money to buy it. The Lamborghini, which he adorned with the plate “V12Toro,” thus became Jack’s oddball commuter to the Naval Weapons Station Seal Beach, where he was an instructor in guided missile systems.

In 1982, the local Italian-car cabal encouraged Jack to drive his car the 450 miles up to Monterey for the annual Pebble Beach car weekend. Back then, it was just an easygoing weekend, fueled more by enthusiasm than money, starting with an informal Italian-car gathering on Friday at the nearby Quail Lodge. That meet eventually morphed into the ritzy Concorso Italiano, but in those days, it more resembled a cars and coffee. It was free to park and free to walk in, and the catering was potluck. Jack remembers that the proceedings were interrupted by badly timed sprinklers, sending everyone scrambling.

Jack found his community, and he didn’t miss a single Monterey weekend for the next four decades. Back in San Diego, he organized his own Lambo weekend, a three-day driving and eating festival that for 30 years was a must-do on the Charging Bull calendar. And Jack went to Italy every spring for 17 years, making lifelong friends at the tempest-tossed factory and becoming an important link between it and the U.S. owners.

When the internet came along, he created the first forum for owners of old Lamborghinis, calling it the Vintage Lamborghini Garage. Through several iterations, the VLG is still online and, with 950 members, still a vital resource for the community trying to keep up these old Latin fusspots. Lambo Jack is often the most authoritative voice on it, having fixed nearly everything one can fix, including rebuilding his own V-12 twice. After the first overhaul, he wrote a comprehensive and illustrated step-by-step rebuild manual that he offers as a PDF to anyone for free.

The years and the miles have rolled up. Lambo Jack is now 85 and the V12Toro has 281,000 miles on it. His wife, Elise, stopped going to Monterey years ago, and last year, on his 40th consecutive trip, Lambo Jack declared it the final run. But a bunch of us cajoled him into making one last drive this year, even submitting his car for the Lamborghini class at the big Pebble Beach Concours on Sunday (they turned him down). But despite only recently recovering from cancer treatment, Jack went anyway. Partly to receive a special award from the Concorso Italiano, but mainly to see all his friends again. There were organized dinners and lots of toasts, but the best was the relaxed night of pizza and Lamborghini wine on the patio of the Mariposa Inn, the traditional HQ of the old-Lambo crowd during Monterey week.

As usual, Jack insisted on driving his car solo all the way up and back from San Diego, through the stew of L.A. traffic. On the return, the starter failed, and he had to get a push start and keep the engine running for the rest of a journey that would flatten a person half his age. Monterey, already suffering from a rising tide of look-at-me hyperflash, just won’t be the same without the old salts like Lambo Jack. I doubt he’ll fall for it again, but come January, I think I’ll give him a call.

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Confirmation bias is the tendency to believe only information that confirms your worldview and reject as false anything that challenges it. Some people know, just know, that everything the government does is some kind of insidious plot. Usually, our merry little world of classic cars is above it all, but a case in point is a survey that California’s air quality agency, the California Air Resources Board, sent out last August to some owners of cars from 1978 or earlier. The nine-question survey asked things like how often the car is driven and how is it stored. (Its full text is embedded at the bottom of this story.)

Well, it proved to be Christmas in September for the national outrage industry, starting with an “exclusive” on The Daily Caller, a right-leaning online blowhorn founded by former Fox News host Tucker Carlson. The item suggested a link between the survey and proposed zero-emissions zones in California. It didn’t take a hieroglyphics expert to see what was being implied, that overregulated, overtaxed, EV-loving California was now moving the levers of its evil empire to ban old cars. The Caller story was soon echoing in other media outlets and ping-ponging around club forums and cars-and-coffee parking lots, a lot of red-faced folks charging exactly what it was worth for their free opinions.

I’ve still got a few contacts from when I wrote a story on the history of emissions controls, so I made some calls. Steve Albu spent 31 years at CARB and helped write a lot of the landmark regulations that cleaned up the cars we drive. He also owns and maintains a fleet of 20 antique Mopars and has tried—with limited success—to educate his fellow Moparians on what is really going on. Which is that California may eventually move to reduce regulation on older cars, but it needs some data first on how these cars are used and the emissions they generate.

Getting an older car smogged in California is no treat. Among Albu’s fleet is a 34-year-old Dodge pickup. Because of its age, it falls into the gap between 1976, when cars received catalytic converters, and 2000 when OBD II on-board diagnostics systems greatly simplified diagnosing emissions problems. Under current California law, vehicles that fall into this 1976-2000 age group must have a tailpipe sniffer test on a dyno every two years. Pre-’76 cars are exempt from any testing, and post-2000 cars simply have their OBD readers scanned. Because of all the extra time and equipment needed for the sniffer test, the cost is typically higher. My local smog shop charges $90 for the sniff compared to $60 for an OBD reader test.

Beyond that, fixing cars that don’t pass has become “a racket,” according to Albu. For example, his truck failed on oxides of nitrogen (NOx), so he bought and installed a California-compliant replacement catalytic converter. Some emissions went down, but NOx stayed the same. “That catalyst simply has no rhodium in it, the stuff that reduces NOx,” he said. And California is not monitoring the makers of these replacement parts to ensure their quality. So owners are often getting screwed while trying to meet the law. Which is also turning desperate people into reluctant lawbreakers. There are phone numbers to which you can text your car’s VIN along with a Venmo of $300 and get back a passed smog certificate. The state is well aware of the cheating, but stamping it out is an endless game of Whac-A-Mole.

Within CARB, I’m told, is a group of regulators who want to bring rationality to the system by cutting loose from the smog-testing program the shrinking number of cars in the state built before 2000. And the number of 1976–2000 cars being tested is shrinking fast, from 1.6 million in 2018 to 1.2 million in 2020, statistically insignificant in a state with more than 30 million registered vehicles, while newer post-2000 vehicles already represent about 86 percent (and growing) of the cars tested.

But since nothing happens in regulatory agencies without data, the survey was a first step in mapping old car use. “The data we had was 20 years old,” said Michael McCarthy, chief technical officer and vehicle program specialist for CARB. The people who collect information for the agency “are always trying to refine our estimate of what’s out there.” As for McCarthy, he said, “I have no doubt in my mind that there’s nothing in the data that will say that emissions are going up on these vehicles… updating the data will only make the case stronger that it doesn’t make sense to keep regulating these things.”

Meaning that it really was in the interest of everyone receiving the survey to fill it out. Sometimes when the fellow says he’s from the government and he’s here to help you, he really is just here to help you.

2023 California Model Year … by Nick Pope

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With the Camaro nameplate retiring soon, we’re honoring the beloved two-door with a series of love letters, fun lists, and memories you can follow along with here. Many performance cars, especially nowadays, aim for an anodyne version of perfection that only a few can afford. The Camaro is for the rest of us—and it’s always ready to party. Still, we can’t pretend the car we’re about to celebrate over the next week or so is perfect. That in mind, let down your hair and come with us for a deep dive into what, exactly, makes the second-gen Camaro so bitchin’.

In drag racing, first gear gets you off the line, but second gear wins the race, and everything can come down to how well you execute the shift. By 1970, after just three short model years of the original Camaro, GM was ready to reach for the shifter.

Sketching of the second gen began in 1966, right after the design work wrapped on the first Camaro. This time, Chevy Studio 3 chief Henry Haga and his counterpart at Pontiac, Bill Porter, were determined not to let family-car proportions hamper their work. The second gen was a clean break, with almost no design elements carrying over from the original. Haga’s team drew the cowl so low that GM engineering pushed back, grousing that there was no way to package the car’s heater, air conditioner, radio, and glove compartment within such a compressed space.

According to Chevy historian Michael Lamm, styling chief Bill Mitchell—a full-fledged GM vice president—was called in to settle things. Mitchell backed up his designers, holding that a low cowl was essential to the car’s sporty character and that it shouldn’t rise even a fraction of an inch. The gen-two Camaro thus became the designer’s Camaro.

The 1970 ½ Camaro, so-called because its arrival was delayed by labor unrest, was proportioned to look dramatically lower, longer, and sleeker, with a slipstream roofline and a much sexier stretch from the dash to the front axle, known as the dash-to-axle ratio. This despite the wheelbase and overall construction, a semi-unitized steel architecture with a bolt-on front subframe, remaining conceptually unchanged from the first gen.

For the face, inspiration came from the then-new 1968 Jaguar XJ6 making the auto show rounds, with its prominent rectangular grille bracketed by faired-in headlights and driving lights. A decision to do away with a quarter-window supposedly saved GM $18 per car, money plowed into better cabin insulation including a double-wall roof. However, besides hampering rear visibility, no quarter-window meant excessively long doors, which were better for accessing the rear seats but made a shimmy job out of exiting a Camaro parked in a garage or between cars.

A decision to give Pontiac almost entirely separate sheetmetal for the Firebird, including slightly different doors, likely killed the convertible as well as a proposed two-door wagon. Tooling up such niche spinoffs for both Chevy and Pontiac was deemed prohibitively expensive, so the F-body for the 1970s arrived as a hardtop coupe only, with T-tops arriving as an option in 1978.

Performance, as well as design, was a calling card—at least at first. Hot engines included a 360-hp small-block V-8 and a 396-cubic-inch V-8 with 375 horsepower. At least one equipped with the Chevelle’s famed LS6 454-cubic-inch V-8 roamed GM’s proving grounds.

The “designer’s Camaro” arrived just as sales in the segment were tanking. Inflation was raging, OPEC was rampaging, and GM was facing mounting costs for meeting new safety and emissions regulations. In its first year, the second gen sold barely 50 percent of what the ’69 had sold. A devastating six-month UAW strike at the Camaro’s Norwood, Ohio, plant in 1972 prompted GM to consider killing the F-body outright. Production was halted so long that 1100 partially assembled Camaros and Firebirds collecting dust in the plant had to be scrapped because their 1972 bumpers no longer met 1973 safety standards.

However, the car had friends in high places within GM and ducked the ax. The second-gen carried the Camaro flag on for an astounding 11 years even as competitors ballooned in size and then drastically shrank (Mustang) or disappeared altogether (AMX, Challenger, etc.). Indeed, the F-body survived long enough for the 1977 blockbuster Smokey and the Bandit to inject new life into the segment; the 272,000 sales of the aging 1978 Camaro beat that of any year of the first gen as well as finally—finally!—swamping that of the Mustang.

As in drag racing, the Camaro launched in first, but it won in second.

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With the Camaro nameplate retiring soon, we’re honoring the beloved two-door with a series of love letters, fun lists, and memories over the next several weeks. You can follow along by clicking here.

Let’s not pretend the car we’re about to celebrate over the next week or so is perfect. In fact, the Camaro has always been flawed and beset with contradictions. It’s a sporty car, sometimes a very capable one, and yet many built over the decades had humble four- and six-cylinder engines and spent their lives as workaday commuters. It’s built by America’s largest automaker but is the consummate underdog, always playing catch-up with its crosstown rival, the Mustang, and scrapping for development dollars with its big brother, the Corvette.

The Camaro has, for most of its existence, lived in the crosshairs of the suits, who sent it into cold storage in 2002 and are doing so again at the end of this year. (Don’t think for a second, though, that it won’t be back.) To be even more blunt: The T-tops often leaked, the doors were usually too heavy, and the view out was almost always obstructed.

No matter, we love Camaros—have owned them, wrenched on them, and generally gotten up to no good in them. Judging by Hagerty data, you feel the same: It’s the fourth most popular car we insure. Our affection has a lot to do with all those “problems.” Many performance cars, especially nowadays, aim for an anodyne version of perfection that only a few can afford. The Camaro is for the rest of us—and it’s always ready to party. That in mind, let down your hair and come with us for a deep dive into what, exactly, makes the Camaro so bitchin’. We start at the beginning…

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First Generation (1967–69)

The one that picked a fight

It was the worst kept secret in Detroit in the summer of 1966. Ever since the arrival of the spectacularly successful Ford Mustang two years earlier, all eyes had turned to Chevrolet and its expected counterattack. Word had gone around that the Bowtie’s answer, the so-called F-car, would be about the same size and price as the Mustang and that it would be christened the Panther. Ford even ginned up a mocking TV ad in which a feline panther unsuccessfully chased a Ford Mustang, and Ford PR reps would quip to any reporter who would listen that Chevy’s blatant knockoff should really be called the Parrot.

On Tuesday, June 28, 1966, newly promoted GM vice president and Chevrolet general manager Elliot Marantette “Pete” Estes made the official announcement from Detroit’s Statler-Hilton hotel over a coast-to-coast conference call with 200 reporters gathered in 14 cities. Backed up by a boisterous squad of Michigan State University cheerleaders, Estes triumphantly announced that Chevy’s new Mustang-beater, due in showrooms that September, would be called—well, uh, it sounded something like “ka-MAIR-oh.”

The Los Angeles Times reported that “a 30-member press gathering at the Beverly Hilton reacted to Estes’ announcement of the name with silence.” To the north, the San Francisco Examiner stated that journalists’ first reaction there was, “‘He must be kidding.’ The name sort of stirs the imagination as much as a wet noodle.”

Estes said that he settled on Camaro only that morning at 10 o’clock, because it both upheld Chevy’s C-centric naming convention—Corvair, Corvette, Chevelle, Chevy II—and in colloquial French loosely translates as “comrade,” (“…a word that also has its connotations,” said a smirking New Hampshire paper).

“We chose a name which, besides being lyrical and new, also reflects the purpose of the car. The real mission of the auto is to be a close companion of its owner, tailored to his or her individual tastes,” said Estes. Some observers also suggested that GM’s recent smackdown in the Ribicoff traffic-safety hearings that grew out of Ralph Nader’s 1965 book, Unsafe at Any Speed, and GM’s hiring of private investigators to discredit Nader had scared GM away from aggressive names that “subtly encourage speed by exciting images of power and violence,” according to one columnist at the time.

So, comrade Camaro it was, although bewildered French speakers said they had never heard the word before, and the entire English-speaking world had to be trained on how to pronounce it. “CA-maro,” and not “caMARo” or “camaRO.” Ford PR reps chortled—again, to anyone who would listen—that a Spanish word very much like it refers to a type of shrimp.

They had every reason for swagger. In just two years, Ford had pumped out more than a million Mustangs, saving the mid-1960s from being an otherwise dreary period for Detroit of repeated factory strikes, encroaching foreign competition, and soft sales. Additionally, the Mustang proved that there was a huge untapped market for what the industry called “specialty cars.” “When you have a winner, you have to expect competition,” mused Ford Division general manager Don Frey, who at the time lived across the street from Estes. “Imitation continues to be the sincerest form of flattery.”

Contrary to expectations that were elevated by the fiberglass-bodied Corvette and the rear-engine Corvair—as well as the front-drive ’66 Olds Toronado and the over-head-cam Pontiacs—there would be nothing very radical about the all-steel, rear-drive 1967 Camaro save for the hideaway headlights that disappeared behind motorized panels in the grille of RS editions. Chevy was aiming hard for a circa-$2400 base price, considered critical to effectively challenging the Mustang, and it would not be deterred by any of the techno-wizardry then pouring forth from GM R&D.

According to Chevy historian Michael Lamm, GM’s See-the-USA division committed to building a Mustang competitor as early as August 1964. It was a rush job on a shoestring, a sporty car to be grafted onto the bones of the Chevy II/Nova sedan (as was the Mustang an offspring of the Falcon). Bill Mitchell, who in 1958 succeeded Harley Earl as GM’s design chief, oversaw the styling of that first Camaro, code-named XP-836 and executed in Chevrolet Studio 2 at GM’s Technical Center in Warren, Michigan, where it was assigned to division stylist Henry Haga.

From the earliest clays, the Camaro’s shape departed from that of the straight-edged Mustang, brooming aside the midcentury-modern convention of flat fender lines and slab sides in favor of rounded haunches and a sloping nose and tail, pulling in elements of both the Corvette and Corvair. As with other sporty cars of the era, the ’67 Camaro’s front and rear fender lines swelled upward to peaks directly above the top of the wheel arches before tapering off. That little trick, called “Coke-bottle styling,” had made period designs from the Ford GT40 to the Lamborghini Miura to the ’68 Dodge Charger look good.

Although the Camaro’s 108.0-inch wheelbase was identical to the Mustang’s, its sedan underpinnings—including the high cowl and conservative dash-to-axle ratio—meant the first-gen Camaro would never be as long, low, or sexy as designers would have liked. Modern collectors might strenuously disagree with him, but Mitchell was a bigger fan of the second-gen 1970 Camaro, saying later that the ’67 was the hasty product of a committee.

Unlike the fully unitized Mustang, which had a frame welded to its body, GM engineers designed the Camaro around a semi-unitized concept, meaning everything forward of the firewall was supported by a bolt-on frame while everything aft of that was, as on the Mustang, integrated with the body. That engineering decision was unwittingly a gift to future restorers and customizers, who could easily swap out the Camaro’s front subframe for a new one or, in more recent years, an all-aluminum pro-touring setup.

Toying with many ideas, including a two-seat roadster and a two-door Nomad-style wagon, Chevrolet eventually settled on two straightforward body styles, a notchback coupe and a convertible, available with six-cylinder or V-8 and various trim levels. People had admired the look of fastbacks since they went mainstream in the late 1930s, but they almost universally plunked their money down on cars with protruding trunks. The 1966 Mustang notchback outsold the fastback by a rate of 14 to 1. The first Dodge Charger in 1966 was a daring fastback—and a colossal failure. The only real exception was the Barracuda, which Plymouth broadened in 1967 with a notchback to join the existing fastback and convertible. The Cuda fastback held its own, selling about the same as the notchback—though all of Barracuda’s sales in 1967 didn’t add up to two months’ worth of Mustang sales. Chevy was aiming higher, and it didn’t want the distraction of a fastback.

Ultimately, however, the first Camaro couldn’t beat Mustang in the showroom. Chevy’s two plants in Norwood, Ohio, and Van Nuys, California, churned out around 221,000 units in ’67, rising to 243,000 in 1969, when even a fading Mustang sold almost 300,000 units. But as the turbulent 1960s drew to a close, GM was undaunted; the Camaro and its sister car, the Firebird, were established enough in three short years to be worthy of a complete reinvention for the next decade.

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Gravity seems a perfect name for Lucid’s next opus: a twin-motor, three-seat-row electric SUV that will have an estimated range of up to 440 miles. Why? Because such a vehicle, packing optional air suspension, rear-wheel steering, 23-inch wheels on some trim levels, a glass roof, and a mighty 118 kW/hours worth of lithium-ion batteries, will have a heck of a lot of mass. And as we all know from high school physics, gravity is the force that attracts all things with mass.

Of course, porcine weight is a problem that affects all electric vehicles today and the Arizona-built Lucids are no exception. The Gravity, the cheapest version of which is expected to have a starting price of just under $80,000 when it goes on sale late in 2024, could weigh as much as 6000 pounds when full specifications are announced. And it’ll tow up to 6000 pounds, giving a fully laden Gravity some serious inertia.

Lucid’s goal with the Gravity was to pack as much space and luxury into a package that is not quite as large as some three-row competitors, such as the Audi Q7. However, while it’s definitely a luxury item, with an opulent interior of wood and metal accents and optional leather, the Gravity design brief seems to have been centered around families. For starters, the sleek wind-cheating design—a super-slippery drag coefficient of 0.24 was mentioned—and the overall shape don’t say off-roader as much as urbane minivan, harkening thoughts of the Kia Carinival but without the sliding doors.

Another minivan-like feature is the flip-and-fold third row that disappears into a cavity in the floor, as well as a middle row that folds to create a flat load floor from the front seats to the rear bumper. The front trunk holds eight cubic feet of cargo, or it doubles as bleachers with an optional portable bench seat. A 110-volt AC outlet means it can also serve as a smoothie station or a charge point for electric bicycles.

As with so many interiors today, the cockpit is designed around its various screens as well as the tablets and phones that passengers bring into the car with them. (Folding tables for Gravity’s middle-seat passengers anticipate the kids’ plethora of devices.) But Lucid has tried something new here, fitting a square-ish steering wheel that allows unobstructed views of the 34-inch OLED “floating display” above it. This, the “microtablet” capacitive finger controls on the steering wheel, and the wide center screen are your gateway to Lucid UX 3.0, as the company calls its digital interface.

UX 3.0 is a multimedia control and entertainment package that includes novel features such as “Lucid Sanctuary”—a multisensory experience that pulls in the displays, the audio system, the climate control, and the massaging seats to “create a Zen space” in which to while away idle time. To ease the drudgery of waiting for the kids in the school pickup zone, for instance, one can choose from guided meditation and a karaoke function among other diversions. And if all gets to be too much, a “digital detox” mode reduces the displays down to only the bare essentials.

We’re told the Gravity uses a whole new platform separate from that of the Lucid Air sedan, with which the Saudi-backed company launched in 2021. The desire to offer a flat load floor in back necessitated a suspension redesign.

Initial Gravity models will have the company’s proprietary compact motor drive unit on both axles, giving it all-wheel-drive capability and a claimed zero-to-60 time of just 3.5 seconds. The 900-volt system allows hyper-quick charging that, presuming you can find a working 350-kW DC fast charger, will blast in 200 miles worth of range in 15 minutes.

The pre-release press material wasn’t clear on whether the circa-$80,000 starting price buys all of the features mentioned above and including the 440-mile range (we’re assuming it doesn’t). Base models will probably be front- or rear-drive only and have lesser range. Either way, the Gravity and an announced smaller and cheaper SUV due by 2026 will take Lucid much closer than the Air to the heart of the market, where the sales are and where the industry’s real heavyweights are already partying. We’ll publish a full review with drive impressions after our first bout behind the wheel.

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When film and television director John Frankenheimer died in 2002, cinema buffs and car lovers both suffered a great loss. The director of critically acclaimed thrillers such as The Manchurian Candidate, Seven Days in May, The French Connection II, and Reindeer Games was also the director of Grand Prix (above) and Ronin, two of the best movies ever made with cars as the action stars.

Turns out that besides being a genuine car enthusiast, Frankenheimer was also a rabid collector of model cars. A 1988 Getty archive photo of Frankenheimer shows him at his Los Angeles home attending to floor-to-ceiling glass showcases crammed full of some of the 1800 diecast models he collected or built himself over his lifetime. After long storage in a climate-controlled facility, that collection is now being offered for auction—not as a whole, but as 1800 individually numbered lots that have been painstakingly cataloged and photographed by Los Angeles Estate Auction in Glendale, California.

The company, which has done celebrity auctions in the past, was approached by the Frankenheimer estate about selling the collection as well as a few awards that John received during his career. The whole collection was appraised at $250,000, according to Zack Oganesyan, consignment director at Los Angeles Estate Auction. That works out to an average value of $139 per model, a relatively affordable way to own a piece of the famed director’s legacy.

Some of the items will undoubtedly sell for more. Model experts will spot some rare pieces from long-gone model companies that have been signed by famous modelmakers such as André Marie Ruf, Buzz Lockwood, and John Simons. Some of the models also have “JF” scrawled on the bottom, implying they were made by or specifically for John Frankenheimer.

Besides those, we also saw some relatively cheap diecast models that will likely sell for $10 or less (plus 25 percent buyer’s premium).

Almost all of the collection is 1/43rd scale, said Oganesyan, meaning the models are around four inches long and made of various materials, from resin to white metal, a mixture of tin and zinc that was commonly used in toy soldiers.

The auction catalog is scheduled to go online on November 1, and the three-day live auction will commence on November 17. Oganesyan said the catalog will feature five photos of each model, a substantial effort that entailed taking and organizing around 9000 photographs. Oganesyan figures each lot will take about a minute to sell, which means the whole auction could last 30 hours. Which is why it’s scheduled for three days. The man liked his models.

Online bidders must pre-register with liveauctioneers.com. See www.losangelesestateauction.com for more information.

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A plan announced this fall by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to curtail off-road driving near the beloved Jeeper haven of Moab, Utah, has pitted environmentalists against a growing number of recreational trail drivers. It seems like nobody will get exactly what they want, which is perhaps by design.

The plan, announced on September 28 and due to take effect at the end of October, unless a pending court challenge prevents it, closes to motor vehicles 317 miles of unmaintained road and dirt two-track trails in a particularly scenic area northwest of the outdoorsy berg of Moab. Other trails have new restrictions.

The plan was spurred generally by a dramatic increase in off-roading in recent decades and in particular by a 2017 court settlement with the local Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, an environmental group. The Wilderness Alliance had sued the BLM to force the federal agency to develop and implement an updated plan for preserving the landscape.

Though the federal plan only addresses about 28 percent of the miles of trail in that particular area, Jeepers and enthusiasts of off-highway vehicles (OHVs) and UTVs (utility-terrain vehicles, or “side-by-sides”) complain that it all but freezes them out of the best parts of this landscape by greatly reducing motorized access to the Green River and some of its tributaries. In these areas, the waterways cut dramatic, thousand-foot-deep canyons that wind through ancient formations of ochre-colored Navajo, Kayenta, and Wingate sandstone.

“There’s no other way to say this. The travel plan is the worst defeat motorized recreation has suffered in decades,” wrote Patrick McKay of Colorado Off-Road Trail Defenders on the group’s Facebook site. “Almost every major trail west of Moab is closed, including Day Canyon Point, Hey Joe Canyon, Mashed Potatoes, Ten Mile Canyon, Hell Roaring Canyon, Mineral Canyon, 7-Up, two of the three overlooks on Deadman Point, and many more.”

The so-called Labyrinth Rims Gemini Bridges Travel Management Area consists of 812 miles of off-road routes spread out like a spider’s web over 300,000 acres of desert and canyon in Utah’s Grand County, which includes Moab. It is only a tiny part of the whopping 42 percent of Utah that is under the administration of the federal Bureau of Land Management, which often finds itself squeezed between conservationists in the state who want to keep the landscape wild and those who wish to recreate in it or exploit it for its commercial potential.

The Labyrinth Rims area has long been used for cattle grazing as well as uranium mining, and it is now spotted with natural gas drilling pads that in recent years have encroached ever closer to the nearby Canyonlands National Park. Meanwhile, Moab has become a thriving tourist hub that caters to visitors of all stripes wanting to engage with a majestic landscape formed over millennia by wind, water, and geologic upheaval. Along its main drag are numerous businesses renting Jeeps and UTVs as well as offering guided off-road tours. In March, tens of thousands of off-roaders converge on the town for the Easter Jeep Safari, an event so important on the Jeeping calendar that Stellantis, which owns the Jeep brand, uses it to debut new designs.

A city of 5000 permanent residents but millions of visitors annually, Moab is unquestionably a victim of its own success. Nestled in the scenic Spanish Valley next to the Colorado River, where it meanders below sheer cliff faces on its way to Glen Canyon and the Grand Canyon, it was for decades a dusty backwater that never fully recovered from the bust of the uranium mining rush in the 1950s. At least, until the rock climbers, river rafters, backpackers, and Jeepers discovered it in more recent years.

A massive national ad campaign, along with the arrival of commercial airliner service and a hotel-building spree in the 2010s, resulted in a tsunami of visitors from all over the world. After an initial slowdown early in the 2020 pandemic, tourism rebounded hard, with ensuing traffic jams, sold-out hotels, and overwhelmed eateries.

The nearby Arches National Park was forced to create a reservation system to stanch the long lines that daily formed at its gate, and many of the town’s inhabitants have turned sour on its tourism industry, voting in a city council that has tightened noise and speed restrictions and even moved to kick out an Easter Jeep-like festival that was just for ATVs. The crush in Moab has spurred other Utah towns to revise their master plans to limit tourism. In Bluff, a hundred miles to the south, a popular bumper sticker reads “Don’t Moab my Bluff.”

Having spent years visiting the area and traversing the trails in question, your author can attest to the gobsmacking grandeur of spots like the Hey Joe and Hell Roaring canyons. And as well to the fact that the volume and speed of the vehicle traffic on Moab’s trails has grown exponentially, especially since the pandemic. That has had deeply negative side effects in terms of trail erosion and trash.

In the old days, when relatively few people braved this wilderness in crude and hard-riding 4x4s such as Jeep CJs and Toyota FJ40s, the speeds were necessarily slow and the impact on the landscape was minimal.

Nowadays, the burgeoning off-road, powersports, and overlanding industries are eager to supply enthusiasts with high-horsepower vehicles that have giant indestructible tires, rut-smoothing suspensions, and future-tech camping amenities. Modified Jeeps and purpose-built side-by-sides give legions of visitors the ability to effortlessly cruise Moab’s outback, often moving at 40 or 50 mph at the pointy end of huge dust clouds. In their wake: denuded trails, flattened brush, human waste, and camping fire rings sprinkled with trash.

Though many Jeep clubs work hard to maintain trails and set high standards for land stewardship, they only represent a fraction of Moab visitors, some of whom exhibit no concern for the land whatsoever. The BLM’s job isn’t to keep people out of wild places, exactly, but rather to balance the needs of the land with those of the visitors and residents. The BLM’s trail-closure plan for Moab seems to be making the case that not every spot on Earth, or even in Utah, needs to be accessible by a motorized vehicle. Whether it remains in place is now up to the courts.

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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 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. 

Everything is somewhere. That simple belief has kept treasure hunters going down through the ages, from the first people who searched for Blackbeard’s hoard to that one guy who, back in 2019, pulled a 500-year-old gold Tudor pendant out of the English mud. Everything is somewhere, waiting to be found—though Randy Carlson has come to believe that “this one found me.”’

What found Carlson at his compound out in the rural inland hills southeast of Los Angeles is a couple of tons of unrestored prewar Mercedes-Benz. If cars could talk, this one would have some tales, starting with its years as a limousine in wartime Berlin, then as the recipient of a sporty new cabriolet body by an obscure German coachbuilder, then as a traveler in the New World that took it as far west as Albuquerque, thence to a barn in Michigan, now back to California and Randy Carlson. After eight decades, the Mercedes manages to wear its years with a battered dignity perhaps only possible in a car built by the world’s oldest surviving car company. That silver star on the radiator cowl still means something, even when showing some serious patina.

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The story begins the summer of 2021 when Carlson’s son came home with Covid. It quickly rampaged through the house right as Carlson was about to leave on his annual pilgrimage to Pebble Beach. “It’s August, I’m supposed to be in Monterey, and instead I’m stuck at home with Covid and pissed off,” he recalled. “I’m spending the whole time watching everything going on up there on the internet and also trolling Facebook pages, looking at car stuff and saying, ‘Why the f*** am I not up there playing with my friends?’”

Carlson is a familiar face in the online VW community, frequently posting VW and related content on YouTube and Instagram and running a VW ad-listing website called Oldbug.com. He describes his profession as “playing around with this stuff,” and he had no idea that he was about to be reminded that everything is somewhere, waiting to be discovered. If you look close enough.

It happened totally by chance, while he was hacking and sneezing and scanning a Facebook group for barn find cars. A fellow Facebooker named Mike Coyer in Portage, Ohio, posted some pictures of a 1934 Packard that he had just extracted from a barn in rural Michigan. Carlson posted a comment, as he still owns a ’34 Packard that has been in the family for decades. The two got to talking online, then on the phone.

“I bought a truck and then sold it to a trucking scrapyard,” explained Coyer of the series of chance encounters that instigated the affair. “The guy who bought it said he knew of some cars in a barn in Michigan.” Coyer buys and sells things, and he plays a long game. He waited 30 years for an old quarry truck to come down to a price of his liking. Naturally, he was curious, and he went to see the farm where, besides a barn full of cars, there were also more than a hundred antique tractors.

“Eventually I asked Mike if there was anything else in the barn,” said Carlson, and he replied that there was a similar vintage Rolls-Royce. Carlson asked for some photos and, upon seeing those, noticed some slivers of an old red convertible buried in the barn behind the black Rolls. Carlson asked his new internet friend about that, “and he says, ‘A Mercedes.’ And I said, ‘Tell me about that.’” Coyer sent another picture that wasn’t much more revealing. “I said, ‘Are you interested in that car?’” recalled Carlson, “and Mike said, ‘No I don’t want anything to do with a Mercedes.’ And I said, ‘Well, can you help me get it?’”

Coyer agreed to drive the few hours back to Michigan and take more pictures and a video “that was low light, you couldn’t really see it,” said Carlson. “It’s a red Mercedes convertible and supposedly from 1940, and I said, ‘I don’t care, it may be rotten from the bottom down, I’m in. What do they want for it?’”

The family was reluctant to sell at first, but with Coyer acting as an intermediary, a price was agreed upon. Carlson wired off a substantial cache of money, including a 30 percent finder’s fee, “to a guy I never met before, that I only talked to on Facebook and one phone call, for a car that wasn’t his, that was in the next state over from where he was. I wired the funds off and thought, ‘I am the biggest idiot in the world.’ I couldn’t sleep for three days.”

Coyer was an honest actor, however, exchanging money for the bill of sale—the only hitch being that nobody could find a key for the car. Then they started pulling cars out of the barn to free the Benz. Carlson was still at home recovering from Covid and anxiously awaiting texts and photos. “They pulled the Rolls out, which was actually a pretty nice-looking car. Then they get this Ford Model A out, and I get the first picture I’ve seen of the profile of the car, and I lost my mind. I’m like, ‘Gah! What did I get?’”

Carlson didn’t know the model, but he could tell the Mercedes was unique, not just from the elegant shape and exquisite trim but from the unusual rear-wheel arch. Then Coyer sent him some detail pictures including one of the coachbuilder’s placard. Carlson said, “Then I completely lost my s**t.”

***

By 1940, British bombers were already in the skies over Germany, attacking industrial targets such as aircraft factories and plants that built airplane components. Daimler-Benz was one of them, a supplier of V-12 engines to Luftwaffe fighters and bombers even as the company still built trucks and passenger cars for the domestic market. At some point that fateful year, one of the final Mercedes-Benz 320 civilian models, a Pullman limo, rolled off the line at the company’s sprawling Stuttgart plant, headed for Berlin and most likely government runabout duty.

The 320, known in Benz-speak as the W142, launched in 1937 as a ’tweener car between the company’s entry-level 170 and its “Grosser” 770 luxury models. Mercedes offered a wide range of body styles, the sexiest being the Stromlinien-Limousine, a streamliner coupe that was dubbed “a pocketbook 540K.” But the car was all flash and no bang; the initial 3208-cc flathead inline-six put out a wheezy 78 horsepower, not much for propelling a car weighing over 4000 pounds. And the power figure didn’t change much when Mercedes upped the displacement to 3405 cc in 1938, mainly to compensate for deteriorating fuel quality in the Reich. Even so, a garden-variety 320 sedan can fetch more than $100,000 on today’s market, with special body cabriolets going for over half a million.

So far, no amount of digging has turned up the story of what happened to this particular 320 after it left the factory for Berlin, or how the car survived a war that flattened much of Germany’s cities. Or, indeed, who in 1948 brought the car—likely somewhat the worse for wear—to the offices of Karosserie F. Rometsch in Berlin’s western Halensee neighborhood to be lavishly rebodied into the graceful cabriolet you see here.

The glorious irony of Randy Carlson’s chance encounter with this car is that he was already a knowledgeable fan of Rometsch, a somewhat obscure name in the rich pantheon of European bespoke coachbuilders. The firm, established by Friedrich Rometsch and his son Fritz in 1924, is best known today for producing a series of special bodies for postwar Volkswagens, including a sporty coupe and convertible based on the Beetle that was a precursor to (and perhaps an inspiration for) the later Karmann Ghia. Rometsch also built a stretched four-door Beetle that was sold to taxi companies.

One of the firm’s designers, Johannes Beeskow, was a veteran of the more well-known Erdmann & Rossi coachbuilder that in the 1930s draped spectacular teardrop bodies over Mercedes-Benzes and Rolls-Royces. Before he went on to work for Karmann in later years, Beeskow is thought to have penned the body for Carlson’s car even as Berlin lay in ruins and its population foraged for basic needs. At Rometsch, while the Soviets commenced a blockade of Berlin in 1948 that led to the Berlin Airlift, during which aircraft shuttled vital supplies to the besieged city for 13 months, the Benz’s new body took shape from hand-beaten steel and copious lead filler.

It’s hard to imagine anyone in that city living under those circumstances wanting and paying for a handmade, 1930s art deco–style coachbuilt body on a used 8-year-old Mercedes chassis. But somebody did, and they weren’t alone. Photos of the finished Mercedes as well as a rebodied Maybach in front of Rometsch’s workshop in 1948 are believed to have come from Beeskow’s personal album. (That book, according to Carlson, went to Karmann and then disappeared into the vast Volkswagen archive after Beeskow’s death in 2005. He would love to get a peek at it but figures it’s hidden away in some “Indiana Jones–like warehouse at Volkswagen.”)

***

Carlson has seen a photo of a personal list kept by Beeskow of his projects, the Benz as well as the Maybach listed next to a hand-scrawled notation in German: “The last.” Perhaps, guesses Carlson, because they were the last of the one-off coachbuilt cars done in the prewar style. Years ago, Carlson visited the former site of Rometsch in Berlin—that’s how big of a fan he is. After the Karmann Ghia arrived in 1955 to wreck Rometsch’s business modifying VWs into sporty coupes, the coachbuilder turned to making ambulance bodies and the occasional modified Range Rover, then was a body repair shop before finally going under in 2000. “I had two Rometsch [VWs] in this garage at one point, and it’s literally the most obscure car you can have. They made maybe 100 cars, and with the Mercedes, I’ve now owned three of them.”

At some point in the late ’40s or early ’50s, the Mercedes made its way across the Atlantic—again, the story is unknown, but Carlson suspects it was a U.S. serviceman or possibly even a German rocket scientist who brought over the car. After the war, a coterie of the Reich’s missile men immigrated—along with their leader, Wernher von Braun—to work on rocket development at the U.S. Army’s ballistic missile range in remote White Sands, New Mexico. The fact that this car’s known owner history begins in Albuquerque is tantalizingly suggestive, as is an old business card that Carlson found in the car for a chrome shop just across the border in Mexico, where German rocket engineers used to go regularly for weekend benders.

The story really firms up when a new owner from the Midwest bought the car in the mid- or late ’50s. The car’s new custodian had relocated to New Mexico from Wisconsin, according to Coyer, and there assembled the bulk of his car collection, including both the Mercedes and the Rolls-Royce. In 1968, he decided to move his family back to the Midwest, to Michigan. All of the cars were driven except, for some reason, the Benz, Coyer says he was told. Instead, the owner widened the holes in the front fenders where the bumper brackets poke through to fit a homemade tow bar and flat-towed the Mercedes all the way, there to go into a barn and wait for Randy Carlson to grow up. And for the internet to be invented. And for Mike Coyer to come along. And for a pandemic that would unite the three for a spontaneous rescue.

After the money changed hands, Carlson was so keen to get the car that he arranged for a truck to pick it up the same day it was extracted from the barn and to haul it out to California. What you see on these pages is not that car, exactly, but the car after Carlson went to work on it. When it arrived, it was in a sad state and missing quite a few parts. The semaphores, or mechanical turn-indicating trafficators, were missing, as were the bumpers, fog lights, and door handles. Luckily, a subsequent trip by Coyer to the Michigan barn turned up a previously overlooked wooden box that contained many of the missing bits. “I had the parts air-freighted,” said Carlson, “because it’s not like you can go to AutoZone and get semaphores for a coachbuilt Mercedes.”

The doors were completely disassembled when it arrived, so he put them back together while he waited for the lube he sprayed into the cylinders to free the rings so he could lever over the 3.4-liter flathead-six. Eventually the engine seemed ready to execute combustion, and Carlson put fuel and spark to it. It fired up for likely the first time in five or six decades with a cloud of smoke and a sporty snore from its long, thin tailpipe.

Since then, Carlson has fixed the brakes, fitted new tires, rebuilt the radiator, replaced the exhaust, and done a host of other small jobs to make the car drivable, confining the cosmetic work to cleaning and waxing it and throwing blankets over its rotting upholstery. It does move under its own power, if not with a lot of alacrity, and on a short drive from his compound, it proved a stately and smooth cruiser with a lot of what the marketers used to tout as “road-hugging weight.” Unlike American cars of the same period, Mercedes had all independent suspensions in the 1930s, with swing axles in the rear supported by two pairs of coil springs. It makes for a relatively sophisticated ride, especially over rough surfaces.

And this is about all Carlson plans to do with it. “It would take the rest of my life to restore it and a crap-ton of money. While I could pull it off to some level, it wouldn’t be to the level it deserves—it wouldn’t be a Pebble-quality restoration.” Besides, he’s got a lot of other projects, including a rare Brubaker Box, an iconic VW-based kit car from the 1970s of which perhaps 28 were made, that needs a few bits to get going.

So far, the old Mercedes has given him plenty of joy in the heavily patinaed state it’s in. “The goal was to get it together, get all the pieces on it, make it run and drive, and take it places. The couple events I’ve taken it to so far, it gets a ton of attention just like this. So as far as restoration goes, what is the point?”

***

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Mike McCluskey was out on his driveway tinkering with his Sunbeam Alpine one day in 1969 when Carroll Shelby rode up on a Yamaha motorcycle. “He lived three blocks away, in a three-level house with a killer view that he got for 50 grand because it had had a fire in a room on the ground floor,” McCluskey recalled to me. “He said, ‘I like what you’re doing on your Sunbeam. I’ve got four Cobras that I want to go through. You want the job?’”

McCluskey wanted the job, and today he’s known as one of the nation’s preeminent restorers of original Shelby Cobras. His shop at the end of the runway at Torrance Airport in Los Angeles is just a few miles from my house. Occasionally, mechanics from the airport take him tough jobs they can’t do themselves. I once brought him the exhaust manifold off my Cessna because a slip-joint was galled and wouldn’t come apart. McCluskey is 75 and so soft-spoken that you sometimes don’t realize he’s talking until he has finished the best part of a sentence. But he attacked the manifold with a torch and pounded on it like Conan the Barbarian until it separated. Then he quietly went back to making old Cobras perfect.

McCluskey grew up by the beach, in a part of Westchester that was flattened to make way for new runways at LAX. His family then moved to nearby Playa del Rey, near the Hughes Aircraft factory and the private hangar where Howard Hughes for decades hid away the Spruce Goose. He worked at Hughes during his high school summers, sneaking off on Saturdays to run a big-block Chevy at Lions Drag Strip down by the port. Then he worked at a shop that made hydraulic presses. “That’s how I learned machining, from a German foreman who was a hardass. He would say, ‘You’re doing this for the rest of the day until you do it right.’ Very perfectionist guy.”

A fortuitously high draft number kept him out of the army, and his parents had hoped he would make a career at Hughes or nearby North American Aviation, but McCluskey’s heart was in cars. He spent three years working on a contract basis directly for Shelby restoring Cobras out of a four-car garage in Inglewood, reporting occasionally to the head office that Shelby had (once again) stolen for cheap because two brothers had gotten into a deadly gunfight in it. “He knew how to delegate; he would find good people, point them in the right direction, and say, ‘I’ll call you once in a while to yell at you.’” Shelby supplied McCluskey with a 427 automatic beater. “It only got 8 miles to the gallon, but back then, you could buy premium for 30 cents.” Every time he ran to Shelby’s pad to swap cars, “there’d be a new girl living at the house.”

McCluskey worked on and off for Shelby for more than 20 years, being hired to build several Daytona coupes as well as the infamous “completion” cars, a handful of 427 Cobras built 25 years after the originals but stamped with leftover CSX3000-series serial numbers. He watched warily the rise of the Cobra replica, starting with the first fiberglass copies from Steve Arntz in the 1970s. “I remember telling Shelby, ‘If you don’t step on this bug, he’s going to start taking over the market.’ Shelby said, ‘Well, you know what, nobody is going to buy a plastic car.’”

He was wrong, and by the time Shelby decided to hire lawyers and do something about it, “the cat was out of the bag,” said McCluskey, who eventually decided that the thousands of fiberglass replicas had only helped drive up prices of the originals. Today, he only works on copies from select brands. He once owned a pair of real 289s but sold them in the late ’80s when prices of everything were zooming. He watched lots of Cobras get converted into 427, Super Snake, and S/C replicas, then did a decent business restoring them back when the fashions changed and originality became more important.

The late Phil Hill introduced McCluskey to the wonders of high-end self-playing pianos called “reproducers,” and he restored a bunch, along with a huge, 900-pipe theater organ that fills most of a separate hangar at the airport. As if that weren’t enough, he also built a few aerobatic aircraft, imported a number of Russian military jets, and is currently hankering not for a Cobra but a Stanley Steamer. You’ll find him at the shop pretty much every day of the week, showing the rest of us what a full life really looks like.

***

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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. 

Look up at the night sky to see one of the best examples of patina in the known universe: our moon. It has been rolling up miles for the past 4.5 billion years and it is sun-faded and totally blasted with stone chips. Who knows, maybe someday we’ll get around to restoring it. In the meantime, we all know that the hands of the clock move in only one direction, and so far, nobody has figured out how to freeze time or, better yet, turn it backward. This despite thousands of years of noodling on the problem. And it is a problem because time marching on means age and decrepitude creeping in. We are aging and so is our stuff, giving rise to multibillion-dollar industries that promise—and uniformly fail—to stop it.

Patina. It’s the Italians, renowned for their metalwork going back to the Middle Ages, who get the credit for the word. It literally refers to a shallow dish but in common usage describes the layer of tarnish on metal—often a dish—due to oxidation or reaction to chemicals. Of course, patina goes back much further than the Middle Ages. Not long after some unknown artisan cast the first glittering object in bronze around 6500 years ago, it started turning green. And you can bet that the customer was pissed, initiating both the first warranty claim and a centuries-long assault on patina that traces a direct blood lineage to the Eastwood catalog.

The question we are attempting to raise is whether we should even bother. Because patina can be a lovely thing. Indeed, the second definition of the word patina in the Merriam-Webster dictionary is “a surface appearance of something grown beautiful especially with age or use.”

What makes an old, used thing more beautiful than a new, clean thing, exactly?

“You’re like the 400th person to ask me that question,” said Steve Babinsky, founder of Automotive Restorations, a Pebble Beach–quality restoration shop in Lebanon, New Jersey.

“I have no idea. There is no intelligent answer to that question. Personally, I like patina, but my customers don’t.”

Along with Henry Ford, who crammed a sprawling museum full of unrestored machines in the belief that technology should be preserved in exactly the condition in which it was used, Babinsky is a kind of disciple of patina. Meaning that he owns numerous original prewar classics himself, including an unrestored 1928 Lincoln with a Locke & Company–coachbuilt body that is currently buried in the shop behind a couple of freshly restored Duesenbergs. “People will walk right past the Duesenbergs to see this Lincoln,” he said. “It’s just more interesting to see how the old dead guys did it back then.”

Babinsky also helped start the preservation class at Pebble Beach in 1998 by entering a Belgian-made 1927 Minerva. It has a unique, impossible-to-restore fabric body, and it was the first original-condition car to enter the famed concours in decades. The preservation class was the institution’s recognition that patina (being the handmaiden of originality) has a place at the pinnacle of the classic car world.

Since then, it has earned a place at other rungs on the ladder, from Magnus Walker’s shaggy “urban outlaw” Porsches to the turbocharged, nitrous-fed rust buckets built by YouTubers like the Roadkill crew. Every year, the Antique Automobile Club of America features a class at its events called HPOF, for Historic Preservation of Original Features, which welcomes cars from all eras with original equipment. Originality is king and patina is no handicap. “People obviously come at this hobby from different directions,” said Steve Moskowitz, executive director of the AACA. “There are a whole group of us who enjoy being transported back to a kinder and gentler time than it is today. And seeing something unmolested is pretty cool.”

Patina on a Radwood (1980–99) car can especially be appreciated when it’s on a rare or high-dollar car. The key is wear, not neglect. Think Ferrari F40 with pitted paint on the nose and rear quarters and faded event participation stickers on the rear glass. — Art Cervantes, CEO and cofounder of Radwood

In common car parlance, “molested” refers to what happens to cars after they leave the factory. It’s perhaps an overly punitive term that can mean anything from miles on the odometer to a roof that has been sawed off. To be fair to earlier generations, pretty much every car built for the first half-century of the automobile’s existence experienced only depreciation. So nothing much was at stake. Cars didn’t really start appreciating in value until the past 40 years or so. Until then, a vehicle was there to be used in whatever manner the owner saw fit until it had no use, then it was scrapped. Indeed, during the two world wars, it was considered a dereliction of your patriotic duty not to scrap worn-out old cars.

And the real prizing of unrestored originals is an even more recent thing, growing in importance over just the past couple of decades. Maybe it’s simply another frivolous indulgence stemming from our postwar peace and prosperity. Nostalgia is the privilege of those who aren’t starving or fighting world wars. Another take might be that it’s a reaction to our modern throwaway society, where nothing seems to last except things made in the old ways (and which testify to that fact by bearing the patina of long and faithful service).

The most famous Barn Find patina car I’ve had was my Ford Country Squire wagon with a 428 and four-speed. I drove it across Kansas with a surfboard on the roof and half the people gave me thumbs up, and the other half thought I was homeless. — Tom Cotter, Barn Find Hunter Extraordinaire

Lance Butler of Los Angeles is 30 and daily drives a ’65 Mustang notchback that he bought from the original owner, the proverbial little old lady from—not Pasadena, in this case, but nearby Pomona. “Original cars are charming because they have a different spirit from a restored car,” said the McPherson College auto restoration program grad and professional mechanic and collections manager. “I’ve owned restored cars. Original cars show function and use—the history hasn’t been washed away.”

Butler likes the evidence of the Mustang’s previous owner. “You can see her habits in the car, where she put her arm on the armrest and where she scratched the steering wheel with her rings.” Butler also has a ’36 Ford that he bought from a guy who had owned it since 1950. “There’s a sticker on the window for his World War II squadron, and there were a bunch of pins in it, like ‘Vote for Willkie.’ There are stains in funny places, where people probably spilled a 5-cent cup of coffee. If you offered to trade me for a freshly restored ’36 Ford, I would say no.”

One of the foremost experts on and enthusiasts of patina is Miles Collier, founder of the Revs Institute in Naples, Florida, a museum and research archive devoted to collecting, preserving, and telling the story of historically significant road and racing cars. Many of the Revs cars wear their wear and tear with pride. “Patina is essentially everything when we’re dealing with relics from the past,” says the reliably quotable Collier, whose book, The Archaeological Automobile: Understanding and Living with Historical Automobiles, attempts to prove that there is indeed an intelligent answer to the question of why patina matters.

“One way to think about it is when objects are created, they are analogous to human children when they’re born,” Collier told us by phone. “We all look the same, we all look like Mr. Magoo. But by the time we’re in our 50s and 60s, we’re all palpably different from every standpoint.”

Likewise, said Collier, objects made in a mass-produced industrial environment are essentially all the same when they come off an assembly line. By the time they have experienced “the vicissitudes of life, they’ve been used, consumed, modified, changed, crashed, updated—all the things that happen to cars. They have gone from being one of a series of mass-produced products to being a one-of-one. They are uniquely transformed by their experiences, and those experiences are manifested in the patina.”

Patina isn’t like rain, descending from the heavens and wetting all objects the same, Collier continued. Every bit of patina on a car is unique and speaks to a very specific incident in its past, whether you know what the cause was or not. Patina gives an object a temporal dimension as well as a spatial one, which makes that object far more interesting, he believes. “That is as close as we can get to the reality of that object’s experiences over time. Why on earth would you ever mess with it?”

Besides, it’s important to remember that the clock never stops. A freshly restored car is the same as a freshly built car, in that both start aging the moment they are assembled. The scientific term is “inherent vice,” which is defined as the tendency of objects to deteriorate over time because of the basic instability of the matter from which they are made. In cars, plastics get brittle and crack, iron and steel rusts, rubber rots, glass hazes, and so on.

I think there’s an appreciation for a 200,000-mile Ford Pinto and there’s an appreciation for a completely restored Pinto. I don’t know that one is, you know, more respected than the other, because they’re equally as ridiculous. — Alan Galbraith, founder of Concours d’Lemons

A car is in motion even when it’s not—even if it’s parked on ceramic tile in a climate-controlled vault. “They all are on a downhill slide to oblivion at some point,” said Collier, “and that is something we need to know, and it makes owning these cars more of an obligation and at the same time is immensely freeing.” How so? Because any car acquires patina, whether it’s used as living room decoration, as a locked-away financial investment, or as it was intended, as a tool for mobility. Rather than fret about it and fight it, we really should be celebrating and participating in it.

OK, but if they were selling tickets in time machines to go back to 1965 and buy brand-new Mustangs out of the showroom, wouldn’t people like Lance Butler be first in line? Well, obviously that is impossible, and a car that attempts to go back in time through restoration, no matter how good or accurate the job is, “is for all intents and purposes a reproduction, a replica, a simulacrum, a facsimile,” said Collier. “All restoration is fictitious. I’m not saying that it’s a bad thing, I’m just saying that’s how it is.”

One reason is that any restoration done in the year 2023 brings with it a 2023 sensibility. “That sensibility automatically makes anything we do fictitious. Because we don’t see the world the way the maker saw it, or the way the user saw it, or the way the person who left it under the apple tree saw it.” Even if you can procure the exact correct paint, and paint it exactly as it was done originally, and chrome the bumpers with the exact same technique and materials, and so on, eventually you will come to points in the restoration where there is no choice but to “stick your finger in your mouth and put it up in the air and see which way the wind is blowing,” Collier said. Because you can’t go back in time and know everything that the people who originally built the car knew.

Yeah, but why does that even matter? A sizable contingent of the old-car world thinks like Babinsky’s customers and would argue that cars are best when they’re shiny and spotless. If not exactly new, then they’ll take a “fictitious” like-new on any weekday plus twice on Sunday. Certainly if the alternative is chipped, scratched, faded, dented, and fritzy. To be sure, owning and operating an original car brings its own pains. “They’re fragile things,” acknowledged Babinsky, whose oldest unrestored car is a 1903 Pierce-Arrow. “They are gradually falling apart.”

Fine, agrees Collier, there’s no problem with wanting shiny and reliable—that’s the owner’s privilege. And at some point, if the car is decrepit enough, it may tell its story better if it’s restored than if left original. That car’s journey toward patina, toward having a fresh story, will begin as soon as you back it out of the workshop.

But if everyone demanded shiny and new, we would be scrubbing away our own fingerprints on time. Patina “is the thing that humanizes cars,” said Collier, and that’s really what it’s all about for people who think like him. Machines in and of themselves are interesting, but like every other machine, a car is merely a tool, and “it’s the human-machine interaction, the human-tool interaction, the human-object interaction that is the critical thing that engages us. We love to see the tool, but we want to know how it was used, why it was used, what did the guy who made it think, what did the woman think, what were their fears, their interests, and so on. Those are the things that add flesh and blood to the object.”

So go out to your garage or driveway and behold your collection of rare, unique, ones-of-one. They are your fingerprints on time, your own flesh and blood as reflected in a machine, your proof that, like the moon, you rolled up a lot of miles and have the stone chips to prove it.

Then come back inside and keep reading.

***

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Duncan Pittaway has found a way into a very exclusive British club: make a whole lot of noise with a very rare American cat. His 1963 Cheetah, just one of perhaps 10 of the slinky Chevy-powered race cars built by California racer Bill Thomas to take on the Shelby Cobra, was a head-turning and ear-shattering highlight at this year’s Goodwood Revival.

The invitation-only Revival, hosted by Charles Gordon-Lennox, the 11th Duke of Richmond, at his country estate in southern England, is generally the exclusive playground of the ultra-rich who can afford the vintage racing Ferraris, Bugattis, Jaguars, and Cobras that are the stars of the grid. But Pittaway, a land surveyor from Bristol in western England, who is already a minor YouTube celebrity because of his 1910 Fiat S76, a gargantuan chain-driven hulk propelled by a flame-spitting 28-liter airship engine and nicknamed the “Beast of Turin,” has discovered that if you can’t afford the best, then go for the weirdest. Invites from the Duke will follow.

Cheetahs are certainly a weird and wild footnote of 1960s racing Americana. Anaheim, California, Corvette racer Bill Thomas created the tube-framed racing machine with backing from Chevrolet as a street and racing answer to the Ford-powered Shelby Cobra. However, in 1964 the FIA sports car homologation rules were changed from 100 cars to 1000 and GM, also facing congressional scrutiny over vehicle safety following the 1964 publishing of Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed, lost interest and yanked the cord on the program. The Cheetah was left high and dry. “They never really had time to develop it,” said Pittaway, “so we’re doing it now. Last year it was trying to kill me, but we’ve made some progress.”

Pittaway spent years cobbling together the car from the crashed and neglected remains of chassis No. 1, which he discovered in a lockup in Arizona about a decade ago. Sorting out the complex fuel-injection system on the 440-hp small-block took 18 months alone. “There are more O-rings and fittings than you can imagine,” he said.

This particular Cheetah, the only survivor of two that had alloy bodywork (the rest were shod in fiberglass), was basically a prototype used to earn the car its FIA certification papers, said Pittaway, then it crashed in testing at Daytona. Entirely new rear bodywork had to be fabricated, while the front had to be carefully hammered back into shape.

The Cheetah is all tire and muscular bulge, looking less like a bounding cat than a mollusk in hot pants. Its signature shape came from mounting the Chevy 327 almost in the middle of the car, such that the Muncie four-speed connects directly to the differential via a U-joint and without a propshaft. Wedged in behind the wheel, Pittaway sits between the rear tires, his baking legs next to the engine and literally under the exhaust, while the 30-gallon fuel-tank wraps around the cockpit from the rear. Three separate filler caps on the body allow multiple crewmen to dump in fuel at once.

The practical result, said Pittaway, is a less-than-ideal 57 percent rear weight bias, which he and his crew chief, loyal friend and former McLaren fabricator Jon Payne, have struggled to overcome. “All the adjustments you do to correct understeer and oversteer seem to be the opposite of what you’d expect,” said Pittaway. “It’s got a front suspension that is copied from a Lotus 23, and a rear suspension off a cement mixer.”

The car’s other big handicap is that Chevrolet in 1963 didn’t offer production disc brakes, so the Cheetah thus has antiquated drums at all four corners. “We are doing 158 mph through the speed trap on the Lavant Straight [at Goodwood], and then there’s the 90-degree right hander at Woodcote,” he said. Besides being heavier and offering a generally longer and softer brake pedal, drum brakes don’t have the cooling capability of discs. Once all that metal gets hot, it is hard to cool down in racing conditions.

“I am definitely shading the brakes,” said Pittaway. “I want to find the limit safely, without going over.” Pittaway met the late Bob Bondurant, one of the Cheetah’s original development drivers, years ago. “He thought it was hysterically funny that we were trying to restore it for racing,” Pittaway recalled. Bondurant’s advice: “You need to pass as many cars on the straight as you can, then try not to be re-passed by everyone in the corners.”

The Cheetah was invited to the Revival weekend’s headliner event, the Royal Automobile Club Tourist Trophy race on Sunday, a one-hour enduro for closed-cockpit GT cars with a mandatory driver change. Often one of the fastest and wooliest races of the weekend, it commemorates the TTs held at the former RAF Spitfire base between 1958 and 1964 and is usually an epic battle between lightweight Jaguar E-Types and Shelby Cobras. Having been to Goodwood many times, this would be Pittaway’s first go in the big race. “We’ve had ten weeks to develop our car,” he said. “Most of our competitors have had ten years.”

Hoping for a finish “somewhere in the top 20,” he formed up near the back of the grid of this year’s running just as rain clouds loomed. About 30 minutes into the race, a deluge hit just as Pittaway, running well behind the leaders, handed off to his co-driver, 81-year-old former motorcycle and saloon car racer Stuart Graham. Graham did a couple of tentative laps in the pelting rain, which sent a couple of Cobras and a spectacular 1965 Bizzarrini 5300GT aquaplaning into the walls, then retired the Cheetah to fight another day.

When we went by the Cheetah’s paddock, Pittaway was nowhere to be found, but a clearly disappointed Payne said he respected the decision. “I guess you don’t get to be 81 in this game without making some smart decisions somewhere.”

***

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Every year, the Goodwood Revival vintage racing extravaganza in southern England picks a nostalgic theme for its main display area by the entrance. Last year it was flying saucers à la 1950s B-movie sci-fi flicks. For this year’s 25th anniversary event, it was The Greatest Show on Earth, the traveling circus as it was back in its postwar heyday when Ringling Bros., Barnum & Bailey, and other operations large and small crisscrossed America and Europe to delight packed tents with death-defying stunts, clownery, and prancing animals.

The Goodwood visitor was thus greeted by a large circus ring in which performers did their acts throughout the weekend, plus a bevy of restored circus trailers and trucks because, let’s face it, Goodwood is all about the vehicles. The other marquee highlight this year was a celebration of 75 years of Lotus, as well as tributes to racing icons Carroll Shelby and 84-year-old Jackie Stewart, who drove a few laps in his 1973 Tyrell-Cosworth 006 F1 car. It was at Goodwood in 1964 that Stewart got his first break in racing, testing a Tyrell F3 car at a faster pace than Bruce McLaren, impressing Ken Tyrell enough to offer him a spot on the fledgling team.

A parade of some of Lotus founder Colin Chapman’s earliest as well as his greatest creations took to the track each day to, well, add lightness to a rollicking weekend beset first by unsually sweltering heat, then by pelting rain. Let out first onto the track were the fastest, including a series of Lotus F1 cars that brought glory to the brand during its 1970s golden years. They included a couple of 1973 Lotus-Cosworth 72s once driven by Ronnie Petersen and Jacky Ickx (who was also in attendance), a brace of famously black-and-gold John Player Special beauties, including the 1976 Lotus-Cosworth 77 and Mario Andretti’s World Championship–winning Lotus 79. The highly inventive double-chassis (but never raced) Lotus 88B from 1981 also ground-sucked its way onto the circuit, followed by the 1982 Lotus-Cosworth 91, which was the last Lotus F1 car produced during Chapman’s lifetime.

Lotus was always innovating, and in that vein, gliding onto the track with the whistle of a vacuum cleaner was the gold-and-black 1971 Lotus 56B, which attempted to bring Pratt & Whitney turbine power to Formula 1 after earlier attempts to win with turbines at the Indianapolis 500. Graham Hill’s green-and-yellow Lotus 49 recalled the great grand prix Lotuses of the 1960s. The many smaller sports racers, single seaters, and road cars from the House of Chapman were represented by the Elevens, 16s, 18s, 22s, 27s, Elites, Elans, and Europas that conga-lined around Goodwood’s 2.38-mile circuit of former dispersal roads for RAF Spitfires and Hurricanes that flew from here during the war.

Finally, the “oldest” Lotus—actually, an exact recreation—trundled out. The Lotus Mk.1 was a jacked-up trials car based on a 1920s Austin Seven that Chapman built in his girlfriend Hazel’s parent’s garage while studying engineering at the University of London in 1948. The original car has been lost, but Classic Team Lotus, which is run by Colin Chapman’s son, Clive, executed an exact copy down to its battered trials patina.

More than 50 cars representing the long and storied career of Carroll Shelby also circulated on the track during intermissions in the racing, starting with his first race car, a wire-wheeled MG TC that Shelby raced in Oklahoma in 1952. Other notable highlights from Shelby’s years behind the wheel included a Ferrari 750 Monza that he shared with Phil Hill at the 1955 Sebring 12 Hours, an Aston Martin DBR2 and DBR4 representing his years driving Astons, and the Balchowsky-Buick special “Ol’ Yeller II” that Shelby ran in a number of sports car races in the U.S. in 1960.

Cobras, King Cobras, and Ford GT40s, including the ’66 Le Mans winner, were there. Notably absent was a Dodge Omni GLH or Shelby Dakota pickup, but the Goodwood Revival, ahem, tends to stick to cars produced during its years as an active racing circuit from 1948 to 1968.

In keeping with tradition, the 15 individual races that the Revival stages each year have charmingly British names, like the Fordwater Trophy and the Rudge-Whitworth Cup. The Lavant Cup is typically a one-make race. Last year it was all MGBs; this year it was Ferrari V-12s from 1960 to ’66, and people took to calling it the Billion-Dollar Cup owing to the approximate (though almost certainly overestimated) combined value of the 18 entries.

There were no fewer than 12 Ferrari 250 GT SWBs in the race, along with a 250 GTO, a 330 GTO, and a 250 LM supplied by Miles Collier of the Collier Foundation in Florida. And lest you think that it was just a parade by nervous zillionaires, there was plenty of carnage, including a sideswiping of the wall by the 250 LM driven by racing veteran Rob Hall.

The weekend’s most dramatic moment also occurred during the Lavant Cup, when the 250 GTO blew its rear differential to smithereens, sending a chunk of shrapnel rocketing through the fuel tank. A massive fireball erupted, out of which the Ferrari, driven by a hapless Karun Chandhok, emerged spinning with a locked-up rear axle. (You can watch that footage and read more about it here.)

The GTO slid into the grass and Chandhok had the door open before it even stopped moving, leaping from the car to avoid being barbecued alive. However, by then the fire was already mostly out and the car was barely damaged, proving that if you’re going to blow a hole in the gas tank of your $50 million-ish Ferrari, blow a big one so all the fuel dumps at once.

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In 2023, McLaren Automotive marks its 60th anniversary. What better day to celebrate than August 30, the birthday of its founder, Bruce McLaren? This story originally appeared in the Hagerty Drivers Club magazine and on this site five years ago; it’s reproduced here, tweaked only to reflect subsequent events. —Ed.  

By all accounts, the ancient Clan MacLaren were fighting folk. Their rallying cry, “Creag an Tuirc” (the Boar’s Rock), is either a tribute to their steadiness in battle or to the hardiness of their lasses. Or to the actual Boar’s Rock, a grassy promontory in central Scotland. When not stealing cattle or running spikes through the neighbors, the MacLarens liked to gather there for haggis roasts—except maybe in summer, when the swarming midges will eat a man alive. No wonder the ancestors of Bruce McLaren, the ambitious Kiwi who built a racing empire and whose name today graces a Formula 1 team as well as a line of dreamy sexpot supercars, got the hell out of there.

The McLarens might have gone to California, where we’ve gathered a triumvirate that represents the high points of McLaren road-car production. It consists of the stunning first attempt, the 1969 M6GT; the incomparable second draft, the 1993 F1; and the breathtaking latest edition, the 2018 720S. Lined up and brooding, their bat-wing doors open and beckoning, they certainly come across as cars from a clan of fighters.

But the early McLarens didn’t come to California. They went all the way to the Switzerland of the South Pacific. This story would seem to start in New Zealand, where a young Bruce McLaren overcame Perthes disease, a childhood hip malady that put him in bed for two years and gifted him with a twisted spine and a shortened left leg, to become the most promising antipodean driver since Jack Brabham.

New Zealand proved too small for a talent such as McLaren’s, however, so we could start this story in clammy England, where Bruce went to seek his fortune in 1958, and where he produced his first car in 1964 in a dilapidated equipment shed. Just four breakneck years later, McLaren was fielding winning cars in Formula 1 and Can-Am, and in 1972, a McLaren conquered Indianapolis as well. Road cars were always somewhere in the back of McLaren’s mind, and today, McLaren Automotive builds a line of roadgoing, mid-engine doorstops in suburban Woking, southwest of London, at a site that looks like Starfleet Academy’s auto shop.

But really, this is a story that starts in America. It’s here that 22-year-old Bruce McLaren found his greatest success, becoming at Sebring the youngest driver to win a Grand Prix, a record that stood for 44 years. And it’s where the roaring Oldsmobile and Chevrolet engines came from that first put McLarens in the spotlight. And where Can-Am victories paid Bruce McLaren his biggest prize money in those early lean years. Thus, any celebration of the man and his cars has every right to be here amid the dry manzanita and pussytoe and rustling pine of the mountains above Los Angeles, not so far from the antiseptic shopping mall that sits profanely on the grave site of the old Riverside Raceway.

The December morning cuts with a high-desert chill as the trailers and rollbacks arrive one by one, dispensing their cherished cargo. The first to show is the McLaren 720S, a cab-forward, mid-engine mega-wedge with android-insect styling, multicolor touch screens, shifter paddles, a new road-to-roof carbon-fiber tub that shrinks the A-pillars practically down to pencil width, and a chorus of electronic ding-dongs to alert the driver of the many concerns on its electronic superbrain. The sticker reads $378,215, including more than $18,000 in optional carbon-fiber exterior parts, and the McLaren dealership in fashionable Newport Beach, California, recently announced that it will accept payment in bitcoins.

Next to arrive is the opposite bookend of McLaren’s road-car efforts, an M6GT replica. It has a steering wheel. It also has three pedals. It has a four-inch-high shifter that comes out of the firewall to the right of the driver on a polished metal stick. The electronics: a few rocker switches, some of which actually work. The only sound this McLaren makes is an unholy explosion of fury from the twin megaphones of its circa-700-horse Chevy stroker as its longtime owner, Allen Korneff, backs it down the trailer’s beavertail. The 16-inch Avon racing slicks in back look cartoonishly wide. “They do grab,” says Korneff with a sly smile.

Finally, a rollback pulls up, and a crowd forms around it—partly because it has one of the mere 64 original short-tail street McLaren F1s ever made and partly because in the truck’s passenger seat is our columnist Jay Leno, the car’s original owner. Leno leaps out and, despite having arrived back in L.A. from the East Coast only about four hours earlier, and sporting a hacking cough, he strides over to introduce himself to the various attending officers from the California Highway Patrol, the Los Angeles Fire Department, the California Department of Transportation, and the U.S. Forest Service. Cellphones whip out.

The F1’s tidy, elegant shape is as fresh and riveting as it was at its lavish launch party at the 1993 Monte Carlo Grand Prix. It’s clear that designer Gordon Murray was receiving signals from heaven or Planet 10 or perhaps the future, because the combined efforts of Ferrari, Lamborghini, and even McLaren have yet to produce a successor so thoroughly inventive or so immediately iconic. Sure, the fashions have changed since this voluptuous three-seater debuted, as have the safety rules. But after only the briefest, barely measurable period of depreciation, the F1 today steadily grows more appealing and, indeed, more valuable. A brown one with fewer than 250 miles on the odometer sold at Monterey in 2021 for an astonishing $20,465,000.

With the rollback tilted down, Leno scrambles into the middle bucket and thumbs the starter, and the F1 crawls down the ramp, a stark contrast to the M6GT bellowing as it sits. Now that all three McLarens are on pavement, we insert ourselves behind the wheels, pull down the upturned doors until they latch with a satisfying click, and head off, a 28-cylinder spectacle paying tribute to a man who packed a heck of a lot into his short life.

We call the M6GT a replica, and it is. But it’s as close as you can get to one of the original four (or six, or eight—you read different numbers) M6GTs that came out of McLaren or its assembly partner, Trojan Cars. Allen Korneff built it in the mid-1970s off the chassis of a former Peter Revson M6B Can-Am car unsuccessfully campaigned by Shelby-American Racing in the 1968 season. Where the 383 Chevy small-block now sits in front of a ZF racing five-speed transaxle, there was once a Ford 427 SOHC screamer, spiked with a mohawk of velocity stacks and, as it happens, stricken with a fatal flaw. According to Korneff, who says he heard it from Carroll Shelby himself, the engine’s long chains tended to stretch and the cams would go off timing. Per his contract with Ford, Shelby stripped the motor and sent it back to the factory. What Korneff bought in the mid-’70s for $7500 was a used-up race car with a beat-up body.

But Korneff had plans. A hospital administrator by day and a street racer by night, he wanted a car that could keep up with the hot new Porsche 911 Turbos that his friends were bringing out to the recently completed Foothill Freeway north of downtown Los Angeles, where speed jockeys once went in the wee hours to test their top ends. Korneff’s pathologist, also a friend of Carroll Shelby’s, suggested the idea of buying Shelby’s M6B chassis and making an M6GT out of it using a body made for him by Specialised Mouldings, the same British fiberglass supplier that made the skins for the original M6GTs. To accurately replicate the original, Korneff found himself chasing a hodgepodge of industry scraps from the day, including taillights off a Volvo P1800 and front turn signals from a London taxi. He also added air conditioning.

“It took a lot longer and cost a lot more than I thought,” says Korneff. “I was in for about $40,000, plus three man-years of my time. But I learned a lot of stuff.”

The sleek black-and-silver limpet is sized for Bruce McLaren, who was not tall. Even with the steering wheel removed, it’s a slithery contortion act to slide in over the 18-inch-wide sill hiding the outboard fuel tanks and down into the nearly horizontal acceleration couch that is the pair of conjoined seats. The car swallows you up, like a close-fitting fiberglass body bag, and only the sight of the old Dutray pit clock at Le Mans would make the view forward between the double humps of the front wheel arches any more authentically race car. Flip the switch and push the start button, and after some lively cranking, Krakatoa blows at your six-o’clock.

The steering column slews out of the center of the metal dash at a crazy angle, the wheel cockeyed in your hands as though you’ve already crashed the car. The wheel, as well as the metal guillotine that passes for the dash, hangs very low, so moving your legs around to operate the pedals is nearly impossible. Legs cramp, shins get bruised.

After a couple of false starts in third gear—the roughly 1950-pound car didn’t stall, it just moved off a bit more slowly—the notchy five-speed shifter proved a reliable bolt-action device with about two inches of total travel at its base. The 383 has only two modes: ridiculously loud and, closer to the red hash mark on the Stewart Warner tach denoting the 6500-rpm redline, unbelievably louder, sounding like all nine seasons of the original Can-Am series uncorked at once in Dolby stereo. Put the spurs to it, and the car blasts forward on a plume of white-hot decibels, the landscape going streaky and your heart rate instantly tripling as your primordial snake brain goes haywire.

As advertised, those chubby Avons do have a lot of grab, and after some tentative probing of the grip at moderate speeds, the tires and the chassis prove capable of so much more. You expect it to be rock-rigid, but the suspension has some give, swallowing the road lumps and squishing a bit to the outside as the car takes a corner. The wide, flat pancake of a tush actually squats under acceleration, and you get the sense that this is how it was, that in the age before carbon-fiber hybrid diesel/electric slot cars, good race-car drivers were masters at managing these relatively compliant suspensions.

Waiting for cameras to be set up, I lean down into the open F1 where Leno is sitting impassively in the car’s thin and delicate-looking command chair, the dry-sump, 6.1-liter, 627-hp BMW S70/2 V-12 idling with a soft tick of injectors and distant zing of timing chains. He invites me to take the starboard seat, which for a normal adult male is a snug leather scoop best occupied with your arms folded. You pull the door down via a small hand grip in the roof and release the door with a lever in the seat.

It’s hard to overstate the weirdness of sitting to the side and just a bit behind the driver, who has a few knobs and a hand-brake pull on his left side, the gear shifter and more knobs on his right, and, thanks to the triangular seating arrangement, unlimited elbowroom to work the delicate three-spoke wheel. In a normal car, the passenger is sort of a co-pilot, not in control but at least on an equal plane. Move the passenger seat(s) back a few inches, and suddenly you feel like baggage. Or, as one of Leno’s mechanics would later quip to me, like you’ve been arrested.

But oh, that sound. The engine’s airbox arcs over the head of the driver as part of the headliner that leads to the roof duct, which means you’re sitting in the speaker cabinet of the engine. Goose the throttle, and the syncopated suck of 12 cylinders erupts all around you, as if you’d suddenly been dropped into the Monte Carlo tunnel circa 1968. The quick, linear blitz of revs to the 7500-rpm redline happens with a shove of thrust and a crescendo of heavenly combustion glissando that future generations, growing up on the whoosh and whir of turbo and hybrid supercars, will sadly never know. Never was a car so aptly named or appreciating in value for such obvious reasons.

One big thing about the F1 is that it’s just so deliciously understated. There is nothing in the low, suede-and-leather cockpit or on the ballet slipper of a body that doesn’t need to be there. Only the Porsche 959 was even close to being this authentic, maybe the F40. Other contemporary exotics such as the Lamborghini Diablo and Ferrari Testarossa were romping circus acts by comparison, extravagant leftovers from the pompous ego trip that was the 1980s. The F1 was the car James Bond badly wanted but Her Majesty’s Secret Service couldn’t afford.

“Back then, the idea of plugging a computer into the car so technicians back in England could read the codes was unheard of,” says Leno. “Still, when I bought it, it was just a car. I drove it almost every day for five years.” Well, at almost a million bucks a copy (back when a million was real money), it wasn’t just any car. But now it’s a collector-car colossus, and too valuable for even Leno to take out except on special occasions and by prior appointment.

The mostly carbon-fiber 720S shows how far things have come in two decades. Crammed with hidden cables and solenoids and all-seeing sensors, it’s fitted with a touch-screen command center plus an all-digital thin-film transistor instrument cluster that all but gets the late show on. Switch the car to its raciest “track” mode, and the cluster folds down on silent motors to present the driver with a Formula 1–style light-bar tachometer. Organic-looking gills on the rear body funnel air into and out of the engine compartment, and you wouldn’t be surprised to see them breathing in and out.

This is by far the easiest car to get into, with the most legroom, the highest ceiling, the best visibility, an arctic blast when the air conditioning engages, and paddles to operate the transmission. That is, if you even want to; the computer will happily do it for you. Push the start button, and the engine lights instantly, a gruff bark out the back in defiance of the two muffling turbos hanging off the 4.0-liter, 710-hp V-8.

Everybody who takes a turn in the 720S comments not on how fast or how tight it is—although it is those things—but on how easy it is to drive. The wheel feels like an extension of your neural network and responds to a delicate touch, placing the car’s prow exactly where you desire it, there to be welded to the pavement against terrific side loads by the prodigious grip. At a pace that would make F1 and M6GT drivers sweaty with effort, the 720S doesn’t even squeal its tires, the turbos huffing and whooshing in sync with your right foot to make massive torque even down in the basement of the tach.

McLaren had a heck of a time topping its limited-production P1 hybrid of 2013–15, as well as this car’s direct predecessor, the 675LT. The company is also in a thermonuclear horsepower war with its arch nemesis, Ferrari, and the 720S edges out the Ferrari 488GTB by a crucial (to some) 49 horsepower. Yep, it’s all about numbers today, and here are some: Using computer-orchestrated launch control and eye-blink-quick upshifts, the 3153-pound 720S murders 60 mph in 2.7 seconds and the quarter-mile in 9.9 seconds—both astonishing figures, especially for a two-wheel-drive vehicle. The 1000-hp Bugatti Veyron was barely any quicker.

The 720’s stats nicely frame the outlandishness of the 25-year-old McLaren F1, which weighed a mere 2579 pounds and did the deeds in 3.2 seconds and 11.1 seconds, respectively. Those were unheard-of numbers for a stock sports car in its day and still quicker than all but a few cars made today. An M6GT running a 400-cubic-inch Chevy with Weber IDA carburetion was said to have pulled the quarter in 12.7 seconds. But back then, acceleration numbers were far less important than lap times and podium places and prize money. Perhaps that’s how it should be today.

At the old Goodwood circuit in England, where Bruce McLaren was turning test laps in a prototype M8D Can-Am car until the rear bodywork failed at 170 mph, they cleared a small garden next to the paddock and put up a memorial black headstone. “Bruce McLaren 1937–1970,” it reads. “Engineer. Constructor. Champion and Friend.” And even though that dismal Tuesday in June was over 50 years ago, they are still making monuments to the most famous son of the Boar’s Rock. Indeed, the best kind, the ones that roll on wheels and strike terror in the rival clan of Maranello. We doubt young Bruce would have wanted it any other way.

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It’s been a rocky start for Lucid. One of several U.S.-based automakers chasing Tesla, Lucid currently assembles the Air, a very sleek and formidable electric luxury sedan. In a few months, at the 2023 L.A. auto show, Lucid will reveal the Gravity, an all-electric SUV. The latest Q2 results announced by Lucid in early August showed deliveries of 1404 cars in the quarter, about 600 short of expectations, and revenues that thoroughly disappointed Wall Street. The company’s stock, LCID, once valued at $55, has been spanked down to less than $7 as of this writing.

Well, if starting car companies was easy, everyone would be doing it. The feat is certainly easier if your friend is the Saudi government, which has invested $9 billion in Lucid so far, including a $3 billion bump this year, and which has committed to buying 50,000 cars. For its part, Lucid is sticking to its plan, which almost from the start included a high-performance sub-brand.

Behold, Sapphire, a lapidarian name that will henceforth affix itself to all top-spec Lucid models. In a brief run around suburban Los Angeles, the, er, ludicrous Lucid Air Sapphire proved that the fledgling automaker can build some pretty impressive machinery while continuing to confound with some eyebrow-raising choices. If Lucid ever manages to hack its way into the mainstream, it will not be for lack of trying to stay weird.

The Lucid Air Sapphire sits above—indeed, way above—the Lucid Air Pure, Touring, and Grand Touring already on the market. Those trim levels are priced from around $87,000 to $125,000, with varying degrees of luxury, power, and range. The Sapphire will have a base price of $250,650.

In answer to that gobsmacking figure, which seems to confirm that lofty prices are one of Lucid’s problems (another: the giant luxury sedan segment is not exactly red-hot), the Lucid people are quick to point out that more of the base, rear-drive Air Pures are coming for 2024. Those should help showroom traffic, along with that desperately needed SUV. In the meantime, Sapphire will arrive sometime before Christmas for those who want and can afford the ultimate electric airport limo.

Specs: 2024 Lucid Air Sapphire

Price: $250,650 (base)
Powertrain: three permanent-magnet electric motors
Horsepower: 1234 hp
Torque: 1430 lb-ft
Layout: all-wheel-drive, four-door, five-passenger sedan
EPA-rated fuel economy: TBC
Range: 427 miles (manufacturer claim)
0–60 mph: 1.9 seconds (manufacturer claim)
Competitors: Tesla Model S Plaid, Porsche Taycan Turbo S

Lucid’s tech and car-development chops have always been bonafide. No doubt, that’s why Aston Martin has committed to purchasing Lucid components for its own electric vehicles. Lucid’s proprietary electric-drive unit is extremely compact, which allowed engineers to graft a second donut-shaped motor onto the rear axle of the Sapphire, for a total of three: one in front, two in the back, producing a combined 1430 pound-feet of torque.

Lucid claims a zero-to-60-mph time of 1.89 seconds for the 5300-pound Sapphire. We can vouch the sprint is fast enough to puddle your brain against the back of your skull. Perhaps more significantly, Lucid claims a 3.61 kW/Hr efficiency for the Sapphire, which puts it near the top of the charts among modern electrics for electron consumption.

Superbike-like acceleration isn’t the only reason to go to three motors, says David Lickfold, Lucid’s senior director of chassis and vehicle dynamics, a veteran of both Jaguar Land Rover and Aston Martin. Torque vectoring is another: All-wheel-drive cars tend to understeer, one reason Petter Solberg was such an expert at the Scandinavian flick while driving for Subaru’s rally team in the early 2000s.

However, the Sapphire’s rear motors can flick for you—sort of. They alternately over- or under-speed as needed to help turn the big sedan in corners, thus giving the steering a much livelier and more connected feel than an AWD car this heavy has a right to have, all without the extra complexity of rear-wheel steering. We managed to provoke this rotational effect—barely—in a few runs between traffic clumps in L.A.’s twisty Sepulveda Pass. The rear end pushes outward almost subliminally while the front tucks into a tighter turn than should be possible for the speed.

Lickford calls the effect “virtual wheelbase,” meaning the Sapphire can feel like a long-wheelbase pullman or a shorter-wheelbase sports sedan depending on the situation and the driver’s mood. The car’s various personalities are selectable through the driving modes: Swift, Sapphire, and Track, the latter of which has three sub-modes—Dragstrip, Hot Lap, and Endurance. Lickford says the torque-vectoring and traction control tuning was pulled in-house for Sapphire, making for some very long days and nights for the Lucideers.

The prodigious grip is helped by the low center of gravity endemic to all-electric vehicles, plus the Michelin Pilot Sport 4S tires it comes with standard. The tires are marked “LM1,” meaning they are an exclusive design for Lucid. Lickfold explained that the inner belts are a durable touring compound while the outer shoulders and sidewall are basically made of Pilot Sport Cup2 super gum. Michelin’s performance tires are renowned for their ability to manage heat—a good thing, since nothing short of the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant makes heat like the tires of a 5300-pound car when 1234 horsepower and 1430 pound-feet of torque are being used in anger. Ditto the brakes, where in the Sapphire are huge 16.5-inch carbon-composite disks in front clamped by 10-piston calipers, the 15.4-inch carbon rears gripped by four-piston calipers.

Lickford and his team also retuned the suspension with stiffer springs, thicker sway bars, sportier bushings, and a new front knuckle that increases negative camber in front, again for faster steering response. In back, a Sapphire-specific lower control arm increases negative camber there as well. The starchier ride is noticeable, and perhaps not to everyone’s taste.

Besides the revised suspension, the extra motor, and the standard 118 kW/Hr battery pack with its rated 427-mile range, the Sapphire comes with exclusive interior treatments and exterior aero bits. Lucid’s signature glass roof is not available, strangely: A more conventional aluminum roof painted black is the only choice, supposedly to reduce weight and lower the center of gravity.

A couple of other oddities: The only color available, at least initially, is Sapphire Blue. This in a segment where black, white, and grey seem to rule. The Sapphire’s unique 20-inch front and 21-inch rear snowflake-spoked wheels come with a set of aero covers in a handsome drawstring bag. Owners can install the covers themselves for hypermiling, but they’d do well to read the directions if they want to avoid freeway frisbees: The cover fasteners have a specific torque spec.

Aimed at folks who like stealthy performance of the type offered by an Audi RS6 or the like, the Sapphire is unquestionably an impressive technical statement and a glimpse of the vast potential for electrics. However, it’s a Hail Mary from a new company that is still struggling to sell cars and figure out how to be profitable. The latest Saudi investment is thought to give Lucid only another year or so of runway. Let’s hope the Sapphire name, like Lucid itself, will live on for many years.

2024 Lucid Air Sapphire

Highs: Outrageous acceleration, moves to match the power, lots of interior space, far nicer inside than a Tesla.

Lows: A lot of money for an unknown quantity, ride a bit crispy, you can have any color you want as long as it’s blue.

Takeaway: Lucid shows us what it’s got; now it’s got to show us the vehicle it needs—an affordable electric.

***

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The first non-Italian to style a Ferrari was nailed by the cops while driving one of his own creations, a Ferrari Enzo, according to The Japan Times. Kiyoyuki “Ken” Okuyama, who did stints at GM and Porsche before taking over as design director at Pininfarina in 1995, was blasting up a scenic mountain road in October 2022 in his native Yamagata Prefecture (north-central Japan) when the local fuzz busted him doing an insane 128.

Ahem, 128 kilometers per hour. Or 79 mph. Which, granted, was 55 mph over the posted limit of 40 kph (25 mph) on that road. Okuyama admitted guilt at the trial in February and argued that he needed to maintain a certain speed to keep the circa-$3 million Ferrari Enzo from overheating. Prosecutors, evidently ignorant of the cooling demands of the car’s 6.0-liter 650-hp Tipo F140B V-12, demanded four months of jail time.

“The degree of speeding was considerable and was extremely dangerous,” ruled judge Osamu Imai of the Yamagata District Court as he sentenced Okuyama to the four months—suspended, however, for two years if he keeps his nose clean. Talking to reporters afterwards, Okuyama figuratively fell on his sword in a most Japanese way, bowing and saying, “I will make sure this will never happen again and will contribute to society. I am very sorry.”

Online comments in Japan were harsh—against the system. “The verdict of the redneck has been made,” said one comment (translated from the Japanese), a swipe at Yamagata City’s rural, upcountry location.

It’s important to note that Japanese generally eschew speed unless they’re riding on of the famous Shinkansen bullet trains. The country’s highest speed limit is 120 kph, or 75 mph, reserved for a few sections of its glass-smooth expressways, but 100 kph (62 mph) is far more common.

Most rural roads are limited to 30 to 40 kph (19 to 25 mph), partly because of a national law that makes setting higher speed limits very expensive. Any road in Japan with pedestrian or cyclist access or at-grade rail crossings (which are everywhere in the train-obsessed nation) must have a limit of 60 kph (37 mph) or be a controlled-entry limited access road like a parkway or freeway.

When he isn’t terrorizing the roads, Okuyama is celebrated in his native country as a global ambassador for Japanese design and culture. Besides overseeing the styling of various early 2000s Ferraris and Maseratis, the graduate of California’s Art Center College of Design worked on the angular fourth-gen Chevy Camaro, the 996-generation of Porsche 911, and the first Porsche Boxster.

He returned home to Yamagata in 2006 to establish his own firm, Ken Okuyama Design, which has developed everything from tea sets to eyewear to one-off concept cars like the Kode 61 Birdcage, a 2023 reboot of the famous Maserati Tipo 61 Birdcage racers of the early ‘60s (pictured below). The Japanese government’s official website has a page devoted to him. “Linking Japan and the world from Yamagata,” it raves, “Okuyama continues to exert international influence transcending cultural borders.”

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Our man Stefan Lombard stammered a bit when asked how he came up with the idea—which we have gone to enormous lengths to execute—of gathering a 1973 Pontiac Trans Am SD-455 and a 1973 Porsche 911 Carrera RS 2.7 in the central Texas Hill Country. “They are kind of the same shape,” he began. “Well, they both have ducktails. The Firebird was the pinnacle of Pontiac production, the 911 was the pinnacle of… you know… Porsche.” He’s on a roll now, hand on chin, eyes at the ceiling. “They have enough small similarities that added up in my mind to—it was just kind of a ‘what-if’—plus, it’s Porsche’s 75th anniversary, and there will be a lot of stories, but not this one.”

At least that last part is certain.

You can classify cars a lot of different ways—by make, by body type, by price, by size, by national origin. Here are two cars joined pretty much solely by year. And the fact that they are both coupes. And they both have four seats (the Porsche is debatable on that point). And they both lean on the sporty side. OK, that’s an understatement; the Porsche was as close to a street-legal factory racer as you could buy in 1973, and even crazier cars were ahead in the company’s future, which is what helps make the ’73 RS so ridiculously valuable today. More on that in a minute.

The Pontiac, meanwhile, is also pretty special, practically a factory hot rod championed and steered through GM’s red-tape forest by a dedicated group of engineers. It is one of just 252 Super Dutys built in 1973 and one of just 73 with a four-speed. Plus it was the final act, practically the end of the road for the division’s decade-long craze for shoving its largest engines into its smallest cars. In 1973, the optional $521 Code X engine, the Super Duty 455, had an 8.4:1 compression ratio and was rated at 310 horsepower. Two years later, the Code X was gone, the Code Y 455 offering a pale 200 horsepower via a 7.6:1 compression ratio. By 1978, the big 455 was extinct.

What the ’64 GTO wrought, the ’73 Firebird Trans Am SD-455 effectively finished, as Pontiac’s performance cars thereafter lost their punch to emissions regulations and oil embargoes. Pontiac as a division still had a few good years left in the ’80s and ’90s, but in between, the so-called widetrack Tigers were tamed and shackled into toothless kittens.

Thus, one empire, Porsche, rising; one empire, Pontiac, in decline. Ever has it been so. The Egyptians gave way to the Greeks who gave way to the Romans, all of whom left behind a lot of stuff we would classify as condition #4 or worse. As Pontiac began its long glide toward eventual mothballing in 2010, Porsche ascended to heights in sales and profitability that would have been unimaginable to founder Ferdinand Porsche (as would the modern SUVs that largely did the heavy lifting).

And the troubled year of 1973—sample newspaper headlines: “Nixon Claims History Will Justify Viet War;” “Inflation Our Big Problem Now;” “Cold Weather Could Intensify Energy Crisis;” and “Stories on Watergate, Syphilis Top Journalism Award Winners”—seems as likely a year as any to be considered the crossover point. Hence, this matchup. You’re welcome, Stefan.

On a gloomy Tuesday in March with a blanketing overcast sky bringing forth wind and spurts of rain, we rolled out of Kerrville, Texas, a town about two hours west of the state capital in Austin. The Mooney Aircraft Company once built small planes here with their famously distinctive forward-swept tails. The Porsche and the Pontiac both have rearward-swept tails, plastered with 3-inch-high lettering shouting their names at the traffic. Because you could do that back in the 1970s, pizazz up your most macho models with bright paint and colorful graphics. You could even paste a flaming blue bird on the nose and everyone up to and including the Marlboro Man thought it was cool.

But then, GM was pretty fearless back in those days. Unlike today’s glacially slow ooze of design evolution, the second-gen Camaro/Firebird, delayed until early 1970 after slowdowns caused by a strike, was a clean break from its predecessor. Pontiac’s then-design chief, Bill Porter, and his team channeled European themes by leaning and visually lowering the car while stripping off most of the chrome and traditional Detroit gimcrackery. The new polyurethane front bumpers supplied by Detroit’s McCord Corp. and its Davidson Rubber Division—GM called it the “Endura” bumper when it debuted on the ’68 GTO—had looked somewhat grafted on when it was applied to the ’69 Firebirds. Now, for 1970, the stylists were able to shape a whole new front end around the bumper, crafting a long and low sportster with alluring proportions behind twin flaring nostrils that defined a clean and all-business nose.

Our Trans Am owner, Keith Sasich of Dallas, certainly likes the look. A lifelong drag racer who started in Pontiacs and still owns his first car, a ’67 Firebird 400 that he laid his eager teenage mitts on in 1974, Sasich walked away from a chance to buy a ’73 Super Duty in 1979. The car was $3500, and the mistake haunted him down through the decades. Just a few years ago, he put up his paddle at Barrett-Jackson for the numbers-matching example you see here, adding it to an all-American collection that tilts toward Pontiac and includes a ’69 GTO Ram Air Judge four-speed and a ’71 455 H.O. Judge. “Many a true Pontiac fan wants these cars,” he says of the Super Duty, conceding he probably paid too much (funny, our Porsche owner said the same thing), but hey, what the hell. He really wanted that four-speed, even more than his preferred color of Brewster Green.

There’s nothing subtle about the Firebird, which is all thundery bravado when you pry open the single 800-cfm Rochester Quadrajet to let the 455 (technically, it’s a 456) inhale. The retro remanufactured Goodyear Steelgards fitted to this car can’t maintain grip against the tidal wave of torque any better than the originals did back in the day, and the ’Bird shakes its tail feathers reliably and hilariously at the slightest provocation. Much finesse must have been required for magazine testers to pull out a 13.7-second quarter-mile in period. Hands up, those who think drag racing isn’t hard.

Buick, Oldsmobile, and Pontiac offered 455s in 1973, but because this was old GM, before bean counting all but eliminated the independence of the divisions, the three engines were completely different except for displacement. The cast-iron Super Duty outwardly resembled the Pontiac 455 available in other Firebirds, but Special Projects engineer Herb Adams along with Skip McCully and Tom Nell labored to make the oily innards feature improvements gleaned from NASCAR, NHRA, and Trans-Am racing, all while still meeting new emissions limits. They include thicker internal block bracing, four-bolt main bearing caps for greater crankshaft support, connecting rods and pistons that were forged for more strength, and an 80-psi oil pump for better lubrication at higher revs.

GM’s suits had by this time banned multi-carb induction setups like the famous GTO Tri-Power, so the Super Duty ran the single, lunchbox-size Rochester four-barrel under a Shaker scoop poking through the hood. The twin forward-facing ducts of the lesser Firebird Formula’s hood were said to be better for breathing, but the Shaker, as always, puts on a better show.

GM automatics in this era had developed to a reliable state of creaminess, which helps explain why so few of the Super Dutys were built with a stick in ’73. There’s no particular joy in shifting the Muncie M20 four-speed with its Hurst shifter about as long as a Texas copperhead. Unless, like Sasich, you were raised on them. Mile-long and trucklike throws along with a heavy clutch are what you remember most, as well as the amusing fact that—per some GM lawyer most likely—you can’t pull out the ignition key unless the shifter is moved to reverse. As you do it, you can hear the cables and pulleys of this Rube Goldberg safety interlock sliding and spooling behind the dash, all part of the charm of this rare car.

Everything feels bigger in the Pontiac, especially the expansive dash trim that salesmen claimed at the time was easier to remove thanks to it being mounted with a total of five screws. Lightbulb swaps in the new F bodies were said to take a mere 60 seconds. In contrast, the delicately spoked and leather-wrapped steering wheel seems small for a car weighing close to 2 tons, a lot of it engine. Our relatively gossamer Porsche was fitted with a plastic rim at least an inch larger. But alas, there is power steering, something the Porsche doesn’t have—or need.

That’s because the Carrera’s creators in 1972 targeted a weight for their RS homologation special of slightly under 2000 pounds. As has so often been the case with Porsche, what the company said it was going to do, it did with aplomb. The result is a glorious little corner eater you drive with your fingertips and toes, the center-mounted tach—where else?—effortlessly zinging on a crescendo of air-cooled clamor to its 7200-rpm redline.

The Carrera feels just as small and light as it looks sitting next to the Pontiac, with that classic upright seating position putting you in perfect relation to the pedals and five-speed shifter. If you bemoan the acres of plain, hard plastic in the Trans Am, you won’t find much relief in the spartan Porsche, even though its price new was more than twice that of the Pontiac. This Porsche isn’t a car as much as it is a tool, and to murder a phrase about a hammer, when all you have is a Carrera, all your problems look like racetracks.

Especially the narrow scribbles that interconnect Texas Hill Country burgs such as Barksdale and Leakey by cutting through the hillsides of limestone and clay, providing undulating, constant-radius joy for drivers and cyclists equally. Having at one time or another owned 35 Ferraris and too many Porsches to remember them all, our Carrera’s custodian, Mike Green of Houston, isn’t easily impressed, but he does like these roads and knows them well.

A longtime exec with the Sysco food distribution giant, Green was out buying hot stuff when it was just lukewarm. But he got bit by the Carrera bug too late and, as mentioned earlier, “paid too much. But I wanted to make sure I got a good, genuine car. I like my cars to be factory spec; taking the original seats out [they’ve been substituted with more comfortable chairs] is kind of a big deal for me.”

Porsche by 1973 was no longer the cottage German firm that seemed to uneducated eyes to make nothing more than hyper Volkswagens. It had only a few years earlier taken its first 24 Hours of Le Mans victory—not in class, but overall, with the outlandish 917K, which instantly elevated the Stuttgart stable above so many of its longtime British and Italian rivals (granted, Alfa Romeo won Le Mans in the 1930s, but that was already ancient history)

However, Porsche’s 240-mph, cost-no-object racing program couldn’t be sustained for long. Thus, when engineering leader Ernst Fuhrmann took over the top technical job in 1971, he was determined to refocus the company’s racing efforts back on production-based models and especially the 911, the better to remind buyers what Porsche mainly sold in its dealerships. As one door closed—1973 was the final year for the 917 in Can-Am—another door opened with a car that took its name from Porsche’s 904-through-908 racing Carreras of the 1960s as well as its long-ago campaigns in the famous Mexican road race, La Carrera Panamericana, which ran from 1950 to 1954.

Key to the effort was getting the 911 accepted for the newly revised FIA Group 4 “Special Grand Touring” competition class, which required that at least 500 units be built for sale to the public. A then-young engineer named Norbert Singer, not long out of the Technical University of Munich, was put in charge of developing the 911 Carrera RS. If Singer’s name is familiar even to non-Porschephiles, it’s because he went on to blaze an illustrious career in the ensuing decades as the company’s brilliant racing czar.

Aerodynamic enhancements like the famous fiberglass Bürzel, or ducktail, were shaped in Porsche’s new wind tunnel while Singer and his colleagues went to work on the chassis and engine, stripping the 911 of carpet and other sound insulation. Out went the bolstered door panels, replaced by simple flat panels with pull cords, as well as the sun visors, clock, under-coating, exterior trim, glovebox, even the gas struts holding up the front trunklid. Anything that could be yanked out without impeding the car’s performance was yanked, though some luxuries crept back in later in an optional Touring trim. The magic of the RS, however, is in the stuff you can’t see from the sidewalk; engineers spec’d thinner sheetmetal and glass for the RS to shave pounds, as well as lighter Bilstein shocks, the first Porsche production car to wear them and the beginning of a very long association between that brand and Porsche.

It’s not entirely wrong to say the 2.7-liter flat-six is half of a 917 flat-12. The Carrera’s 210-hp fuel-injected mill was bored out from the regular 911 S’s 2.4-liter to eventually share its bore and stroke measurements with the later 917/10 Can-Am car (and who didn’t have the Corgi model of that white wedge with its red and black L&M cigarette logos?). The Carrera’s engine employed a then-radical spray-on hardening process called Nikasil, developed by the German supplier Mahle for strengthening an aluminum engine’s otherwise fast-wearing cylinders.

So many important firsts, so many distinguished fingerprints; the 1973 Carrera RS ranks among the cream of the Porsche collector car elite. Though at the time, writes eminent Porsche chronologist Karl Ludvigsen, the company worried that all 500 units would not find buyers, especially since the 2.7-liter engine hadn’t been certified for U.S. sales. The price was thus kept artificially low, at the German deutsche mark equivalent of around $10,000. However, the initial run was sold out within a week of the Carrera’s debut at the Paris Salon in October 1972, and the company went on to produce three times as many as originally planned—1580—thus launching a dynasty.

Of course, that’s not nearly enough cars in a world of 8 billion people, so the Carrera RS, like the even rarer Super Duty, trades hands for many multiples of what lesser—but really, not that much lesser—versions go for. Here are two cars from the very unsentimental year of 1973 that prove that no matter what, in the collector car world, it’s all about sentiment. And personal choice informed by your own history, your own experiences, and your own tastes.

Mike Green and Keith Sasich both unquestionably fall under the title of “car guy,” but, as with their cars, they don’t have much in common beyond that. Sasich likes his thrills one quarter-mile at a time and doesn’t own a foreign collector car. And Green has never owned an American muscle machine—or, indeed, any American collector car beyond a modern Ford GT. We tried to persuade him, but no luck.

Different passions inflame in different directions, and 1973 was a crossroads year in which two storied brands found themselves on vastly divergent trajectories reflected in this pair of special, limited-production cars. The good news is that a half-century later, in times that are perhaps equally fraught and uncertain, you still have some excellent choices. Perhaps 50 years hence we’ll be publishing a comparison of the Porsche 911 GT3 RS and Dodge Challenger SRT Demon 170, both new for 2023. Stefan is already working on the pitch.

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The Ford Mustang was the very first V-8 pony car, and the 2024 Mustang GT is looking like it will be the last, what with the exit of the Challenger and the Camaro this year, perhaps to be replaced by electric facsimiles. Whether you’re gaga over Mustangs or just “meh,” you have to respect Ford’s loyalty to the model and its millions of fans. It is now Ford’s oldest nameplate, having been in continuous production since 1964—unlike all of its competitors, which came and went… and then came and went again.

And except for a brief period during the Mustang II years, the model has always featured an optional V-8. Every red-blooded American—and especially the haters—should probably own a Mustang at least once in their lives. Otherwise, you just don’t know the joy of it all, of roaring at the horizon as if you can outrun age and responsibility, of squirming out of a corner with the rear tires aflame and the engine bawling at the heavens, of being 19 again if only for an hour or two on a Saturday.

We all know Mustangs can do respectable quarter miles; over the years they’ve become ever more competent at turning, and the 2024 model (the S650, in Ford-speak) continues the trend with a slightly quicker steering ratio (15.5:1 vs 16.0) and even better suspension composure. The helm response is gratifyingly quick for a four-seater with a 107-inch wheelbase—ten inches longer than a Toyota Supra’s—and a curb weight licking at two tons. The Performance Pack ($4995) fitted to our sampler includes 19-inch wheels on Pirelli PZero summer rubber surrounding huge six-piston Brembo front calipers and four-pot Brembo rears. That’s fairly serious performance kit, and even on a car this size and this heavy, the stopping power was enough to impress even the smack-talkers in their Porsches.

So, it’s hardly a street-racer one-note. Yes, it has the optional Drift Brake for sideways hoonery, and you can rev the engine with the key fob for some juvenile curbside theater. But aside from that, this is a Mustang that has gone to college, has become exactly what its GT badge says it should be: a comfortable, fast grand turismo capable in all situations. As a low-4s-to-60 adrenaline shot goes, it’s a pretty cheap one for the amount of juice it supplies.

We’re not surprised. Ford has made continuous improvements to the car nearly every year it has been in production. Some big. Some small. All for the good of the car and its buyers. For 2024, the Mustang isn’t exactly “all new” as claimed in the press bumf (see our companion story on the 2024 Mustang EcoBoost for details), but plenty of this GT is.

Specs: 2024 Ford Mustang GT

Price: Coupe $44,090 / Convertible: $53,110
Powertrain: 5.0-liter V-8, 6-speed manual; 10-speed automatic
Horsepower: 480; 486
Torque: 415; 418 lb-ft
Layout: Rear-drive, two-door, four-passenger coupe or convertible
EPA-rated fuel economy: 14–15 city/23–24 highway
0–60 mph: 4.3-sec (est)
Competitors: Toyota GR Supra, BMW M240i, Nissan Z, (the last) Chevrolet Camaro SS

First, the prices: The base 2024 GT commands an $11,575 premium over the base EcoBoost, for a starting price of $44,090, representing a big bump of around $4000 over the base 2023 GT. Inflation, baby! You do get some extra features in the deal, including all those digital screens, but you are also paying a lot for the privilege of a V-8. Even so, we’re told that 2024 preorders are heavily favoring the GT, by a ratio of 68 percent to 32 percent for the EcoBoost. No doubt that will adjust in favor of the EcoBoost as time marches on and the first-in-line enthusiasts all get their cars. The GT convertible starts at $53,110.

We talked about the new in-car screens in our companion story, so let’s flesh out some of the exterior styling changes. The grille grows larger and taller visually. In GTs, two pronounced bars separate the grille into distinct quadrants. The GT’s cheek nostrils get snarlier, too, and the GT hood sprouts black extractor vents to further separate it from the EcoBoost. “I like cars that look menacing,” explained exterior design manager Chris Walter. “I don’t like friendly cars.” To be sure, the 2024 Mustang face won’t be mistaken for Thomas the Tank Engine’s, but it’s the rear where the new styling seems most successful.

Below the rear bumper, designers have increased the blackout panel/faux undertray/decorative cladding—call it what you will—to visually pinch the rear end and make the Mustang look wider and lower. They’ve also ditched the plain flat panel that last year separated the taillights, instead shaping what designers call “a deep break,” or an inward slanting concavity, that helps make the rear end look like it’s squatting provocatively.

Down the sides, they’ve smoothed the flanks, shaving down some of the pronounced streamer lines of the previous model, and re-cut the break between the plastic rear bumper and steel quarter-panel. Now the break is one continuous straight line angled down at the rear wheel to, we’re told, accentuate where the Mustang puts its power to the road. “It’s more broad, more brazen—I’m gonna say a little more American,” said Walter.

A little less American is the Gen-4 Coyote V-8. Well, of course this 5.0-liter V-8 is all-American by definition (except that it’s made just across the river from Detroit, in Canada). But by that we mean that this four-cam, 32-valve wailer feels even a little more Italian, sounding like a ripping Maserati at full revs—if you select full-loud in the menus; you can pick from four levels of tailpipe blast, which also vary depending on which drive mode you’re in.

For 2024, Ford has split the intake with twin induction tubes and two separate 80-mm throttle bodies, the plastic pipes angled off the front of the engine like two fearsome ram’s horns. One reason may have been to upsize the throttle body volume and enable a 500-horse rating for the Dark Horse without major production variation among the models. Another is to give the engine computer some flexibility; it can open one throttle body in low-power situations and then bring the second one online, first in phases, then synced with the other throttle, when the driver calls for higher power. The benefit is better breathing and lower emissions.

Another change to the V-8 is a new steel oil pan that supposedly cuts the oil sump by half a quart to make internal engine breathing easier. We’ve seen a shift toward less oil used more efficiently in other cars, including the Corvette Z06. As it was, the sump of the previous Coyote held a sloshy 10 quarts.

The base 2024 GT now out-gooses 2023’s top-of-the-line 470-hp Mach 1. The new GT gets 480 horses at a very Italian 7150 rpm—or 486 horsepower with the new active valve exhaust system, a $1225 stand-alone noise-making option. The torque figure of 415 pound-feet, or 418 with the fancy exhaust, is almost unchanged from last year. No doubt, a lot of the Coyote’s revisions, including new camshafts, are for the Dark Horse, or for tightening emissions standards. Or for other horsepower upgrades planned but as-yet unannounced.

Both the standard Getrag MT-82 six-speed manual and $1595 10-speed automatic are carryover, though the $60,865 Dark Horse performance model will have a Tremec TR-3160 six-speed manual along with an automatic (watch for a Dark Horse writeup in the coming weeks).

The Getrag probably isn’t quite as buttery as the Tremec, but it’s still a willing partner in making good go-fast, with notchy throws and an organic clutch heft and take-up. We found the 10-speed is mostly well calibrated and delivers seamless upshifts but could knock your head forward with the occasional rough downshift. A blip in the software, perhaps.

Manual-shift paddles are fitted standard to the GT’s steering wheel (you must pay extra for them in the EcoBoost), though paddling among ten ratios is not exactly fun. The 10-speed has three—three!—overdrive ratios, and above fourth gear you pretty much lose interest.

By the way, that racy flat-bottomed steering wheel, fitted to both EcoBoost and GT Mustangs for 2024, is a change of which the Mustang’s creators are inordinately proud. We’re told that they have been pushing for such a flat-bottom wheel for years, but the suits were reluctant to tool up a unique internal ring, a part that is common across a lot of Ford products. Well, for 2024 the factory, ahem, ponied up and you get a flat-bottomed steering wheel.

Nobody including Ford knows how long cars such as the Mustang GT—expect a frightful 17 to 18 average mpg—have before encroaching technology, or regulation, or both, drive them to extinction. In the meantime, the 2024 Mustang GT proves that it’s going to keep doing what it’s always been doing, getting better with each passing year.

2024 Ford Mustang GT

Highs: A Ford with the heart of a Maserati; turns and stops as well as it quarter-miles; tons of options to make one all your own.
Lows: Fuel goes whoosh; two tons of fun; the V-8 price premium is growing; the back seat did not grow at all.

Takeaway: American as all hell, the Mustang GT takes another step forward. Get one while you still can.

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The industry-wide move to batteries and electric motors has been hard on the fuel-guzzling 12-cylinder engine, which has been or is about to be chopped from several automaker catalogs. Mercedes-Benz cut its 6.0-liter twin-turbo V-12 from the lineup in 2020, letting it ride for a few more years in the exclusive Mercedes-Maybach S 680 4Matic, while BMW installed its final 12 in June 2022 (a version soldiers on in Rolls-Royce products). Others, like Ferrari and Lamborghini, are pairing future V-12s with hybrid electric systems to reduce fuel consumption.

Bentley, which has promised to deliver five EV models by 2030, is the next brand to axe its 12, scheduling the end of production for April 2024. Over 20 years, Bentley has moved approximately 100,000 examples of its unusual and long-serving W-12, one of the most produced automotive gasoline 12-cylinders in history. Currently the W-12 commands about a 20 percent price premium over the V-8 and represents 25 percent of U.S. Bentley sales, the other 75 percent being V-8 and V-6 hybrids.

Rather than hold a wake, the brand is celebrating with a special Speed Edition 12, a package which will be available in all four models of Bentley (Continental coupe, convertible GTC, Flying Spur sedan, and Bentayga SUV). The price is yet to be announced, but the W-12 Bentleys start around $264,000 for a Flying Spur and up to $323,000 for a Continental GTC, so figure on some premium over that. There will also be 18 total examples of the $2.1 million Bentley Batur coupe, a Continental highly modified by Bentley’s Mulliner bespoke division and running a 739-hp version of the W-12.

The company let journalists waft around southern California in a bunch of 2023 Bentley Speeds, the trim level that offers the W-12, on a one-day poker outing. On the drive, the engine proved as always to be your silent partner in speed. At idle you can barely hear it and, blindfolded, you would lose a bet on whether the car is actually running. It’s as stable as Grant’s Tomb until you engage drive and glide away.

As with other luxe V-12s that came before it, the W-12 isn’t about all-out acceleration or euphonious roar. In fact, a Bentley with the W-12 doesn’t feel hugely faster than those with the 542-hp twin-turbo V-8s that will replace it at the top of the lineup. It just doesn’t work as hard to make the numbers. The unit supplies a lusciously even torque delivery, the max of 664 lb-ft available from just 1500 rpm, which thrusts the car’s prodigious 5000-plus-pounds forward in ample haste without requiring a frantic, unseemly sprint to redline. Though the engine will do that if you demand it. Having a W-12 is like exercising soft power in politics; the badge alone does most of the job that’s required of it.

The prize for the poker winner was first shot at a one-week press loan of a Speed Edition 12. Sadly, our team came up short with a lowly pair of deuces, so you’ll just have to wait for that review. Meanwhile, we had fun wheeling the other big Bentleys around the California hills, as always enjoying the way they seem to give a middle finger to physics by being both galactically heavy and also nimble enough to hold a bead in a corner at considerable speeds. The steering is insulated and somewhat relaxed but it all seems about right for the target audience, many of whom just want to be pampered in comfort.

Bentley plans a total of 480 Speed Edition 12s, or 120 examples of each model. Special badging, interior appointments, and embroidery celebrate the 12-pots up front. The dash is even inscribed with the engine’s firing order (so that’s one thing you won’t need to look up when it’s time to rebuild it). However, the best reason to buy a Speed Edition 12 may be the 1/7th scale replica of a W-12 engine block that comes with it. Then, perhaps, you will finally understand how this bizarre powerplant works.

Conceived in the latter 1990s, the W engines represent the apogee of late VW Group leader Ferdinand Piëch’s cost-no-object approach to engineering. If you recall your VW history, the company introduced the VR6 engine in 1991 and it was just like a V-6 except that the two banks of three cylinders were squished together, separated only by a super narrow 15-degree V-angle. That allowed VW to use a single cylinder head, which saved weight, cost, and perhaps most importantly, packaging space. A VR6 could easily shoehorn into a Golf-sized engine compartment intended for a four-cylinder.

In the 1990s, pretty much every Volkswagen was small and built around a four-banger, but Piëch had big plans for moving VW upscale as well as acquiring luxury brands such as Lamborghini and Bentley. Coming for the early 21st century: the Phaeton luxury liner and the Touareg SUV, all larger vehicles intended to take VW into BMW and Mercedes territory. And the W engines were part of the strategy.

There was a W-8 (two narrow-angle V-4s joined at the crank) that fit where a V-6 would go. And a W-12 that would easily slide in where a V-8 would go. And eventually a W-16 for VW subsidiary Bugatti that would fit where a V-12 would go. The early 2000s were a crazy time for Volkswagen Group. Both the Phaeton and Touareg would get optional W-12s (the latter not in the U.S.), pushing their prices close to $100,000. Even the humble Passat was offered in the U.S. with a peaky flat-plane-crank W-8 and 4Motion all-wheel-drive—plus an optional six-speed manual! It was glorious madness.

Flash forward 20 years. Piëch has gone to his reward, as have the Phaeton, Touareg, and pretty much all of VW’s delusions of grandeur. Bentley is the final VW outpost for the W engine, and it will be gone next April.

In Bentley’s twin-turbo W-12, which debuted as a 6.0-liter in the 2004 Continental GT, two VR6 engines were essentially laid alongside each other and their connecting rods fitted to a single crankshaft, then splayed out to a 72-degree angle. It’s called a W-12, but the “W” moniker is kind of a misnomer; it doesn’t look like a W when viewed head-on. It looks like a conventional V engine with perhaps beefy cylinder banks. But the W label (it helps to think of it written not as W but as V V, the Vs crossed in the middle) helps distinguish the engine from more conventional V-12s and, well, we’re just used to calling it that.

Open the hood of the Bentley and you’ll see why the W idea is a work of genius. With a block that is barely two feet long and 27 inches wide, the twin-turbo bantam packs 12-cylinder power and smoothness into a shockingly small space. Back in 2004 the engine was rated at 552 horsepower and 479 lb-ft of torque. But subsequent improvements, including a 2015 overhaul for the launch of the Bentayga SUV that brought in direct fuel injection and cylinder deactivation, have raised the power output while reducing emissions. The current Speed editions make 626 horsepower and 664 lb-ft of torque.

Bentley says the 30 workers currently assembling W-12 engines at its factory in Crewe, England, will be reassigned to work on V-8 and V-6 hybrid powertrains. However, those powertrains are assembled elsewhere and merely prepped for installation at Crewe, meaning the former Merlin engine factory is at a turning point.

The demise of the flagship Mulsanne in 2020, whose body and storied 6.75-liter pushrod V-8 engine were both fabricated at Crewe, meant the Bentley factory was out of the business of making bodies. Now with the W-12 going away, the plant will be out of the engine-making business too, becoming, at least for the foreseeable future, just a final assembly site for bodies and powerplants made elsewhere in the VW empire. So it goes.

***

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They’re calling this new Mustang the seventh generation. Hmmm! They sure don’t define that word “generation” like they used to. The first-gen Mustang went from 1964 to 1974 and was replaced by the radically smaller, Pinto-based Mustang II. The Mustang II was replaced in 1979 by the fabulous Fox, and the Fox by the curvy, ovular SN95 in 1994. Now those were generational changes.

By comparison, the 2024 Mustang (internal code name: S650) is about a 3.5-magnitude quake on the Richter scale, definitely a lot less than a complete rupture. Meaning it retains a lot of the previous-gen S550 of 2015–23, the body hard points and suspension pretty much the same. America’s favorite (and last remaining) pony car hasn’t gone all-wheel-drive, or adopted hybrid-electric gizmology, or suddenly incorporated tons of composite materials. Even with its dazzling new in-car electronics, it remains as it was before: a handsome if slightly porky nostalgia piece for folks who like to revel in the good old days.

But there is enough new that we can cut Ford a little slack here. Because of the company’s peculiar information embargos, we’ll be covering the V-8-equipped GT in a separate story. For now, we’re sticking just to the base EcoBoost turbo-four versions—starting prices of $32,515 for the hardtop coupe and $40,615 for the convertible—which some lucky journos got to flog for a hot summer second over Southern California mountains last week.

We were part of the pack and can say that though the EcoBoost is half the cylinder count of the V-8, it’s still got plenty of punch, dash, and flair to give gas jockeys a tingle, even without an available manual transmission. And for 2024, Ford proves that it knows its Mustang customers well by equipping certain versions with a new electronic handbrake optimized for drifting. For really dedicated show-offs, there’s a button on the fob that lets you rev the engine while standing outside the car. Cars and coffee will never be the same.

Unfortunately, Ford nixes the manual from the EcoBoost order sheet for 2024, no doubt because the bulk of buyers are rental fleets and people with less obsession for all-out performance. And it costs big money to certify each separate engine-transmission combo. Heck, Ferrari did away with manuals decades ago and the gates of Maranello haven’t burned, so be glad you can still get a stick in the Mustang GT. For now.

Specs: 2024 Ford Mustang EcoBoost

Price: Coupe $32,515 / Convertible: $40,615
Powertrain: 2.3-liter turbocharged four-cylinder, 10-speed automatic
Horsepower: 315
Torque: 350 lb-ft
Layout: Rear-drive, two-door, four-passenger coupe or convertible
EPA-rated fuel economy: 21–22 city/29–33 highway
0–60 mph: 5.0-sec (est)
Competitors: Toyota GR86, Subaru BRZ, (the last) Chevrolet Camaro

Except for the fact that your only transmission choice is the 10-speed automatic, the new Mustang EcoBoost tries to be more things to more people, with loads of options and tons of personalization afforded by a highly digitized interior. There are 12 available wheels, 11 exterior colors with several options for hood and side stripes, four colors of Brembo brakes if you opt for the $3475 High Performance package, and a host of add-ons from car covers (two available colors) to a first-aid kit. Don’t sit down with the online configurator unless you have a free evening, because ordering a ’24 Mustang is not something you do during a commercial break.

Ford says it wants to broaden the car’s appeal to pull in new customers, especially younger buyers accustomed to staring at screens all day. So it has built the new Mustang with a lot of screen to stare at, infused with loads of submenus and wooly multicolor graphics to entertain and delight. The old “twin-brow” dash evocative of the 1960s original is gone, replaced by a 12.4-inch flat-screen instrument cluster adjoined seamlessly in one flowing rectangular wave of glass to the 13.2-inch touchscreen that is your portal to Ford’s Sync 4 infotainment system.

All of it is angled at the driver in what Ford claims is a riff on the all-glass cockpit of an F-35 fighter jet, with the operating system intended to mimic the latest video games. “It’s progressive, disruptive, pushing the Mustang into the future,” said Chris Walter, the Mustang’s exterior design director. “We want it to feel like a digital video game or the devices that [younger people] have grown up with.”

Disruptive for sure, especially in what is the market’s most pointedly retro vehicle (now that the Camaro and Challenger are dead). Do Mustang buyers really want to swipe their fingers on a screen to adjust cabin temps or select radio stations, choose their ambient lighting from a zillion possible colors—purple and yellow gauges anyone?—or spin a 3D rendering of their car to amuse their passengers?

Ford is gambling that they will. Or, at least, they won’t mind, especially since some functions can be done with steering-wheel buttons. And the screens usher the Mustang into the modern age, giving the driver access to features they never had before. Like picking from five different gauge displays, one of which is a digital simulation of the classic Fox-body instruments (yes, please!). You can select four different drive modes, ranging from “Slippery” to “Track,” which vary the throttle and stability control settings, and also pull up a screen with extra engine-performance gauges, an acceleration timer, or a track-lap timer.

It goes on and on. One of the few hard buttons on the dash has a small Mustang pony on it. The so-called “My Mustang” button takes you directly to the menu page for most of the drive features. Suffice to say, when they deliver your new Mustang, don’t let the salesperson out of the car until he or she has shown you everything. And fear not; the EcoBoost has the exact same menus and graphics as the GT.

Car writers used to usher in a new Mustang with talk about carburetor barrels and solid lifters; now we talk about 3D graphics engines and the user experience. As Captain Jack Aubrey observes in Master and Commander, “That’s the future; what a fascinating modern age we live in.” At least the screens are easy to read and, on our short drive, weren’t flustered by direct sunlight. Eventually you don’t even think about them, they just become part of this pony’s scenery.

No carburetor stats here, but there are things to talk about under the hood. The 2.3-liter inline-four has some significant changes, including a revised valvetrain that replaces flat-tappet lifters with roller finger-follower lifters to reduce friction for more efficiency. The direct fuel-injection system is now joined by separate port injectors, the two injector systems working together in certain lower-rpm situations to take fuller advantage of turbulence in the manifold for better burning and lower emissions. The turbo actually shrinks to reduce compressor inertia and hasten spool-up and thus throttle response, and an electronic wastegate replaces the old pressure valve to give precise control over boost dumps. Ford has also computerized the exhaust-gas recirculation system and rerouted the intake to bring the airbox closer to the manifold.

The net effect on paper is an eensy power bump, only from 310 horses to 315. Torque remains the same at 350 pound-feet, but there’s said to be an improvement in emissions, and there’s definitely a slight improvement in fuel economy. However, the net effect in the real world seems to be a livelier throttle response that makes the EcoBoost plenty assertive off a corner or up a freeway onramp. Is the feel you get in your butt the five horsepower, the revised throttle mapping, or better tuning of the 10-speed, which clicks in upshifts with the speed of a dual-clutch? Probably all of the above.

About that $3475 High Performance Package: Besides larger Brembo brakes; 19-inch wheels and 255/40 Pirelli PZero summer tires; a 3.55 Torsen limited-slip rear differential to replace the standard 3.15; a strut-tower brace; steering wheel paddle shifters; stiffer springs and sway bars; and a long list of other stuff, the package gives you the future option of selecting MagneRide electronic suspension. We say “future option” because, as of this writing, the press kit says it’s an option with the Performance Package, but as yet it’s not available to select on the online configurator. Also included is an electronic hand-operated parking brake, which is the enabler for the car’s Drift Brake.

As if YouTube wasn’t already crammed with Mustangs going sideways to disastrous effect, the factory has decided to give the nation’s budding drift-o kings a helping hand. There’s no release button on this hand brake, meaning you can yank and release at will to fishtail the car in whatever way best demonstrates that mother was wrong. In a parking lot demo, it proved fairly easy to pitch the big Stang around cones using just the right combo of brake and throttle, but it does strike us as equipping the car with a dedicated idiot mode. Then again, this is the company that brought you the Line Lock burnout feature for immolating rear tires.

When not drifting or driverless revving or doing other Mustang-y type silliness, the EcoBoost is a pleasant cruiser, potentially returning over 30 mpg on the highway. It’ll stretch out and relax, with decent sound insulation and a quiet mode among its four driver-selectable exhaust volumes, made possible by electronic muffler flaps (and, we suspect, varying levels of sound boosting through the car’s audio system).

The engineers tell us the steering rack has been revised and made 3 percent quicker. Which further helps the big car feel frisky in the hills, with direct steering and excellent composure over writhing pavement. Full disclosure: We only drove a Performance Pack version, with its stickiest possible rubber and firmest available springs. Even so, the ride was quite acceptable, and we dare say the Performance Package is well worth it if you’re not a cost accountant at Hertz or Avis.

Yes, we keep harping on how big and heavy the Mustang is. The lightest EcoBoost hardtop is just shy of 3600 pounds, according to the specs. The heaviest, a convertible GT, is over 4000. True, all of the latter-day muscle machines are in this weight neighborhood, but for roughly comparable prices, a Toyota GR86 is less than 2900 pounds. You know, just sayin’.

People will continue to call the EcoBoost the “base” Mustang and will look down on it, but since day one at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, the Mustang has always depended for its survival on the volume of its less flashy versions. The only difference today is that the “base” Mustang is so much better than any base car really has a right to be, it makes you wonder why the world even needs a GT. Well, we’ll tell you in the next story.

2024 Ford Mustang EcoBoost

Highs: Chassis keeps getting better; base engine has upgrades; up-to-date interior electronics; lots of freedom to customize.

Lows: Still a bit too heavy; all-iPads dash may not please traditionalists; no manual in the EcoBoost.

Takeaway: All the old Mustang attitude but improved, and at a semi-affordable price.

***

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Four months of squinting through jewelers’ glasses at a tiny lump of metal molded in the shape of a 1970 Ferrari 512S and I declared—well, not victory, exactly, but a sort of détente. I had run out of parts to stick on it and would have to settle for what I believed to be the flawed result of a truly absurd tally of hours. The headlight lenses that didn’t fit quite right. The decals that didn’t lie down across the contours perfectly. The little globby beads where I had gotten a bit too effusive with the glue. Then I took the glasses off and gazed upon my work with failing middle-aged eyes now shorn of 3.5x magnification. And I had to admit that the finished product didn’t completely suck.

I started building 1/43rd-scale models in high school because I like miniature things and the smaller, the better. Plus, my attention span was too short to build the bigger 1/20th- and 1/12th-scale plastic jobs that have a billion parts. Then I quit for 30 years to focus on real cars. A couple of years ago, I took up modeling again, throwing adult sums of money at it. I bought finely made tweezers and jewelers’ drills. I lined one whole wall of my office with paint jars from Japan, where modeling is still a national passion, and bought an imported airbrush and a paint booth with a fan to extract fumes through a filter. And I ordered the Rolls-Royce of magnifying glasses, with a choice of five lenses, a little swing-down monocle that provides extra-extra magnification, an adjustable padded headband, and an integrated rechargeable LED light.

Most of the companies of my youth are gone, killed off by a flood of Chinese die-casts and a generational shift away from hands-on hobbies. However, Tameo Kits, operating out of a small workshop in northwest Italy, still produces a few thousand kits each year from a catalog of more than 700 subjects, mostly 1970s and ’80s F1 cars and sports-racers. The company applies modern tech to its old-world product, such as computer-aided design and spin-casting of the white metal (a malleable mix of tin and copper that goes back to toy soldier days). Unlike the kits of my youth, which resembled lead fishing sinkers, Tameo’s exquisite kits fit together precisely with a minimum of filing and shaping.

That makes them a favorite among the modelers who like to work in the fiddly 1/43rd scale, a relic of early model railroading that reduces, say, Ayrton Senna’s 1988 championship-winning McLaren MP4/4 down to a tiny shelf sculpture barely 4 inches long. “Our kits aren’t exactly the easiest thing to assemble,” acknowledged company founder Luca Tameo when I emailed him some questions. “It takes skill and excellent equipment to be able to make a finished model of good quality.”

I follow expert builders on social media, which is both good for picking up tips and terrible for the ego. But I learned they also screw up and sometimes resort to dunking the whole model in solvent to start over. One Japanese builder, who goes by @hantyan2015 on Instagram, calls it “the Bath of Shame.”

The Ferrari, a 250-piece kit of the car Mario Andretti helped crew to victory at the 1970 12 Hours of Sebring, was a challenge from my friend David Barnblatt, a video producer in LA who runs a side hustle called Vintage43.com selling model cars and kits. He corralled me and East Coaster Tim McNair, a skilled painter of both models and real cars, into building the same Tameo kit as a social media challenge. Tim finished first, producing a museum-quality model. I finished last, producing more of a 10-footer. Though the kit includes extensive instructions, we each applied our own artistic flourishes. David built his to resemble the restored car in modern times, while Tim and I both aimed to replicate the car as it raced back in the day.

That’s the great thing about building versus buying a pre-made die-cast; you make it the way you want it. That and the pride of creating a thing. Visitors to the house always ask me which of my far-too-many models I made myself, and I am eager to point them out. In the 21st century, when so many people spend so much free time staring at screens, old-fashioned hobbies like car-wrenching, woodworking, and model-making are a gift you give to your brain and hands and soul.

Your eyes—well, not so much.

***

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

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Winston Churchill is said to have observed that America could always be trusted to do the right thing, but only after exhausting all the alternatives. The same can now be said of Acura, which, after 20 years blundering around in identity crisis, flushing all sorts of almost entirely forgettable vehicles onto a wholly unimpressed U.S. market, has decided to try a new angle: remembering who the hell they are.

The 2024 Acura Integra Type S is everything a compact sport sedan should be—indeed, what it used to be before the triumph of the computers and the relentless pursuit of global volume through watery mainstreaming. It squirts, it zooms. It is supremely functional and not especially flashy. The Integra Type S and its fraternal twin, the Honda Civic Type R, are two of the best gas-powered compacts we’ve seen in years, and the best expressions of Honda-ness in a generation.

That is, assuming you can work a stick shift, because—and this is not a misprint—the Integra Type S only comes with a six-speed manual transmission. What a joy that shifter is, too; stubby, short-throw, precise, and fluid. It recalls the late, lamented S2000 roadster and a host of hot Integras of the now-distant past, when Honda and Acura once offered the best gear-changers in the industry.

Acura is Honda’s luxury subsidiary, launched in 1986. Right out of the gate came the Legend and Integra, two exquisite charmers that were so fine that they forged an empire. That wasn’t good enough for the suits, however, and Acura entered the 2000s nakedly trying to claw up the social ladder with ever more expensive (and ever duller) vehicles. Sure, the MDX luxury crossover sold pretty well, but Acura product planners ultimately renamed the Integra and in the night murdered its replacement, the RSX. The next two decades were a parade of both mediocrity and broad irrelevance.

“We needed to refocus ourselves back to ‘precision crafted performance,’” acknowledged American Honda vice president and Acura brand chief Jon Ikeda at the Integra Type S media drive. “After 30-odd years you get to know who you are as a person. We are a performance brand, and we said, ‘Hey, we need to bring Integra back.’ Integra is our [Porsche] 911.”

The division has thrust itself back into what it does best: building entertaining cars with modest proportions. For Honda is, at heart, a small-car company—always has been, probably always will be. It doesn’t matter if you rolled out of bed tired, if you missed your morning coffee, or if you’re coming down with that head cold going around; the 320-hp Integra Type S will grab you by the scruff and pull you in. There is no brainless autopilot; you will steer and brake and shift, you will have fun, you will smile. You will wail the return (finally, dammit!) of the Integra.

Specs: 2024 Acura Integra Type S

• Price: $51,995 (including destination)
• Powertrain: 2.0-liter turbocharged four-cylinder; six-speed manual
• Output: 320 hp @ 6500 rpm, 310 lb-ft @ 2600–4000 rpm
• Layout: Four-door, five-passenger, liftback sedan
• Weight: 3219 pounds
• EPA fuel economy: 21 mpg city / 28 mpg highway / 24 mpg combined
• 0 to 60 mph: TBA
• Rivals: Honda Civic Type R, VW Golf R, Audi S3, BMW M235i, Mercedes-Benz CLA35, Cadillac CT4-V

We say “compact” and “small” as if the new Integra is little, but it’s actually within a few inches of the original Acura Legend, which says more about the size of cars today than the size of cars in 1986. By today’s standards the Integra is on the small side, yet it’s roomy enough thanks to Honda’s customarily brilliant interior packaging that provides good head- and legroom for all. And it’s a liftback with split-folding rear seats, meaning you can easily pack in a lot of stuff when the need arises.

The Type S takes its place at the top of the built-in-Ohio Integra food chain. The base 1.5-liter 200-hp Integra, introduced last year, kicks off at $32,495. The meaner-looking and tech’d-up (but no more powerful) Integra A-Spec starts at $34,495, and with the optional Advanced Package it’s the only way to get a manual in any Integra, totaling $37,495. The Honda Civic Type R, starting at $43,990, is the cheapest way to get the big 2.0-liter, though with five fewer horsepower. The Integra Type S, at nearly $52,000, is positioned as a more luxurious offering with richer trim.

You can spot the Type S right away from the front because of the vented aluminum hood and wider front fenders that Honda has gone to the trouble of specially stamping in steel (the rears have plastic appliqués). From the side, it’s the special 19-inch aluminum alloy wheels, which are larger in diameter and width than the A-Spec’s 18-inchers yet 6.5 percent lighter. They wear proper, state-of-the-art Michelin Pilot Sport 4S summer tires, replacing all four of which will set you back about $1500, but worry about that later. In the meantime you have about the best grip a wet/dry street tire has to offer.

In the rear, the main Type S giveaway is the triple tailpipes—actually three separate silencers controlled by a solenoid to sound fairly subdued, or to blat and crackle even more belligerently than the Civic Type R system, which has one more silencer up front. A dynamic mode selector next to the Integra’s shifter gives you some control of the exhaust noise as well as the suspension damping stiffness and steering effort. Set on maximum Sport+, the Type S gets very blatty—and very choppy—indeed.

Besides that, there are wider grille openings and some aero enhancements, not all of which are plainly visible. An underbody tray creates a nearly flat floor, while blades hidden behind the cheek grilles smooth airflow at speed down the side.

***

Mother Nature took a big, wet dump on Acura’s plan of showcasing its newest model on a winding ribbon of California rollercoaster known as Highway 33. The road through the Topatopa Mountains above Ojai, California would make a Yugo on four space-savers look good. But winter rains played havoc up there and the highway has been closed for months. Instead, we cut west across the Santa Barbara coastal suburbia and through the Santa Ynez Mountains on a much less challenging (and less private) route.

No matter, the Type S was luminescent, with fast and naturally weighted steering, firm and reassuring brakes from the Brembo-branded front calipers, and a suspension providing both decent travel and excellent body control. It assaults a corner with the same prompt helm responses as an E46-generation BMW 3 Series but with much better tires and sound isolation, the steering wheel transmitting just enough feedback to be certain of the grip situation up front. Which is important because the 320 horses and 310 pound-feet of torque generated by the turbo 2.0-liter reach the road only through the front wheels. Those driven wheels can sniff around a tiny bit out of a lumpy corner, despite the suspension geometry almost eliminating torque-steer, but they generally take you exactly where pointed.

Not since the return of the Civic Type R to U.S. shores for 2017 have we shaken our heads at a Honda product and wondered, “How’d they do that?” But the Integra has us shaking our heads. For one thing, the all-steel body structure is exceptionally stiff, especially when compared to some of the Korean pretenders, yet there is nothing overtly fancy about the way the Integra’s steel structure was spot-welded together. No underhood shock-tower braces, no fancy thin-wall alloy castings at the hard points, no especially exotic materials. Yet somehow the car’s curb weight sits at about 3200 pounds, which is pretty light in this day and age.

Stiff cars make for quicker steering response, as you don’t have to wait for the steel to bend before the tires can do their thing. Unibody structures with gaping holes in the back for a hatchback tend to sacrifice some rigidity for utility, because you can’t hide a cross-car beam or X-brace under a parcel shelf as you can in a sedan to tie the rear suspension mounts together. Yet the Integra shakes not at all over bumps, even while wearing 30-series tires on 19-inch rims. Nor does it flex when you dive for a corner.

Another gobsmacking feature is the VTEC-equipped K20C1 four-cylinder. It’s the rare turbo engine with a shorter stroke (85.9 mm) than its bore (86.0 mm, granted not much). Meaning it’s a turbo engine that will rev if you want to—though its flat torque curve means the 310 pound-feet arrive at 2600 rpm and hangs in to 4000. It’s gloriously smooth and tractable around town in Comfort mode, but turns into an animal when the boost builds, which takes a half a second but hey, this little thing makes 160 horses per liter. Expect it to drink premium fuel at a rate of around 25 mpg.

If you’re into dashboards comprised of so many interlocking iPads, the Integra comes across as remarkably old-school. Not that there aren’t screens, including a central nine-inch touchscreen with standard CarPlay/Android Auto and a volume knob, but the cockpit is a touch retro. A mix of metal- and leather-like textures surround a binnacle with an old-timey round tach and speedo. The Type S gets exclusive, power-adjustable sport thrones with perforated leather and contrast stitching, not to mention heated elements that are not offered on the Civic Type R. Acura is offering three interior colors, the red/black contrasting scheme being the raciest for this get-down-to-business workspace.

No, it’s not cheap, and cynics will raise eyebrows at a gussied-up Honda Civic hatchback costing north of 50 grand. Two things, though: A good car is worth whatever you have to pay for it, and a look around at what else you can buy for the money isn’t awe-inspiring. The sporty Audi S3, Mercedes AMG CLA35, and BMW M235i are all in this neighborhood, and none of those sedans offers a manual transmission, though the less-posh VW Golf R does. Most of Acura’s traditional competitors are too obsessed with crossovers, or EVs, to build an exciting compact sedan with an internal combustion engine. Indeed, the Type S’s toughest competition is in-house with the Civic Type R, which offers only a slightly less premium experience but at considerable savings.

Both of hot hatches seem like the Nikon F6es of our era, the 2004 version being perhaps the last, best 35-mm film camera ever made before the onslaught of digital photography. With many of Acura’s young, hip, and city-dwelling target demographic having bled away to Tesla Model 3s, and with more and ever-better EVs piling into the space, the Integra Type S arrives just in time. Such an intense, satisfying mechanical experience—irreplaceable to those still craving a certain kind of driving pleasure—is becoming rarer by the minute.

2024 Acura Integra Type S

Highs: Manual only, brilliant packaging and old-school Integra performance, a car you will never be bored in.

Lows: Not cheap, a Civic Type-R is about $7000 less and offers a lot of the same joy, arrives just as EVs are taking over.

Takeaway: At the dawn of a new age, Acura finally resurrects its old icon to save its reputation, and it doesn’t disappoint.

***

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We dedicated the May/June 2023 issue of Hagerty Drivers Club magazine to the deep connections between music and cars, including several fun lists featuring your favorite car songs. Come back often or click the Music & Cars tag to stay up to date on these stories as they roll out online. You can also jam with our custom Music & Cars playlist on Spotify, available here.

If you’re one of the millions who own one of them gas-drinking, piston-clanking, air-polluting, smoke-belching, four-wheeled buggies from Detroit City, then pay attention; I’m about to sing your song, son.” So sang the Alabama Wild Man, Jerry Reed, a half-century ago in his 1973 country hit single, “Lord, Mr. Ford.” People have written a lot of love songs to the automobile over the years. They have names like “409” and “G.T.O.” and “Hey Little Cobra,” and they often get played on permanent rerun at car shows. “Lord, Mr. Ford” is not one of those songs.

It could be called a protest song, but it’s really about a love affair gone bad. It’s a reminder of all the ways that cars eat their owners and foul the skies. “Lord, Mr. Ford” pulls no punches; it calls cars a “ready-made pile of manufactured grief” and talks about being dollared to death and the “carbon dioxide haze a-hangin’ over the roar of the interstate.” As breakup songs go, it rivals Alanis Morissette’s much later “You Oughta Know” for driving home grievances with a nail gun, but does it all with a wink and a smirk. Nobody wanted to say it about cars, but by 1973, when the smog shrouding our traffic-clogged cities was at its gloopiest, somebody had to. And Jerry Reed, the sideburned guitar picker famous for calling everyone “son,” was the man to say it.

Reed was born to Atlanta cotton-mill workers and grew up listening to the Grand Ole Opry on the radio. His mother bought him a used guitar, which he attacked with a thumb pick, striking it viciously to produce a particularly sharp twang. He schooled on banjo great Earl Scruggs and called Chet Atkins a mentor, and he developed his own complex style of five-fingered picking that Nashvillians later dubbed “the Claw.” He appeared on television shows and in several films, most famously playing the dog-loving trucker Cledus “the Snowman” Snow opposite real-life buddy Burt Reynolds in Smokey and the Bandit. “I’m no actor,” he said, “I just play myself.”

But more often Reed appeared in honky-tonks, state fairs, and backwater casinos with warm-up acts like Tina the Performing Elephant. On stage, he was a friendly, down-home wisecracker whose songs often poked fun at common working-class dilemmas such as divorce (“She Got the Goldmine [I Got the Shaft]”) and getting arrested (“When You’re Hot, You’re Hot”).

Reed wasn’t supposed to be the man to sing “Lord, Mr. Ford.” Songwriter Dick Feller, who wrote much of the Smokey and the Bandit soundtrack, including “East Bound and Down” and “The Bandit,” said he actually wrote “Mr. Ford” for Jimmy Dean, the country music legend and sausage king. But “Dean was too busy selling sausages or something,” said Feller, and never recorded it.

Feller was what people back then called a “song stylist.” He wrote folksy romps such as “Biff, the Friendly Purple Bear,” and “Makin’ the Best of a Bad Situation,” which in three minutes manages to cover a man who loses an ear to an alligator, a wife who is having an affair with the milkman, and a woman whose husband thinks he’s a chicken. Born in Missouri, Feller moved to California because, he said, “Living in a little Missouri town, you think people [in California] don’t have acne or bowel movements or anything else that common people have.”

However, California didn’t work out. Nor did Nashville. So, Feller ended up in New York, where he said he didn’t write anything until nightfall, after he had donned a special pair of underwear and brewed a pot of tea. He wrote hits for Johnny Cash and recorded a whimsical lament of easy credit called “The Credit Card Song” that hit No. 10 on the country music charts. He cited a love of John Steinbeck paperbacks as well as hypnotism for his success.

Feller, who came out as a she in 2014 and became Deena Kaye Rose, once said he had a dream that he gave “Lord, Mr. Ford” to Jerry Reed, who had just recorded a tune about gas lines called “The Crude Oil Blues.” After waking up, Feller did just that, and the song immediately shot to the top of the country music charts. “I understand that the Ford people didn’t like ‘Lord, Mr. Ford’ too much,” Feller said, “but General Motors loved it.”

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Call it cool, call it retro, call it Bussy McBussface, just don’t call it the new Microbus.

Fine, call it the new Microbus if you really want to. Volkswagen certainly would like that. At the reveal of the new electric VW ID. Buzz in seaside Huntington Beach, California, the company laid on the nostalgia as thick as fresh Kartoffelsalat. A DJ calling himself “Radio Woodstock” laid down one purple-haze track after another while flower-power hippy types mingled among more than 280 examples of T1-T5 Microbuses, Vanagons, Eurovans, Kombis, Crew-cabs, and pop-top Westfalias driven in by local collectors. VW execs even proclaimed June 2 to be International Volkswagen Bus Day.

The original 1949 to 1967 (in America) T1 and T2s are beloved nostalgia icons that are today highly collectible. A 1964 model parked at the ID. Buzz launch had a for sale sign on it and an asking price of $64,000. It was pointed out at the Buzz event that the Microbus has been at the epicenter of American culture and history since it was launched. It helped spawn the surf craze, Nike founder Phil Knight sold his first sneakers out of the back of one, and Steve Jobs sold his Microbus to get the money to start Apple Computer.

But the ID. Buzz, due in showrooms next year with an expected price of around $60,000, ain’t exactly a Microbus. For one thing, Volkswagen’s designers specifically backed away from making their new electric van too retro. “We came up with tons of sketches. A lot of sketches,” said lead exterior designer Einar Castillo Aranda, a native of Mexico City whose previous work was on the VW Polo subcompact.

“Round eyes. Square eyes. In the end we decided to go with a kind of integration of the headlights with the side lines. You don’t really want to go full retro. It only fits for a few cars, and we didn’t want to go that route. We’d like to push it a bit more forward.”

Another reason the ID. Buzz is not the new Microbus? It’s not micro. The U.S. will only get the XL-size version, with three seat rows and a 192.4-inch overall length. At roughly 16 feet it’s about the length of the VW Atlas SUV, which I don’t think anyone would call “micro.” Europe has the option for a shorter, two-row version.

Granted, 16 feet doesn’t seem so long when you realize the original Type 1 and 2s were 14 feet and change. And a 2023 Toyota Sienna, at roughly 204 inches, dwarfs the new Volkswagen. So if the ID. Buzz is not the new Microbus, let’s call it the new Mediumbus.

The ID. Buzz will debut with an upsized 91-kWh battery (the shorter Euro version gets an 82-kWh pack) that should be good for at least 280 miles depending on the configuration. A 282-hp rear-drive base model will slot under a two-motor, 335-hp all-wheel-drive version. Options include a two-tone paint job like the original Microbus, a bevy of bright exterior colors, three interior color options, and an electrically dimming panoramic sunroof that is five and a half feet long.

One downside to electrification: a relatively high floor inside and no fold-into-the-floor seating, as in other minivans, due to the battery pack being in the way. However, VW promises there will be a camper version for the U.S. along the lines of the California model sold for years in Europe (but not, ironically in California, or any other U.S. state).

It’s been over 30 years since VW dumped the flat-faced shape of the bus, the last one being the T3, known in the U.S. as the Vanagon and dubbed the “waterbox” for the water-cooled flat-four installed in later versions. Its replacement, the T4 of 1990, moved the engine to the front, mounted within a pronounced schnoz, while the driver shifted behind the front axle for better crash protection. Subsequent generations of Volkswagen vans have all sported Romanesque noses.

One thing Aranda and his colleagues are very pleased about is being able to move the ID. Buzz’s overall shape closer to that of the original monolithic box. That’s because of the switch to electric, which removes the engine front the front and all the necessary structure required to keep its bulk out of the passenger compartment in a frontal crash.

“Before with an ordinary combustion engine, it was impossible, you always ended up with a bonnet (hood) on the front, which was not anymore this [original] shape,” said Aranda. “Now with this new platform, we’ve been able to put the wheels to the corners to reduce the front overhangs, and move the driver forward in the cabin to produce the bus shape again. We are able to return to the true shape of the car.”

Shape, perhaps. Size, not so much.

***

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George Lucas’ cinematic salute to midcentury cruise culture opens with the jumbled chirps of an AM car radio being tuned, like the pit orchestra warming up at an opera house. Then, as the curtain lifts on a sunset scene of Mel’s Drive-In, the soundtrack locks on to Bill Haley and His Comets belting out their famous 1950s pop anthem, “Rock Around the Clock.” What follows is a 112-minute comic opera of love, longing, joyriding, and high school restlessness that takes place over a single night and is set to a nearly nonstop soundscape of ancient jukebox hits.

“Where were you in ’62?” asked the movie posters when American Graffiti debuted in the summer of 1973. It didn’t matter where you were, because watching the film, whether for the first time or the 40th, puts you right where Lucas wants you to be. Which is in his backwater hometown of Modesto, California, in the last golden days of greasers, bobby socks, poodle skirts, and doo-wop burbling from tinny dash speakers.

Marking its 50th anniversary this year, American Graffiti is often called one of the best car movies ever made. Granted, it’s a low bar; the film catalog, especially from the 1950s and ’60s, is full of lousy car flicks, from Hot Rod Girl to Hot Rod Rumble to The Devil on Wheels. Most were just gasoline porn wrapped in some tin-pot scold against motorized delinquency to please the censors. Few remember them now, while American Graffiti sits on the American Film Institute’s prestigious list of top 100 movies.

It was nominated for five Academy Awards and is thought by some to be the film industry’s first summer “blockbuster,” taking in so much money that it rates as one of the most profitable movies ever made based on its ratio of return on cost. It launched a decades-long craze for ’50s nostalgia and it catapulted Lucas out of impoverished obscurity, making him an overnight millionaire and rocketing him to his next stop in a galaxy far, far away from Modesto.

No mere car movie has that kind of power. Because American Graffiti isn’t about cars, really. Or even the early rock-and-roll that serves as its only musical soundtrack. Those are just the props and the scenery. At its core, American Graffiti is a coming-of-age story, a theme that has sold tickets since Shakespeare’s Hamlet pondered whether to be or not to be. Lucas’ inspiration was to figure out how to tell it with a juiced ’32 coupe and a bitchin’ ’58 Impala as costars.

Fans of American Graffiti have erected more than a few monuments to it online. You can while away many hours watching interviews with the cast and crew or reading Kip’s American Graffiti Blog, which is a dense accounting of film factoids. Such as that the Pharaohs gang “with the car coat and blood initiation” was based on a real Modesto car club called the Faros. And that the small-town Mel’s Drive-In featured in the movie was actually located on Van Ness Avenue in the heart of San Francisco, used because it was one of the last circular drive-ins left in California.

Or that the origin of the whole film was based on a previous flop. Not long out of USC film school, Lucas was advised by his mentor, director Francis Ford Coppola of The Godfather fame, to develop a more lighthearted project following Lucas’s screenwriting and directorial debut, THX 1138. The somber sci-fi potboiler starred a rookie Robert Duvall as a mal-content living in a dystopian future where people with shaved heads and serial numbers for names drone their lives away in an oppressively bland surveillance society. It was a feature-length version of a 15-minute film school project by Lucas, and it was produced by Coppola’s newly created American Zoetrope production company, established in San Francisco to be at the pointy edge of the long-hair, purple-haze, counter-culture film movement.

Rich with ingenuity but perhaps a bit too avant-garde, THX 1138 (which took its title from Lucas’ college phone number, an alphanumeric sequence that reappears throughout his later career, including as a license plate on Graffiti’s yellow ’32 Ford), bombed. According to a box office–tracking site, the R-rated pic currently ranks as the 32,230th highest-grossing film ever. Thus, the young director was keenly focused on commercial viability when he turned to his next project.

His mind wandered to his teenage years in Modesto, a small Central Valley farm town where bored kids cruised the drag or idled away the nights at soda counters and drive-ins, wondering what life was like just over the horizon. Lucas had been one of those kids, turning 18 in 1962 and fixated on cars and racing. He worked at a foreign car shop and blatted around town in a tiny Autobianchi Bianchina with a rollcage and a Maltese cross on the fenders. At least, until he was torpedoed by a Chevy while turning left into his driveway. The crash punted the Bianchina sidelong against a tree, breaking the seat belt and hurling Lucas onto the pavement. He spent his high school graduation in the hospital coughing up blood, and the world came breathtakingly close to not having American Graffiti, Star Wars, and all the rest.

Even so, Lucas never lost his infatuation with vehicles, incorporating some sort of hot rod, interstellar or otherwise, into almost every film. At USC, his senior student project was called 1:42.08 and featured Pete Brock of Shelby Cobra Daytona fame in a Lotus 23 at Willow Springs Raceway in a wordless montage of driving scenes. The best part of THX 1138 is the final eerie chase sequence in which Duvall flees the subterranean city in an “Autojet,” which was a lightly disguised ex-Sebring Lola T70.

Thus, cars and what Lucas called “the particularly American mating ritual of cruising” were destined to be fixtures in his new movie. Trying to immerse himself in the times as he took his first stab at the screenplay, Lucas raided his record collection and spun 45 after 45 of period tunes on his sister’s turntable. The project faced numerous rejections until Universal finally agreed, but only after Coppola’s name was thrown on the table as executive producer. Script doctors Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck, an old USC classmate, came aboard, fleshing out Lucas’ screenplay using their own high school memories. Universal’s purse was tight; the film was allocated a miserly budget of barely $750,000, which meant it had to be shot in a blitzkrieg 28 nights and with a troupe of young actors who were relative unknowns at the time. Ron Howard was the biggest star, having played the freckled tyke Opie Taylor in more than 200 episodes of The Andy Griffith Show. The future Han Solo, Harrison Ford, whose brief role in Graffiti was as the reckless hot-rodder Bob Falfa, was then working as a carpenter in Los Angeles.

As the film begins, the four central characters—class president and popular guy Steve Bolander played by Howard; an undiscovered Richard Dreyfuss as the doubt-ridden beatnik Curt Henderson; rat-racing everyman John Milner embodied by a former amateur boxer named Paul Le Mat; and the gawky nerd Terry “the Toad” Fields played by teen actor Charles Martin Smith—have just been booted from the nest of their comfortable high school adolescence. In one fateful night of cruising, brooding, kidnapping, canoodling, and brawling, they will each try to figure out their path to manhood. “You can’t stay 17 forever,” Steve exclaims to Curt at the beginning of the film, launching the boys on their journey.

Lucas wanted a documentary style and gave the actors minimal direction, encouraging improvisation as the camera rolled. Almost invariably, said the actors in later interviews, Lucas chose the sloppiest takes, believing they were the most natural. Such as in the opening scene at Mel’s when Charles Martin Smith rides up on a Vespa, accidentally slips off the clutch, and crashes into a trash can. In the first minute of the film, this unintentional blooper neatly establishes the character of Terry the Toad as the movie’s bumbling comic relief.

Another documentarian trick—though it was really a cost-saving measure—was to shoot the movie in Techniscope, a cinematography format developed in Italy in 1960 to maximize the productivity of expensive 35-millimeter color film stock. Basically, Techniscope cuts the conventional 35-millimeter frame in half, cramming two shorter frames into the space of one while still preserving the frame width. That allowed Lucas to shoot twice the footage on each canister of film. However, when the film was developed and distributed, its 35-millimeter width allowed it to be transferred to conventional widescreen projection stock. Meaning the images still filled up the theater screen, but at the cost of the blown-up images being grainier. Which for Lucas, who had used Techniscope on THX 1138, was what he wanted anyway for a gritty, realistic style.

Naturally, there were disasters. Modesto’s commercial drag was considered too run-down by 1973, so Lucas chose the Bay Area city of San Rafael as a stand-in. However, after the first all-nighter of filming, the city tore up Lucas’ film permit and kicked the production out, citing disruption to downtown businesses. The entire operation had to move overnight some 20 miles north to the more welcoming burg of Petaluma, where most of the film was shot. The vintage DC-7 airliner that Curt boards at the end of the movie had engine trouble and was a week late arriving at Concord, California’s Buchanan Field for the scene. Bob Falfa’s ’55 Chevy was a cinematic hand-me-down, having been built for the 1971 road movie Two-Lane Blacktop. Fitted with antiroll bars and a lowered suspension, it refused to roll over on cue in the penultimate sunrise race scene between Milner and Falfa, forcing Lucas to shoot Falfa’s crash in bits and pieces over weeks.

The film is as much an aural experience as a visual one. Lucas’ original script included his insertion of specific songs for specific scenes, such as The Platters’ “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” for the dance between Steve and girlfriend Laurie, played by the late Cindy Williams. But it isn’t just the 41 rock-and-roll hits that wallpaper the soundtrack—from “16 Candles” by the Crests to “Come Go with Me” by the Del-Vikings to “Since I Don’t Have You” by the Skyliners. It was Lucas’ decision, along with his sound editor, Walter Murch, to feature the music—again, documentary style—as though it was heard on a car radio or from some distant jukebox. Thus, the old 45s were rerecorded, but in gymnasiums, between buildings, or out on streets, with the speakers moved around to achieve different distortive effects.

At times in the film, the music is distant and fleeting, as if playing in a dream or a nostalgic reverie. At other moments, it’s upfront to heighten a scene’s emotional punch. And it was Murch’s suggestion to incorporate Robert Weston Smith, aka Wolfman Jack, as an unseen Wizard of Oz figure presiding over his kingdom of teenagers through the medium of radio. Except for the scene in which Curt meets the Wolfman, most of the famous DJ’s splendid contribution to the film was cribbed from previously recorded live broadcasts from the 1950s.

Unlike most films that use atmospheric music to heighten a scene’s tension, Lucas instead went silent in Graffiti’s few suspenseful moments, using the disquieting break in the soundtrack to ratchet up the drama. Such as when Curt, at the behest of the Pharaohs, into whose captivity he has fallen, sneaks under a cop car to hook a chain to its axle. This was partly an artistic choice and partly a monetary one, as Lucas had no cash to commission a unique score. He spent $80,000 of his budget on music licensing alone, working out to roughly $2000 per song. It’s a ridiculously low number by today’s industry standards, and American Graffiti is thus a film that would be nearly impossible to make today. At least, for so little—in part because the movie helped establish pre-released popular music as an acceptable (and profitable) soundtrack source, driving up licensing fees.

Lucas has said that all the characters contained pieces of him, but the one he most identified with is Curt, played by Dreyfuss. Curt begins the film waffling over whether to leave for college or stay behind in Modesto. As the tale proceeds, he’s seemingly presented with a series of glimpses of life’s smallness if he stays, from the juvenile pranks of the Pharaohs to the high school teacher who got out but then failed, returning to a petty existence of flirting salaciously with his students. “Where you goin’?” Curt asks his old girlfriend at one point in the movie. “Nowhere,” she replies. “Well, you mind if I come along?” The white Thunderbird with the blonde that Curt spends the night chasing proves to be nothing more than a mirage, a giddy fantasy that, in the end, he leaves behind as the DC-7 wafts him away to adulthood.

American Graffiti opened in theaters on August 11, 1973, as the papers trumpeted news of the Watergate hearings and the American bombing in Cambodia. Except for San Francisco Chronicle film critic Anitra Earle, who called it “without doubt the most tedious film I have ever seen,” reviewers generally swooned. Los Angeles Times film critic Charles Champlin praised the movie’s affectionate “reexamination of the last hours of settled youth,” echoing others in saying it was “one of the most rewarding attractions of the year.” The public packed the seats, and as late as the following January, fully five months later, theaters were still advertising daily showings.

The cultural impact was immediate. Nostalgia spinoffs in the form of Happy Days and Laverne & Shirley hit the tube, Ron Howard sticking to type as the clean-cut Richie Cunningham. A leather-jacketed Henry Winkler became a household name as The Fonz, all but reprising his role as the kindhearted hood from another ’50s retro set piece, The Lords of Flatbush, from 1974. Fifties-themed diners sprang up across America and singer Billy Joel cut hit songs in doo-wop style.

Meanwhile, as Detroit sank steadily into the 1970s malaise, car customizing experienced a resurgence. The so-called Bubble Top King, Darryl Starbird, who served as a technical adviser on Graffiti (and is mentioned by name in the dialogue), credited the movie with reactivating people’s interest in frenching and pinstriping. “Four or five years ago, drugs and music seemed to be big,” he told his hometown newspaper, the Wichita Beacon, on the eve of a local custom car show in 1974, “but the trend back to cars is coming around strong.” Hot-rod meets started filling up with chopped and hoodless ’32 Fords, everyone wanting to be as cool and unbeatable as John Milner.

It’s hard to believe that only 11 years separates the time period in which the original film is set from the year it was released. We think life moves fast now, but if you released a film about 2012 today, its main defining differences would be iPhone 5s and slower internet. However, so much happened in the world and in the culture after 1962 that Graffiti’s America was virtually unrecognizable by 1973. First John F. Kennedy, then Bobby Kennedy, then Martin Luther King Jr. were gunned down. An unpopular war rang up a horrible butcher’s bill while cities and universities split open in protest and race riots. The Age of Aquarius led to the gloom of Watergate, environmental crisis, and oil embargoes. American Graffiti isn’t just about the end of youth, it’s about the end of innocence, perhaps the one thing that the people who were actually there in ’62 mourn the most.

“Rock-and-roll has been going downhill ever since Buddy Holly died,” grouses the hot-rod hero John Mil-ner as a Beach Boys track briefly interrupts Graffiti’s endless eulogy to the 1950s. Fittingly, perhaps, the film closes with the song “All Summer Long” by the Beach Boys, meaning you can’t hold back progress. “Every now and then we hear our song/we’ve been having fun all summer long …”

Lucas attempted to neatly tie up his story with an epilogue board preceding the final credits that spelled out the varying fates of his four principals. But the film raked in so much dough that a sequel was virtually inevitable. A suddenly very important and busy Lucas—Star Wars, Indiana Jones, founding Lucasfilm and Industrial Light & Magic, etc.—was only involved as an executive producer in the 1979 follow-up, More American Graffiti. It ushered the characters, minus Dreyfuss’ Curt, firmly into the 1960s maelstrom but with less charming results.

Maybe nobody really wanted to grow up after all. That’s the problem with coming-of-age stories; once the characters come of age, you want to hit the rewind and go back to their uninhibited youth. George Lucas did it in spectacular fashion for all of us, creating an inviting multisensory sanctuary that you can curl up in whenever the mood strikes. Because as John Milner declares every time you load up the video, “I ain’t goin’ off to some damn fancy college! I’m stayin’ right here, having fun as usual!” And you’ll always be able to find him at Mel’s, in 1962, having fun as usual.

To this day, the American Graffiti soundtrack serves as the ultimate introduction to early American rock-and-roll, doo-wop, and R&B. It’s best heard on a beat-up triple LP copy or, perhaps better yet, by way of a dusty cassette on rally night. Over 3 million copies were sold in the U.S. alone.

***

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

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Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe. It powers the sun, fills the oceans and our bodies, and, when burned or forced through an electricity-generating fuel cell, sends nothing but pure, drinkable water out the tailpipe. It packs a lot of energy, too; NASA’s Artemis 1 rocket recently flew laps around the moon powered mostly by zero-emissions hydrogen. So why aren’t we driving our kids to school with it?

That’s what hydrogen proponents such as Toyota and Honda want to know as the wider industry races headlong toward battery-electric vehicles. Both automakers, as well as Hyundai, have fleets of hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles in circulation, and they are swimming against the battery-electric tide by placing even bigger bets on the odorless, colorless gas. “The whole world will not adapt at the same time [to EVs], so we need multiple solutions,” Akio Toyoda, Toyota’s chairman of the board, recently told journalists.

Mighty Toyota is the chief cheerleader for the big H. Last year, Toyota inked a deal with BMW, its partner on the Supra, to jointly develop a hydrogen fuel-cell vehicle said to be slated for 2025. It has joined heavy-duty engine-maker Cummins in exploring large engines that burn hydrogen while also collaborating with motorcycle-maker Kawasaki on mini hydrogen engines for bikes.

It all sounds promising, except for one thing: Hydrogen is not an easy fuel to work with. Though it is literally everywhere, hydrogen naturally couples up with other elements such as oxygen and carbon, meaning you must force it apart using energy. A color-coded system has been created to classify hydrogen sources by their environmental impact: Black and brown are separated from coal and are the worst; gray, the most common, is taken from methane or natural gas using energy-intensive steam reforming; blue is the same but with a carbon-capture system; and green hydrogen is separated from oxygen using electrolysis, a process that can harness renewable energy such as solar and is the cleanest of the clean, but it’s difficult to scale up and represents a tiny fraction of today’s supply.

Additionally, hydrogen is not as energy dense as gasoline or other fossil fuels, meaning you must carry a lot of it to drive very far, either packed into highly reinforced tanks at pressures of 5000 to 10,000 psi or liquefied to negative 423 degrees F. It and helium are the only gases that heat up when they expand, so leaks are potentially catastrophic. Hydrogen is the smallest molecule on the periodic table of elements and is difficult to contain, easily evaporating away through tank walls and seals. And fuel cells need much purer hydrogen than that currently produced for its most common end-use today, which is oil refining. Otherwise, the catalytic plates in fuel cells that help strip away hydrogen’s electrons to make electric current get contaminated.

There are just 56 hydrogen refueling stations in the U.S. compared with more than 50,000 EV charging stations, yet transportation thinkers say there may yet be a role for it. Heavy trucks, stationary power plants, agricultural and construction equipment, ships, and freight trains are all considered potential candidates for hydrogen conversion. Packaging storage tanks in those vehicles is less of an issue than in a family car, and the power output is greater for the weight when compared with batteries. Thus, a long-haul rig running on hydrogen can carry more payload than the same rig with the same range running on today’s batteries. And it takes much less time to refuel than to recharge a large battery pack.

As Tom Stephenson, co-founder of Pajarito Powder, a New Mexico hydrogen-components startup backed by Hyundai, told the trade publication Automotive News: “A good rule of thumb is that you’ll see hydrogen fuel cells where you see diesel today and battery electric where you see gasoline.”

***

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Welcome to Small But Mighty, a short series about boutique British car companies. You may not know much about Ariel, Briggs, Caterham, or Morgan, but you probably see at least one car the way they do: as a crafted thing, meant for enjoying and possessed of its own personality. To read more about the landscape of this cottage automotive industry, click here.

Below the Malvern Hills in far western England, amid the rolling green quilt of pasturelands and farm paddocks of bucolic Worcestershire, is the home of Britain’s most quintessentially British car company. If you could build a car out of wet sheepdog, tea with milk, flowering heath, the Royal Dragoon Guards, and a half-timber pub in the village with a good fire, it would look like a Morgan.

Indeed, were founder H.F.S. Morgan to turn up today at the workshop he opened in the spa town of Malvern in 1910, he would probably know exactly where to find his office and the coffeepot. The factory sheds with their A-frame ceilings and concrete floors stained by a century of car making aren’t all that much different today, being still arrayed sideways down a hill from the gate on 86 Pickersleigh Road, the easier to push unfinished cars to the next assembly stations.

Well, he might not recognize the gift shop, the gastronomic bistro where the furniture was made in-house out of ash (of course), or the buses rolling up with punters willing to pay $34 for a factory tour or $365 to rent a Morgan for the day. The Morgan Works hosts 35,000 visitors a year, making this cottage maker not only the largest of our group and the oldest name in continuous operation, but also the closest thing to Disneyland.

As the tourists look on through their iPhones, new Morgan Plus Fours and Plus Sixes come together (still down the hill), starting where craftspeople painstakingly fit the pressed aluminum fenders, doors, and scuttles to the body’s ash frame. Then on to the paint booths where they are hand-sprayed to the buyer’s specification, and then to final assembly at the bottom where they are united with an aluminum chassis, new last year, featuring an all-independent suspension and either a 255-hp 2.0-liter turbo four or a 335-hp 3.0-liter turbo inline-six, both from BMW. Plus Fours start at the equivalent of $79,000, the Plus Six at $91,000, though it’s easy to let the options swell the bottom line.

Off in a corner, we saw the very first production units of the new $51,000 Super 3 three-wheeler getting final fettling, the car’s design completely overhauled and updated to package a water-cooled Ford Fiesta inline-three instead of the old S&S V-twin thump-a-dumper. Morgan is hoping to grow its output to 1000 cars a year, including 500 Plus models, 400 Super 3s, and possibly 100 units of a new company flagship to replace the retired Aero.

So says Jonathan Wells, the company’s head of design, before acknowledging that supply problems and economic uncertainty may alter the timeline. There is certainty of demand, he says, what with the wait time at six months for a Plus Four and one year for the Super 3, a sleek mashup of retro and modern that has been designed specifically with younger buyers and the U.S. market in mind.

A Morgan has to look like a Morgan, meaning it has to look like the car that retired group captains named Bertie and Albie would buy. But “we have to be careful not to become a pastiche, what we call in Britain ‘a wedding car,’” says Wells. Basically, he means a Ford Focus with a vintage body plopped on it. The new alloy chassis and BMW powertrains moved the ancient Plus into the 21st century, and “the Super 3 gives Morgan an opportunity to explore different design themes, to create a foundation for a broader, more relevant brand,” Wells says.

Along those lines, the company built eight safari-style Morgans with rock-crusher tires and suspensions, capitalizing on the off-road Dakar craze. “They were huge time sinks,” says Wells, and there are no plans to make it a regular product, but they helped introduce Morgan to the Instagram generation. Problems include escalating energy prices, which have hit the aluminum-intensive Morgan hard, and supply chain snarls that have forced the company to order some components as much as 36 months in advance. And, as with everyone else, a forthcoming EV mandate will force Morgan to figure out how to shove a few hundred pounds of battery into a 2200-pound car without turning it into a giant anvil.

On the upside, “We’re seeing a marked decrease in the average age of the buyer,” says Wells. “It is getting younger, and we’re seeing less bias about whether it has to be an IC engine.”

***

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Welcome to Small But Mighty, a short series about boutique British car companies. You may not know much about Ariel, Briggs, Caterham, or Morgan, but you probably see at least one car the way they do: as a crafted thing, meant for enjoying and possessed of its own personality. To read more about the landscape of this cottage automotive industry, click here.

Just south of London, down by the city’s other bustling airport of Gatwick, Caterham Cars beckons in the visitor with two-story-high, full-color action pics of its retro road crabs and bright, Caterham-green arrows pointing to a glass door with the word “Welcome” in bold letters next to it. This operation doesn’t mind foot traffic.

Caterham has been dining out for over 50 years on the brilliance of Colin Chapman’s original 1957 Lotus Seven, a featherweight, cycle-fender skiff intended for trials and other forms of small-car racing. Two years after the Seven debuted, Graham Nearn started a Lotus dealer on Caterham Hill south of London and became a rabid seller and advocate of Sevens.

By 1973, Lotus was ready to move on, but because nothing ever dies in Britain, Nearn acquired the production rights from Chapman and rechristened it the Caterham Seven, producing both kits and finished cars. (To read about 7 reasons why Caterham’s Seven is still going strong, click here.)

After the original factory blew down in a storm, Caterham moved to a new plant east of London and then opened the facility near Gatwick as a production site, showroom, and customer delivery and service center. If you live anywhere in Europe, you can easily fly in, watch your Seven being worked on (or attend a course on how to assemble it yourself), and drive out. Being so accessible is one of the ways Caterham keeps its cash register humming.

Another is a driver academy it started in 1995 that today accepts 56 students per season and plugs them into an eight-event Caterham racing series. It costs about $43,000 a head and is sold out through 2024. And the company licensed a Lego kit a few years ago that sold over 200,000 copies, bringing a nice return.

Meanwhile, the cars and kits keep selling “500 a year, religiously. It doesn’t matter if there’s a recession on, a war on, we always seem to build 500 cars a year,” says David Ridley, Caterham’s chief commercial officer. He told me the company is trying to squeeze out another 100 cars to pare down an “infuriating” 12-month order backlog.

The U.K. takes 40 percent, with the rest headed to Japan, France, and the U.S. as the company’s biggest export markets, plus a host of other countries. Coming: a dedicated U.S. model because of a 2015 federal law allowing builders of low-volume replicas—the Caterham certainly qualifies—to sell 325 units a year exempt from safety regs. “We’re barely scratching the surface in America,” says Ridley.

Nearn’s family sold the business in 2005, leading to a high-flying era in which tiny Caterham fielded an F1 team for three seasons (best finish: 10th) and produced a sports prototype for a one-make racing series. Money vanished faster than it was coming in, and in 2021 the beleaguered company was sold again to its Japanese distributor, VT Holdings, a multibillion-dollar international car dealership group.

Besides financial security, the deal produced the 84-hp Caterham 170, which at VT’s behest substituted the 2.0-liter Ford Duratec unit of the company’s more powerful 360, 420, and 620 models (and their many variants) with a turbocharged Suzuki 660-cc three-banger from Japan’s domestic mini-car market.

Originally intended solely for Japan, the lightest Caterham at 970 pounds is also the cheapest, with a starting price of about $35,000, and it has become wildly popular elsewhere. On a short skim of the pavement around Gatwick, it proved the closest Caterham comes today to replicating the original Seven, with gossamer-light controls hitched to narrow tires and acceleration that is breezy if not exactly face-puddling.

As with the other cottage makers, Caterham will have to be agile to avoid walls that are closing in. The number of gasoline engine and manual transmission combos available from a global industry headed in the exact opposite direction is shrinking yearly. Two-pedal Caterhams might be anathema to a company that trades on a full-immersion interactive experience, but “if I had mentioned an electric Caterham two or three years ago, I would have been strung up as a witch. Now there’s a growing acceptance and interest in it,” Ridley says.

However, until you can drive one to the track, blast around, charge up, and drive home, there won’t be an electric Caterham, he said. “We’re waiting for it to be the right time for us. It’s a tough world and it’s only getting harder, but we’re fighting the good fight, and I see no reason to believe we won’t be here in 10 years.”

***

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Most digital content is about quick consumption, but we believe there’s a place for deeper stories and careful exploration. So pour your beverage of choice and join us for another Great Read. –Ed.

A sullen and largely drunk crowd greeted drivers Jim Richards and Mark Skaife as they mounted the podium at the 1992 Tooheys 1000 in Bathurst, Australia. Hours earlier, Denny Hulme, the 1967 Formula 1 world champion, had suffered a heart attack and the New Zealander died at the wheel of his BMW M3. Then, an epic downpour cut short the 1000-kilometer enduro near the end as cars careened into the walls and each other. Richards’ and Skaife’s leading Nissan Skyline R32 GT-R was one of the crash victims, slotting local favorite Dick Johnson into an apparent win in a Ford.

A Skyline had trounced the locally made Fords and Holdens the year before, so fans were primed to celebrate the return of Aussie pride. Instead, because the Nissan was so far ahead at the red flag, the officials declared it the winner. Boos thundered and beer cans flew. “I thought Australian race fans had a lot more to go than this—this is bloody disgraceful,” Richards snarled from the podium. “You’re a pack of arseholes!”

As with so many automakers going back to Henry Ford and his “999” oval-track racer of 1902, Nissan had set out to build an engineering marvel to win races and to heap glory upon its name. Calling fans “arseholes” probably wasn’t in the brief. But power often provokes more fear and resentment than awe. And, for a brief moment exemplified by the Nissan Skyline R32 GT-R, Japan seemed to have all the guns.

“From the front, it’s all puffed guards, fat paws and squinting eyes,” marveled Australian motoring writer Ewen Page for Wheels magazine in 1991. “It is, as some would say, one tuff muther.” That’s because the GT-R had been created to rule what was then the dominant form of international stock-body racing, the FIA Group A class, and it looked the part. “When it rolled onto the tarmac for the first time at a racing meeting,” reported the magazine Sports Car International at the time, “fear met imagination with a combustive swirl in the mind of a mechanic, who remarked coolly, ‘There it sits—Godzilla.’”

Australians get the credit for the Godzilla nickname, allegedly hated by Nissan’s management. It was apt in so many ways, though. The mythical film creature was supposedly a lizard or dinosaur altered by atomic radiation. The Skyline, too, was a freak of science, an undistinguished Japanese recast of a Chevy Monte Carlo that disappeared into the same lab that built the Bionic Man. Unlike most lizards, which have eyes on the sides of their heads, Godzilla’s peepers face forward, the better with which to see both adversaries and the future. Godzilla, the car, looked over the horizon with its multitude of computer-controlled performance widgets with jazzy acronyms like ATTESA ETS, Super HICAS, and RB26DETT.

(For a crash course in Skyline-speak, click here.)

And, like Godzilla, the GT-R did its stomping and fire-belching mostly at home. It was a product of Japan’s supercharged ’80s tech culture and, ultimately, a prisoner there, never officially exported to any market except for the few that dribbled out to Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, and New Zealand. It won every Group A Japanese Touring Car race, all 29 events, from 1990 to 1993, and won the Bathurst 1000 twice before Australia banned it from its preeminent race. However, in most places outside of Japan, it is an orphan and a curiosity, a stranger wandering in strange lands. Which, of course, makes it incredibly sexy and desirable, especially to the millions in Gen X, Y, and Z who grew up piloting GT-Rs in gaming simulators.

Hagerty added the R32 Nismo Edition pictured here to its collection a few years ago because it is 100 percent a youth car, an object of fixation by multitudes who often couldn’t give a wet slap about a Duesenberg, a Shelby Cobra, or other traditional lust magnets.

“You’ll be at a cars and coffee event, and a dad will pull up in a brand-new Ferrari with his kid, and the kid will jump out and be like, ‘Hey it’s a Skyline,’ and he doesn’t care about the Ferrari.”

So said Sean Morris, who runs Toprank Importers in Cypress, California, a shop that specializes in importing, certifying, and selling older Skyline GT-Rs. A number of his customers recently were older collectors who snapped up a GT-R not because they craved one, but just to have one car in a collection of blue-chip classics that their kids are excited about, Morris said. “For guys used to paying a lot more for stuff, $50K, $60K for a car is nothing.”

To see if a real R32 GT-R really was all that—as well as to belatedly celebrate the car’s 30th anniversary—we shipped the Hagerty collection’s gunmetal gray ’92 R32 Nismo out to California. We trucked it all the way from Michigan so it could roam mountain roads that echo the coiling ribbons in Japan’s Gunma prefecture, where the country’s touge driving and drift scene was born. And we sent it to cruise a few cars and coffees to gauge reactions among a jaded lot that is so not easily impressed, accustomed as they are to being flaunted at by L.A.’s legions of climbers, wannabes, and arriviste.

We started by aiming the Skyline up L.A.’s own skyline drive, called Angeles Crest or, on road maps, California State Highway 2. Since the pandemic, a group of hairpin hounds and responsibility avoiders have been meeting informally on Friday mornings in the parking lot of a roadhouse called Newcomb’s Ranch, about 30 boisterous miles up. Somewhere along the line, this utterly unplanned gathering acquired the name Good Vibes Breakfast Club, no doubt because everyone needed some good vibes in the depths of pandemic isolation. Despite the name, there’s no breakfast—Newcomb’s closed in March 2020 and has been put up for sale. The windows remain dark and the diner’s mediocre chili is now desperately missed by the knee-draggers and gear jockeys who have made the place a destination for years (though on Fridays somebody usually brings enough doughnuts to go around).

The R32 feels custom-tailored and 3D-printed for underground events like Good Vibes. The flog through the canyons asks everything from the car, from its twin-turbo 2.6-liter inline-six to its all-wheel drive to its electronic rear differential to its four-wheel steering. And the Hagerty R32 answered, with a planted, stable security despite rolling on ancient moaning tires in desperate need of replacement. Once you work up the nerve from the right seat and with the shifter in your inexperienced left hand to tackle corners at sweat-breaking speeds, the GT-R knuckles down and gets to work, eating the asphalt under command of direct if insulated steering and progressive, fade-free brakes. This is no Japanese Monte Carlo.

Once we arrived at Newcomb’s, the GT-R handily polished off its second duty of the day: making us look cool. A crowd dressed in fashionable skinny jeans and waxed canvas jackets gravitated toward it like iron filings around a magnet. The exotic Skyline seems small and delicate next to the bulk of Good Vibes’ turnout, which is late-model Porsches and BMWs inflated to modern, five-star-crash-rated pudginess.

“Even in LA’s unique car market, where even the rarest cars become oversaturated quickly, I still do a double-take when I see an R32—I just can’t help it.” So said Leo Mayorquin, an L.A. car-scene regular who routinely posts extensive photo galleries of meets under his social media handle, CNC Pics. “It’s the old story: Race on Sunday, sell on Monday—then sell again 30 years later to young and old because history remembers how dominant you were.”

The name “Project 901,” as it was called within Nissan when it all began late in 1984, supposedly had a very simple meaning. It signified “1990s, project number one.” Or it meant, “1990s, in which Nissan will be number one.” People who claim to be experts disagree. Either way, “it started from humble beginnings,” said Morris, who inherited his interest in Japanese automobile arcana from his father, who ran a thriving business exporting Chevy Astro vans and other American cars to Japan. “Take a regular sedan and go racing with it. To a point, it’s an underdog kind of story, the underdog punching above its weight and doing well. It was a lot of car for the time.”

The task of fulfilling Nissan’s ambition to catch and even overtake Honda and Toyota in technology was handed to Naganori Ito, a protégé of the original Skyline chief engineer, Shinichiro Sakurai, who had become ill and could no longer work on the project. Going back to the 1960s, “The Skyline was Mr. Sakurai’s car and I thought it would end with Mr. Sakurai,” Ito said years later in an interview translated from Japanese. “That is what I thought, so I never wanted to take over. Once Mr. Sakurai fell ill, however, someone had to.”

As an engineer with Prince Motors, which merged with Nissan in 1966, Sakurai had been present at the rebirth of the Japanese auto industry as something other than the builders of postwar utilitarian mules. Prince itself was a descendant of the Nakajima Aircraft Company, which had built fighters and bombers during the war, so from the frumpy Prince Skyline in its early days down to the R32, the DNA is laced with the best of Japanese vanguard engineering.

Eager to grow its domestic industry quickly, Japan blatantly got out the tracing paper. The first Prince Skyline in 1957 looked like a ’56 Plymouth that had shrunk in the wash, down to little chrome tailfins tacked to the rear haunches. As the ’60s dawned, the country looked increasingly to Europe in design with the hiring of Italian stylists such as Giugiaro, Pininfarina, and Bertone, as well as in engineering, with the embrace of smaller, higher-revving engines, overhead cams, and sidedraft carburetors. Sakurai’s time at Prince and then Nissan was heavily influenced by the worldwide craze for motor racing. The freshly completed Suzuka Circuit hosted the first Japanese Grand Prix for sports cars in 1963. Sakurai entered the following year with a Skyline sedan into which he had squeezed a six-cylinder in place of the stock 1500-cc four, and the seed was planted for the Skyline epoch.

As it was merging with Nissan, Prince introduced the Skyline 2000GT which took its cue from the Pontiac GTO by offering the company’s largest engine at the time, a 1990-cc overhead-cam inline-six from the bigger Gloria, in the more compact Skyline body. The third-gen C10 “Hakosuka” and fourth-gen C110 “Kenmeri” Skylines of 1968 and 1972, respectively, especially the 160-hp GT-R versions, are as rare today as they are hugely collectible as the earliest GT-Rs. Some have gaveled at auctions for over $200,000. Yet, even greater things were to come.

“We thought about what was expected of a Skyline,” recalled Ito of his earliest planning sessions on the R32. “Historically, there were many Skylines along the way. We faced different situations. Some wanted the rear seats to be more spacious—the dealer would say that it was not as spacious as the [Toyota] Mark II and they were troubled by it, so we would make the car bigger. Then someone would say that it was bigger and heavier now and did not run as well. Turn it back into a Skyline, they would say.”

When Ito took over, Skyline sales were down and Japan had just yielded to international pressure to revalue its currency, causing prices to soar overseas and sales to drop. Thus, development money was tight and export sales were off the table as the new car was expected to be way too expensive for pay-by-the-pound America. Even so, Ito wanted to hit it out of the park with a Skyline that would stun everyone.

“We wanted to surpass the highest-performing cars of Europe. In order to do so, we were going to make the vehicle smaller and give it the most up-to-date body,” said Ito. Racing would be back on the agenda, which meant more power and a better chassis to deliver it. Which led Ito and his team to consider driving all four wheels.

“A normal four-wheel drive has the problem of understeering, I knew that,” said Ito. “Also, there was no record of a car with a four-wheel drive performing well on the circuit. The Porsche 959 was a four-wheel drive, but it was not doing well. Rally cars need to be four-wheel drive, but for circuit races, there just was no record of a vehicle with a four-wheel drive having done well.”

Another problem: Racing regulations restricted Nissan’s choice of tires. Out of the box, the R32 GT-R came with 225/50R-16 Bridgestone Potenza R71s, or less than 9 inches of tread at each corner of the 3400-pound car—roughly the same size tires as Honda fit to its 2010 Accord sedans. To get around the problem of the car’s small feet, Nissan needed to draft the front axle for duty, but without destroying the car’s handling. The solution was computers.

ATTESA ETS is a ridiculously long but very Japanese acronym that stands for “Advanced Total Traction Engineering System for All Terrain,” referring to its all-wheel-drive system, and “Electronic Torque Split” the name of the car’s rear differential, a sort of robotic Posi-Traction. The short brief is that the GT-R is rear-drive with the ability to vary torque left to right as needed, until the computer senses the need for torque up front. It deduces that from the readings of three electronic accelerometers, which are basically wired-up pendulums that swing back and forth as the car accelerates, brakes, and builds lateral g-forces in corners. A hydraulic pump above the front differential provides pressure to squeeze a wet-clutch pack at the back of the transmission that diverts torque to a prop shaft going forward.

Deciding exactly when you want the front axle to come alive is the black art of all-wheel-drive tuning. Too much and you make understeer, or the tendency of a car to plow straight ahead even though the wheel is turned. Not a racer’s friend. Nissan thus tuned the system to engage the front axle only for straight-line stability and wet-weather traction.

To further reduce understeer, the R32 runs a hydraulically operated rear-steering system called Super HICAS, or High Capacity Actively Controlled Steering, which at speed toes the rear tires a few degrees in phase with the fronts for sharper steering response. At slow speeds, it turns the rears in the opposite direction of the fronts for a tighter turn radius, a welcome feature in Japan’s densely packed cities. However, many R32 GT-R owners strip off the HICAS system, says Morris, because its extra hydraulic fittings and ball joints don’t age well, and they don’t like the somewhat rubbery feeling of the rear end doing its own thing in corners. We did not find that to be the case (though we wouldn’t swear on a stack of Bibles that the system was actually working on our GT-R).

A small gauge on the GT-R’s dash tells you how much torque the front axle is receiving. Most of the time it remained at a disappointing zero, even when we were doing our best impersonation of the late Ken Block—which, granted, isn’t very good. Morris explained that Nissan understood that you actually want less torque up front when trying to turn, because torque just causes the wheels to go straight. If we could get the GT-R on a wet or snowy surface—no easy feat in sun-drenched L.A.—or look down during hard accelerations, we would see the needle twitching, though the R32’s now-ancient system operates with a certain on-off quality.

Ito explained that ATTESA was only in the R&D phase at Nissan when he decided to grab it for the production R32. The developers worried that the untested system wouldn’t hold up to customer pummeling, so they resisted using it. “If things did not work out, all the departments were afraid that they would be blamed and they tried to avoid going forward. But I said, ‘Let’s give it a try,’ and I would take responsibility if things did not go well,” he recalled. “Whenever you try something new, you need resolve.” The compromise was to tune the system so that it only sent modest torque forward and operated only when necessary, to prolong its durability. As Nissan became more comfortable with ATTESA, successive R33, R34, and the U.S.-bound R35 generations of the GT-R became more sophisticated.

In contrast, the iron-block RB26DETT inline-six engine (the D stands for dual overhead camshafts, the E for electronic fuel injection, and the TT for twin turbo) is way overbuilt, with hefty crank journals and piston oil squirters for cooling. And way oversquare in true racing fashion, its 86-millimeter bore dwarfing its 73.7-millimeter stroke, meaning the torque is kind of thin until about 3000 rpm. Once the lightweight ceramic turbine wheels spin up—each compressor feeds three cylinders a max of 8 to 9 psi through a lovely array of individual throttle bodies—it’s a gripping ride to the 8000-rpm redline as the ultra-smooth inline-six whooshes out a turbine-like whine. The Japanese have been in love with the inline-six since the 1940s, and we love them for it.

Let’s not overstate it, however. Magazines at the time pinned the 60-mph sprint for a stock R32 at about 5.5 seconds. On the mountain roads, the R32 feels quick, but a new four-cylinder rental Mustang would spank it in the quarter-mile. Hey, things are supposed to be better after 30 years. Back in the day, Japanese automakers held themselves to a voluntary power limit of 280 PS, or 276 horsepower. So that’s what a stock GT-R makes—as far as you know. Most experts agree that R32 GT-Rs rolled out of the plant with around 300 horses, and tuners have since doubled that figure without major surgery to the engine. But monster R32 builds aside, the GT-R isn’t about drag-strip times, it’s about balance. It’s a crouched bushido warrior rolling on the balls of his feet, and those guys are plenty dangerous if not particularly beefy.

Nissan provided plenty of fodder for future Skyline nerds to chew over, spinning out low-volume variants of the R32 with subtle differences such as the Nismo (no ABS), N1 and N1 V-spec (different turbos, wheels, brakes, and body kit), of which there were versions 1 and 2 (wider tires). For the roughly $100,000 you would pay for the car pictured on these pages, which is a 1992 Nissan Skyline GT-R R32 Nismo purchased in Florida a few years ago, you can buy all manner of machines built in the intervening three decades that will kick its ass six ways from Sunday. They will have modern safety gear and be serviceable with parts available at your local dealership, and they will be easy to register and smog (Toprank charges $10,000 to California-certify a GT-R).

But they will not be Godzilla, King of the Monsters.

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

***

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Welcome to Small But Mighty, a short series about boutique British car companies. You may not know much about Ariel, Briggs, Caterham, or Morgan, but you probably see at least one car the way they do: as a crafted thing, meant for enjoying and possessed of its own personality. To read more about the landscape of this cottage-car industry, click here.

Though motor racing is a global business, Britain is justifiably proud of its place at the center of it. An oft-repeated adage is that from a single hill in Oxfordshire you can see the headquarters of six of the 10 teams competing in Formula 1.

Several hours to the north, in an otherwise nondescript industrial estate on the banks of the River Mersey and next to Liverpool John Lennon Airport, is one firm trying to condense England’s proud F1 legacy into a car on which you can hang a license plate.

With a single open seat mounted at the center of what looks like a slithering cybernetic cobra, the BAC Mono is perhaps the ultimate hedonistic toy.

It’s effectively your own private formula car, complete with tomorrow-tech carbon graphene and exotic niobium-alloy components, inboard dampers peeking through slits in the bodywork, a 332-hp Ford-based turbo four-cylinder attached to a paddle-shifted Hewland sequential six-speed from F3 racing that is also a stressed member of the chassis, and no hint of bumpers. And no doubts about the car’s purpose as the ultimate F1 simulator for armchair Verstappens—plus any others with around $200,000 to spend on the conviction that Porsches and Ferraris are bloated and floaty.

Briggs Automotive Company, or BAC, is the brainchild of brothers Ian and Neill Briggs, a car designer and a car engineer who grew up locally, going to the nearby Oulton Park circuit and the local forest rallies. In 1995, the pair set up a vehicle design consultancy in Germany that did quite well, helping Ford launch its RS performance brand among other projects.

Success led a few years later to “I guess you could say a midlife crisis of sorts,” says Neill Briggs. “Right from the word ‘go,’ it was a vehicle with a singularity of purpose, which was driving pleasure and performance.”

The steel tube-frame Mono started as the product of a 2008 design competition for a unique luxury sports car within the brothers’ consultancy, and by 2009, BAC was incorporated as a separate company with its own staff.

“Now it consumes 120 percent of our time,” says Neill, and the consultancy has fallen away. Money was exchanged for the first production Mono in 2011, and since then, the 50-person company has delivered around 150 units, 30 of them to the U.S., all titled for road use.

Behind the glass-walled showroom and delivery center, the Mono and even lighter and racier Mono R take shape in a 7000-square-foot production facility in which the cars circle around the workshop from station to station, exiting at the rate of 2.5 per month. The company claims 95 percent of the parts come from the U.K., about 50 percent from the region surrounding Liverpool. Personalization was always central to the Mono’s pitch, and BAC has worked up an online design program that helps customers envision their own color and trim schemes using various storyboards that are retro, racing-themed, or futuristic.

Just as in racing, constant iteration defines the Mono, the brothers keen to work in new ideas and technologies as they come along. The car’s forward composite crash structure has been redesigned nine times (it includes a small trunk), and 3D printing has recently been incorporated for items like the headlight buckets, freeing BAC to shape the headlights to their own design rather than work around an off-the-shelf part or spend millions to tool a bespoke injection-molded bucket. A two-seater is on the drawing board, and the company has conceived a hydrogen fuel-cell design study called the e-Mono as a glimpse of a potential future.

A few customers are asking about an electric version, says Neill, but “what the power unit is for that vehicle is quite a complicated question.” Loading such a small, light car with the batteries necessary for a decent range and performance will ruin its character, he says. “When you start to add 150 kilos [330 pounds] to a car that weighs 500 kilos [1100 pounds] that has quite a big knock-on effect.”

Says Neill: “The niche vehicle sector relies on an existing supply chain, which doesn’t exist yet in the EV space.”

***

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The post Want an F1 car? BAC builds the next best thing—road-legal, too appeared first on Hagerty Media.

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

Back in February, I mentioned my 1973 Land Rover that got snared in a two-week Customs hold at the dock. The Landy is the seventh car I’ve imported from foreign lands, and each experience has been completely different, with wholly different costs, challenges, and exasperations.

Which means that you can’t rely precisely on anyone’s advice unless they’ve done it many times. And those people know to just shrug and start every sentence with, “Well, in my experience …”

The 40,000-foot view is that in our grand system of government, federal agencies including the Department of Transportation and the Environmental Protection Agency decide what vehicles are legal to import and be sold within our borders—anything 25 years old or older gets a pass.

The 50 states, however, decide what gets a title and a license plate. Some states are easy; they’ll issue a title for a toilet seat. Others, like California, seem to despise older cars and throw down numerous bureaucratic spike strips to stop them from entering. Read all the squint print about your state before buying overseas.

If you’re loaded, you can fly a car over. For the rest of us, there are two types of surface shipping: container and roll-on/roll-off, or RO-RO. With container shipping, the car is secured—hopefully—into a rented 20- or 40-foot box that is stacked with thousands of other boxes on a container vessel. This is the more expensive way, and a route many people choose believing that being inside a container means less probability of damage.

It might be true, but containers do get dropped, they get slammed sideways into other containers, they even sometimes fall off ships at sea. I once brought in a ’72 Chrysler VH Valiant Charger from Australia that was packed above two other cars on an improvised latticework of pine two-by-fours that looked like the back of the bleachers at Indy (quality control among shippers varies greatly). The two cars below broke loose and spent 7000 miles pounding each other to a metal pulp while my car somehow, blessedly, came through without a scratch.

Once they reach port, containers must be hauled off the dock by a drayage company and taken to an off-site warehouse to be unpacked, which adds significantly to the cost. When I container-shipped my 1942 Dodge WC-54 army ambulance home from Europe in 2015, the first 8000 miles cost roughly $2000 and the last 10 miles cost $1000.

Considerably cheaper and easier is RO-RO, though you can’t have any loose items in the car. Just as with any new Porsche or Volvo, the car is driven by a stevedore, or dockworker, onto what is essentially a sea-going parking structure that trundles across the ocean at about 13 knots.

The Land Rover sailed from Southampton, England, with a bunch of new Rovers and Mini Coopers on the Maltese-flagged MV Titus, launched in 2018 as one of shipper Wallenius Wilhelmsen’s newer Panamax series of upsized vehicle carriers. Designed to take advantage of the 2016 widening of the Panama Canal, the 656-foot-long, 73,000-ton Titus can hold up to 8000 vehicles.

Whatever way you ship, prepare for the army of gerbils that will all take a nibble on your wallet, including a 2.5 percent federal import duty. You can save money by filing all the forms yourself, including the all-important Importer Security Filing, or ISF, which alerts Customs to your impending shipment. I have done it twice, and I have also paid customs brokers to do it. A rule of thumb: If you do your own taxes, you can file your own forms.

The Rover was the third car I’ve shipped RO-RO and, as with the others, it arrived without a scratch. Then U.S. Customs got ahold of it. For some reason, they used a power grinder with extreme prejudice to cut out all the fasteners holding down the passenger floor, thus revealing … the ground. No explanation, no apology, just a handful of mangled fasteners on the dash. If you don’t like the way Customs treats your vehicle, you can write to the complaint department, c/o The Circular File, Washington, D.C.

Even so, importing vehicles has filled my driveway with some very interesting cars while being a mostly painless (if hardly profitable) exercise. Well, at least, in my experience …

***

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Welcome to Small But Mighty, a short series about boutique British car companies. You may not know much about Ariel, Briggs, Caterham, or Morgan, but you probably can appreciate at least one car the way they do: as a crafted thing, meant for enjoying and possessed of its own personality. To read more about the landscape of this cottage industry, click here.

Drive too quickly out of the village of Crewkerne in England’s pastoral southwest county of Somerset and you’ll bolt right past Ariel’s headquarters. There’s no sign out front, Ariel apparently trying hard to look no more interesting than a couple of red-brick tractor barns. But pull through the fence and into the courtyard and you’ll likely see the nose of one of the company’s skeletal road rockets poking out of a garage bay.

We were greeted by Henry Siebert-Saunders, managing director and son of company founder Simon Saunders. Parked in the courtyard was a freshly completed Atom, the company’s signature two-seat mid-engine speed toy that starts in the U.S. at around $80,000, plus a mud-caked Nomad, the Atom’s $92,000 off-road cousin. Just visible through a doorway was an Ariel Ace motorcycle, an organic sculpture of cast and machined billet aluminum packing a 1237-cc Honda V-4 and emitting 1000 rads of radioactive attitude.

Ariel is a family affair, the two Saunders presiding over a workforce of 30 that aims to build 100 cars and perhaps 30 motorcycles each year.

“A lot of people are obsessed with growth,” Henry tells me. “We have not grown in 10 years. If you can keep a steady business, growing just enough to support price increases and whatnot, we can make this a business for life.”

Ariel is one of those ancient British nameplates that died only temporarily. It dates to 1871, when bicycle makers James Starley and William Hillman named their first product after the character of Ariel, the spirit of the air, from the Shakespearean fantasy frolic, The Tempest.

Ariel the subsequent car and cycle maker was best known for its Square Four motorcycles, built from 1931 to 1959. They were exquisite odes to British complexity, featuring parallel pairs of cylinders under chain-driven overhead cams, and twin counter-rotating crankshafts linked by intermeshing gears to merge their torque. Ariel was absorbed by BSA in 1951 and production of anything bearing the name petered out in the early 1970s during the great British bike collapse.

It was resurrected when car designer Simon Saunders, who previously sketched for Porsche, Aston Martin, and General Motors, decided to try his hand at producing a modern take on the 1957 Lotus Seven, the grandpap of postwar British roller skates. His 1996 concept, unambiguously called the LSC for Lightweight Sports Car, debuted the naked aluminum trusswork that was to characterize all future Ariels, which look like Formula Junior entries for some futuristic Grand Prix du Pluto.

“We wanted to create a reliable, dependable thing that you can treat like a normal car,” says Henry about the Atom, which since the beginning has put ultra-reliable Honda Civic power behind a frill-free cockpit open to the wind and rain. “We tell people that if you take the body panels off a Ford Mondeo, it would be an Atom.”

Well, not exactly. The 1400-pound car is basically what you’d create by slinging a jacuzzi between two Ninja sport bikes. It’s fairly easy to drive, and the components are all modern and reliable automotive spec, but without ABS and stability control (the newest version has traction control), you are master of your own fate. “Our current record is 11 miles, showroom to crash,” Saunders says.

Production units began dribbling out in 1999, but it was a 2004 star turn on the U.K.’s preeminent car show, Top Gear, that lit Ariel’s fuse. In the nine-minute segment (now viewed 12 million times on YouTube), host Jeremy Clarkson circled a track with his face hilariously puddled by wind and g-forces as he screamed with joy.

“Everything changed,” says Henry. “Our order book went from a six-month wait to 28 months overnight. Our phones did not stop ringing for 18 months.”

Ariels are hand-assembled by individuals working in bays in the workshop, one at a time over 140 to 160 hours from outsourced components—75 percent of the parts, from the steel frame to the Aim electronic instrument cluster, are British-made (though the 1.5-liter Honda turbo comes from Ohio). Each car is signed by its assembler.

Despite a line of mostly British customers and a favorable legal environment that shields cottage builders from safety regs that affect larger manufacturers, staying alive is an everyday challenge. At the time of our visit, the company’s electricity rates had just jumped 300 percent because of energy shortages caused by the Ukraine war. Henry figures Brexit has added £1500 (about $1800) to the car’s price and made it more difficult for certain EU customers to register their cars.

And the U.K. is threatening to ban sales of internal-combustion engines by 2030.

“If they pass [an EV mandate that doesn’t exempt small producers], we go out and pull the door down, we’re done,” says Simon Saunders. “It’s on our minds. We know we have to electrify, but we don’t have the resources to develop an electric car on our own. We have to wait for the industry to do it.”

***

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Welcome to Small But Mighty, a short series about boutique British car companies. You may not know much about Ariel, Briggs, Caterham, or Morgan, but you probably can appreciate at least one car the way they do: as a crafted thing, meant for enjoying and possessed of its own personality.

In this intro, author Aaron Robinson details the landscape of this cottage industry. You can read part one, on Ariel Motor Company, here. 

A sad fact of modern life is that the most British thing you can do as a British citizen these days is buy a British car.

The country is overrun—indeed, was overrun decades ago—by imports that have steadily winnowed down the number of domestic choices for Mr. and Mrs. Hail, Britannia. Gone are the proud Wolseleys, Hillmans, Humbers, and Sunbeams that once ranged in huge numbers over this green and pleasant land.

Most of the remaining choices, such as from Bentley, Mini, Rolls-Royce, or Land Rover, are not actually built by British companies but instead by local subsidiaries of foreign firms. Even Ford, which has assembled vehicles in the U.K. since 1911 and is considered by most Brits to be a local company, has made only engines and transmissions there since 2013.

However, as the giant conglomerates of the global auto industry merge and shovel out highly homogenized transport units suitable for all tastes and markets, scurrying at their feet in Britain are a few tiny hustlers. They have managed to carry on a century-old tradition of British cottage car making while somehow dodging a reaper that comes in many forms, including encroaching safety and electrification regulations, the vagaries of the global economy, the ever-escalating costs of development, and Brexit, the trade wall that Britain voted to erect around itself in 2016.

To see how things are going, we set off on a tour of England’s cottage car industry, picking four firms that represent the historic cornerstone themes of British car expertise: elemental lightness, cutting-edge racing tech, and retrospective heritage.

Their cars may lack roofs or, indeed, windshields (both useful in the realm of the perennially pissing rain), but we found Ariel Motor Company, Briggs Automotive Company (BAC), Caterham Cars, and the Morgan Motor Company all to be going concerns with full order books and bustling workshops. Each has its own distinct personality and unique selling proposition, as well as its own master plan for surviving into the future. And they are brothers in arms in a trade group called the Niche Vehicle Network that represents the concerns of the U.K.’s cottage car industry to the government.

Well-known Union Jack brands such as Aston Martin, Lotus, and McLaren didn’t make our itinerary, as they each assemble well over 1000 vehicles a year. And Gordon Murray Automotive—which is set to produce a series of new and somewhat atavistic million-dollar supercars that evoke Murray’s magnum opus, the 1992 McLaren F1, with naturally aspirated V-12s and manual transmissions—didn’t return our calls.

The onslaught of regulations and economic upheaval greatly thinned Britain’s car-making roster in the 1970s and ’80s, leaving the business of building oddly esoteric right-hookers to but a few hardy remnants (plus a couple of newcomers). However, nothing ever really dies in Britain, a country obsessed as no other with its own history.

As we write this, efforts are being made to revive Bristol, TVR, Jensen, and probably half a dozen other dormant brands. AC Cars, which was formed in 1901, keeps churning out Cobra replicas and variants as Britain’s oldest active car company. Lister still produces copies of its 1950s and ’60s racing cars as well as hopped-up versions of late-model Jaguars.

Thanks to dedicated artisans and favorable local laws that exclude small-volume producers from some of the most onerous regulations, you can still motor in weirdly British style if you want to. And that is indeed a great thing.

***

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We’re told that the compass—little c—has been around for about 2000 years as a handy device for finding your way. The Jeep Compass isn’t nearly that old, being born in 2006 as the slightly odd twin brother to the far more handsome and jeep-y Jeep Patriot. It exists only because DaimlerChrysler (remember them?) couldn’t decide which direction to take—the more rugged Patriot or the more urbane Compass—to fill a hole in the subcompact crossover segment. So they built both. Their internal compass, it seemed, wasn’t working too well.

Perhaps shockingly, the Compass pointed to the right direction after all. The Patriot is gone, killed off in 2017, and the Compass endures as a critical player in a very hot global segment, carrying the Jeep brand to far-flung markets in Europe and Asia. The exterior design took a giant leap in 2016 with a far sleeker look, and it took yet another step with a 2020 facelift that also spruced up the interior. Now, for 2023, Compass gets a new powertrain, some handling refinements, and even more interior upgrades.

Broomed out is the old 2.4-liter “Tigershark” four-cylinder that goes all the way back to 2013 (and which proved to be more of a kittyfish), in comes a 2.0-liter direct-injected turbocharged four that punches horsepower from 177 up to 200, and torque from 172 pound-feet to 221 pound-feet, with most of it available from 1750 rpm. In a rare case of a transmission actually dropping in ratios, a new eight-speed automatic replaces the nine-speed ZF 9HP that, shall we say, had a rough start in life and never really outgrew its troubled quality rep.

Even so, the EPA rating also goes up by 2 mpg, from 22 city/30 highway to 24 and 32, respectively. In the grand scheme, those aren’t particularly stellar numbers, about average for this circa-$30,000 B-segment class of crossovers which, despite their reduced size, can drink through the juice like the bigger boys (if you want fuel thrift, consider the hybrid Hyundai Tucson at 37 mpg combined). We’re guessing that moving to a smaller turbo engine allows Jeep to game the EPA test a bit more than with the old 2.4, meaning it can run the EPA test off-boost to produce better numbers, but drivers won’t see much change in real-world driving while hauling kids and stuff up hills.

One big initiative in the new Compass was to improve steering response through some spring and shock tuning changes, including a stiffer anti-roll bar in back. Over a brief drive through the Malibu, California hills we can say that the steering indeed feels alert and tracks a corner with reasonable precision. However, the most noticeable change was in interior noise and vibration. The car is pretty quiet inside, thanks in part to new hydraulic engine mounts, and the turbo engine/transmission combo works with seamless efficiency, always seeming to be in the right gear and at the right rpm for the moment.

You can shift manually by sliding the selector over, but you can’t call up a sport mode as there isn’t one. The fact that we didn’t feel the need for one while driving twisty roads is a hearty compliment to the engineers who tuned the software. It helps that the turbo engine behaves almost like a diesel; there is a low, 6200-rpm redline and ample low-end grunt. The outgoing car’s frantic shifting isn’t necessary when the engine has a broad, muscular torque curve.

Specs: 2023 Jeep Compass

• Base price: $31,590 (Sport 4×4) – $39,935 (High Altitude 4×4)
• Powertrain: 2.0-liter turbo I-4; eight-speed automatic
• Output: 200 hp @ 5000 rpm, 221 lb-ft @ 1750–4250 rpm
• Layout: Four-wheel-drive, five-seat compact crossover
• Weight: 3620 lbs
• EPA-rated fuel economy: 24/32/27 (city/hwy/combined)
• Cargo capacity: 27.2 cu ft / 59.8 cu ft (rear seats up / down)
• Towing capacity: Up to 2000 lbs
• Competitors: Ford Escape, Toyota RAV4, Mazda CX-5, Subaru Crosstrek, Honda CR-V

The engineers also did some work on the off-road modes for the get-dirty Trailhawk version, which includes more ground clearance, skidplates, and bigger tires. Creeping over rocks and through ditches cut by heavy rains, the Trailhawk proved highly maneuverable and easy to ooze over obstacles. Which, despite its ultimately superior capability, can’t be said about the Wrangler, Jeep’s standard-bearing off-roader. (In this author’s opinion, the Wangler has for years suffered a throttle that is far too jumpy at initial tip-in for careful rock-crawling.)

Interior upgrades include wireless Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, which synced up quickly with our phones, plus some safety tech spread across all trims including drowsy-driver detection. While the Compass starts right at $30,000, it’s easy to go over $40,000 with some rich option packages. The Altitude 4×4 we drove stickered at $42,550 with three packages that were close to $2000 each. The Altitude package at $1795 (gloss-black exterior treatments including 18-inch wheels) struck us as the most dispensable and likely the most shameless profit generator for Jeep. If you want a power tailgate, perhaps the one feature every SUV should have, it’s buried in a $1995 convenience group that includes heated power seats and auto climate control.

Thus, while the Compass is now a nifty and very well sorted and refined little crossover, be prepared to spend if you want the best versions.

2023 Jeep Compass

Highs: A handsome face, excellent noise and vibration refinement, new engine has some beans.

Lows: Gets pricey with the good options, fuel economy is still average among the competitive set.

Takeaway: The Compass demonstrates perfectly how the cute-ute segment has drastically upped its game.

***

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In late October, an old Land Rover Series III station wagon that I bought in the U.K. sailed into a California port on a vehicle carrier after three weeks at sea. It was parked in the sun and salt air of the dock to wait out what I believed would be, based on five previous imports, a couple of days of Customs clearance. A week went by. Then another, with barely any information despite repeated inquiries. My temperature began rising. I went around telling people that Customs adopted a new motto: E Screwitus Younum.

So perhaps I wasn’t in the best mood when pics of the new Lotus Eletre SUV dropped in my inbox. I like Lotus and I’m not opposed to luxury SUVs, but the styling did strike me as just another angry face in the crowd. The Eletre has pinched headlights and a scowling grille, and one imagines that Lotus’s designers were evoking a fearsome cobra. Or a warrior chief in the throes of doing his taxes. Or 5-year-old me tasting gefilte fish for the first time.

Thanks to relentless copying and the auto industry’s deep fascination with fads, cars today are almost universally unhappy. They fret, they glare, they scowl, they stew with festering grudges. They are at risk of developing deep and permanent worry lines. For decades, the Toyota Crown has been the upright and understated flagship of Japan’s taxi fleet as well as legions of sensible salarymen. Toyota just released pictures of the new Crown: slit headlights, a jutting chin accentuating an acute underbite, and a wall-to-wall grimace for a grille. Toyota has become enamored with inking its creations with random blackout panels, and the Crown is so thusly tatted that it looks like a gangbanger out on an assuredly brief parole. The new Crown is not here to provide safe, reliable transport—it’s here to swipe your watch and wallet.

Cars seem to reflect our mood. Columnist David Brooks wrote in The New York Times recently that “the negativity in the culture reflects the negativity in real life,” noting that researchers who analyzed 150,000 pop songs released over 50 years determined that the word “love” appeared half as often in later years, while the word “hate” had an uptick. From the endless downbeat headlines to the repeated surveys that say more and more people rate their lives as terrible, the world is in a funk, and it apparently wants its cars to be sad and angry, too.

This wasn’t a problem when most of our classics were built. They were given regal, technical, and forward-to-the-future faces. It helped that industry standard from the 1930s to the 1980s was a 7-inch round headlight (followed by a 5.5-incher), because round lenses backed by semi-hemispherical reflectors did a good job of concentrating light, especially from 6-volt bulbs. Darkness, both literal and figurative, was thus banished to the shadows. The ultimate happy car, the bug-eyed Austin-Healey Sprite, was born into a Britain mired in empire collapse, currency drift, nuclear threat, and increasing social disorder. Yet it keeps smiling (and making smiles) to this day, reminding us all to stop clenching and maybe lighten the hell up.

I waited out Customs with scant information, which sent me to black, enraging places where uncaring bureaucrats lounge through long coffee breaks and slow-walk approvals out of unwarranted spite. Finally, I talked to someone in the know and learned that old Land Rovers get extra scrutiny because theft and import fraud has become so rampant among them. The thin blue line was merely doing its job, and two weeks was actually pretty good—some Rovers have taken six months to clear.

And there it was on the dock, filthy, spotted with seagull crap, but still bright-eyed and chipper. Old Land Rovers have a simple face—just a cube, really, yet a welcoming and competent one. It’s a face that says, “Keep calm and carry on.” And, “If you’re going through hell, keep going.” Apparently, from all the thefts, it’s a face loved the world over, perhaps proving that we’re ready for some happier cars to take us to happier days.

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A McLaren with a charging cord was coming sooner or later. The question isn’t whether McLaren will join the parade to electrify—the company has already shown that it can and it will—but whether the shire-folk in Woking will get it right.

The regulators have already come for V-12s, and many V-8s have targets on their backs. Will the transition to hybrid systems with smaller engines dim what should be the enthralling, unforgettable experience of driving a six-figure mid-engine doorstop? We tromped off to Las Vegas Motor Speedway to plug a finger into the socket of the new McLaren Artura in search of an answer. Would the hybrid V-6 supercar have enough sizzle to toast our crumpets?

About the model name: The British maker of carbon-fiber dream wedges acknowledges that buyers were confused by its many model designations, which were determined by output measured in metric horsepower (PS). One car—the 570, for example—was also sold as the 600 and the 620, depending on the on-tap power. Though they seemed to be separate models, they were largely the same. More important, perhaps, is that the industry’s move toward electrification is is already bringing 1000-plus-horsepower cars, and McLaren feels that horsepower has faded in significance against other metrics like battery kilowatt-hours and driving range. Then again, “McLaren 7.4-kWh” isn’t a moniker that rolls easily off the tongue.

Hence, Artura—an entirely made-up name that combines “art” and “future.” It’s perhaps appropriate for a car that seems like McLaren’s most ambitious street-legal undertaking since it started making road cars again in 2011, beginning with the MP4-12C. Unlike the company’s prior two hybrids, the P1 and the Speedtail, both highly exclusive million-dollar hypercars, the Artura will be an entry-level offering priced at $237,500 to start.

And as we all know, it is way harder to build cheaper cars well than it is to build million-dollar cars well.

Specs: 2023 McLaren Artura

• Price: $237,500 (base MSRP with destination)
• Powertrain: 3.0-liter twin-turbo V-6, eight-speed dual-clutch automatic transmission; 7.4-kWh lithium-ion battery, axial-flux electric motor
• Horsepower: 671 hp from total system (V-6: 577 hp @ 7500 rpm); (e-motor: 94 hp)
• Torque:  531 lb-ft from total system (V-6: 431 lb-ft @ 2250–7000 rpm); (e-motor: 166 lb-ft)
• Layout: Rear-wheel-drive, mid-engine two-seat hybrid coupe
• Curb weight: 3303 pounds
• EPA-rated fuel economy: TBA
• Electric Range: 11 miles
• 0–60 mph: 3.0 seconds
• 1/4-mile: 10.7 seconds

There’s not much overt bravery in the Artura’s styling, but the car is instantly recognizable as a McLaren. The overall profile is familiar, and the face is defined by two sharp chevrons that echo the McLaren logo. The real developments are underneath. Behind a completely redesigned carbon tub, a novel and nearly flat 120-degree twin-turbo and direct-injected V-6 flushes out 577 horsepower at 7500 rpm, augmented by a bagel-shaped, 94-hp electric motor coaxial to the crankshaft. These units feed their combined peak of 671 horsepower and 571 pound-feet of torque to a new, clean-sheet eight-speed paddle-shift transaxle that saves weight and bulk by having no reverse gear (and, more significantly, no reverse layshaft) as the electric motor can conveniently spin backwards to send the car in reverse. The transmission employs twin clutches, plus a third to disengage the engine from the transmission so the car can run solely on electric power. The Artura is rear-drive only.

At a glance, the specs of the Artura and Ferrari 296 hybrid seem eerily similar, as if spies were afoot in the competing camps. Both run mid-mounted 120-degree turbo 3.0-liter V-6s through “flywheel” electric motors into eight-speed paddle boxes with small, 7-ish-kWh battery packs good for 10–20 miles of pure EV driving. The 819-hp (gas-electric combined) Ferrari offers more protein than the 671-hp (combined) McLaren, for which you pay significantly more ducats. In fact, the Ferrari’s base price is about $100,000 more. But you get more, literally. The mostly aluminum Ferrari is 300 pounds heavier than the carbon-fiber Artura with its claimed 3300-pound curb weight.

You get the idea; in this age of electrification, great minds are thinking alike in the exotic-car game. The smaller turbo engines and limited electric-only driving range are mainly for European cities that mandate zero-emissions downtown zones, as well as American gated communities that don’t condone brash supercar exhaust noise. Eventually these hybrids will give way to full electrics, but in the meantime, they’re a pretty thrilling bridge between the eras.

Crack the McLaren’s butterfly “billionaire” doors to see McLaren’s fresh take on its all-digital and modernistic cockpit motif. The buttons have been simplified, the old controls for drive mode and stability control simplified into sleek twist paddles that bracket the driver’s cluster. They can be reached with fingers from a hand still gripping the wheel—a welcome improvement over McLaren’s “Active,” push-a-button-to-push-a-button setup in the older cars.

As in most new vehicles, a central touch-screen tablet dominates the cockpit design. McLaren did not take the difficult route of integrating this eight-inch high-def screen neatly into the dash, though some carmakers do try. Instead, it’s mounted freestanding on a plinth as though it’s something out of the Sharper Image catalog. Car tablets are ubiquitous now, as universal as TV screens in airliners, so this is not really a complaint.

The screen is easy to use, too. McLaren’s redesigned menus provide easy access to (at last!) the Apple CarPlay and Android Auto gateways as well as the car’s other functions. They include the Artura’s all-electric climate control, which is said to provide quicker heating and cooling than a system running off of the gas engine, and its 12-speaker Bowers & Wilkins sound machine, which for the first time includes a subwoofer incorporated directly into the carbon tub.

Also redesigned are the seat controls, which is a positive change from the prior experience of sending blind hand down the front of a McLaren seat in the hope of finding the right control among a byzantine battery of toggles and switches. Further Artura comforts: electric tilt and telescoping steering, and a new optional Clubsport seat that offers the look and feel of a lightweight racing shell but with an adjustable backrest and a clever, elliptical seat-height adjuster that doesn’t change the relationship of the seat to the wheel and pedals even as you move it up or down.

Despite the badge on the nose, the Artura is designed to be all-day comfortable, an exotic commuter for the still-working rich. We spent four hours in it and found it to be exactly that, with a cosseting interior, friendly controls, and good sightlines in almost every direction (a McLaren hallmark). The ride was relatively relaxed with the electronically adjustable shocks in their softest setting, despite 35-series Pirelli PZero Corsa rubberbands on the rims.

The Ferrari 296 notwithstanding, McLaren’s first direct-injection engine is an odd duck. The angle of the cylinder banks is wide enough that it’s an almost-flat six, one that inhales upward from airboxes on the underside and exhales into twin turbos in the vee. The design puts the crankshaft two inches lower than in McLaren’s V-8 cars and the engine’s nearly flat configuration further lowers its center of gravity for better handling. The 90-mm stroke is just long enough to take advantage of the turbo’s boost but short enough to keep the engine compact (Ferrari runs a shorter stroke and a bigger bore to achieve almost exactly the same displacement, 2992 cc vs. 2993, advertising an 8000-rpm power peak to the McLaren’s 7500).

In action, the McLaren’s so-called M630 engine is glassy smooth and the sound a nearly uniform burr of mechanical noise (the car sounds better outside than in, to be sure). It’s more of an anodyne thrust unit than a barking, spitting, waste-gate-whistling fire-breather, though the thrust is surely startling. McLaren puts the 60-mph sprint at three seconds flat and we have no reason to doubt it. Rather than increasing overall output, the electric motor’s main duty is to fill in potholes in the small engine’s power curve with the efficiency of an autobahn paving crew. For example, the motor helps enrich the V-6’s low-end torque before the turbos have spun up, and it compensates for torque gaps during upshifts. The result is one firm, unceasing sensation of acceleration, with Tesla-like weight on your chest. In fact, McLaren was able to upsize the turbos for optimal high-end output because it knew that slower spin-up, a drawback of big turbos, wasn’t as important thanks to the electric shove from the motor at low revs.

The all-wheel-drive Corvette E-Ray, for reference, hits 60 mph in 2.5 seconds with its naturally aspirated V-8 and electric motor, despite weighing about 700 pounds more and costing just over $100,000. That said, the Artura can boast an exotic badge and dramatic doors that communicate a certain level of status.

The Artura starts in its default E-Mode, and it will drive 11 miles on the EPA cycle in pure EV form, the cabin as quiet as Chichester Cathedral on a Tuesday. We were able to stretch it to 19 miles with modest throttle applications. Once you’ve drained the battery, you can tell the Artura to recharge itself while motoring exclusively on gasoline, meaning you’ll have some electrons in the tank if you wish to slink your last miles home silently.

McLaren proudly stands by hydraulic power steering even as the rest of the industry years ago moved to electric steering boost. And, indeed, you can feel some vague tugs and sags of the Artura’s front tires at work, so the filter is definitely less pronounced than in the many steer-by-wire vehicles that have emerged since EPAS (electric power-assisted steering) became common. For some, it might be the chief reason to pick an Artura over a similarly priced (with options) Porsche 911 Turbo.

McLaren’s first cut-price hybrid is also its first car with an electronic differential to control side-to-side torque, which encouraged engineers to design a drift setting for the stability control. In fact, not just one but 15 settings allow increasing degrees of sideways hoonery, selectable through menu layers deep enough that there’s no possible way to activate it by accident. Around Las Vegas Speedway’s road course we toyed with the settings, finding level 12 to be plenty hairy enough to get the car sideways in lurid slides without risking a snap spin. As with many mid-engine cars, the Artura is not an easy drifter, and if you’re at all hesitant on the throttle it snaps back to alignment. The engine’s location behind the seats ensures centralized weight and more stable and predictable handling, all of which works against easy drifting.

McLaren’s new budget car is one of its best efforts yet, and for a time this hybrid will stand as the company’s most sophisticated opus until its technologies filter upwards into the more powerful models. Already there’s talk of an R variant among other spinoffs that, in the service of more testosterone, will grind some of the polish off this generally soft-edged exotic. The standard Artura is already a hoot, suggesting this era of transition at McLaren promises to be anything but boring.

2023 McLaren Artura

Price: $237,500 / $289,900 (base / as-tested)

Highs: Latest tech for the lowest price in the lineup. A true every-day supercar. Cockpit layout benefits from newfound logic.

Lows: Engine is a bit anodyne. Shrinking violets need not apply—design is for dedicated show-offs.

Takeaway: The Artura is McLaren’s convincing evidence that bridging the gap between combustion and electrification need not be a bridge too far.

The post 2023 McLaren Artura Review: Familiar face, fresh guts appeared first on Hagerty Media.

It’s August of 1943 and German troopers are dug into a hillside somewhere in occupied Sicily. American scout cars probing the lines suddenly come under their fire. The Yanks answer with the rat-a-tatting of their own light machine guns. Then, ka-BOOOOM! The air is split open by the concussion of an American 155-mm “Long Tom” artillery piece firing in the distance. Dirt flies, smoke billows, but the enemy resistance only strengthens. The scout cars flank left; behind them, three American Sherman tanks clank forward, flame pluming from their gun barrels while their turret-mounted .50-caliber machine guns go POM!-POM!-POM! as if bullets the size of Coke bottles are flying out. More dirt flies and bodies begin tumbling. The radio crackles: “Chris, are you on comms? I need you at Oy Vey—fast, fast, fast!”

The show goes on, but without the Rabbi.

That day, the Rabbi was off somewhere doing something that his crew would only speak about in cagey terms. “Cybersecurity,” was all they would tell me. The Russians had just invaded Ukraine and started a real war, so the Rabbi was busy and couldn’t be at this make-believe war at a military museum in Florida, even though he was footing a rather sizable bill for it. Ah well, war—both real and staged—is hell.

Drive north out of Orlando into the citrus groves, hothouses, and organic boutique farms of central Florida and, if you’re lucky and turn your head just right to catch it when the doors are up, you may spy a shed full of tanks. This is Rabbi Rob Thomas’s domain, a healthy spread of Florida forest and swampland that is the equivalent of a Kentucky stud farm for retired military vehicles. Some people collect firetrucks; others, steam engines. Rabbi Rob—everybody calls him that, or just “the Rabbi”—collects tanks, trucks, and equipment from World War II. And, as you might expect an ordained rabbi to do, he has given them all Yiddish or Old Testament nicknames: Oy Vey, Schmuel, Golem, Bupkes, Meshuggah, which means “crazy.” The booming 15-ton Long Tom has been dubbed Kelev Gadol, or “Big Dog” in Hebrew. Even the machine guns have Judaic nicknames.

Rabbi Rob shares his tanks with the public through his nonprofit organization, WW2Armor.org, which regularly trucks tons (and tons… and tons) of equipment to weekend historical reenactments where anyone can see and touch a tank and hear it grind around a field in noisy mock battles. “First and foremost,” reads WW2 Armor’s website, “we’re an educational outfit seeking to educate the wider public on U.S. armor tactics, training, vehicles, and personnel of WWII. In short, our goal is to allow a taste of what it meant to be a tank crew member during that time and to show what those soldiers endured and accomplished.”

Most of Detroit’s World War II arsenal went to the scrapper decades ago, making wartime equipment highly collectible and very expensive. A decent Sherman tank nowadays can run $400,000 to $500,000. At Rabbi Rob’s, no fewer than 16 of these iron mastodons now live in pampered comfort, their every (and frequent) need tended to by a permanent paid staff of 11 and a volunteer force of more than 30. The day we visited, the team was preparing its machines for the aforementioned attack on the Sicilian hillside, which was to take place at the Military Museum of North Florida in Green Cove Springs near Jacksonville the following weekend.

And to be clear, we definitely mean Sicily, and not Italy or France or the sands of Iwo Jima. WW2Armor.org prides itself on historical accuracy, meaning the equipment, uniforms, and tactics used in Green Cove Springs would evoke a specific theme. “The theme is Operation Husky,” explained the group’s “Technician Fifth Grade,” Matt Lambert, referring to the Allied code name for the Sicily invasion in the summer of 1943. Lambert, who carries a notional military rank like everyone else in the organization, is the group’s armorer and maintains a heavily secured room full of pistols and machine guns. “We have to have the right equipment,” he says. “No ‘grease guns,’ for example, because they weren’t available in Sicily.” He’s referring to the war-time-era .45-caliber M3 submachine gun that resembled a mechanic’s grease gun.

Pining for an interview with Rabbi Rob—there were so many questions—as well as a ride in a tank, we were first shown around the property. A bunch of sheds house the machines and the workshops that are necessary to keep them running. Former car mechanic Chris Bischoff joined six years ago, answering an ad that advertised for diesel and aircraft specialists and mentioned a Hellcat. “I thought they meant a real Grumman Hellcat—you know, the fighter plane.” Most people probably would have thought a Dodge Hellcat, but Bischoff found out that they meant an M18 Hellcat, a 19-ton tracked and armored tank destroyer built by Buick starting in 1943.

Why did they want an aircraft mechanic? Six of the Rabbi’s tanks are powered by versions of a common Wright nine-cylinder radial aircraft engine. The rest of the American tanks (they have a couple of German ones) run an 1100-cubic-inch Ford GAA, a four-cam, 32-valve V-8 designed specifically for tanks. “Unlike being a car mechanic, I just have to be an expert in two engines,” says Bischoff. “I used to spend seven hours pulling an engine out of a Toyota. Last week, we pulled an engine out of a tank in 50 minutes.” The downside: “There’s not a lot you can lift by hand.”

We were ushered to the small engine room, the only air-conditioned shed on the property, where John “Wolfie” Nicholson, a retired Marine helicopter crewman and civilian aircraft mechanic, works on the fleet’s fuel-burners. “It’s so relaxing. I get left alone, and I get a lot done. Who doesn’t like playing with tanks all day?” The organization’s pre-COVID schedule had at least five tanks going to four to five shows a year, Nicholson told me, and back in the day, the Army rule of thumb was one hour of maintenance for every hour of running time.

Over a show weekend, the tanks may run for four to five hours. A tank’s radial engine holds 14 gallons of oil and burns 7 quarts of it an hour in normal operation. “With all the heat cycling, they loosen up and they leak.” Worn cam lobes are another big problem, as is the usual gamut of electrical fritzes, like bad plugs and dead starters. “Once the V-8s came in, the Army didn’t want anything to do with radials,” he says.

After some safety instruction, I was plopped into a small chair at the front of a Hellcat named Bracha, which means “blessing” in Hebrew. My helmeted head poked out of the hull while the driver sat to my left, on the other side of the enormous transmission turning the front sprockets. Sitting in a tank is like driving a car from under its hood, and you realize quickly that it was not built with any thought to comfort. If your knee, elbow, or head collides with anything, it leaves a nasty bruise. And the clatter from the radial engine is ear-shattering. If Grandpa was deaf, this was the reason; jockeying these things to Berlin must have wrecked the hearing of an entire generation. But did they complain?

The driver pushed both steering bars forward, releasing the brakes, and the engine roared as if a bomber were taking off 3 feet behind our backs. The relatively light tank scampered—for a tank—toward the woods at 10 or 15 mph. There is a set of redundant controls on the right side. Two long bars control steering and, with both pulled back, braking, and a lone floor pedal is the throttle. I was told not to touch them, which was fine, because I was partially blinded by sand flying into my face and up my nose.

A tank underneath you feels like a boat in water. It rolls and pitches with soft motions as the tracks and torsion bar–supported wheels soak up, or simply flatten, even the biggest ruts. Gravel, mud, water, a house; the tank doesn’t really care what it’s churning through, it just pootles wherever you point it by alternately tugging or pulling on the two control handles. Shermans had five-speed manuals, but the later Hellcat had a three-speed automatic shifted via a stick on the huge transmission case. They were designed to be operated by kids accustomed to driving the family farm truck.

As the photographer blasted away, we went romping over yumps and plowing through mudholes. We flung off big clods in tight turns and crisscrossed a sandy flat with deep track ruts. After a while, our tank commander, “Sergeant” Tim “Hellfish” Meyering, called a halt for a water break and we switched positions so I could see what life was like in the turret. Standing next to the huge breech of the 76-millimeter main gun, it’s hard to imagine actually firing it in combat. The explosive concussion, the rocking of the tank, the certainty that somebody will be firing back.

Hellcats were appreciated by their crews because the open turret was less hot, less noisy, and less claustrophobic than the sealed-up Sherman’s. It’s the classic convertible versus coupe argument. The downside was the Hellcat crew’s vulnerability to snipers, air bursts, and any kid carrying a potato masher grenade, not normally concerns in an MGB.

After enough time of burning gas at the rate of 8 gallons per mile, it was time to put Bracha to bed. I was still hoping to catch up with “Colonel” Rabbi Rob, but alas, he was nowhere to be seen. Mike Houk, an Army veteran who now serves as the group’s chief of staff and PR flak, said he would email the Rabbi and request some time, but he warned that the Rabbi was presently somewhat distracted. By this point, Rabbi Rob was starting to take on the aura of a modern-day Howard Hughes, an eccentric recluse who ran his empire and communicated to the outside world exclusively through underlings.

Our meeting wouldn’t come until weeks later, via a Zoom call that I was instructed would be exactly one half-hour, no more. Rabbi Rob joined but with his camera off, the dark rectangle on my screen only confirming his hermit-like persona. Then, after a couple of minutes, he said, “Oh, I should probably turn the camera on!”

And there he was, not a black-hatted, black-suited, bearded rabbi of popular conception, but a slender, balding, middle-aged everyman wearing a yarmulke and a purple T-shirt emblazoned with a flying saucer and the words “Visit Roswell New Mexico.”

“I am a rabbi,” he says in the rapid cadence of a firing grease gun (I later transcribed almost 5000 words spoken over 34 minutes, studded with Old Testament refs and Hebrew catchphrases). “I am ordained. I am not a bema rabbi [meaning one with a permanent congregation], though occasionally I am an associate rabbi at the local Chabad, where we attend, so I help out there. I do life-cycle events, mostly marriages, because it’s a lot of fun, it’s a lot of mazel [good fortune], it’s a great time.”

Rabbi Rob counsels Jewish military vets struggling with their experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well. “I am a veteran, and I’m obviously a Jew, so I can appreciate them at a spiritual level, but I can also appreciate them at a military level. So when they go quiet and stare straight ahead into space, I know what they’re thinking.”

He describes himself as “a late bloomer,” and indeed almost everything that defines him nowadays came largely in recent years. After serving as a Navy medic attached to the Marines during the first Gulf War—a so-called “devil doc”—he invested in tech at a good time when many of the big names today were still in their infancy. And he started a cybersecurity company. “It’s not cagey; it’s just not that interesting. We look at malware and malware infrastructures and provide threat intelligence so that companies can protect themselves.”

Did the Russian invasion explain why he was so busy?

“Yeah,” he says, “though nothing really sexy should be read into that. A lot of it has been spinning down alleged incidents that are alleged to be tied to [Russia]. What you generally find is that it’s a punk kid in Texas who’s having a go. It’s still bad, but it’s not going to be followed by nukes. It’s going to be followed by a picture of buttocks or something.”

Raised in a casually Jewish household in Chicago where there was “a lot of tradition but very little religion,” Thomas was asked about a decade ago to serve as a reference for a friend wanting to become a rabbi. The dean of the rabbinical school called him, “and he asked a lot of very good questions.” After the interview, the dean told Thomas that he thought Thomas should become a rabbi himself. “And I thought, you know, people don’t say things randomly, and by the way, he’s a fellow human, so I should respect his opinion even if I disagree.”

He didn’t disagree for long, and after Rabbi Rob finished his rabbinical studies, the World War II thing started. “I grew up watching the movies and the TV shows. I was marinated in it,” he says. There was also a personal angle; his wife’s father had been a truck driver in the war until he was asked by an American officer to serve as a Yiddish translator at a recently liberated concentration camp. “He had lost a buddy to a sniper, had been under sniper fire himself. It was very common for the truck convoys to be sniped at and attacked, so he had seen a lot and he had seen death, but [after he saw the camp] he said it was the first time he was truly shellshocked.”

Around 2014, Rabbi Rob decided that he wanted an M1A1 Thompson submachine gun. “Like a real one, not a toy. I was going to put it up on a wall, and shoot it sometimes, but I dunno, I just wanted one.” It was a slippery slope; it led to him obtaining a Federal Firearms License and a couple more guns, including a war-time .50-caliber machine gun. “So I bring it home and put it on the garage floor. My wife comes out and says, ‘How do you even carry that?’ I said, ‘Well, it’s got a tripod so it sits on the ground, but nobody does that. You got to have it on a vehicle.’ So now I have to buy a jeep.”

The jeep was an even slipperier slope. It led Rabbi Rob into the reenactment community, in which hobbyists don the uniforms and equipment of war and stage mock battles with the goal of evoking history and thus being closer to it. Soon there were tanks, a 138-acre plot of land to run them on, staff and volunteers to care for them, and a mission to educate the public on the sacrifices of an earlier generation. Rabbi Rob is even on the hunt for German equipment, though it seems incongruous with his Jewish faith. For him, it’s about telling a more complete story. “We’re told that the 614th mitzvah [commandment] after the Shoah [Holocaust] was ‘never again.’ Well, that’s not sufficient. I’m sorry, but it’s not. Never again what? If we don’t teach the history, then ‘never again’ has no meaning.”

Of his reenactment audiences, Rabbi Rob says, “I want them to smell it, I want them to feel it, I want them to hear it. And obviously we do everything at safe distances and stuff, so it’s not like they’re experiencing it the way their grandfathers did, but they are getting a sense of it that you’re just not going to get from a movie or a book or seeing this stuff sit in a museum.”

Rabbi Rob’s one word of advice for anyone who wants to buy a tank: “Don’t.” They have two states, he says, “breaking and broken, that’s just the way it is.” And besides the time and expense of keeping them running, there’s the ever-present danger of serious injury or death.

In addition to adhering to strict operation protocols—such as always having two crew aboard and keeping reenactors at a safe distance during the highly choreographed battles—WW2Armor.org conducts monthly crew drills that include fire evacuation, rollover, and spectator safety. Tanks were designed purely to kill, he says, and his organization’s approach to events is the same as what Rabbi Rob learned in the Marine Corps: “The more you sweat, the less you bleed.”

Back in “Sicily,” around 18,000 rounds of various calibers of ammo were fired over two days (the .50-caliber blanks come from a Hollywood supply house and cost about five bucks each). The Germans were inevitably vanquished. Before this staged battle, Chris Haskell, the organization’s vice president and executive officer as well as its licensed pyrotechnics man, led a group that spent six hours peppering the field with 98 black-powder charges that he controls with a laptop from the sidelines to simulate bullet and shell bursts. Each charge, one or a couple of ounces of black powder, is wrapped in cellophane and placed in small, specially made steel pots that ensure the blast goes safely up and not out. Then it’s packed with dirt that the group has sifted through by hand to ensure that there are no hard objects to make dangerous shrapnel. Haskell told me that the first load of dirt he inspected had nails in it.

With the battle won, the crowd applauding, and the tanks returning to their lines, the mopping up began. Lambert, the armorer, says that once all the equipment comes back to the sheds, it takes a week of cleaning guns and swabbing out tank-cannon barrels of the corrosive black powder used in the blanks. Broken things need fixing, and everything else a good greasing. And the war goes on to remind Americans of the bravery of their forefathers. “Bravery isn’t the absence of fear,” Rabbi Rob insists. “Bravery is having absolute fear and doing it anyway. Those guys knew what they were doing, and they did it anyway.”

He seems to get that this is an odd hobby, especially for a rabbi. But as you might expect from a clergyman, even a part-time one, the rationale for what is clearly a fun (if expensive) pastime has a heavy philosophical slant. Rabbi Rob: “People say to me, ‘Wow, you have a lot of weapons of war.’ I say, ‘No, I don’t think I have any, but I do have some weapons of liberation I’d like to show you. They all have a story to tell, and I wish they could tell it. But they can’t, so we have to tell it for them.”

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Welcome back to the Hagerty Bull Market List, our annual deep dive into the collector cars (and bikes) climbing the value ranks. This vehicle is one of 11 chosen for the 2023 installment of the List. To see the other 10, click here. 

Here’s one to stump all those I-know-every-car car guys. The eensy Suzuki Cappuccino was a low-volume flash in the pan built exclusively for Japan’s domestic minicar segment. Ridiculously cute, it sold in the 1990s against the mid-engine Honda Beat and the gullwing-doored Autozam (Mazda) AZ-1, the latter also conceived by Suzuki with a Suzuki engine. All three cars are now highly collectible and, along with Nissan’s contemporary Figaro and S-Cargo, represent an all-too-brief moment of Japanese insanity.

In the late 1980s, with Japan’s bubble economy on boil, the country’s automakers were feeling frisky. Sporty concepts from Daihatsu to Subaru sprinkled the biennial Tokyo Motor Show, and Suzuki, best known locally for its small city cubes that sell in Japan’s low-tax keijidosha, or minicar, segment, decided to crash the party with a convertible funster that vaguely resembled the then-new Mazda Miata. However, the Cappuccino had certain notable differences.

First, its size, which—at 130 inches long and 55 inches wide—fell just within the keijidosha standards but was more than 2 feet shorter and nearly a foot narrower than the export-oriented Miata. Also, instead of canvas, the Suzuki’s roof is composed of three removable aluminum panels and a targa bar that can fold into the body. Thus, the Cappuccino can be a coupe, a T-top, a targa, or a full roadster. And the design was so crafty that the three roof panels neatly pack into a trunk that makes a clarinet case seem vast.

The engine in this first-gen Cappuccino (code name: EA11) is a dual-overhead-cam, 12-valve, turbocharged and port-injected three-banger based on the all-aluminum F6A that Suzuki was at the time shoving into its smallest cars as well as its Japanese domestic Jimny 4×4 (Samurai in the U.S.). Independent upper and lower control arms suspend the 14-inch wheels with their skinny 165/65-size radials. The curb weight was listed as 1543 pounds.

The Cappuccino won’t light ’em up off the line with its advertised 63 horsepower. But once moving, it slaloms a twisty road like a Miata on Atkins, darting at corners with quick steering and a firm ride. The turbo packs usable torque into the lower ranges of the 8500-rpm tach, centrally located in the cluster as it should be. Boost is indicated by a green turbo light—so ’90s—and means that unlike the turbo-free Honda Beat, which also revs to 8500, you don’t have to scream the Cappo to redline in every gear just to keep up with traffic.

Suzuki may have done its job too well; aluminum was used liberally, and the deluxe interior trim, from its contoured buckets to its tilt/telescoping steering to its ruffled, leather-like door panels, probably meant the car was too expensive to turn a profit. Suzuki produced 26,480 Cappuccinos, fully 75 percent of them in the first 2 years, before faddish Japan lost interest and sales tanked in an economy mired by recession. Few have made it to North America, ensuring that this mini-Miata remains a rare sighting.

***

1991 Suzuki Cappuccino

Highs: Among alt Miatas, way more reliable than anything British; standard A/C; flexible roof arrangement; 42 mpg; deft handling; unlikely to see another one at the cars and coffee.

Lows: Anyone over 6 foot need not apply; body and trim bits getting scarce; many have been modified; not as rigid as a Miata, which is why shock braces and underbody shear plates were popular accessories.

Price range: #1 – $22,000  #2 – $14,000  #3 – $8500  #4 – $4000

HAGERTY AUTO INTELLIGENCE SAYS:

The Cappuccino never got the same attention as its fellow ABC kei cars, the Autozam AZ-1 and Honda Beat. However, demand for this more “practical” kei car is increasing. Imports have outpaced the Beat in recent years and average protected values are increasing at twice the rate of those for the Beat. Millennial and Gen Z enthusiasts submit over 80 percent of insurance quotes, which assures there will be a dedicated following in the future. It’s nearly impossible to find a more interesting car for under $10,000, assuming you can fit in one.

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The post 2023 Bull Market Pick: 1991–98 Suzuki Cappuccino appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Welcome back to the Hagerty Bull Market List, our annual deep dive into the collector cars (and bikes) climbing the value ranks. This vehicle is one of 11 chosen for the 2023 installment of the List. To see the other 10, click here. 

It’s said that Murciélago the feisty bull endured 90 blows from the matador’s sword before he was spared from slaughter and sent to the famous Miura stud farm to beget a line of little bulls with bad attitudes. Speaking of prominent lineage, Murciélago the Italian sex-wedge was a direct descendant of the Lamborghini Diablo, Countach, and Miura, which means there were high expectations when it launched in 2001.

With 571 horsepower from a 6.2-liter V-12, the requisite scissor doors, self-levitating air scoops, and the very baddest of attitudes, the new Lamborghini lived up to its heritage. However, even people who travel in their own private 747s have needs, and the Murciélago (say “mercy-ell-a-go”) answered criticisms of past Lamborghinis by providing certain luxuries like outward visibility and working A/C. It also had superior chassis dynamics with sharper helm response and less of the notorious understeer that dogged the Diablo.

Don’t get us wrong; the Murci was still almost 2 full tons of raging Latin libido—but wrapped in a little more velvet. And now the Murciélago has followed the path of its predecessors by bouncing from a rapidly depreciating used supercar into an appreciating classic. Its course was set when Lamborghini became a colony of the mighty Volkswagen Group in 1998. Fully functioning prototypes of a Diablo evolution called the Canto were fed to the shredder, and work began on a road-to-roof replacement of Lamborghini’s flagship. More interior space, a more logical dashboard, more power, and better handling were all priorities.

As production continued throughout the 2000s, Lamborghini kept tweaking the Murci and introducing variants such as the open-top Roadster and 40th Anniversary Edition. In 2006, it launched the LP640 you see here, with larger side scoops and a goggling monopipe for an exhaust. As it did when pasted on the original Countach, LP means longitudinale posteriore, a reference to the engine’s longitudinal location behind the seats, and 640 a rounding of the upsized 6.5-liter V-12’s rated 632 horsepower.

Strapping yourself into a Lamborghini with an 8500-rpm V-12 is like crawling into Keith Richards’s Fender Telecaster for a set at the Garden. The feral bark at startup is a prelude to the werewolf yowl the engine achieves when it goes on cam around 4000 rpm. Ferrari never made a berserker quite like this, and nobody makes one quite like it now, ever since turbocharging and electrification took over the sex-rocket trade. Especially when you factor in the Murci’s rare six-speed manual transmission, a relic of the pre-paddle past when anyone who wanted to go fast needed to know how to work a clutch. It’s thought that perhaps fewer than 25 manual LP640s came to the States.

The Murci’s shifter glides easily on triple-cone synchros through its stainless-steel gate. The same transmission was used in the Audi R8 and a few others, perhaps the highest evolution of a supercar manual before it all ended in microchips. Microchumps, we say. It’s worth spending the time and (significant) extra cash to get a Murci with the buttery stick shift. It is, as they say, the full Monty—er, Murci, and that’s no bull.

***

2007 Lamborghini Murcielago LP640

Highs: Doors that swing up instead of out; a V-12 that revs to 8500; the (remote) possibility of acquiring a manual; makes your kid an instant celebrity at the school drop-off zone.

Lows: Italian fragility; needs regular conjugal visits with a gas pump; you must enjoy getting your picture taken at all hours and speeds.

Price range: #1 – $382,000  #2 – $323,000  #3 – $262,000  #4 – $191,000

HAGERTY AUTO INTELLIGENCE SAYS:

The rush to find analog supercars with manual transmissions overlooked the Murciélago. Shifting owner demographics suggest this is slowly changing, but a couple of big sales could change the perception of the Murci quickly. Values for the Murciélago are up 48 percent since 2019 but have lagged behind those of cars like the Porsche Carrera GT, which doubled in value over the same period. As next-generation enthusiasts are a growing share of owners (approaching 2/3), values for the Murciélago appear poised for more appreciation.

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The post 2023 Bull Market Pick: 2001–10 Lamborghini Murciélago appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Can you feel a 100-pound weight difference in a two-and-a-half-ton sports car? We couldn’t, and we expect that most people don’t have the necessary butt calibration to feel a weight change of three percent.

In any case, with the new Porsche 911 Carrera T, such mass loss is not important. Given that much of the T’s trimming over a base 911 Carrera results from deleting the latter’s tiny rear seats—a 911 amenity that most will not miss—any change in overall weight balance might be more significant. A rear-engine car such as a Porsche 911 can always stand to lose a few pounds in the rear.

The T designation—for “Touring”—launched in 1968. At the time, Porsche saw the model as the basis for a homologated race car in a stock-body touring series. The name has long been known, however, as the stripped-down, poverty-pack 911, a car for people who want all the 911 feel but no unnecessary coddling. That first T was drop-kicked from the 911 lineup in 1973. Nowadays, when the base Carrera starts at just over $100,000, a poverty-pack 911 doesn’t exist. With its relaunch in 2017, the T became something of a connoisseur’s choice. Priced between the base Carrera and the more powerful Carrera S, the car was and remains the lightest 911 Porsche builds.

We make light of the Carrera T’s hefty lightness—the model also receives thinner glass and reduced cabin insulation—but at a claimed curb weight of 3254 pounds with the standard seven-speed manual (an eight-speed automatic is a no-cost option), the 379-hp, rear-drive Porsche is indeed pretty light for a modern car. The $118,050 base price is more than $5500 below that of a Carrera S, a car with 64 more horsepower.

Is the T worth the spend over the base Carrera? It’s best to think of the former as an optioned-up base car, since nobody really buys a stripped Carrera anyway. Standard T upgrades include Porsche’s electronically adjustable PASM Sport suspension and Sport Chrono package. The Chrono pack includes driver-selectable performance modes, dynamic engine mounts that help dampen the pendulum effect of that rear engine’s mass in corners, and a dash-top chronograph.

With the T you also get access to some options unavailable on base Carreras, including active rear-wheel steering and that rear-seat delete. (The seats can be optioned back in for free.) On top of that are distinct 20-inch wheels and light exterior changes over the base Carrera, including a lightly revised front fascia.

In the age of 450-hp stock Mustangs, the 379-hp and 331 lb-ft produced by the T’s twin-turbo, 3.0-liter flat-six can seem like a yesterday figure. That’s a clue to intent: This model isn’t for those swayed only by power figures. And working a sports car up a winding road with just enough power will always be more fun than holding one back when it has too much.

The T attacks back roads with organic and naturally weighted steering, a surplus of grip, and a lively throttle pedal that seems connected to the engine by tensioned piano wire. At 178.3 inches long, the current 911 is about the same length as a C7-chassis Corvette (2014–19), a car most people would not consider stubby. That said, the Porsche seems to operate with a complete lack of slack or slop, seemingly smaller once in motion, and so you wear it like a second skin.

No doubt the T’s corner appetite is aided by that $2090 rear-steer option. The rear-steer system was featured on our test car, and it massages rear toe settings in concert with steering and chassis conditions in order to sharpen helm response. Some rear-steer setups can make a car’s back end feel disconcertingly loose and rubbery, but Porsche seems to have worked hard to make its mechanism operate transparently.

Does the car just have focused, immediate turn-in, or is it that rear steering? Or is it both? Hard to say. One thing we won’t say is that the T is a go-kart; Porsche has evolved the 911 over the years into a very sporty grand tourer, striking a pleasant balance that stops well short of feeling darty or hyperkinetic.

It’s fun to tell people you have a seven-speed manual. And it’s always more fun to row a stick than to punch a paddle. But you never feel that the seventh gear is necessary here, as the turbocharger provides so much torque in the basement. Peak torque arrives at a diesel-like 1900 rpm and hangs on through 5000. Top gear isn’t particularly tall, so the engine still pulls nicely there. You may commute in a 911 T for years without ever feeling the need to slap the shifter into seventh gear, but that is not a criticism, only an observation.

Thus, the T is for 911 pilots who aren’t obsessed with numbers. Not that the base 911 (if you can even find one in dealers) is a dull pencil. But as always with Porsche, you can get a little more from having a little less.

2023 Porsche 911 Carrera T

Price: $118,050 (base)

Highs: Balance and feedback, and a sense of outsmarting the option book to land a sports car that punches above its weight.

Lows: The “cheap” enthusiast 911 that still ain’t cheap. Knowing that we live in an era where a bare-bones European performance icon weighs 3200 pounds. Everyone will ask why you didn’t spend another five grand for the 64 additional ponies of the Carrera S.

Takeaway: Balance and restraint in an age too often lacking both.

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You’re entitled to wonder about the purpose of the Bentley Bentayga, beyond bringing long-elusive profitability to a storied British luxury brand by hacking into the popular SUV market. After all, if you’re buying an SUV it’s mainly to cart around kids and dogs and Home Depot stuff, and in that case $100,000 should be tops for a car that will be barfed on, shed in, and slobbered upon as it shuttles between schools, doggy salons, and malls. But here is the Bentayga, which starts just shy of $200K and can easily zap closer to $300K with some options.

Yet as we all know, SUVs have largely replaced a host of other sleds—Mercedes sedans with little flags on the fenders, Cadillac limos with boomerang antennas—as the luxury mount of the elite. And with raging popularity comes proliferating choice. Now, for example, Bentley has expanded the Bentayga range beyond the standard model first launched for 2016. To produce the $229,175 Bentayga EWB, Bentley dropped another seven inches into the wheelbase. (Thus the suffix that stands for “extended wheelbase.”) And unlike most SUVs that are stretched to accommodate a third seat row, the Bentayga EWB is (at least, for now) about deeding more of the baronial estate to the rear-seat passengers to stretch their legs.

A tempting way to take advantage of the extra room is an $11,195 option called “Airline Seat Specification,” which in concert with the “Four Seat Comfort Specification” (another $3720) replaces the standard rear bench with two articulating thrones that have a claimed 22 separate adjustments. (We didn’t actually count them.) Despite the many ways the seat can tilt, recline, massage, warm, cool, and coddle your body in sumptuous perfumed leather backed up by a featherbed-like stuffing, it somehow never managed to achieve a position of perfect comfort for us. The seat bottoms are a little short, the seatback shape a little too convex to feel like you’re fully sitting in them rather than on them. If you raise the motorized leg rest, your feet dangle. At all times you feel like you’re riding a little high in the cabin.

Granted, for short hauls it’s quite pleasant, suggesting that designers had in mind a quick executive shuttle to waiting Gulfstreams and Dassault Falcons. For long stints, however, these seats might get tiresome. Perhaps that’s why they called them “airline” seats, an association that for many is not necessarily positive. It no doubt sounded better than “Fractional Jet Ownership Seat Specification.”

The base Bentayga shares its bones with the Audi Q7 down to the 117.9-inch wheelbase, and the EWB’s is probably closer to—if not exactly the same as—the forthcoming Audi Q9. The VW Group’s family 4.0-liter twin-turbo V-8 is the only engine choice in the EWB, rated at 542 horsepower in the Bentley, which is plenty. Despite a very soft throttle calibration, which slow-rolls the Bentayga off the line unless you really mash it, the big Bentley can make a solid head of steam when needed. The claim is 4.5 seconds to 60 mph for an all-wheel-drive, air-sprung machine that weighs well above 5000 pounds. It also hacks through a corner with car-like grip and restrained body motions that belie its girth. It’s extremely quiet inside, as well, which is really where your big bucks are going. All that near-silence makes for a perfect setting in which to soak in the Naim stereo, which delivers the symphony (or cacophony) of your choice with impressive clarity.

Effectively, the Bentayga EWB replaces the lately lamented Mulsanne sedan, which ended production in 2020 as the last truly hand-made outlier in a lineup that otherwise heavily leverages the VW Group’s mass-production body plants and drivetrain parts bins to hold down costs. Also going away soon is the W-12 engine that is optional on the standard-wheelbase Bentayga—a victim of ever-tightening emissions standards. Bentley expects its new hybrid powertrain (which we drove in the Flying Spur) to be the Bentayga’s best seller. Alas, it’s getting harder and harder to be exclusive in this world of increasing economization. What’s an oligarch to do?

That’s not to say that the Bentayga feels cheap in any way; everywhere an eyeball or a finger lands on the exterior or interior, a heavily fussed-over surface awaits to convey opulence. But step back and the similarities to Audi products, from the overall proportions to the control layout to the telematic screens, are hard to disguise. On the other hand, few people outside of the industry would notice. Even fewer would care. And in the end, sitting in a Bentayga’s “Airline Seat” is better than sitting in an actual airline seat going just about anywhere today.

2023 Bentley Bentayga EWB

Price: $229,175 / $263,500 (base / as-tested)

Highs: Superb NVH isolation. Thumping Naim stereo. Impressive body control for a vehicle this massive.

Lows: “Airline” rear bucket seats never feel quite right. Similarities to VW Group siblings diminish Bentley’s air of exclusivity.

Takeaway: With always-welcome additional legroom, the Bentayga EWB is a cosseting, competent shuttle to your waiting Gulfstream.

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Jay Leno hates to be idle. Just over two weeks since he suffered third-degree burns in his garage, requiring doctors to cut away much of the skin on both sides of his face, the comedian was back on stage at his regular haunt, The Comedy and Magic Club in Hermosa Beach, California. “So tonight we have two shows—regular and extra crispy,” he joked to a packed house that had already been warmed up by longtime friends Arsenio Hall and Jimmy Brogan.

A crowd of local news reporters and paparazzi had waited for Leno to arrive at the club for his regular Sunday night show, which he has been performing at the Hermosa Beach fixture since the 1990s. The local police were there as well to keep order, having parked a black-and-white Jeep Wrangler in Leno’s traditional reserved spot in front of the club. It caused a minor embarrassment when Leno accidentally sideswiped one of the Jeep’s tires while trying to maneuver his Tesla around it. “Hey, at least people care,” he said backstage after threading his way through the thronging crowd with his wife Mavis.

Leno was under his 1907 White steam car on November 12, working to unclog a fuel line, when a spray of flaming gasoline rained down on him. “I saw it coming and I closed my eyes,” he recounted to me before going on stage. “I could feel it burning, and I said, Dave, I’m on fire.” Quick action by employees at the garage to smother the fire helped save Leno’s eyes and ears and, ultimately, his life.

When asked if the ordeal has been painful, Leno assured us “it’s not that bad.”

He shared a few pictures from his phone which can’t be published here. They show the bloodied and scalded mass that was his face when he arrived at the Grossman Burn Center in the San Fernando Valley north of Los Angeles. The fuel burned his hands as well, and they remained scabbed and raw two weeks later. His face, however, looked almost as before.

“It’s all new, everything,” he said of his extensive skin grafts and plastic surgery. “Hey, I’m the new face of comedy!” Then he turned back to his friends in the club’s green room and shouted, “I’m not an animal, I’m a human being!” (In case you don’t know the ref, it’s a line from The Elephant Man.)

The crowd gave Leno a standing ovation, no doubt many surprised by how normal he appeared despite the grim tabloid headlines. Before launching into his regular set, he made a couple of jokes about his accident. “I’ve never really thought of myself as a roast comedian,” he quipped to laughs. “Actually, the most expensive part of the whole thing was the gasoline.”

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As companions to Aaron’s lovely historical feature below, we are publishing three Hagerty member stories about their own Tri-Fives. You can read the first installment, about a green 1955 Nomad ex-drag car, here. The second installment, about a 1957 Bel Air convertible dream car, lives here. And lastly, our final installment about Betsy, a tattoo artist’s 1956 Chevy Bel Air Sport Sedan, here. –EW

It’s strange to start a story about some of the greatest General Motors cars ever produced with a nod to Henry Ford. But that’s where it begins, with the famous founder’s resignation in 1945 and the handing of the company keys to his 28-year-old grandson, Henry Ford II. From his perch atop his mighty arsenal of American industry, the young Deuce could see an even taller mountain just to the east, and it had a chrome bowtie on it. Ford knew what he had to do. “Here’s the car that will lead the way,” ran a subsequent Ford advertising ditty, “and beat the hell out of Chevrolet.”

Well, there were 90,000 people working for Chevrolet in the early 1950s, headed by the likes of general manager Thomas H. Keating and chief engineer Ed Cole. They weren’t going to simply roll over while Ford ate their lunch. Competition spurs innovation, and when the wraps came off the 1955 Chevrolets, the Deuce must have known that he was in a fight. Chevy showed that it was quitting the business of selling plump little economy sedans for the old folks. The ’55s were trim and direct, with a Ferrari-inspired grille, a Corvette-influenced dash, a rakish two-tone color scheme, and a new V-8 if you wanted it. The chrome and other tick-tackery were kept to a minimum—the jet taking flight on the hood notwithstanding—and the car’s bluff body lines were left to stand on their own.

Somehow, in one car, Chevy captured the boundless optimism of a nation whose youthful population was growing by 11,000 souls a day while also embodying John Wayne’s maxim to “talk low, talk slow, and don’t say too much.” The rest, as they say, is history. The 1955, 1956, and 1957 Chevys sold in the millions and became the holy Tri-Five, the beloved Shoebox Chevys (because of their boxy profile), the three cars that for a graying generation today best represent the decade of the 1950s and all their fond memories of youth, freedom, rock-and-roll, horsepower, and a prosperous suburban America at peace.

For the rest of us, the Tri-Fives, a nickname invented in later years to encompass the ’55s, ’56es, and ’57s, are simply cool, sized and styled just right and in a way that transcended the era of excess into which they were born. Today, a ’55 Plymouth is delightful; a ’55 Chevy is a national monument. Drive one through Brooklyn, Highland Park, North Kansas City, or Compton and people will flash you a thumbs up. Ford sure tried, but it couldn’t bump off the bowtie as the most American of American brands.

The Tri-Five’s genesis started when Ed Cole kicked the door in at the sleepy Chevrolet Division in May 1952. Demanding and energetic, Cole had led the development of the 1949 overhead-valve V-8 at Cadillac before going off to a GM defense plant in Cleveland to run tank production for the duration of the Korean War. He arrived at Chevrolet already determined to invigorate its fusty image, with the Corvette planned for 1953 and a cut-price V-8 coming to finally answer Ford’s decadelong lead in that department. Chevy wanted younger buyers, and the youth wanted horsepower. GM had earmarked $300 million for Chevy’s 1955 model overhaul, and Cole was determined to spend all of it.

He went on a recruitment drive, luring young engineers with the tantalizing prospect of reinventing Chevrolet with bold, exuberant products aimed at performance. Then he flushed whatever the division had already been working on, shelving a V-8 project based on the expensive and heavy Cadillac motor and tasking his staff with developing an engine that was smaller, lighter, cheaper to make, but still powerful. Precision thin-wall casting and stamped rocker arms were some of the enabling technologies for a compact new 265-cubic-inch “small-block” V-8 that would launch a dynasty, the descendants of which are still in production today.

Wisely, Cole nurtured his relationship with GM’s autocratic styling chief, Harley Earl. Thus, unlike other divisional chief engineers, he was not an unwelcome visitor to the styling studio on West Milwaukee Avenue, behind the GM headquarters building in Detroit. There, through the summer of 1952 and into 1953, the ’55 Chevys emerged from sketches and clay lumps under the guidance of the division’s styling head, Clare “Mac” MacKichan.

“We were working on front ends in the studio in the early stages, and one day ­Harley came in and said, ‘You know, I saw a Ferrari, and I’d like to try that kind of grille on the car,’” MacKichan recalled to author Michael Lamm in 1975 for Lamm’s subsequent book, Chevrolet 1955: Creating the Original. “And then he described what he wanted and, of course, we got out magazines and pictures and started to do this grille.”

On Milwaukee Avenue, they were aiming high, trying to produce a mini-Cadillac at a Chevrolet price. Hooded headlights and frenched-in taillights that recalled a lady’s elegantly enameled fingernail were prominent Cadillac riffs. As a flourish and to accentuate the rear haunches, the designers pressed a dip into the horizontal beltline just aft of the B-pillar and accented it with a chrome band that joined to a side spear. These ornaments formed a natural border for one of the ’55’s signature elements, a white accent color on the top trim level that wrapped over the trunk and onto the opposite quarter panel.

“The Hot One,” as Chevy marketers called it, debuted officially when dealers peeled the paper off their showroom windows on Thursday, October 28, 1954. The public pressed in to see the new car—and it was indeed totally new. Of the roughly 4500 parts that went into a 1955 Chevrolet, boasted Keating, Chevy’s general manager, fewer than 700 were carryover from the previous year. Including the switch to a 12-volt electrical system, the changes, crowed the former car salesman with perhaps understandable hyperbole, “were greater than have ever been attempted by an automobile manufacturer in one year.”

The new 162-hp Turbo-Fire V-8—or 180-hp with the optional four-barrel carb and dual-exhaust “power pack”—was said to benefit from “dynamic engine balancing” that involved spinning each engine to 700 rpm and using an “electronic brain” to measure and counterweight out any wiggle in the crankshaft. Other robotic machines were used to perfectly broach, plane, and mill the 190-pound castings of the V-8 block. For the first time, overdrive was an option on a Chevy, though priced at a steep $108.

There were three models—the base 150, the mid-priced 210, and the deluxe Bel Air—encompassing 16 separate body styles. Earl wanted to offer something special for the ’55 Chevys, so in 1953, he commanded his team to sketch a two-door wagon that used the upper half of the forthcoming 1954 Corvette Nomad show car and the bottom half of the ’55 lineup. Station wagons were red-hot sellers at the height of the baby boom, by which time 35 million Americans were said to have moved out to the suburbs. The Chevrolet Division built 160,000 wagons in 1955, the Nomad (as well as the lesser 150 and 210 versions, which weren’t called Nomads) being one of two wagon bodies offered that year. The two-door wagon claimed a healthy 54,000 sales in ’55.

However, sales were halting at first; the public took time to warm up to Chevy’s pivot. During the first two weeks, weeds grew at the dealerships, and GM president Harlow Curtice called a meeting of Keating, Cole, and other managers. Curtice arbitrarily pinned the problem on the grille, saying that Ferraris sold in the hundreds while Chevy was gunning for millions. The group sketched out a rush program to redesign the grille, but before it could be implemented, dealers began to see some traffic (the replacement grille concept was adopted on the ’56 models).

Perennial Chevrolet pitchwoman ­Dinah Shore rode the back of a Bel Air convertible to pace the 1955 Indy 500, while drivers Fonty Flock and Dave Hirschfield campaigned the new car in NASCAR’s various series. Kustom king George Barris wasted no time applying his touch, restyling a ’55 Chevy with Dodge trim pieces, Lincoln taillights, and a Corvette grille. Said Chevy designer Dave Holls: “If there was ever a time when the kids went 360 degrees from Fords to Chevys, it was 1955.”

By the spring of 1955, the cars were flying off lots. On April 28, a Thursday, the Chevrolet Division set a one-day industry production record, cranking out 7902 cars and 2178 trucks before the evening whistle. In announcing the record, Keating reeled off some statistics: the $20 million worth of vehicles produced by Chevy in one day would, if parked end to end, stretch 35 miles. The 33 million pounds of steel needed to make those vehicles had employed 20,000 steelworkers and was enough metal to erect a skyscraper with a base of one whole city block and a height of 25 stories. Altogether, Chevy’s plants and their suppliers had consumed 50,400 tires on that Thursday, 1.7 million pounds of paint and other chemicals, 7 million pounds of iron, 27 million gallons of water, and 650 tons of coal, while producing enough textiles to wrap around the globe four times.

Such was the postwar industrial colossus that was Detroit, the city’s Big Three (GM, Ford, and Chrysler) owned 95 percent of the U.S. auto market in 1955. Chevrolet handily beat Ford that year, as it did in 1956 when it softened the car’s look slightly and applied the ’55’s wider replacement grille. Always a fan of chrome, Earl pressed his underlings to gussy up the now spectacularly successful Chevy line for 1957. The result was an even larger and busier oval grille bracketed by prominent bullets and bisected by a chrome center bar housing inset parking lights. The flat hood sprouted two long bulges capped by chrome rockets jutting forward, and the treatments got more deluxe as buyers moved up the line. Flashy dorsal-shaped side molding inserts for Bel Airs accentuated the new tailfins.

Though it’s revered today, the ’57s proved less popular with the public then, and Ford regained the sales crown by about 30,000 registrations. Some economists blamed the fierce battle between Chevy and Ford, with all the attendant discounts, rebates, and overproduction, for sparking the 1958 recession. It was said that pie-in-the-sky sales targets involved shoving cars on to people who couldn’t afford them (auto loan defaults climbed dramatically in 1958) while driving the few remaining independents, Nash-Hudson, Studebaker, and Packard, to the brink of bankruptcy.

Whether true or not, Ford and Chevy continued their sales war, the latter largely abandoning vertical tailfins after ’57, flopping them over into horizontal blades before pruning them off entirely for 1961. The completely redesigned ’58 Chevys followed the industry trend toward longer and wider cars with even more chrome, and the all-too-brief Tri-Five era was over.

Except that it wasn’t. The Chevys from those three years took less time than most models to rebound from depreciating used cars into desirable classics. There’s always been something appealing about a big engine dropped into a cheap car, and the ’55 Chevy with its compact new V-8 was destined to rank with the ’32 Ford as the roots of America’s muscle car epoch.

GM turned against racing, starting with a 1957 ban by the Automobile Manufacturers Association and reinforced in 1963 by a company fearful of breakup by antitrust crusaders. That meant the Tri-Fives would represent at the drag strips in later years as the car of the grassroots independents and the little guy. Into the mid-’60s, small-block tuning pioneers such as Bill “Grumpy” Jenkins and his Monster Mash ’55 Chevy were cheered as underdogs against the newer factory jobs. Meanwhile, the Chevy Nomad seemed built to specification for the 1960s surf craze set to an epic soundtrack by The Beach Boys, Jan and Dean, and Dick Dale & His Del-Tones.

Early on the Tri-Five was a screen regular, starting with Rebel Without a Cause and the Highway Patrol TV show. Star turns in Two-Lane Blacktop (1971), American Graffiti (1973), and Diner (1982) kept the Tri-Fives in the public’s eye as the most 1950s of 1950s Americana. Go online today and you can buy Tri-Five metal signs, Tri-Five models, Tri-Five T-shirts, Tri-Five–only magazines, and couches made to look like the rear end of a Tri-Five Chevy. Those three model years support an enormous aftermarket parts industry that supplies everything to keep a Shoebox Chevy running, up to and including completely new steel body shells officially licensed by Chevrolet.

Which is why if you go to any car show, concours, cars and coffee, or cruise-in anywhere in America (and likely elsewhere), you’re all but certain to see at least one 1955–1957 Chevrolet. More than 3000 show up every year to the Tri-Five Nationals hosted by the American Tri-Five Association, whose members are certain to write in and point out with exhaustive detail any mistakes in this story.

A story which, at its heart, is about a commercial product. It was developed and built for the purposes of turning a profit over three short fiscal years in the life of a corporation that, once those years were over, quickly moved on to other matters. Car designers and engineers usually don’t know when they’re being timeless—not until some time has passed. They also don’t get to pick which of their creations qualifies; that’s for the rest of us to decide. And in the intervening years, the masses have spoken, blessing the Tri-Five with its well-earned immortality.

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

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Max Neary’s business card resembles a 1920s movie poster and reads “Antique Auto Repair and Maintenance” specializing in Lincoln, Stutz, Locomobile, Packard, and other makes of a bygone era. When not dickering with magnetos or adjusting thermostatic grille louvers, Neary dresses in wide-lapel vintage suits and slicks his hair back above a pencil mustache to look like a young Fredric March, the cigarette occasionally smoldering on his lower lip figuring in as a period prop as much as a bad habit.

Neary slipped his card into my hand late one night this past August as he and some friends were downing beers and polishing the fenders of a 1926 Lincoln, the car being prepped for the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance a couple of days hence. The scene looked like many such gatherings on the Monterey Peninsula that week, wherein the young grunts who make it all happen serve in rented garages fettling the cars for the wealthy owners dining in splendor in Carmel or Pacific Grove. Except that Neary owns this Lincoln, and he and his friends are anything but rich.

A lot of people at Pebble worry about the future of Pebble. They should; to go is to gaze upon a vista of immaculate silvery cars brought by equally silvery people. The event’s bias toward the automobile’s prewar glory years has made it the sport of kings—the princes being out in the parking lot ogling new Paganis and McLarens. That has backed the event into something of a demographic corner. But I have met Pebble’s future, and it is Max Neary. Did I mention that he’s 27?

Neary has a great story, the product of mentors and benefactors who took time to share with a young kid. When he was 12, a guy brought a Model T to his school and asked if anyone wanted to learn how to drive it. Neary thought, well, what the hell, and put up his hand. Old-car owners, pay attention: This is why you give rides. The experience changed Neary’s life, evoking a passion for cars from the Tin Lizzie years.

Before the pandemic, Neary was waiting tables in Oakland and aimlessly taking classes at the local college. He had befriended a collector of Lincolns and other old crocks and the guy was out of space, so he offered to let Neary take one of his long-sleeping Lincolns home for the summer to see if he could do anything with it. It’s a one-of-10 Willoughby-bodied Berline Landaulet town car that, without wishing to offend, isn’t exactly the sexy apple of a young man’s eye. It is a mile long and a mile high, the square turret of the upper body a roadgoing aquarium in which the owner luxuriates in back while barking orders at the chauffeur through a microphone. However, Neary was smitten with this time-travel barouche, so he rebuilt the engine and other bits and drove it 5000 miles, somewhere along the line coming to an understanding with the owner on a price. “I had to scrimp and save and beg and barter to make it happen,” he says.

When Pebble put the word out that it was celebrating Lincoln’s centennial in 2022, Neary—who had by then moved with a roommate into a rented L.A. house and hung out his shingle as a journeyman mechanic—threw his name in, eventually getting the nod for the prewar V-8 class. He and his crew were up till 2:30 the morning of Pebble getting ready in a friend’s garage. At 5:30 a.m., they rolled. The Lincoln burbled happily through the misty darkness, as it had on the 80-mile Tour a few days earlier, then died half a mile up a steep hill with no shoulder. With no choice, they dead-sticked the giant black limo backward through the night to the nearest gas station, one of the team running ahead waving his phone flashlight as a beacon to warn cars emerging from the fog. “I honestly thought we were going to die,” said Neary’s partner, David Lepor, still shaking in his vintage wingtips and clutching close their wirehair terrier, Boggsie. It took an hour and a half to find and fix the fuel issue, and they arrived at Pebble with only minutes to spare. And on a dead battery. Neary had to borrow one from the car next to him to be judged. The reward: a joyous third in class.

It sounded like a college romp, one of those crazy stories you tell for years about your sleepless, harried, misspent youth. And it made me, for the first time ever, want to show a car at Pebble Beach. I never thought it would be fun. Probably because I never saw somebody my age or younger do it.

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Across the digital world, most published content is bite-size, designed for quick consumption. Still, deeper stories have a place—to share the breadth of an experience, explore a corner of history, or ponder a question that truly engages the goopy mass between your ears. Pour your beverage of choice and join us for a Great Read. Want more? Have suggestions? Let us know what you think in the comments or by email: tips@hagerty.com

A photo from 1939 snapped just as the cars roll out from their angled parking positions at the start of the 24 Hours of Le Mans underscores what an intimate affair this storied French enduro used to be. The 4.5-liter V-12 Lagonda of Arthur Dobson and the Bugatti Type 57C of Jean-Pierre Wimille lead the charge down a pit straight barely wider than a country lane, while the Talbot-Lago T26 of Luigi Chinetti, who later forged an empire hawking Ferraris to Americans, gives chase. Picket fences and a hedge are all that separate the roaring machinery from the capped and woolen-coated crowd, a tragic lack of safety that wouldn’t be corrected until after the horrible crash of 1955.

Unseen in the photo, way off in the hazy clutter of the backmarkers, are three white cars from a small Munich firm that had entered the race for the first time, its six drivers having never been to Le Mans before. In those days, journalists writing about the Bayerische Motoren Werke put periods after every initial of its name, such that devoted readers of the motoring magazines and sports pages knew the firm as “B.M.W.” The company had been building automobiles for only 10 years and was better known for its motorcycles and aircraft engines, but BMW was intent on changing that.

Competing in the event’s 2.0-liter class were three factory-prepped BMW 328s that survived a crash- and failure-prone grind to finish first, second, and third in class—or fifth, seventh, and ninth overall. The little BMWs with their snarling inline-sixes vanquished much faster and more seasoned opponents, in part just by not breaking. This was the first chapter of an epic tale, a tale of 2002s knifing through the forests of the Nürburgring, of art cars and M1s and 1500-hp Brabham F1 engines and everything BMW has ever done on a track with an automobile.

It would be many years and a world war before that BMW would come into existence. This BMW was still small and humble, and somehow, miraculously, one of its white racing cars is sitting before us in a nondescript office park in Boca Raton, Florida, bubbling on its raspy idle. The car’s current owner, Stephen Bruno, curates a private menagerie of the rare and unusual, his tastes running particularly toward one-off, special-bodied Ferraris. However, he’s latched on to this obscure nugget of German racing history like a dog with a bone.

“I always look for the rarest of the rare,” he explained. On a rally once, he saw a BMW 328, the cycle-fendered Morgan-like roadster that was the company’s first production sports car. Fewer than 500 were built between 1936 and 1940, and Bruno wanted one. But, as usual, he wanted “the rarest of the rare.” Well, he got it, and the story of how he got it is pretty interesting.

Back in 1939, the cover art of the programme officielle for the 24 Hours of Le Mans depicted a racing driver hoisting up a pole a few flags of the world, including Old Glory and the red-and-black swastika ensign of the Third Reich—obviously some wishful sentiment on the eve of war about nations uniting in motorsport. Though it was BMW’s debut at Le Mans, the factory had been entering the 328 in lesser events since the car’s unveiling in 1936, including endurance races at the Nürburgring and at Montlhéry in France.

The 328 won its class in the blood-soaked 1938 Mille Miglia, during which a Lancia Aprilia plowed through a crowd of spectators in Bologna, and prospects were good for 1939, when BMW planned to enter every major sports car event on the European calendar. BMWs swept the season-opening British RAC Rally in April 1939, a fact that did not sit well with the Brits, who by then were developing a healthy grudge against all things German. The cars, including this one, also performed well in the Mille Miglia Africana, a 1000-kilometer dash held in the Italian colony of Libya after Italy banned road racing—briefly—following the ’38 tragedy.

Thus, even though the BMW team was crewed by six Le Mans rookies, they were primed for the race with tested equipment and a well-lubricated group. Post-Libya, the No. 27 car I’m sitting in—after I receive some instruction from Bruno’s chief technician—was sent to Le Mans to be helmed by a motorcycle racing jockey named Ralph Röese and his co-driver Paul Heinemann, the son of a building contractor who had started with BMW’s factory sports car team back in ’36.

As the seemingly endless daylight of the summer solstice neared, Europe’s sporting automakers headed for the ancient seat of France’s Plantagenet kings to race in the annual “double 12” on the narrow farm roads south of town. Favored at the start of the 16th running of Les 24 Heures du Mans was Jean Trémoulet of France, who had won the event the previous year in a Delahaye 135CS. However, three hours into the race, the 4.0-liter straight-six of Trémoulet’s Talbot-Lago SS roadster started bleeding out oil, causing chaos behind him as cars skidded and spun. The marshals tried to flag the Frenchman in, but he ignored them for several laps as he turned the 8-mile-long circuit into a skating rink.

At the 90-degree right-hander at Arnage, one of the race’s two female drivers, Anne-Cécile Rose-Itier (her co-driver, Suzanne Largeot, was the other) slid into the embankment and her Simca 8 rolled over. Jean Breillet, in another Simca, spun wildly and was thrown from the car 20 feet over a hedge. He miraculously survived with only bruises. Le Mans rookie André Bellecroix lost control of his Delahaye at 120 mph, hitting several trees and slamming into a house. He also survived, but with more serious injuries, and was taken away in an ambulance that had to circle the track among the race cars. When Trémoulet pitted at last, the crowd booed him long and hard.

The BMWs raced on, their white faces bearded with black gunk. Their only real competition in class was an Aston Martin 2-Litre Speed, a bigger version of Aston’s 1935 class winner. However, at the finish, the Touring-bodied BMW 328 coupe of His Serene Highness Prince Max von Schaumburg-Lippe and Fritz Hans Wenscher led the class, finishing fifth overall and just three laps behind a far more powerful Lagonda. Röese and Heinemann took second in class, seventh overall in the No. 27 car, and the No. 28 car of Willy Briem and Rudolf Scholtz wrapped up BMW’s sweep of the 2.0-liters, finishing ninth overall. The average speed of the race winners, Jean-Pierre Wimille and Pierre Veyron in a supercharged Bugatti Type 57C “Tank,” was 87 mph.

The Werke was riding high that summer of 1939. On the Friday before Le Mans, its motorcycle team had taken the top two spots in the Senior TT class at the Isle of Man Tourist Trophy, with winner Georg Meier’s supercharged 492cc BMW Type 225 RS hitting 132 mph on the island circuit’s notorious Sulby Straight. Meier was the first non-Briton to win the event since its founding in 1911, yet another cause for anti-Teutonic grumbling in the British press. No matter—BMW had made its mark and was rapidly ascending into the top tiers of European racing.

Three months later, Germany invaded Poland and the world fell into war. The problems of three little racing BMWs—to borrow the great line from Casablanca—didn’t amount to a hill of beans in that crazy world. As the bombs fell on Germany, two cars survived the conflagration with recorded stories, including the class-winning Touring-bodied coupe, No. 26, which is now in BMW’s museum in Munich. The No. 28 roadster also survived and was owned for a time by British racing journalist Denis Jenkinson, who famously navigated Stirling Moss to his 1955 Mille Miglia victory. Today it belongs to a private collector. However, the team’s middle car, the roadster numbered 27, disappeared for almost eight decades.

Well, actually, it didn’t. Somehow, in a manner that is as yet unknown, the No. 27 car made its way to America and into the hands of an owner whose tastes obviously ran toward the obscure. Few Yanks had ever heard of a BMW in the late 1940s or early ’50s, when the company was clawing its way out of the rubble making kitchen utensils and bicycles, and when this 328 is thought to have arrived stateside. The car passed from grandfather to grandson, undergoing a restoration in the 1990s that disguised it as “just another” roadgoing BMW 328.

By 2017, the car’s then-owner had become aware that it might be the missing ’39 Le Mans team car and Mille Miglia Africana veteran, rather than simply another BMW ex-competition car hiding under a handsome coat of silver paint over black disc wheels. He approached Daniel Rapley, a classic car dealer in Connecticut, about possibly selling the car. Rapley had a buyer, Stephen Bruno, if the car’s provenance could be authenticated. So as an initial investment, Bruno paid to fly Klaus Kutscher from BMW Group Classic in Munich over to inspect the car. He spent hours underneath it and with his head in the dark crevices. There he discovered that, besides the competition-spec rear axle and oversize fuel tank, the original Le Mans fuel-filler hole and special air vents were all there, covered over during the previous restoration. He pronounced the No. 27 car found, and Bruno unholstered his checkbook.

It was only the beginning of the spending, as Bruno wanted to return the car to its racing condition down to the single windshield, center driving light, and peculiar curlicue flourish adorning the 2 in its racing number. For that, he turned to D.L. George Historic Motorcars in Cochranville, Pennsylvania, which did the ground-up restoration. Fortunately, some of the competition parts that had been stripped off in the ’90s restoration had been packed away in attic boxes. The owner thought they were mods added to the car in the ’50s or ’60s but, thankfully, saved them. In fact, they were on the car when it raced at Le Mans in 1939.

One troubling aspect of the restoration that was was the headlight covers protecting the lenses from damage during the daylight hours of the race. The originals were gone, and no color photos of the car from that time are known to exist. So Bruno gambled that they were the same deep red as similar hard-shell covers used in the day by Alfa Romeo and other teams. “We just went with what we thought was correct, but we pontificated for months,” he said.

Because literally everything was politicized in prewar Germany, BMW’s racing cars bore the NSKK logo of the Nationalsozialistisches Kraftfahrkorps, or National Socialist Motor Corps. It was basically the Third Reich’s equivalent of the Auto Club, charged with educating new legions of drivers for industry and the Wehrmacht and supporting competition events. The logo, which was on the cars in Libya, depicts the Third Reich eagle underneath a banner that reads “N.S.K.K.” and clutching a laurel wreath with a swastika in the middle. Mindful of modern sensitivities toward the image, Bruno exercised one bit of creative license and left the logos off the doors.

Otherwise, the 328 is just as Ralph Röese and Paul Heinemann drove it, or as near as Bruno could make it given the limited amount of documentation and archival photos available. At first glance, it’s easy to mistake it for any number of British roadsters from the 1930s, except that the dual-kidney grille is a giveaway that the car is a proud son of Munich.

The rear-hinge doors swing just wide enough for people of average girth to slide through. Sitting in the car is akin to sitting in an MG TC or other roadsters of the era, in that the large black steering wheel with linguine-thin spokes is up close and always brushing your lap, and the close-coupled foot pedals seem to be made for people who drove in nothing but stockings.

Giant, white, clockwise-rotating gauges read out the speed (max 180 kph) and engine revs (max 5000 rpm), while a brace of uniformly small instruments report the fuel state and health of the engine’s oil and cooling systems. One of the handles on the dash activates the slide-out trafficators in the body, which return to the stowed position with a satisfying thunk. You turn a small key marked with Bosch’s familiar armature-in-a-circle logo, then push the starter button marked with the same logo, and the inline-six lights right off with a raspy syncopated snore that instantly defines the car as something other than a clattering British side-valver.

BMW had evolved from its start in 1917 as an aircraft engine maker to motorcycles in 1923 and then cars in 1929 with the acquisition of Dixi, a company that was burning through cash while building British Austin Sevens under license in Eisenach in central Germany. That was just in time for the national economy to collapse in sync with the global Depression, which helped launch fascism in Germany. Considering the titanic obstacles that any carmaker needed to overcome in the 1930s, it’s something of a miracle that the 328 was ever produced, much less produced with such a dramatic increase in sophistication over the company’s previous cars.

Although a car company today employs thousands of engineers, back then, the 328’s existence was largely down to the work and persistence of two men, Rudolf Schleicher and Fritz Fiedler. The former had come to BMW in 1922 to help launch motorcycle manufacturing in Munich. In 1927, he left for a job at Horch, where he met Fiedler. BMW, having entered the car business and wanting to take a big technical leap from the Dixi, lured Schleicher back to Munich in 1932. He persuaded his friend Fiedler to go with him.

The small company didn’t have much in the way of resources, just some guys standing at drafting tables day after day over the better part of a year, sketching out their idea of a lightweight two-seater with a tubular steel chassis, flowing contemporary lines, and a novel overhead-valve inline-six. The suspension hewed to late-1930s convention with a single transverse leaf spring up front supporting independent control arms, and a solid rear axle on semi-elliptical leaf springs. Fiedler handled the frame and body development, while Schleicher, along with his colleague Rudolf Flemming, fleshed out the new engine.

The 1971-cc six used the iron block from an earlier production sedan, but with a new aluminum cylinder head to produce the higher output befitting a sports car. It featured semi-hemispherical combustion chambers that splayed the valves at a wide angle and placed the plug in the center for better breathing and combustion. The arrangement demanded that the engine have either two separate camshafts or some novel way of actuating both the intake and exhaust valves from one camshaft. Overhead cams were rejected because it would require the development of an entirely new engine, something BMW couldn’t afford. Since the whole project was being done on a shoestring, the team was stuck with a single-camshaft block from the previous BMW 326 sedan. Thus, the solution was to incorporate three sets of pushrods: One conventional vertical set moved the intake-valve rocker arms; another parallel set moved bell cranks on the rocker shaft in the head; and a third set of short, horizontal pushrods reached across the head from the bell cranks to move the exhaust-valve rockers.

Three center-mounted Solex type 30 downdraft carburetors do the breathing as well as make the engine look pretty. With a 7.5:1 compression ratio, brake horsepower was listed in the catalog as 80 at 4500 rpm, but competition models were almost certainly above 90 horsepower, with the Le Mans cars thought to make in the neighborhood of 135 horsepower. Which is one reason the early racing cars were fragile; the running gear lifted straight from the sedans wasn’t up to handling the power of the 328’s engine. From its first race in June 1936, the 328 underwent continuous development as bits broke and were reinforced.

Luckily there’s some decent driving within blocks of Bruno’s office, and I was able to run the car’s Hurth four-speed through its gears. The clutch is light and the takeup exceptionally smooth. The car immediately makes friends and is easy to drive. A conventional shift pattern with reverse left and up, the selector feels direct, with an obvious and satisfying engagement. The car was fresh out of the restoration shop, and some more miles on the gearbox would probably loosen it up. Indeed, the whole car feels a bit like a new saddle not yet worn in. Maybe, as with many valuable classics, it never will be. But you can easily picture yourself getting comfortable enough with this benign and predictable machine to make fast midnight runs through Maison Blanche or down the Mulsanne, living life to the fullest in the last happy moments before the abyss.

Neither Röese nor Heinemann ever raced at Le Mans again, and their nation burned to ashes in a war that consumed many of the people and vehicles they raced against that June weekend in the French countryside. Jean Trémoulet, whom the crowd jeered so viciously, died in a motorcycle accident in 1944, it was said while on a mission for the French Resistance. BMW’s Munich factories were bombed to dust, its operations in Eisenach seized by the Soviets. The company was prohibited by the occupying Allies from making cars until 1951, though the British Bristol Aeroplane Company recognized the value of BMW’s engineering and launched itself into the auto industry in 1947 with cars and engines pilfered from BMW designs, replete with the split-kidney grille.

As we all know, BMW was irrepressible, and it emerged to flower as an automaker and to race again at Le Mans—finally winning it all in 1999 with its V12 LMR prototype. That was a feat for sure, but this charming little roadster managed to pull off an even greater triumph: It outraced the clock and, thanks to its various caretakers (some known, some unknown), it survived the past 83 years to bear witness to a moment when a world was just about to end but a really good story was just getting started.

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A couple of lifetimes ago, I phoned up Phil Hill to interview him about his kid Derek, then attempting to climb racing’s greasy pole with a seat in the Barber Dodge Pro Series. We had a pleasant conversation, and I got some good quotes. A little while later, the phone rang; it was Hill calling to amend some things. A few minutes later, he called back to amend some of the amendments.

America’s only native-born F1 champion was apparently like that, a perfectionist obsessed with details, a trait that served him well later in life as a frequent Pebble Beach Concours entrant and partner in the Hill & Vaughn restoration shop. It was said that back when he raced, Hill, who died in 2008, always walked or slow-drove a circuit in advance, stooping to remove leaves and noting where overhanging branches might drip dew on a corner. That he would nervously start cleaning his goggles hours ahead of a race and still be cleaning them two minutes before the start.

“He was so taut,” observed one of his rivals, Stirling Moss, “so overwrought much of the time that one would have thought that he’d have been exhausted from sheer tension inside of 200 miles.”

Hill thus seemed an unlikely addition to Scuderia Ferrari’s roster, which he joined full time in 1956 as “the ninth man on a nine-man team,” noted Sports Illustrated. Ever since the great Tazio Nuvolari’s epic drives for the fledgling Scuderia in the 1930s, Enzo had searched for a new garibaldino, a soldier in the mold of the Italian hero Garibaldi, with the same flair, fearlessness, and singular devotion to victory.

Hill didn’t fit the profile. Besides being manifestly cautious—he said an ulcer diagnosed in 1953 came from the epiphany that racing was deadly—Hill had other interests such as classical music and art, which Enzo considered distractions for dilettantes. And Hill, a bachelor, seemed to live a monk’s existence, spurning advances from female admirers. In a squad of habitually libidinous Italians, that left him the odd man out. They dubbed him “Hamlet in a helmet.”

Hill had reason to be wary. He was an eyewitness from the pit wall to Pierre Levegh’s 1955 Le Mans crash, ducking just in time to miss debris thrown from the flaming Mercedes as it exploded into the crowd. And Hill joined Enzo’s Scuderia as death gripped its ranks. First Alberto Ascari in 1955, then Eugenio Castellotti, Alfonso de Portago, and Luigi Musso. In 1958, after becoming the first Yank to crew a winning car at Le Mans, Hill was moved up to the A-team, slated to drive F1 for the ’59 season. But only because teammate Peter Collins had died that August at the Nürburgring.

Hill’s promotion coincided with a shining moment for the Scuderia. For 1961, it had finally embraced the future with Vittorio Jano’s mid-engine Tipo 156, the famous “sharknose.” The car’s 1.5-liter, 120-degree “Dino” V-6 was the class of the field. Though Hill won only two races, he and teammate Wolfgang von Trips dueled for the championship up to the final European round at Monza. On the second lap, von Trips tangled with Jim Clark’s Lotus, and von Trips launched into the crowd, killing himself and 15 bystanders. Hill clinched the championship but under dreadful circumstances; he described von Trips’s funeral as one of the worst days of his life.

According to Hill, Enzo never said a word of thanks. Like many drivers, Hill saw Enzo as a father figure with a lot of similarities to his own father, and Enzo knew it and used it, stirring up sibling rivalry in the team to extract maximum effort. However, the Old Man unilaterally decided that Hill had lost interest in racing and fired him at the end of the ’62 season, seeing in the young bike racer John Surtees his next garibaldino. “I can’t say I’m heartbroken,” was Hill’s response.

“They were an absurd mob,” he told Ferrari biographer Brock Yates years later. “Ferrari was surrounded by flunkies, all seeking some sort of favor or approval.” Hill had been one of them. He quit racing for good in 1967, relieved to be one of few survivors from his era.

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

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Talbot-Lago. No doubt you’ve heard the name called out in the dulcet tones of a concours emcee as beautiful people flit among beautiful cars while Camembert and sauvignon blanc are served. Talbot-Lago stands with Bugatti, Delage, Delahaye, and Voisin as one of the great practitioners of French bespoke carmaking from the great interwar years of flourishing art deco design. From a tiny factory in the Paris suburbs that never had more than 450 workers, Talbot-Lagos roared forth to race at Le Mans, they battled fang and talon with the ascendant Germans on the Grand Prix circuit, they drew crowds of gawkers at the annual Paris Salon de l’Automobile, and they were the preferred bolides of an exclusive coterie of moneyed elite who fled to the Riviera in autumn.

Mike Regalia’s 1949 Talbot-Lago Grand Sport came after all that. After a cataclysmic war smashed the old order and impoverished a continent, as Paris’s thriving carrosserie industry was being reduced to vapors, and as the hard-drinking, hard-smoking boss, Tony Lago—who had once escaped a Fascist hit squad by lobbing a grenade into a cafe—was conniving to keep his factory open through sheer force of will. None of which detracts from the fact that Regalia’s Grand Sport, one of only around 31 to 35 cars thought to have been built between 1948 and 1951, is a spectacular automobile, even as it sits idling on a California side street in largely unrestored condition.

“It’s kind of like owning a Bugatti,” says Regalia, who started in 1978 as an in-house painter for the great car collector and cosmetics baron J.B. Nethercutt and retired in 2005 as the Nethercutt Collection’s president. “It’s very rare air. These are one-off custom coachbuilt cars, and they were some of the last.”

We ensconced ourselves in the Grand Sport’s ridiculously cramped cockpit for some action shots for the photographer. The T26 Grand Sport has about the same space inside as a 1958 Corvette or, more contemporaneously, a Jaguar XK 120. People were obviously smaller back then, or just more forgiving. The 4.5-liter pushrod straight-six sucks through its triple carburetors with a raspy snarl while its exhaust pushes the gases out with an arresting burble. Regalia, sitting in the right seat per prewar French convention, snicked the column shifter for the Wilson preselector gearbox down a notch, from point mort, or neutral, into first, and we rolled off.

Talbot-Lago is one of those names with complex parentage, somehow surviving the incestuous turmoil of the early auto industry when most new automaking start-ups lived lives of brief, unprofitable anguish before dying or merging with others. For those interested in the particulars, the history is cataloged in minute detail in Peter Larsen’s two-volume compendium, Talbot-Lago Grand Sport, a towering work of research that is also pleasantly readable. “One Sunday in 2008,” Larsen explained via email in the same breezy manner that he wrote the book, “I was reading yet another T26 Grand Sport article that contained a baker’s dozen of mistakes—an article that perpetuated the same mistakes others had made before moronically repeating them. I got fed up and decided to rectify matters. It took four years.”

See what we mean about the writing? Much of the following information has been taken from Larsen and his co-writer Ben Erickson, who are by their own admission indebted to the research of others on this obscure topic. In brief, the company’s tale started with bicycle-maker Pierre Alexandre Darracq, who built what was to become the Talbot-Lago factory in 1896 in the Paris suburb of Suresnes, about 5 miles west of the newly erected Eiffel Tower.

Around that time, a French former bicycle racer and bicycle maker named Adolphe Clément took a trip to London, where he learned of the newly invented Dunlop pneumatic tire. He bought the French rights, which made him a fairly instant millionaire. Keen to move into automobiles, Clément partnered with the British lord Charles Chetwynd-Talbot, the 20th Earl of Shrewsbury, to buy Darracq’s bicycle business while also founding Clément-Talbot Limited in England to build cars.

Lots of drama and disasters ensued over the next 30 years as companies collapsed or merged, a succession of mediocrities took charge, plans were laid and schemes were schemed, and vast fortunes were burned. Perhaps sensing his end was near, Lord Talbot exited the car business in 1919 and died two years later, not living to see how his family name would be pasted on all manner of vehicles from both sides of the English Channel until well into the 1980s (the current heir, Charles Henry John Benedict Crofton Chetwynd Chetwynd-Talbot, the 22nd Earl of Shrewsbury, no doubt takes some satisfaction from it). Today, the name Talbot is variously pronounced as Tal-beau or Tall-bit depending on whether you side with the French or English.

In 1933, as the surviving car company, Automobiles Talbot, was hemorrhaging cash at a particularly robust rate and its British shareholders were bemoaning their collective plight, along came Talbot-Lago’s most illustrious personality, Antonio Franco Lago, or “Tony” to his friends, lovers, and numerous creditors. Lago was born in 1893 to a middle-class Venetian family and attended technical college while falling into the orbit of a young Benito Mussolini. Lago is thus otherwise semi-notorious as one of the 50 founding members of the Italian Fascist Party. However, as Larsen writes, he was more interested in lofty ideals than jackbooted thuggery and, after serving as an aircraft mechanic during World War I, turned on the party. Which is why they eventually sent a gang of black-shirted assassins to take him out. After tossing the grenade to escape, Lago fled to Paris, then onward to London, and never returned to his homeland.

In London in the 1920s, while running a small shop specializing in Isotta Fraschini cars, Lago became enamored with the newly invented Wilson preselector gearbox, a type of semiautomatic manual that offered benefits in noise and efficiency over contemporary non-synchro manuals while also reducing shifting to a gentle flick of the wrist. Lago wrangled the rights to assemble Wilsons in France—though Larsen is not convinced that Lago ever actually paid for it—and started building his empire.

In 1933, he approached Talbot’s grieving shareholders with a highly dubious plan to take over and run the factory in Suresnes. Talbot-Lago was effectively born, and right up until the Nazis let themselves into Poland in 1939, the company produced a few hundred examples each year of a dizzying—and mostly unprofitable—array of road and racing cars. From the ordinary Minor 13CV (in France, most cars were denoted by their cheval-vapeur, or taxable horsepower) to the fabulous T150 sports cars that would be bodied by the best coachwork designers in France, including the uninhibited Joseph Figoni and the Russian Jewish émigré Iakov “Jacques” Saoutchik.

The idea for Regalia’s azure blue roadster was born in the latter days of the war, when Tony Lago joined with his Paris colleagues in the coachbuilding business to try to pretend that the war never happened. Talbot-Lago would ride back to glory partly atop the T26 Grand Sport, a compact and lightweight two-seater built with only few changes on the bones of the company’s old prewar Grand Prix cars. Even as the bullets still flew, Lago and his chief engineer, Carlo Marchetti, worked on a new version of the company’s 4.5-liter, 26-cheval-vapeur inline-six, with twin cams in a long-stroke block topped by semi-hemispherical combustion chambers.

However, postwar austerity, shortages, and inflation kneecapped French car production, Lago spending much of his days haggling with local officials for allocations of raw materials. By the time the Grand Sport debuted in 1948, the best from England, Germany, and Italy was already better, and the car was obsolete the day it arrived. “I don’t think numbers sold [fewer than 35] is a measure of success—that is a sort of McDonald’s X-billion sold philosophy,” said Larsen, who is curating a special Grand Sport class at the 2022 Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance. “The car was an extreme sales flop, in the sense that it was the wrong car at the wrong time, and at a hideously expensive price. But I think that is beside the point; it was an outrageously exclusive and beautiful individually coachbuilt objet d’art on a gorgeous, if outdated, chassis.”

At 2.65 meters, or 104.3 inches, the Grand Sport’s wheelbase was 2 inches longer than the aforementioned ’58 Corvette’s, but Talbot-Lago’s lengthy T26 inline-six consumed much more real estate than the legendarily compact small-block. The GM mention is not by accident; Saoutchik supplied the body for the debut Grand Sport, an extravagant coupe in pastel green with brown accents that stole the 1948 Paris Salon de l’Automobile. It also heavily ripped off the 1942–49 Buick fastbacks designed under Harley Earl at General Motors. Saoutchik would do several more Grand Sport coupes using variations on the Buick theme.

Regalia’s Grand Sport was the factory’s 17th chassis, delivered to its buyer, a Mr. Paul Gerbe of Paris, on September 29, 1949, exactly one month after the Soviets detonated their first atomic bomb. Compared to the rakish Saoutchik coupe that preceded it and the fenderless racer that came after, Regalia’s Dubos-bodied convertible is a study in conventional elegance, vaguely resembling a contemporary pontoon-fender Triumph 1800 roadster, albeit with far more graceful lines. The three Dubos brothers had taken over their father Louis’s Paris coachworks upon his death in 1946 and attempted to continue building commissioned one-offs in the firm’s tastefully understated style, but by the mid-1950s, that business was dead and the company switched entirely to building buses and commercial vehicles.

Regalia’s car survives as the only unrestored Dubos Grand Sport of the four to which Dubos supplied coachwork. The bare chassis alone cost Gerbe roughly the equivalent of $5800 at a time when a new Cadillac Series 62 convertible ran about $3500—and this in post-occupation France, when people were still lining up for bread. It took Talbot-Lago five months to build the chassis using tools and equipment that mostly dated back to 1912. Thus, you can see why bespoke carmaking was rapidly nearing its end, and Talbot-Lago died with its chief motive force, Tony Lago, in 1960, having outlived its era and most of its contemporaries by at least a decade.

Eventually this Grand Sport made its way to America and received a fresh paint job that is, by Regalia’s estimation, slightly darker than the original color. It should be said that Regalia is a paint-matching expert who helped the Nethercutts win six Pebble Beach Concours Best of Show awards, along the way acquiring, restoring, and reselling Steve McQueen’s Ferrari 250 GT Lusso. He bought the Grand Sport out of a San Diego–area collection in 2019, figuring it might be his only opportunity to own an example of French bespoke coachwork at a somewhat-affordable price.

“Postwar coachbuilt cars are actually rarer than prewar,” he says while manhandling the Grand Sport on a twisty road in summertime heat, “because World War II destroyed the industry. And this one was an open car, and unrestored, making it even rarer among the rare. Three-quarters of the Grand Sports were closed.” Postwar Talbot-Lagos, except for the million-dollar Grand Sports, are relatively affordable, partly because of obscurity, partly because of high restoration costs, and partly because at concours they tend to be lumped into postwar sporting classes with much more popular Ferraris and Gullwings.

By the looks of it, the Talbot-Lago is no easy thing to drive, but then it is more than 70 years old and based on technology from the 1930s. Author Peter Larsen, who calls himself a “Talboiste” of many years, says the cars are nonetheless real sports cars by the definition of their day, especially the earlier Grand Sports whose wheelbases were almost 8 inches shorter than the later cars. “It is a direct successor to the prewar T150 C-SS and the chassis is virtually identical to the prewar GP cars, with a great old-school 4.5-liter six and that marvelous Wilson preselector,” says Larsen. “The faster a Grand Sport goes, the better it goes. This isn’t a Delahaye, just as a Duesenberg is not a Packard.”

Running hot from all the photography work in the California sun, Regalia’s car signaled that it was time to call it a day. He’s owned more usable cars, including a 1972 Ferrari Daytona that he bought decades ago and is currently restoring in his garage. But he’s utterly smitten by this obscure sliver of French artisanal carmaking and the story of its suave and wily chieftain, who deserves to be mentioned with Ettore Bugatti and Enzo Ferrari in the ranks of the industry’s driven visionaries.

Even as the company was dying, “a Talbot-Lago finished 1-2 at Le Mans in 1950,” Regalia notes. “This is basically the same chassis with a custom coachbuilt body on it. In the collector car world, that’s as good as it gets.”

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One of Toyota’s top U.S. execs, Jack Hollis, told the trade rag Automotive News recently that the company has “continued to look” at the small-truck segment, acknowledging that Toyota has “continued to look for a long time” even while others have acted. The Ford Maverick and Hyundai Santa Cruz are two new entries in a once-sleepy corner of the market, and together they racked up over 50,000 sales in the first six months of 2022. Meanwhile, Toyota and Nissan, which practically invented the compact pickup in the 1970s and forged empires from their popularity in the ’80s and ’90s, seem to be dozing.

Those who look fondly on the truly compact pickups of yore, the Hardbodies and Hiluxes and LUVs, have suffered through a long drought. After Ford killed off the Ranger in 2012, the segment went into hibernation. Its main entries, the U.S.-built Toyota Tacoma and Nissan Frontier, were left to molder from lack of competition, even as small-truck production soared overseas—especially in Thailand, where several automakers build new compact pickups for foreign markets (the U.S. is walled off from these by a 25 percent tariff on pickups).

The Ranger returned in 2019 to join the Chevy Colorado/GMC Canyon as “mid-sizers,” while the 2022 Frontier is all-new and the Tacoma finally gets an overhaul for 2024. Hollis promises that it won’t grow, but nor will it shrink to anything approaching what many consider to be peak Tacoma, those of the late ’90s and early 2000s. Those trucks, very hot items today in the resale market, were nearly a foot shorter, about 8 inches narrower, and roughly a thousand pounds lighter than the current Tacoma. Anybody wanting a pickup with that degree of garageability (and fuel economy) has only the Maverick or Santa Cruz as options. And those are not the body-on-frame workhorses of olden days but effectively four-door, car-based, crossover SUVs with exposed cargo areas.

Why can’t we have new little trucks? One answer: the corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) standard. It has several inputs to its complex calculation, including sales of a particular model as well as the model’s footprint. When the formulas were rewritten in a 2008 revamp of CAFE, domestic automakers argued that they were unfairly penalized because their product mix tended toward large trucks (which are safer, they noted), especially the kinds of essential work trucks favored by the heartland. The argument, however patriotic, disguised a growing truth in 2008: Trucks were increasingly purchased as family vehicles. Nonetheless, light trucks and especially the higher footprint classes were let off the hook with lower fuel economy standards.

Seeing a loophole, automakers rushed to redesign more products to meet the incredibly broad definition of “light truck” specified in Title 49 of the Code of Federal Regulations. Today, vehicles ranging from the wee Honda HR-V to the Subaru Outback to traditional pickups like the F-150 are all classified as light trucks, the sales of which have consequently swelled to three-quarters of the U.S. light vehicle market.

The footprint rule endures, effectively discouraging carmakers from building body-on-frame trucks in smaller sizes owing to the cost and difficulty of meeting tougher mileage standards. Being car-based, the lighter Maverick and Santa Cruz (both circa 3800 pounds) skate through with four-cylinder engines and hybrid options. They’ll even tow up to 4000 and 5000 pounds, respectively. But buyers don’t have the kinds of choices in cabs and bed lengths that they once did with compact pickups.

Lovers of small trucks must pin their hopes on hybridization and electrification, two technologies that would make it easier for brands to reenter the segment. However, the prices of such trucks likely wouldn’t land far enough under those of full-size trucks to prevent most buyers from just stepping up to a larger offering. In the future, if you can even get a small pickup, you’ll have to pay through the nose for it.

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

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If you’ve ever thought it would be fun to tour Europe in a red-blooded slab of Detroit iron, plenty of Brits think so too. Classic American cars are highly collectible in both Britain and mainland Europe despite the continent’s narrow roads, limited parking, and $7-a-gallon fuel. Thus, the turnout of Americana was heavy at Britain’s annual Goodwood Revival vintage car meet and nostalgia fest, with Yank tanks of all eras, shapes, and (mostly large) sizes represented in the parking lot, on the track, and in support roles, the latter including a fleet of World War II Willys and Ford jeeps that shuttled spectators around the periphery of the track.

Here are our 10 (15, 12, 18?) picks of the best cars to represent the stars and stripes at Goodwood:

This 1973 Cadillac sedan was a whale among minnows:

No car show is “proper” without at least one screaming chicken. There were several at Goodwood, this early red T/A the best of them all:

This 383 Coronet must scare small children as it thunders through the rural villages of Britain:

This Belgium-registered late square-body Caprice no doubt turns heads while on the holiday road to Disneyland Paris:

Racing for pinks would be easier in a Camaro SS if your competition was a Mini or Morris Minor:

Whale among the minnows, Part 2: A ’67 Ford Galaxie 500 XL claims a wide berth.

A 1960 Buick is the perfect car to go for fins and chips.

Can’t outrun the law, even in England, as this Plymouth Fury police cruiser proves:

A 1958 Chevy with a continental kit, in case you, you know, go to the Continent:

In England, a Ford Falcon drag racer and a ’53 Cadillac are equally unusual:

A Stingray surrounded by Jags. Who’s outnumbered now?

A 1940 Ford V-8 looks happy in the September sun of southern England:

A Bullet and a Square Bird came together to Goodwood:

The wicker stenciling on this Plymouth classes it right up:

What the Brits call “wing mirrors” looks a bit odd on this wide-track Pontiac:

When this huge ’65 Mercury Montclair rolled up, onlookers were snickering at how big and heavy it is. We noted that nobody in England complained about the size and weight of the Shermans:

A ’49 Cadillac is all class on the grass.

This old Ford has become the carriage for a hobbit’s hideaway:

A ’57 Bel Air says farewell to the Queen, who died a week before Goodwood:

Captain America’s car in the land of the Britons: a ’64 Ford F100.

Lead sleds like this ’49 Merc aren’t a common sight in Olde Blighty:

One of several Stingrays racing at Goodwood roared the sounds of freedom at the crowd from their sidepipes:

Infield Willys and Ford jeeps reminded everyone of America’s contributions during the war:

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The blue and white 1965* Plymouth Barracuda on the grid at this year’s Goodwood Revival blatted out Talladega riffs from its side-pipes and looked as menacing as any car possibly can while sitting in the second-to-last starting spot. At the wheel was The Blackadder himself, Rowan Atkinson, perhaps best known to Americans as the ridiculous Mr. Bean, while hidden inside the rear brake drum was a kluge that I helped install to try to get the car through the race without its rear brakes failing. Did Atkinson know that he was about to trust his life to a borrowed throttle return spring, some aircraft safety wire, and the ring off a delivery van keychain? Mmm … don’t think so.

Sometimes you get pulled into things. Or, in my case, you stand around long enough trying not to look like a complete idiot that you fall into things. I stood around Duncan Pittaway’s Barracuda as Subaru’s guest at this year’s Goodwood Revival, the famous British race meet and vintage dress-up gala, so long that eventually I sort of became part of the crew.

I had known Pittaway exactly four days, having earlier stopped in at his shop in Bristol, England where he keeps the Barracuda as well as numerous other old cars, the most famous of which is the Beast of Turin. It’s a flame-spitting 1910 Fiat land-speed-record car with a 28-liter four-cylinder that has connecting rods the size of sledgehammers. The 120-mph car is YouTube-famous, and I was there to (hopefully) get a ride and a story. But Pittaway was too busy trying to prep the Barracuda for Goodwood and his star co-driver, Atkinson, that he had no time for flame-spitting, so that story will have to wait.

I liked Pittaway instantly. He came out of his shop with grease on his arms and a tie around his neck. He said his grandfather told him never to leave the house without one on and he’s always followed that rule. Anybody who wears a necktie in his shop has my admiration. Pittaway is also hysterically droll, like when he says to a fellow he’s known for ten minutes, “You know, you’re a lot nicer than everybody says.”

He wasn’t hard to track down at the Revival. Amid all the 1940s frocks and fedoras and mustachioed men wearing RAF group captain uniforms, both the Barracuda and Pittaway, dressed in a white suit covered ankle-to-shoulders in STP logos (a nod to the late, great Andy Granatelli) were like an In-N-Out burger planted in the center of London’s Barkly Square. I told Pittaway that, as an American, the Granatelli getup straight-up put a lump in my throat. He said I was the only person so far who had gotten the reference. Then he invited me to have a cup of tea, and that’s it. I just stood around the Barracuda for the next couple of days trying to be useful.

Mainly I helped push the car around, and I carried tools to the pit wall. I also cleaned out a lot of dirty teacups. After Atkinson drove the Cuda on the event’s first day, he reported transmission noise and soft brakes. It was decided the transmission was probably fine, so attention turned to the brakes. Pittaway’s longtime friend, Jon Payne, who joined McLaren in the 1990s as a composites specialist while it was still building the famous F1 road car, was the Barracuda’s sole mechanic, and I became his semi-able assistant.

With the drums disassembled, one thing became obvious. The shoe linings were worn down to paper in places. Pittaway Racing, which (I don’t think he’ll mind me saying) will never be confused with Team Red Bull, had accidentally left the spare brake shoes in Bristol. So the issue became how to get the rear brakes through the weekend.

Another related problem was that of the three factory brake-return springs fitted to the Mopar’s drums, the lower spring on one side had been replaced at some point. It was a spindly little spring, possibly off a Morris Minor, and it looked totally inadequate for the big Cuda’s shoes. Thus, they likely weren’t retracting from the drums fully when the brake pedal was released, which may help explain why the pads were down to almost nothing.

A couple of guys in our class were racing big Ford Galaxie 500s, but they had no spare springs from which we could fashion a substitute. Though any NAPA in America probably has them or something like them, Mopar drum-brake springs from the 1960s are a rather hard thing to come by in southern England. Payne and I began to walk the paddock, and we didn’t get far before he spotted someone he knew, a crewman for a team running a 1965 Lola-Chevorlet T70. That gentleman produced two stout throttle-return springs from his box, and we went with those.

The springs had double-rolled loops at the end, meaning you attach them the same way you attach a key to a keyring: by lifting one end of the wire with your fingernail and sliding the thing you want to attach around in circles until its joined. That wouldn’t work for fitting it to the Mopar’s brake shoe. So Payne came up with the idea of using a steel key ring off the rather bulky and many-ringed keychain for his Mercedes van as the attachment point for the shoe. At the other end, he would safety-wire the spring to the opposite shoe, thus making it possible to draw tension on the spring once the shoes were fitted up by pulling on the wire and twisting it.

I have to say, it looked pretty good as we wiped the brake soot off our hands.

Atkinson was next up to drive. Okay, so, maybe his life wasn’t exactly in danger, but a worst-case scenario could be imagined where a chunk of the lining failed and then swirled around inside the drum to shear off what remained of the other brake lining just at a critical moment, causing the Barracuda to pinwheel off the track. I’ve seen drum brakes fail that way, though in that case the car didn’t crash, it just started making a hideous metal-on-metal noise from the back. We tried not to think about that possibility as the Atkinson roared off the line.

As it happened, the Cuda ran fine though it was slow. The mildly worked 318 V-8 just didn’t have enough ponies to overcome the Plymouth’s weight and its wind-scooping profile against the quicker and lighter Alfas and Ford Cortinas in the class. Atkinson, a Goodwood veteran, finished pretty much where he started, in the back. But over tea and with a huge crowd gathered around the Cuda pining for photos and autographs (Mr. Bean is obviously a much bigger deal in Britain than America), he pronounced the car fine and fun. He had a good time. 

Atkinson then turned to Pittaway and whispered, “Who’s that foreign chap?”

*Goodwood’s documentation, and feedback from the owner and pit crew suggested this Barracuda is a 1965 model, but an eagle-eyed reader noticed the 1966-specific front end and rear taillights that suggest otherwise. 

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Henry Ford introduced the rolling assembly line in 1913 and brought automobile ownership within reach of the masses. He also put in motion the eventual decline of coachbuilding, a trade that is thought to date back to the Romans and which produced some of the most spectacular automobiles of the 20th century. Coachbuilders delivered a few handmade bolides produced by irreplaceable craftsmen using ancient tools and techniques, while mass production harnessed unskilled labor and mechanized automation to deliver millions of identical vehicles at an affordable price. One form of production flourished while the other diminished until, in the postwar period, it was practiced by only a few specialized design houses—and most of those are gone today. But has coachbuilding died out completely?

No. Thanks to new technologies and materials, plus an innate aversion by people of means toward commonplace consumer goods, coachbuilding has never really gone away. Today, the art of coachbuilding fuses cues from traditional hot-rodding, new-car customization, and old-car restoration. No surprise: Many of the skills and techniques for those various disciplines overlap. What fans of hot rods, customized new cars, and restored classics all have in common is the desire to own a car that is completely singular and not made on an assembly line.

“There’s something magical about things that are made by hand, whether it’s a leather handbag or a boat or a piece of pottery or a car,” says Steve Moal, whose family has been in the coachbuilding business for more than a century and who runs Moal Coachbuilders in Oakland, California. “Handmade things are not plentiful these days.”

Moal’s customers tend to be looking for one-off vehicles that evoke the past but are not replicas. For example, in 2012, Moal completed the Gatto, a Ferrari-powered coupe built from scratch that conjures—but does not copy—the 1950s work of Italian masters such as Zagato, Touring, and Pininfarina. Another current project in Moal’s shop is a tube-frame, aluminum-bodied roadster with the powertrain from an Aston Martin DB4. The owners, rabid Aston collectors, “just wanted their own Aston Martin-ish car that was completely unique. Nobody is trying to fool anybody—it’s not a real Aston. They’re just trying to pick up the spirit of the period,” Moal tells us.

In another arena of modern coachbuilding, designers try to merge classic themes with 21st-century standards of technology, performance, and safety. “It will never be as free as the 1930s,” says freelance automobile designer Niels van Roij, who in 2016 was commissioned to create a one-off wagon version of a Tesla Model S, a project that led van Roij to make custom coachbuilding his full-time job. “We can’t possibly develop a whole car; it would never be at the level of an OEM. But there is still a lot we can do.”

Van Roij’s “Breadvan Hommage” (pictured below) is just the sort of mad, nerdy fever dream that makes you both smile in amusement and nod in respect. You can’t believe somebody would be crazy enough to build a modern-day tribute to one of the oddest cars ever to turn a wheel in competition, and yet you love that somebody pulled it off. “In all honesty, the original car wasn’t a very good piece of design,” says van Roij of the original 1961 Ferrari 250 GT Breadvan. “They did it in a hurry.” But as an expression of one person’s obsession with Ferrari’s lesser-known history, the Breadvan Hommage is a perfect example of the unexpected directions that modern coachbuilding can take you.

Thanks to safety and emissions rules, you can’t walk into an automobile showroom, as you might in the industry’s golden years, and buy a naked chassis ready for a unique body from your favorite carrozzeria. But you can still commission a vehicle today that is entirely your own. That is, provided you’re willing to pay a lot, wait a long time, and make a million decisions about shapes and colors and materials.

“I once had a customer who squirted out a pack of Colman’s mustard and said, ‘Make that color,’” says Tim Gregorio, senior director of product experience for Singer Vehicle Design, which restores old Porsches with a highly contemporary flair. “What shocks me isn’t the number of people who go into this overwhelmed by the choices, but the number of people who know exactly what they want.”

Today’s coachbuilders stand on the shoulders of the giants who first recognized that the invention of the automobile could be a boon to the carriage-making industry that flourished at the end of the 19th century. Car buyers were no different from the buyers of horse-drawn barouches, landaus, and cabriolets, said Arthur F. Mulliner of the famous Mulliner coachbuilding family. Addressing the Institute of British Carriage Manufacturers in 1907, he said that “the purchaser of the motor carriage purchases because the carriage work meets his requirements or taste, and it is therefore the carriage work that sells the car.”

The interwar period of the 1920s and ’30s was the heyday of coachbuilding, mainly at the upper echelons of the market where the buyers of Duesenbergs, Bentleys, Bugattis, and other exotic marques could order bespoke bodies from separate firms. Their names echoed those of any fine clothier at the time: the Walter M. Murphy Co., J. Gurney Nutting & Co., Carrosserie Gangloff, and Figoni & Falaschi Carrossiers, among the many that hammered the metal that graces the cars that today populate the major concours. It’s said that the level of opulence (plus the simplicity of the engineering at the time) was such that some owners had both summer and winter bodies for the same car.

Social upheaval in the Depression and the subsequent world war ended many of these firms, while the auto industry that emerged from the era was leaner and more focused on volume through line production. Still, the coachwork industry thrived for a time, especially in Italy, where ancient metal-working skills were still nurtured and where design has always trumped most other considerations in manufactured goods. “It is in my country’s nature to have specialists,” Sergio Pininfarina once told a reporter. “Our people are artisans. We take pride in our work and perhaps we also know something about form and function.”

Through the 1950s and early ’60s, famous design houses such as Pininfarina, Bertone, Touring, Boano, and Zagato continued to sculpt fabulous creations for discerning buyers who craved exclusivity. However, the business was changing fundamentally. To survive, the coachbuilders turned from catering to individuals to catering to automakers, competing to build the high-profile, low-production models that larger companies were either too busy or too focused on volume to produce themselves. The business became less about individual taste and more about pleasing corporate clients and their committees of designers, engineers, and bean-counters. “I’ve known car builders from all over the world,” commented Nuccio Bertone to the author of a book about his company. “And every man jack of them had his own opinion.” (The only exception, Bertone noted, was Ferruccio Lamborghini. According to Bertone, “He said, ‘I’ll make the mechanical bits, you see to the body. The Bertones of this world don’t need my ideas.’”)

But the blazing meteor that took out most of these remaining firms was the increasing regulation that in the 1970s drastically drove up the costs of developing new cars. Over time, the industry responded through model consolidation, producing fewer specialty vehicles; in the 2000s, design work was pulled almost entirely in-house. Even Ferrari ended its nearly 70-year relationship with Pininfarina in 2017 when it cut the front-engine F12, the last production Ferrari to wear a Pininfarina badge. It was part of the decimation of the independent Italian coachbuilding industry. Pininfarina was purchased by India’s Mahindra Group and now lives on as a design consultancy. Bertone went bankrupt in 2014 and folded, its name sold to an architectural firm in Milan. Zagato has evaded death only by becoming an independent design house working on everything from commuter trains to agricultural harvesters while still producing the occasional dream car and rebodied Aston Martin.

Today, what is left of the coachbuilding trade is a tiny cottage industry largely dedicated to building retro cars from scratch or reshaping existing mass-production vehicles into one-off creations that express their owner’s personality and aesthetic. Commissioning one lands somewhere between ordering a tailored suit and building a custom house in terms of cost, personalization, and buyer involvement. Projects typically take from a year to 18 months (though Moal has done projects stretching to five years), they usually cost double but often triple the original purchase price of the car, and they require the designer and customer to practically get married. “The client needs to be willing to invest not just the funds but the time,” says van Roij, whose portfolio includes the design for a Rolls-Royce Wraith shooting brake called the Silver Spectre (seven will be made), and a modern two-door Range Rover dubbed the Adventum Coupe that evokes the configuration of the 1970s original.

“I visit the client at home to see their art, what their musical tastes are, and what’s in their garage,” says van Roij. “I know their wives, I know their children, I know the name of their dog.” In return for all this openness, he adds, the client gets back a car that expresses his or her individualism in a way no mass-produced car could ever do, no matter how the option boxes are checked at the dealership. When van Roij worked on converting the Tesla Model S into a wagon, for example, the factory green was abandoned, he says, for a green that was more vibrant and complimentary of the new shape—and which also came from the logo of the client’s company. “That’s what coachbuilding is about,” says van Roij. “The rest of the world sees a green car and [the owner] sees his company that he built.”

Similarly, the Breadvan Hommage completed last year expresses a reverence for Ferrari history while also taking liberties to produce a car with a more curated and harmonious shape than the original. That’s partly because van Roij isn’t interested in producing exact copies, and partly because the original, a used 1961 Ferrari 250 GT SWB modified by privateer racer Count Giovanni Volpi as an aerodynamic experiment, was not especially pretty, van Roij says. “They didn’t call it the Breadvan because they liked it.”

However, a Ferrari enthusiast in Germany was keen to create a car that evoked Volpi’s strange machine (born out of a spat that Volpi was having with Enzo Ferrari, who refused to sell Volpi a new GTO). Sketches were made, followed by an expensive full-size clay model—a step not many builders take but which van Roij insists upon for any commission as he believes it’s the best way to visualize and perfect the design before metal is cut. Certain hard points of the manual-transmission Ferrari 550 Maranello coupe on which the Hommage is based were preserved to retain the modern usability as well as to hold down costs. “If you change a door by 2 centimeters, it can cost $20,000. You have to change the glass, the rubber, all the sensors. The amount of engineering is huge.” The result shows a modern reshaping of the original’s numerous vents and ducts as well as a rethinking of its Kammback rear—though, in the end, after trying different rakes to the tail, van Roij and his customer agreed to adhere to the original’s perfectly vertical rear end. It’s the only part of the nuovo Breadvan that matches the 1961 car line for line.

The techniques used to make the Breadvan as well as most coachbuilt cars today are Old World—and painstaking. Steve Moal’s craftsmen work mainly in aluminum for its vintage appeal and light weight, but it’s a demanding metal that requires knowledge and experience to get right. “Where you put the seams is important, so it doesn’t fatigue and crack,” he says, adding that old-school oxyacetylene welding is employed because the finished weld is more malleable and less prone to cracking. “When you’re finished, it’s beautiful, but it isn’t always beautiful along the way.” Still, Moal’s clients tend to like some imperfections in their cars, the hammer marks and other evidence of handwork, at least underneath. “We have a sports car here that is finished in gloss black and it’s perfect, but we have not painted the inside panels, because the owner wants to see what I like to call the signature, or the fingerprints, of the craftsman.”

At Singer, which is based in Southern California and has delivered fewer than 160 cars over its 13 years of operation, the goal is to fully preserve the 1989–94 Porsche 911 (aka 964) that the company uses for donor cars but with a thoroughly contemporary updating in both performance and styling. Incoming cars go through a 4000-hour transformation in which they are stripped down to the bare metal, repaired from years of road use, altered as needed for new components (for example, the company replaces all of the factory hinges with milled aluminum ones of its own design) and to clean up unnecessary brackets and reshape less-than-lovely factory welds and edges. The car is then fitted with carbon-fiber body components before heading for paint and interior trim.

While more of a restoration shop than a coachbuilder, Singer nonetheless shows what is possible—as well as what is challenging—in using new materials such as carbon-fiber composite. Every exterior panel on a Singer project except for the doors is either remade in carbon fiber or skinned in carbon fiber, says Gregorio, the components sourced as a kit from a local aerospace supplier. The material has advantages in weight and durability but also requires new techniques. Unlike the aluminum and steel that skilled craftsmen shape with press brakes, English wheels, and hammers, carbon fiber is molded to its final form.

“You can’t shape it after the fact or just push it a bit to fit; you get what you get, which is why you need to maintain a very good relationship with your carbon supplier,” says Gregorio. A worker trying to achieve Singer’s tolerance goals of a half-millimeter can’t even grind carbon fiber if the piece is slightly oversized. “Once you grind it, you can’t put it back like you might tack a weld onto metal,” he says. “You approach it with a very light hand.”

During the month or so that the car spends in Singer’s body shop, the new body panels will go on and off the car six or seven times as the company’s technicians perfect the fit. Particularly nerve-racking is a carbon-fiber skin that is bonded to the factory’s original steel rear quarter panel, which can’t be replaced entirely with carbon because it’s a load-bearing part of the car’s monocoque shell. The huge composite piece that Singer applies stretches from the aft doorjamb to the rear bumper and is bonded with an adhesive that allows workers to adjust it for up to 30 minutes, though if it’s hot in the shop, that lessens the cure time. “You only get one shot at it,” says Gregorio. “If you have to remove it, it would require major surgery.”

Today, coachbuilders are hemmed in by constraints that would have been unimaginable to their early predecessors, ranging from new materials to regulatory prohibitions to trademark issues. In the past, Ferrari has attempted to use trademark protection to insulate its designs from modification or copying. And owners of the trademark for the modified 1967 Mustang known as “Eleanor” from the 2000 film, Gone in 60 Seconds, have sued to stop unlicensed copies.

Is it even legal to modify a current production car for your own purposes? Singer makes it very clear that they “restore” cars, not “build” them, the semantic dance done to keep the company free of legal entanglements. James Glickenhaus, the New York–area collector, racer, coachbuilding customer, and now full-time carmaker, notes that it is one thing to modify a one-off car for a private customer; quite another to make a business out of it. Basically, “you have to talk to your lawyer,” he cautions, adding that Ferrari allows customers to modify a new car and leave the Prancing Horse on it, but doesn’t allow any changes to the windshield or any of the side glass. The Maranello firm will bless factory-modified cars, as it did so often for the Sultan of Brunei, who was famous for his stable of bizarre, one-off Cavallinos, but the fee runs into the millions.

Glickenhaus started creating his own cars in 2006 when he built the Ferrari P4/5 as a tribute to his favorite 1960s-era prototype sports racers. “Having driven every type of exotic car of the past 50 years, I know a few things about them,” he says. The donor car was a brand-new Ferrari Enzo that was heavily modified, the design and fabrication work done by Pininfarina. The ultimate product was a stunning machine that looked both backward at the company’s racing history and also forward toward the future, but the price was equally dizzying. Just tooling up a set of bespoke tail-lights for the P4/5 that were DOT compliant cost $250,000, Glickenhaus says.

Since then, he has branched out with new designs for supercars, including the sexy mid-engine, three-seat, manual-transmission wedge called the SCG 004, as well as an off-road buggy called the Boot, a tribute to the Baja Boot that Steve McQueen raced in the Baja 1000 in 1969 (Glickenhaus owns the original). But Glickenhaus has moved beyond being a mere client or coachbuilder; he will make new cars from the ground up at his facilities in Danbury, Connecticut, and Pont-Saint-Martin, Italy, north of Turin.

Jumping from coachbuilding or resto-rodding to full-blown carmaker producing legally certified vehicles is not a move for the faint of heart. “To start a small car company, it’s $100 million to start,” says Glickenhaus, and “if you make a car nobody wants to buy, then you might as well take that money and sink it in the East River.” Still, he notes, a run of a few hundred cars (with the first deliveries of the 004 and Boot expected this year) should make the business profitable, assuming he’s gauged the market right.

Most people wanting a unique car do not want to be automakers. For them, hiring a coachbuilding firm to alter an existing car will be enough of an exposure to the stresses and challenges of carmaking. And for the effort, they will not only own a unique automobile, they will get to delve into that curious area where art and machinery merge. For the job of the coachbuilder, Nuccio Bertone once mused to a journalist, is “the realization of a dream which is present in us all but which only the artist has the ability to translate into concrete form.”

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Walter Owen Bentley was well into retirement in the 1950s when members of the Bentley Drivers Club started rallying to his cottage in Surrey, just southwest of London. Unlike some of the other hard-nosed auto chiefs who etched their names into the prows of their own fabulously expensive creations, Bentley was apparently as much a sentimentalist as he was a business failure. He appreciated the visits and was not opposed to celebrating the old days while posing in a driver’s seat for a snap. There’s a photo of him, a slim and balding elder in a raincoat, sitting in his first production car, a 1921 3 Litre, which bore the winged badge of the company he founded when he was 31. “As the last booming Bentley exhaust note faded away,” W.O. wrote in his memoir, published in 1958, “I felt it had all been worthwhile.”

Worthwhile indeed, for his Bentleys have not faded away and are still booming around the world as owners continue to operate those first cars to wear the flying B. A subsidiary of the Volkswagen Group continues to build new Bentleys (and even a few re-created old Bentleys) at the former Rolls-Royce plant in Crewe in northern England, but it is the earliest cars that concern us here. These are the so-called “W.O.s,” produced from 1921 to 1931 at Bentley’s original Cricklewood factory in northwest London. And particularly of interest are the owners who drive them to a degree barely matched by any group of vehicles that can claim its youngest member is 90 years old.

“I’m probably one of the only guys who polishes his Bentley,” says Craig Ekberg, the Southern California owner of a 1928 4 ½ Litre with a reproduction Le Mans body as well as the organizer of several Bentley rallies. “Most of them are left filthy because they’re driven so much.” Of course, the international Bugatti clubs can pull together a sizable group on occasion, and rallies of old Ferraris often snarl traffic for miles. Although W.O.s are smaller in number—only 3034 cars were built at Cricklewood and not all of them survived—their owners seem to enjoy flogging their cantankerous machines, with their suggestive brakes and antediluvian crash-box transmissions, to a degree that is exceptional in the classic car world.

“I’ve driven faster cars and cars with better chassis,” says Paul Lee, a Brit based in Los Angeles who regularly runs errands in his 1923 3 Litre TT Replica. “But this is the most beguiling car I own. They are from the booming 1920s, and you can sense in these cars that sort of optimism and boundless ambition of the times.”

No doubt. The appeal of a Bentley rests partly in that association with the golden age of la belle vie. The company’s annals have now grown to a full century, but they are the richest in the earliest years, during the era of “The Bentley Boys,” the wealthy amateurs who raced for Bentley and lived and played as hard as they drove. Among them, Jack Barclay, the Brooklands racer and car salesman whose Bentley dealership still stands in west London’s Mayfair district; Sir Henry Ralph Stanley “Tim” Birkin, the northern England scion of a fabric lace empire who stuck superchargers on his racing Bentleys, much to W.O.’s dismay; and Captain Woolf “Babe” Barnato, the son of a South African gold and diamond baron who loved Bentleys so much that he shoveled in more than £100,000 of his inheritance in a vain effort to keep Bentley independent. Indeed, not all the Bentley Boys were boys; wealthy heiress Dorothy Wyndham Paget, a descendant of cotton-gin inventor Eli Whitney, was a racing patron and Birkin’s bankroller.

Their stories are ridiculously romantic. There was Barnato pounding through the darkness, rain, and fog in his Speed Six to beat the Blue Train back to Calais from the Côte d’Azur. He arrived at the French port with such a lead that he had time to sail the Channel, roar on to London, and be bounding up the steps of the Conservative Club on St. James’s Street as Le Train Bleu was pulling into Calais. There was the 4 ½ Litre the boys nicknamed “Mother Gun” that was leading at Le Mans in 1927 when it was involved in the famous White House Crash that took out Bentley’s entire team plus four other cars. After the crash, the eminent bacteriologist and part-time Bentley Boy, Dudley Benjafield, helped knock back together the slower 3 Litre they called “Old No. 7” and limp it to victory with the brakes failing, the front axle dislocated rearward from the crash, and one headlight smashed. At the riotous celebration back in London, the team stripped off the fenders and just barely squeezed Old No. 7 through the front doors of the Savoy Hotel so that it suddenly appeared in the dining room with its engine roaring and its single working headlight blazing in pirate defiance. Cheers erupted and the Champagne flowed.

Well, who wouldn’t want to be a latter-day Bentley Boy? Sure, there are no continents left to conquer, and the fire marshal will want a word if you try to run a race car through a hotel dining room (the Savoy’s staff couldn’t complain—Mrs. Benjafield’s family owned the place). But threading a line of ancient Bentleys through today’s traffic requires its own kind of bravado and appetite for adventure. And that do-or-die imperative, that pirate spirit, is as pervasive on Bentley tours today as it is integral to the whole Bentley mystique. Just as in the pits of the long-ago “Double Twelve” races at Le Mans, heroic all-nighters sometimes happen in the parking lots of hotels in order to keep what Ettore Bugatti called “le camion plus vite du monde,” the fastest lorries in the world, running to the finish.

“You have to be a little bit handy,” acknowledged Gary Hunter, who owns the 1929 4 ½ Litre Vanden Plas pictured on these pages, “but there is a lot of pride in being able to drive it and drive it well.”

Here, we should take a moment to add to Bentley’s roster of well-known luminaries the name of Gerald Keston Pelmore (the best British names have more than two handles). “Pelmore” was actually “Pfliederer” back in 1915 when Gerald was still a boy, Europe was at war, and the family fled Germany for England, Anglicizing their name on arrival for obvious reasons. He became a professional photographer by trade and a car enthusiast by passion, and, in 1936, he walked the parking lot at the Brooklands circuit leaving cards on the windscreens of the Bentleys. The cards invited those interested in the formation of a new “Bentley Drivers Club” to phone him at Kensington 7020, his number under the old London phone exchanges.

The first summit in March 1936 was so well attended, Pelmore said later, “that it was necessary to telephone The Bolton hotel at 326 Earls Court Road and ask them if they could provide us with a larger room in which to continue the meeting.” The Bolton is still there, and the Bentley Drivers Club has thrived into the 21st century, but Pelmore did not live to see his creation flower. Two days after Christmas in 1941, his Vickers Wellington bomber went down over Düsseldorf, Germany, returning this native son to his home soil in the most tragic of ironies.

By then, Bentley Motors Ltd. was long gone, too—or, at least, W.O.’s original company. To save money, Bentley quit racing in 1930, giving the press the unlikely excuse that “there is little more to learn either in speed or in respect to reliability at the present moment.” Ultimately, however, it succumbed to both the worldwide economic depression and Barnato’s impatience with being bled white. When Bentley’s prodigious debt was called in by the creditors, it all collapsed, and the firm was bought out of receivership by Rolls-Royce in 1931.

For connoisseurs of the original Cricklewood cars, Bentley’s story largely ends there. But the tale of those old W.O.s certainly hasn’t ended. That’s due to the efforts of the Bentley Drivers Club, which hosts worldwide driving tours and connects owners with each other and with parts suppliers. It’s also due to the tireless work of individuals such as Ekberg who organize and plan their own tours. Original Bentleys continue to rack up miles in far-flung locales such as South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand, India, Singapore, Patagonia, and California, not to mention all the kingdoms and republics of Europe.

Ekberg got hooked while on a vintage rally years ago that ran from Seattle down to the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance. “My wife and I were driving this old Packard through the rain, the top is leaking and we’re freezing, and I look over and there was this guy in a Bentley, top down, windscreen down, just out there in the weather, and it stuck in my mind how cool it was.”

Ekberg owned several blue-chip exotics, including a Ferrari F40, before branching out into older, slower, and more esoteric vehicles. After a lengthy search, he ended up buying a nearly identical Bentley to the one he saw, with some of the same unusual features, including Zeiss headlights, the longer hood from the low-volume 6 ½ Litre, and the rare factory belly pan. His tours are all 1000-plus miles, but they promise excellent food, high-class accommodation, and even a private air show (an avid pilot, Ekberg is the leader of a band of amateur fighter jocks called the Tiger Squadron). The Bentley tours typically are full at 25 or so cars—any more makes restaurant and hotel bookings difficult—and they are “more work than you know,” he says. But he insists that they pay back richly in fun and fellowship. “It’s a great group, and everyone has a good time being together and enjoying the cars.”

Thanks to the pandemic, the Bentley social calendar has been exceptionally quiet the past 15 months, but we managed to pull together three local cars from the Los Angeles area for a run and a photo session in the mountains behind glittering, beachside Malibu. Three invitations were issued, and three affirmatives immediately came back. After months of downtime, the modern-day Bentley Boys were clearly ready to exercise their cars again.

Ekberg figures there are a few reasons Bentley owners turn out in such strong numbers. “These cars were very sophisticated for their day. They can go 80 mph on the freeway like nothing, which is unusual for a car of that period.” That makes modern touring necessities such as freeway transits much easier and safer. Additionally, he says, they are built like they were designed by a man who got his start in the railroad business (a young W.O. Bentley apprenticed in the locomotive workshops of the Great Northern Railway in Doncaster, England). “They are pretty tough,” he says.

In their homeland, the big Bentleys—despite their lofty values—are regulars at vintage trialing events, a winter pastime involving climbing mud-slicked forest tracks up sodden hills as the muck slings everywhere. They are also seen at another peculiarly English form of motorsport: stubble racing. In a tradition that is thought to date back to the 1930s, after the fall harvest, racing enthusiasts cut dirt tracks through the field stubble. “The surface is dusty and rutted, rather like the roads would have been when the cars were first built in the 1920s.” So says Nigel Batchelor, who owns three prewar Bentleys and is a past chairman of the Benjafields Racing Club. In addition to organizing stubble races, the club has held 500-mile races, 12- and 24-hour races for classic Bentleys, and, in 2019, a race for 40 cars at the Silverstone Circuit with a Le Mans–style running start.

“People ask why we would subject the cars to this sort of treatment,” says Batchelor. “The answer really lies in that spirit of camaraderie that was the hallmark of the original Bentley Boys in the 1920s. The cars were designed for all conditions and have no problem coping with the bumpy fields.”

You can see why Ekberg’s car is one of the few old Bentleys that gets a regular washing. And why Bentley owners think nothing of driving across Tanzania or China in their cars. Batchelor has rallied his cars in Jordan and Iceland and driven in the Le Mans Classic and at Laguna Seca. Obviously, one reason these cars are so valuable is that they are welcomed at pretty much any event where something cool is happening.

Though Bentley and Rolls-Royce are often equated together (the two companies were conjoined for 67 years), the sportier image Bentley enjoys today has roots in those early years. Compared to contemporary Rolls-Royces—owner Gary Hunter tours in his 1911 and 1923 Ghosts, as well—the W.O. is “the Bugatti Veyron of its day,” he says. The four-cylinder engine in his ’29 4 ½ Litre has an overhead cam actuating four valves per cylinder, four individual ports per cylinder, dual magnetos, and twin spark plugs. Unlike the side-valve six-cylinder Ghost that wafts along smoothly and quietly, the Bentley is feral, a roaring brute built to go fast and do it all night long through the rain and spray at Le Mans.

Not to mention, the Bentley starts a conversation wherever it goes. Says Hunter: “A lot of the cars we have, people go, ‘It’s a what??’” Hunter collects Brass Era antiques and especially early Popes, a largely forgotten though significant name from the earliest days of the automobile. “Nobody knows what a Pope is even though they owned the patent on the automobile and were a very important company,” he says. “But everyone knows what a Bentley is.”

Despite the prestigious badge, these big old Bentleys with their giant headlights, side-slung spare tires, and slightly scruffy appearance come across as friendly and approachable. That matters to owner Paul Lee, who says that for the same money as a 1920s Bentley, “you can drive a modern supercar and everyone will look at you—but they won’t particularly like you. However, you drive up in one of these and people gather around and want to talk to you.”

And Lee echoes the sentiment of other owners in describing the joy of mastering such a demanding car in an age of digital push-button transportation. “There is something way more satisfying about properly changing the gears of a 1920s crash box than going naught to 60 in a few seconds,” he says. “This is like riding a steel horse into battle.”

Indeed, it doesn’t take but a few miles in a car that is older than the Empire State Building to realize that the experience is rather different. The wheel of all W.O.s is on the right, British-style, unless the car was converted. The occupants sit about as high as those in a Chevy Tahoe, and the helm is about the size of a pizza pan to give the driver enough leverage to turn the huge wheels. The short shifter for the non-synchro four-speed is not in the middle of the cockpit but down around your right calf. It takes a practiced finesse to work it smoothly through the gears (owner’s manuals for the early 3 Litre cars advised that “an appreciable pause must be made in neutral in order to get a silent change.”) The foot pedal for the brakes will eventually slow this hurtling 3000-pound ingot of British pride, but experienced drivers keep their right hand at the ready in case they have to reach suddenly for the exterior handbrake that works the rear drums.

That about wraps up the commonalities among the early Bentleys, as every car is otherwise quite different. That is due in part to the fact that although many of the early W.O.s have been converted in later years to sporting coachwork, they all received different bodies at the time from the various coachbuilders that Bentley buyers relied upon, including James Young, H.J. Mulliner, Vanden Plas, and J. Gurney Nutting. There were several different rakes built into the steering column, varying lever lengths and placements, and an endless variety of seats, cockpit controls, headlights, windscreens, dash instruments, fuel tanks, exhaust pipes (fishtail exhausts were on racing cars), and luggage compartments.

“The cars were often custom-fit to the original buyer,” warns Hunter. “For any car you want to buy, it’s very important to sit in it and drive it to make sure that you fit and you can reach the shifter and the handbrake.”

There were several engines that today determine value and desirability, starting with the more common four-cylinder units in the 3 Litre and 4 ½ Litre, and topping out with the much rarer—fewer than 650 made—six-cylinder engines of the 6 ½ Litre and 8 Litre. W.O. showed his fondness for locomotives when he designed the latter sixes with an overhead cam driven by twin reciprocating pushrods, just as the drive wheels of a train engine would be. Besides the top-of-the-line 8 Litre, Bentley’s answer to his arch-nemesis Rolls-Royce, the 4 ½ Litre is the most sought-after, as they were raced with the most success at Le Mans.

Today, many people refer to these old Bentleys universally as “Blowers,” but in fact, only 55 of the original Cricklewood cars were fitted with the Roots-type Amherst Villiers supercharger, five of which were raced but without much success. Famously, W.O. hated supercharging. “To supercharge a Bentley engine was to pervert its design and corrupt its performance,” he grumped later in life.

W.O. Bentley’s story is filled with disappointment, such that upon the publication of his memoir, The Manchester Guardian newspaper commented that “one lays down the book with a feeling of exasperated sadness.” Bentley was in command of his ship for a mere 10 years—actually less, considering that he was forced to make Woolf Barnato director in order to tap Barnato’s cash supply. Bentley was a dreamer and a perfectionist but not an especially astute businessman; the company was deep into the red well before the 1929 Wall Street crash, and the subsequent global depression finally flushed the remaining wreckage of Bentley’s dream into the pocket of Rolls-Royce.

But what a legacy he left for those who want to taste life as a Bentley Boy, who crave a thrilling counterpoint to the bland predictability of the modern era. We can’t go back in time (yet) and experience the gilded, unfettered age these cars were born into. But a lucky few can drive the exact machines that the boys drove. And thanks to a plethora of tour choices, they can do so in the manner in which the cars were engineered to be used. The original Bentley Motors was the brightest of lights that burned for the briefest of moments. But surely, as W.O. observed himself—and his latter-day acolytes would undoubtedly agree—it was all worth it.

This feature originally ran in the Hagerty print magazine RADIUS, a perk of one of our exclusive member programs.

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If you’re able to stroke a check for $2 million, an Italian couturier with nearly a century of design hits will build you a svelte, graceful, and opulent two-seat sex wedge with almost 2000 horsepower. Its acceleration, quoted as “less than 2.0 seconds” to 60, will be dangerous to cardiac patients and send major organs yo-yoing on their strings. Wherever one of the 150 planned copies goes, there will be curiosity, questions, and admiration. And once again there will be proof that the world never stops running out of good reasons to be rich.

You remember the Pininfarina badge from your favorite Ferraris of yore. Founding father Battista “Pinin” Farina formed his illustrious carrozzeria in 1930 and got down to business with Ferrari starting in the early ‘50s. Well, the glory days of independent Italian design houses is well past—Ferrari stopped putting Pininfarina badges on its cars with the 2012-2017 F12—and those that survive are now scrambling for a buck doing whatever consulting and design work they can lay hands to.

As of 2015 a subsidiary of the Indian industrial conglomerate Mahindra, Pininfarina spun off a separate company in 2018, Automobili Pininfarina, based in Munich (and also primarily owned by Mahindra). The mission is to build and sell cars bearing the Pininfarina badge right on the nose, rather than down at the sides where bodymakers traditionally get their stamp. The move into whole-car production is seen as the final fulfillment of Pininfarina’s original vision. “Battista always wanted to make his own cars,” says Automobili Pininfarina chief design officer Dave Amantea. “He was once offered a job to head design at Ford, and he turned them down to pursue his dream.”

However, Battista, for whom the new car is named, never quite got that far, spending his years bejeweling the showrooms of other automakers. And these days it’s no small trick to produce a reliable and legally compliant car. For one thing, it pretty much has to be electric; that is the way the whole automotive industry, and especially the hypercar niche, is headed. Unless you’re Gordon Murray and then you can do whatever the hell you want. But the V-12-powered, manual-transmission T.50 aside, it’s now obvious to everyone that electrics will drop-kick any internal-combustion car into next week on acceleration, and let’s be honest, hypercars are all about the fast.

This one may even sell out fast. Pininfarina says its nine dealers in the U.S. and Canada have already packed the order book. The first five retro-themed blue-and-white Annversario cars are taken, and interested parties are encouraged to “be quick if you want one,” as the whole 150-car run is expected to be done by 2024.

To get a car out so quickly after the company was formed, Automobili Pininfarina inked a co-development deal with Croatia-based Rimac, the electric supercar startup that last year embarked on a joint venture with Volkswagen and Porsche AG to take over the Bugatti brand. Despite the pandemic, the war in Ukraine, and all the other upheaval since, the two companies, Rimac and Pininfarina, have produced effectively one car in two versions.

The similarly expensive (and heavy, at over 5000 pounds) Rimac Nevera and the Pininfarina Battista start in Croatia as a common chassis with a carbon-fiber tub, T-shaped 120 kW/hour battery said to be good for 300 miles, four-motor torque-vectoring drivetrain, and electrical architecture. From there they diverge, embryonic Battistas heading to Pininfarina’s operation in Cambiano, near Turin, for the company’s special slathering of opulence, Italiano-style. Customers are invited to come to Cambiano and personally customize their Battistas with help from the firm’s designers, creating their own interior and exterior color combinations, materials, engravings, and appointments. Amantea figures there are 128 million possible combinations, meaning no two of the 150 cars will be alike unless it’s done on purpose.

Pininfarina furnished us to drive for a few hours in the car pictured here and painted a shade of opalescent green it calls “verde paradiso.” The color is “inspired by the color of Lake Como,” according to the car’s chief production and engineering officer, Paolo Dellacha. The shape, which includes a rear wing that deploys at speed to augment the car’s downforce-producing aero, is a touch generic. At a quick glance it reads like any one of several mid-engine pop-rockets that you can buy from Ferrari or McLaren. Which feels like a missed opportunity considering the car bears prominently the name of an illustrious carrozzeria that designed everything from pre-war Lancia stunners to the Ferrari Modulo. No doubt the firm’s hands were tied somewhat by its relationship with Rimac and the need for common hardpoints.

The Battista’s cockpit shows more adventuresome thinking with its brace of info screens and machine-milled rotary knobs for the PRNDL and drive-mode selection. As you would expect, the detailing is exquisite, down to the orderly herringbone pattern of the naked carbon fiber and the unusual stitch patterns in the chairs (if you don’t like them, opt for something else). Entering and exiting is fairly easy; the door swings up and out on a wide arc revealing a relatively slender sill to slide over.

Once ensconced, however, the visibility to the rear quarters is virtually non-existent. (Surprising, given there is no engine and associated plumbing behind you to cloud the view.) Backup and surround-view cameras, which were non-functional on the prototype we drove, will be vital tools to preserving the paint job. There is a small cargo area in back; opting for Pininfarin’as bespoke luggage is essential, as it will drop in more neatly than your battered American Tourister.

The four UK-sourced permanent-magnet AC electric motors deliver a combined 1726 pound-feet of torque, but each turn a wheel separately. That offers virtually unlimited fore-aft and side-to-side torque adjustment as well as torque vectoring and, ideally, ultra-refined stability management. Want to go sideways, but only just so much? Or horribly overcook a corner but still stick the apex? This system should be able to do it at the push of a button. Welcome to the future, where everyone is a robot-assisted Fangio.

The driver can select a flavor of power delivery, as well as steering and dampener stiffness, from one of five modes with increasing levels of spiciness. There’s Calma (calm), Pura (pure), Energica (energetic), Furiosa (just guess), and Caratterre (character). The latter offers individual settings for the stability control, steering heft, and damper stiffness as well as noise. There’s both an interior and exterior sound system, the former to provide the driver some aural feedback—sound, the engineers feel, is a sense that is important, even necessary, in driving—and the exterior to warn pedestrians and give the car a curbside personality. Kneel down by the bumper and you’ll hear hidden speakers pulsating at “idle,” emitting a combination of simulated turbine whoosh and a rhythmic thump-thumping that the designers liken to the beating heart of an animal. A finely-tuned exhaust sound has been a trademark characteristic of hypercars, and so will it be in the future, albeit with speakers and custom programming.

The Battista defaults to Pura on startup and that’s a fine mode to do most of your driving in, though the regen is still fairly aggressive and one-pedal driving is possible. If you need to stab the brake, 15.4-inch Brembo carbon-ceramic discs are at the pedal’s command, waiting patiently for those pull-downs from 200 mph that will come but rarely in a Battista’s life. Most of the time they’ll be four stone-cold plates in city traffic as the motors efficiently eat up the car’s kinetic energy and convert it to juice for the pack.

The car has plenty of road-hugging weight, as they used to say, but in typical EV fashion it’s relatively low in the car, acting as more of a keel than a pendulum against excessive roll. Thus, despite the extra 1500 or so pounds over a comparable McLaren, the Battista eats a twisty road with reactive steering responses and plenty of grip, the suspension controlling the motions of all that avoirdupois with commendable restraint. Any deeper investigation of the promised torque-vectoring capability would have required some track time; if it was working, it was mostly transparent to the driver.

We found the car’s controls overly assisted and the steering remote. Not much feedback comes up the column and it’s easy to overcorrect in the normal course of trying to keep the car between the lines. On a particularly tight and gnarly stretch of canyon road, we switched into Furiosa and felt the front end go completely light, the turning grip seeming to have melted away. It caught us by surprise, given that’s supposed to be the corner-killer mode, so we quickly went back to Pura, our favorite. Maybe the torque vectoring wasn’t so transparent after all, and perhaps the software in that mode is still being baked.

You can’t give this thing much more than 20 percent accelerator unless you’ve sent a police escort up the road in advance to block intersections and clear away any nuisance traffic. Car writer types have been trying to come up with superlatives to describe fast acceleration since the Hudson Hornet—and have generally failed to produce literary achievement. So there’s no point in attempting to break a record here. However, if you’re familiar with the acceleration of a 1-liter superbike, in which it takes mere half-seconds to fling past a car on a two-lane, then the Battista is as quick or even quicker. It should be, with all things being equal (about 2 to 2.5 pounds per hp, give or take), as it possesses the advantage of four-wheel-drive and more tire on the road, plus instant torque and no transmission to shift. We used to think the 1200-hp Bugatti Veyron Super Sport was fast; it seems like a beached jellyfish compared to the Battista.

You have to warn your passenger before opening it up, lest their head get smacked from behind by the seat hard enough to erase memories. The fact that the Michelin Pilot Sport Cups can even hold on enough to transmit the Battista’s torque is a miracle of tire science. Don’t expect the rubber to live long if you’re heavy of foot. With electric cars, and hypercars in particular, we are approaching the point where more power simply can’t be transmitted to the asphalt to increase acceleration. Pininfarina’s eventual Battista replacement may have 1 million horsepower, but without rocket bottles it likely won’t be any quicker to 60. If it is, its occupants will be passed out.

Pininfarina and Rimac still have some work to do on the car. The electronics are not completely sorted on this very ambitious undertaking, and they need to be considering the car’s power source. Rimac is supposedly tied down by an exclusive development agreement with Porsche once the Battista production run is finished, so Pininfarina will have to grow its next car internally or seek another partner. Let’s hope the styling is a bit more adventurous. It seems right that if any car should break a mold or smash a convention, it should come bearing the badge of a famous Italian design house.

2023 Pininfarina Battista

Price: $2M+

Highs: Brutal acceleration, gorgeously detailed interior, 150-unit production limit ensures exclusivity.

Lows: Electronics need refinement, as does dynamic handling in certain modes. Styling is a little anodyne, especially for Pininfarina.

Takeaway: Like Brad Pitt or Jessica Chastain, nice to look at but the most interesting things are inside.

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The steering wheel of Ayrton Senna’s 1988 World Championship-winning McLaren MP4/4 Formula 1 car was about 10 inches across. Now imagine that same steering wheel rendered as just one tiny, 0.2-inch part among 300 parts in a scale model kit of his McLaren that, when completed, is no more than four inches long. Believe it or not, there are people who build these for fun.

Most of us assembled a plastic car model (or three) as kids. That every town had a hobby shop and the aroma of Testors paints filled the basement seems today like a quaint amusement from the distant past. However, for a small but loyal group of hard-core hobbyists who are more like jewelers or watchmakers than modelers, car modeling remains a serious business borne of a rabid obsession for miniaturized realism.

For more than 40 years, one small Italian boutique, Tameo Kits, has fed the hobbyist’s habit with an extensive menagerie of metal kits, surviving against market changes and social forces that has thinned the ranks of modelers and model companies.

A peruse through Tameo’s catalog (available at the company website, tameokits.com), which the company playfully dubs “Turtle Soup,” is a stroll through some of the highlights of Formula 1 and sports car racing. Everything from the forgotten AGS Cosworth JH23 from the 1988 Monaco Grand Prix to Jody Scheckter’s 1976 six-wheeled Tyrell P34, to Alberto Ascari’s Ferrari 375 from the 1952 Indianapolis 500 are rendered in 1/43-scale kits that sell for $50 to $125 depending on the level of detail.

The kits are produced using a combination of old-world metal-casting techniques, modern photoetching, and 3-D printing, and they are shipped around the world in individual 3 x 5-inch cardboard boxes. “Since 1981 we have produced over 700 models that are always in the catalog and constantly in production,” says the company’s founder, Luca Tameo. “I think that Tameo Kits is the only company in the world that has kept the entire production in range without ever running out of a single reference.”

For modelers who work in the fiddly 1/43 scale, a relic of early 20th century model railroading that was later embraced by popular British toymakers such as Corgi and Dinky, the Tameo name is a gold standard. That’s partly because of the kit quality, partly because of the sometimes-obscure subjects that are not offered as models by any other company, and partly because of the Tameo’s longevity.

“Tameo is a survivor of the classic European model car companies,” says David Barnblatt, a model builder and Tameo distributor through his Venice, California-based company, Vintage 43. “During the 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s, there was a vibrant industry of 1/43rd artisan model car makers in Italy, Germany, France, and the U.K.. There were also a few in the US and Japan. Nearly all of the companies have vanished due to competition from diecasts and the readily available plastic model kits that are larger at around 1/24th scale. But Tameo stuck around because they specialized in Formula 1 models and they were also technically a few notches better than the rest in precision quality and ease of assembly.”

Tameo, who is now a very youthful 60, started the business out of his house when he was 16, building models on commission after his father, a manager at Fiat, bought him his first kit, a model of a Lancia Stratos rally car. He sold the finished model and used the money to buy two more kits, selling those as well. A lifelong fan of Formula 1, Tameo “felt the need to make something that was entirely mine,” and produced his first model from scratch, a 1978 Arrows Ford A1 which was an obscure gold-and-black F1 car sponsored by the German beer company, Warsteiner.

He subsequently met and befriended Andre-Marie Ruf, a French pioneer of small-scale metal car modeling who produced what are now highly collectible kits bearing his initials, AMR. Ruf taught Tameo the art of sculpting parts in wax as part of the prototyping phase of kit design, and in 1983 Tameo designed his first kit in 1/43 scale, Nelson Piquet’s 1983 Brabham BT53 F1 car.

“Ruf was a model-car maker who firmly held on to a certain sense of principles,” says Barnblatt. “One of the most important to him was that shrinking a car down 43 times smaller doesn’t always make a good miniature.  A sense of interpretation needs to happen when shaping the master pattern, where the ‘feeling’ of the shape of the car can be accentuated or improvised in such a way that the model takes on a life of its own.” There is no mistaking an AMR model, says Barnblatt. They can be spotted in a line up, and “Tameo took some of these principles to heart and developed his own style. Especially in his early model Ferrari kits, which are still available today.”

Nowadays, a staff of six employees at Tameo Kits S.R.L. operates out of a two-story, 8600-square-foot factory on northern Italy’s Ligurian coast, south of Turin and near the border with France. The company produces a range of kits, starting with its simplest SilverLine, which are mostly models of vintage Formula 1 cars that are oriented towards beginning builders with about 100 parts each. The typical kit includes a cast metal body and floor, plus wings, suspension pieces, whatever engine components would be showing around the closed bodywork, and wheels and tires. These kits sell for around $50.

At the opposite end of Tameo’s range is the WCT Line, which are no larger than the SilverLine kits at around four inches long but feature removable bodywork and exposed cockpits, chassis, and engines. They have around 300 parts and, in the hands of an expert builder, are the dazzling Fabergé eggs of the model world.

Compared to your typical plastic model, “Our kits aren’t exactly the easiest thing to assemble,” acknowledges Tameo. “It takes skill and excellent equipment to be able to make a finished model of good quality.” To aid builders, the company’s website features an extensive tutorial on building the kits. Some basic metalworking tools such as files, snippers, and tweezers are needed, as is good light and, especially for older folk, a jeweler’s magnifying glasses. The paints and glues also tend to be a little different from the plastic kits you may remember. A good place to start is an enclosed sports car like Tameo’s 1970 Ferrari 312P coupe, a relatively simple kit of few parts that only requires spraying the body with one color. Patience is a necessity, but compared to plastic kits, it’s easier to undo a mistake with metal and start over.

The main ingredient in Tameo kits is “white metal,” a relatively soft, pliable alloy of tin and copper extensively used in 1/43-scale kits today and which traces its hobby roots to toy soldiers. White metal remains popular with modelers because it’s easy to cut and file and it gives an unexpected heft to an otherwise tiny model.

Internet research, graphic computer modeling, and 3-D printing now stand in for hand-sculpting wax masters from grainy photos in magazines and books. Tameo has spent 30 years perfecting a centrifugal casting process that involves cutting the shape of a kit’s parts into a matched pair of plaster discs, then spinning the discs at speed while molten metal is poured into the center. The centrifugal force pushes the liquid metal into fine crevices and cavities, meaning Tameo can cast the parts with more precision. They emerge from the separated discs as giant metal snowflakes of tiny suspension and brake components. The snowflakes are then cut up, the individual parts going into small baggies for the kits. Much of the excess metal “flash” is recycled for further use.

It takes Tameo about two months, “if we focus,” to design and engineer a new kit. “The choice of the models to produce is always very difficult because it is a question of ‘guessing’ whether a new kit will be successful or not,” he says. “Of course, if the choice falls on the big teams like Ferrari, Lotus, or McLaren, the guarantees of a good sale are greater. I must say that lately we have been registering great interest in minor Formula 1 cars. That is, those cars that have never won or that have distinguished themselves only for very particular designs or captivating decorations.”

Other considerations, such as steep licensing fees, has meant that Tameo now shies away from newer F1 cars and produces mainly models of historic race cars. However, that means wading into the morass of tobacco sponsorship on older race cars. The regulatory agencies of many countries lump in model kits with toys under a blanket ban against tobacco advertising. That forces Tameo to ship its kits without tobacco logos, meaning modelers demanding perfect accuracy must go online for aftermarket decal sheets that contain the right logos.

While Tameo sells to more countries today than ever before, the overall market has been in decline for several years, he says. That’s partly because of an invasion of finished models from producers in China that offer highly detailed diecasts for the same or less than a Tameo kit. “To survive we decided not to compete with them, but to find our market niche by turning to model makers who do not like the diecast model but prefer quality, detail, and the almost total absence of compromises,” says Tameo. “I must say that, even in the face of constantly decreasing numbers, this way to produce models has proved to be a winner for us and has guaranteed us, until now, our survival.”

Another problem is that modeling hasn’t made the generational jump from older builders to younger people, who are more attracted to electronic entertainments. Says Tameo: “There are still model makers who have followed Tameo Kits since the early ‘80s, but we can’t see the right generational change because young people are no longer interested in modeling but prefer other leisure activities.”

The company has spent a lot of time updating its older catalog listings, redesigning kits from the 1990s using new technology and materials. It has also begun producing a range of accessories, such as more accurate tires and detailing bits, that modelers can use to dress up their kits.

Barnblatt hopes more collectors will be willing to venture into attempting a model kit, “which would easily become the centerpiece of their collection.” It’s one thing to have a wall of model cars, quite another to say that you built some of them yourself. Says Barnblatt: “There is a world of interesting artisan model cars out there, old and new, that can contribute to an already impressive diecast car collection.”

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While researching the feature on fin cars published last week, I came upon this quote from 1955: “Cars that are 19 feet long and weighing 2 tons are used to run a 118-pound housewife three blocks to the drugstore for a 2-ounce package of bobby pins and lipstick.” The speaker was George Wilcken Romney, then the president of American Motors, which was about to kill off the Nash and Hudson brands in favor of a $50 million all-or-nothing bet on the compact Rambler. “People are getting smart,” he continued. “They know they don’t have to have cars with dinosaur dimensions to get around comfortably.”

Every trend sparks a counter-trend, and Romney wasn’t the first nor the last to try to mine gold by being where the mainstream wasn’t. However, in 1956, with AMC hemorrhaging $20 million in losses, Romney was selling the Rambler’s clean, compact austerity against an industry making bank on chrome broughams. Time magazine wrote that bus drivers pulling up to AMC’s bell tower–like headquarters at 14250 Plymouth Road in Detroit would shout, “All out for the old folks’ home!”

But Romney wasn’t your typical Ivy League boardroom suit. The grandson of a Mormon who had 30 children by four wives, Romney was born in 1907 in Chihuahua, Mexico, in a dusty desert colony established by Mormon ex-pats fleeing U.S. polygamy laws. When he was 5, rebels fighting for Pancho Villa rode into town and drove out all the Americans. The family fled to Los Angeles, then Salt Lake City; Romney’s father went broke five times in the process. George started working at the age of 12.

He was selected as a church missionary and sent to Great Britain at 19, spending two years bringing the Mormon gospel door to door and preaching from a soapbox in Hyde Park, London. Ever the entrepreneur, he teamed up with a redheaded socialist on another soapbox and the two agreed to loudly heckle each other, which proved the best way of drawing crowds. Back in America, Romney met a brunette knockout named Lenore Lafount and followed her everywhere—out on her dates with other men, to Washington, D.C., when her father took a government job, to New York where she studied acting, then out to LA where Lenore was offered a $50,000 contract with MGM. He’d probably be arrested as a stalker today, but Romney somehow persuaded Lenore to turn down Hollywood and instead marry him. He always called it his best sell job.

Romney came to AMC via its predecessor, Nash-Kelvinator, whose chairman, George W. Mason, had big plans for small cars but was running out of money. And time. Mason died suddenly in 1954, leaving Romney in charge. Romney’s lifestyle matched perfectly the smart, frill-free, unibody Rambler; he didn’t smoke, he didn’t drink, he didn’t swear, he stayed trim by playing sports with his kids (son Mitt is currently a senator from Utah), and he tithed 10 percent of his salary to the church.

Eventually, enough hard-bitten Yankee pragmatists caught on to what Romney (and some foreigners, like Volkswagen) was preaching, and Rambler sales took off. In 1960, dealers moved almost half a million units, bringing AMC revenue of over $1 billion. The Big Three were already rushing to catch up with their own compacts. Romney stayed through 1962, then ran for Michigan governor. The Cleveland Auto Dealers Association bestowed on him a trophy inscribed with the words: “To George Romney, critic, lecturer, anthropologist, white hunter of the American dinosaur.”

Where Romney left off, the Japanese were only too happy to step in, sticking small-car thorns into Detroit’s chiefs for decades. In the end, though, what seemed like the inevitable future in 1960 because of a rising population, crowding cities, and choking traffic remained only a niche. Sixty years later, the bestselling vehicle in America is the Ford F-150, versions of which are nearly 21 feet long and close to 6000 pounds. They don’t have tailfins, and they can do a lot more, but Romney’s “dinosaurs” are still with us.

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

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Today’s pop-culture, flash-montage mythology of the 1950s reduces the decade down to poodle skirts, hula hoops, doo-wop, and pastel-hued, postwar tranquility. American ideals of democracy and free enterprise seemed to trump all, and the standard of living was never higher as the new suburbs of our economic colossus brimmed with affluence and home appliances.

Yet, we were mired in self-doubt. “We have the most gadgets and the most gimmicks in our history, the biggest TVs and tailfins,” said a 42-year-old John F. Kennedy in announcing his candidacy for president in 1960. “But we also have the worst slums, the most crowded schools, and the greatest erosion of our national resources and our national will. It may be, for some, an age of material prosperity, but it is also an age of spiritual poverty.” At least some people agreed; he won that election, you may recall, and it was the start of one of the most tumultuous decades in American history.

All of which is to frame the scene into which our three feature cars were born. The 1960 Cadillac Series 62, the 1960 Chrysler 300F, and the 1960 Lincoln Continental Mark V arrived as latecomers to a party that was already winding down. Sensibility was in the air; Ford showrooms were just receiving deliveries of the trim and uncluttered Falcon, and the same Chevy dealer that could be-chrome you with a new Impala could also sell you the Euro-flavored rear-engine Corvair. And it’s almost inconceivable that the Lincoln pictured on these pages in all its finned, scalloped, bumper-bulleted baroqueness was replaced in 1961 by the so-called Kennedy Lincoln. Which didn’t look like it had come from an entirely different car company so much as from an entirely different planet. By the watershed year of 1960, America was at a turning point, and it had largely turned against tailfins.

You can’t say they didn’t depart on a high note. Part of the reasoning for gathering this trio from 1960 rather than from ’59, the year most people agree that tailfins reached their apogee, was pure, rank bias on our part. The final year of the tailfin—OK, like all fads they coasted on momentum for one or two more years—was also one of its best. The lines were clean and sleek, the chrome slathered on with, in many cases, more artistic restraint. If, as American Motors designer Dick Teague famously put it, it was “the golden age of gorp,” at least the gorp was ending on a grace note.

The stage on which we set our fin finale is Palm Springs, California, at the height of The Season. The desert retreat just beyond the mountains from greater Los Angeles has been a wintertime escape for the glittering and the gilded since Hollywood was young. However, the oasis named for its natural hot springs came into full frond during the postwar boom, when whole neighborhoods of midcentury villas were erected in the rigorously geometric, flat-plane, minimalist mold of architects such as Donald Wexler, John Lautner, William Krisel, and E. Stewart Williams. In the years since their heyday, what became known as “desert modernism” has become extremely vogue, and in its cooler winter months when the light is softer and 10,834-foot Mount San Jacinto looms over the city with a frosted crown, Palm Springs is a magnet for vintage style seekers of all persuasions. It seemed the perfect backdrop for our atomic-era finsters.

General Motors design chief Harley Earl generally gets the credit for inventing the tailfin. In fact, it was his underling, Frank Hershey, head of GM’s Special Car Design Studio, who took cues from the twin-tailed Lockheed P-38 Lightning fighter plane and sculpted two gibbous protrusions for the haunches of the 1948 Cadillac. They were instantly controversial. Nicholas Dreystadt, the general manager of Cadillac at the time, is said to have hated them. His successor, John Gordon, wanted them reduced. Comedian Jack Benny quipped on his hugely popular radio show that they looked like “two salmon swimming upstream.”

Buyers had the last word, however, and despite a couple of recessions that temporarily dimmed auto sales in 1954 and 1958, they fell hard for fins. “People want beauty with a built-in feeling of motion,” said the Auguste Rodin of tailfins, Virgil M. Exner of Chrysler, who changed everything with his wider, lower, longer, and downsloping Forward Look of 1957. “Tailfins are a natural and contemporary symbol of motion, appearing on nature’s creatures and on aircraft, speedboats, racing cars, guided missiles, and rockets.” Accordingly, Chrysler’s sales went ballistic: The company increased its market share from 15 to 19 percent in 1957, mostly out of GM’s hide.

However, the mood shifted instantly on October 4 of that year, just a week after Chrysler debuted its 1958 models at a splashy gala at the Americana Hotel in Miami Beach. While Detroit’s color and trim staff were shaping fins and slapping on fake chrome rockets, Russian scientists had launched a real rocket. “In America,” a budding 17-year-old electrical engineer named Ronald Segall told a reporter as the world’s first man-made satellite beep-beeped from orbit, “it’s more rewarding for someone to produce a tailfin than a Sputnik.”

The nation was shamed. Suddenly, the soaring tailfin, that epochal touchstone of 1950s Americana, was Exhibit A in an indictment of our self-indulgent phoniness. Contrarians pushed back, and tailfins became the fulcrum of a vicious culture war. They were either “to American cars what embroidery is to Swiss cottage curtains and French cuffs are to men’s shirts … trimming to enhance the sale of a product,” as the conservative commentator Alice Widener reasoned, or, as the journalist John Keats remarked in his bestselling 1958 book, The Insolent Chariots, they were “illusory symbols of sex, speed, wealth, and power for day-dreaming nitwits to buy.”

“The tail-fin was horrid,” concluded the editors of Alabama’s Montgomery Advertiser in 1960, “but as a symbol of American decadence and ostentation, it infuriated the middle-class snobs, and that made it a satisfying national asset.” Or, in the parlance of our own times, tailfins owned the libs.

Certainly, Alex Lithgow’s red 1960 Cadillac Series 62 convertible is a national asset. It’s hard to imagine the extravagance of such a machine as it swishes along the Palm Springs byways amid today’s plasticized commuting corpuscles. However, at $5455 new, it wasn’t even half the price of Cadillac’s most expensive car that year, the $13,000 Eldorado Brougham. And at 18 feet, 9 inches, it wasn’t the longest model, either (the Seventy-Five sedan was over 20 feet). Lithgow, a commercial real-estate man in Northern California, came late to car collecting, falling for big Cads only a few years ago when he saw one parked in the garage of a house he was buying.

The Cadillac’s 390 V-8 rumbled sweetly as we purred through Deepwell Estates, a former horse and apricot ranch east of downtown Palm Springs that was redeveloped in 1952 into a neighborhood grid of midcentury masterpieces. Notable luminaries including Liberace (and his mom) owned houses here, as well as Liz Taylor, Carmen Miranda, Robert Livingston (the original Lone Ranger), Dragnet star Jack Webb, Jerry Lewis, and The Love Boat captain Gavin MacLeod. We paused for shots in front of the collection of white, perfectly rectilinear shoeboxes that formed the home of the late actor William Holden. His longtime neighbor, Cindy Quin, emerged from the house across the street to see what was going on.

Quin related how the 1953 Academy Award winner liked to water his flower beds in his sunglasses and swim trunks. One day a tourist bus pulled up and a lady in a big hat, not recognizing the celebrity, asked him to kindly step aside so that she could grab a snap of the house of the illustrious William Holden. The actor calmly obliged, setting down his hose and walking back into the house. “My mother and I died laughing,” said Quin. As we chatted, a line of private cars rolled up and stopped, their occupants also drive-through sightseers, listening via radio to a narrator in the lead car relate the history of the Holden house. The actor died in 1981, but the tours still come, mainly for the architecture.

Holden’s on-screen persona as the cynical everyman would clash somewhat with our blazing red Cadillac, but indeed the Series 62 seems the most rational of the trio. The layout of the contoured dash is by far the most conventional, the knob and switch placement rather lucid considering that most contemporary car designers seemed to be taking their cues from the movie Forbidden Planet. The only hint of flying-saucer gear in the Cad is the Guide-Matic Headlight Control, a small bullet on the dash that contains an optic sensor for automatically dimming the high beams when oncoming cars were detected. There’s also cruise control, a novel feature in 1960, along with power steering, power windows, power seats, and air conditioning.

Skimmed lower from the twin-bullet monsters of ’59, Cadillac’s 1960 fins actually debuted first on a special 99-car run of ’59 Eldorado Broughams whose bodies were handmade in Italy by Pininfarina (one later became the Ridler-winning hot rod CadMad). As on the Chrysler 300F, the Caddy’s fins come to bayonet points certain to fillet any unwitting bystander who is backed into. It was not without some justification that Ralph Nader had railed against such protrusions in his 1965 book, Unsafe at Any Speed. Still, a world that is perfectly safe would be unbearably boring.

Virgil Exner denied that his cars had any “Freudian implications,” though he conceded that fins are “definitely masculine” by nature. “They are masculine because they are directional,” he said, leaving posterity to interpret that comment. What did women want? “Ashtrays,” he said with a huff. “They want them in over 200 different locations. Tell them we’re trying.”

Exner suffered a heart attack in 1956, taking five months off to paint watercolors. He returned to a somewhat diminished role at Chrysler. However, the 1960 models, including the 300F, were already fleshed out, such are the lead times of car companies—then as today. The 300F thus qualifies as Exner’s déclaration finale, his last great statement on the subject of tailfins (the ’61’s fins were barely changed). And yow, it was a lulu. Even longer and taller than the 300E’s, the F’s fins sprout from the car’s torso mid-door and knife up and out, spreading into glorious steel sails to catch and direct the rushing wind. Or something—even Exner eventually admitted that their aerodynamic utility was speculative.

There’s no doubt that you’re driving Chrysler’s sportiest and most expensive model for 1960, since the number 300 is scrawled on the car in about 300 places. Of course, it’s featured prominently in the tri-color emblems on the side spears, but it’s also placarded on the steering wheel, the doors, a big gear-like badge between the separate rear seats, an insert on the faux spare tire (or atom-smasher?) housing gracing the trunk, all four hubcaps, the grille, and probably all eight piston crowns in the cross-ram 413. If anybody asks you what you’re driving, you’re forgiven for bursting into tears.

Besides the fins, the badges, and the early adoption of unibody construction, Chrysler’s most glorious bit of design kitsch for 1960 was the AstraDome Control Center. A plastic bubble containing layered arcs of three-dimensional gauges is the electroluminescent centerpiece of a button- and knob-a-palooza that made drivers in 1960 feel like they were navigating the stars rather than the new Cross Bronx Expressway. The five push buttons controlling the TorqueFlite transmission, an idea that first saw light in 1956 Chrysler brands, were still considered space-age even by 1960. Sure, the world had problems, but Chrysler was pinning its sales to a sort of trippy astrophysical optimism that one day we would all have our own rocket ships.

Basically a loaded New Yorker with more horsepower and some extra trimmings, including power swivel-out seats, this 300F ($5841 new) belongs to Paul Forgette, a Mopar collector from the Los Angeles area with several Forward Look cars in his stable. The glossy black 300, one of just 248 convertibles made that year, was right at home burbling up to the pull-through portico behind the former Coachella Valley Savings and Loan, built in 1961 and now a Palm Springs branch of Chase Bank.

The E. Stewart Williams–designed structure is on the National Register of Historic Places because it oozes midcentury Jetsons chic, with its high, flat, and deeply overhanging roof buttressed by inverted parabolic columns. What a stark contrast it was to the many Parthenon knockoffs then dotting cities across America, blueprinted to rigid neoclassical convention with Greek columns and frilly detailing. A deposit in Williams’s futuristic bank was a deposit in the world of tomorrow.

No wonder cars were changing; architecture as much as America was moving at supersonic speed, and modernism was everywhere. Three landmarks of transportation design—the saucer-like Theme Building at Los Angeles International Airport, the swooping terminal at Dulles Airport, the neo-futurist domes of the TWA Flight Center at John F. Kennedy Airport—all opened between 1961 and ’62. Even the places where cars were designed and engineered were getting with the program. General Motors had opened its new Technical Center in Warren, Michigan, only in 1956. Designed by Eero Saarinen, who also did the Dulles and JFK terminals, the campus was a midcentury tour de force with floor-to-ceiling glass, levitating stairways, floating cubes, polished-metal guy wiring, and shallow reflecting ponds.

Key elements of midcentury architecture are authenticity and simplicity, not two words commonly associated with 1950s cars. Fins, bullets, strakes, and fake rockets met their doom in a burgeoning crusade for forms that were geometric, simple, modern, and clean. But before it all ended, Ford’s Lincoln luxury division wanted one last word.

Buttoned-down, family-run Ford didn’t embrace the tailfin with the exuberance of its competitors, the Dearborn fins never amounting to much more than relative nubs or suggestive creases, even at the fad’s zenith in 1959. Henry Ford had been in the ground just over a decade, and no doubt his wizened puritanical specter still loomed over the Albert Kahn–designed Ford Rotunda. The 1930s art deco building burned to its destruction in 1962, perhaps finally releasing that oppressive spirit to the great beyond—the Mustang appeared two years later.

It should be noted that Lincoln took more risks, especially with the ’57 Capri and Premier, which were about as finny as any Ford division ever got. The cars that followed, especially the crème de la chrome Continental, were a double-barrel shotgun blast of late-1950s design motifs—fins, glitter, starship controls—into what was still a fairly upright and imperious package that defied the longer-lower-wider trends at the competition.

The Continental Mark V pictured here swanning through its element in Palm Springs was our most expensive car new ($7056). It is also the heaviest, at nearly 6000 pounds. The 131-inch wheelbase is the longest, as is the 227-inch overall length, and the car is over 6.5 feet wide. Lincoln produced just a little more than 2000 Mark V convertibles, with an enormously complex roof and motorized window-within-a-window rear pane that let the driver drop either the rear glass or the entire roof at the push of buttons. The works disappeared under a self-retracting tonneau cover.

When this robotic spaghetti splicer has problems, which is not infrequently, David Freedman—an L.A. television producer who has owned the car for more than 25 years—applies a knowing touch to the various switches, joints, and boughs to get it to move. Luckily for us, the roof had recently undergone a restoration at a shop in Hollywood, and the car’s mighty spread of canvas folded away with only mild groans from the ancient clockworks hidden beneath.

Unlike the racy Chrysler and the slinky Cadillac, the Lincoln feels the most like a mobile throne. The flat, button-tufted bench affords you a commanding view, especially of the imposing dash with its tapered jet nacelles housing the gauges and its many appliqués of metalized textures. The steering wheel hub alone is fascinating: The trademark gold Lincoln star seems to float above a disco ball surface composed of tiny, interlocked triangles. It looks like something a semiconductor fab made last week in South Korea, not some trinket of interior jazz from 60 years ago.

Until a sudden brake-lining failure slowed the car’s pace, the Lincoln performed for us like it was new, the big 430 purring as if it rolled out of the plant minutes before. Despite its bulk, it wasn’t difficult to wheel through modern traffic, just as the Chrysler and Cadillac also seemed perfectly at home crisscrossing the wide boulevards of Palm Springs, making their occupants feel like a million bucks. Anyone who has driven a car from this era knows what they drive like: floating suspensions, leisurely acceleration, and fingertip steering effort.

Ad copywriters loved to weave word-carpets in Life and Look about the “command feel” of a “highway-tuned suspension.” However, even if the Chrysler’s 375-hp 413 was indeed a preview of the horsepower wars to come, Detroit was still focused on velvet-wrapped luxury as the sole determinant of a car’s worth. These days, the ideal way to enjoy a fin car is to don your best trilby, throw an arm over the seatback, and cruise like you own the joint.

And that’s what these cars do—indeed, did back then for the people who bought them. If the world of 1960 was speeding up and shrinking rapidly, these cars made you feel like you still owned it. John Keats railed that the automobiles of the era were not “reliable machines for reasonable men to use,” but instead resembled “vast, neon-lit pinball machines with the chromium schmaltz.” Ultimately, though, the schmaltz lost, and “reasonable machines” went on to rule the earth. Meaning today’s newest five-door, all-wheel-drive, multi-activity, active-safety hybrid crossover is barely distinguishable from last year’s. Yay for progress.

Maybe it’s because we had spent a couple of days driving the perfect cars in the perfect setting enjoying fairly perfect Southern California weather, but if forced to pick a side, reliable machines for reasonable people or tailfinned schmaltz for daydreaming nitwits, we stand proudly with the dreamers who wanted in their cars a taste of an optimistic future.

***

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

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Victor Holtorf is on a mission. The Fort Collins, Colorado, proprietor of High Mountain Classics, a restoration and vintage race-prep shop at the foot of the Rockies, wants people to know that the Lamborghini Countach is a great car.

That’s it, just that: The Countach doesn’t suck. In fact, before we visited Holtorf and his personal collection of Countaches, he sent over a lengthy email covering Countach history that began with his objectives for our visit. “1) Educate the collector car public about this icon,” it said. “2) Correct myths and misconceptions about the car. 3) Have fun with friends.”

OK, you have to know Holtorf. He’s got one of those brains that naturally sorts the chaotic world into neat, orderly silos of logic and purpose, which is a valuable trait that explains how he came to own a bunch of Lamborghini Countaches (as well as dozens of other interesting cars). And you might dismiss his quest as an amusing bagatelle, like pleading the case for cookie-dough ice cream—especially to anyone whose first exposure to the car was watching Adrienne Barbeau and Tara Buckman streak across the desert in a black LP400S in that glorious Countach advertisement from 1981, The Cannonball Run.

If you saw that film as a kid, you’re entitled to wonder why the Countach—last year celebrating its 50th anniversary—even needs a defense. Holtorf was himself one of those kids, as well as one of the millions who subsequently tacked a Countach poster to his wall. That exact same poster now overlooks the lobby of High Mountain Classics, and he pointed to it when recounting how he bought his first Countach, an early LP400 “Periscopio,” back when they were about 75 grand for a nice one. It’s why he’s acquired three more, and why he’s made his shop—a second career after a fruitful first one in real estate—a refuge for broken and abused Lamborghinis.

However, as much as Holtorf loves the Countach, the car’s stature has unquestionably been dragged down by unsavory tropes. By its casting as the absurd clown car of the gold-chained, coke-dusted 1980s. By its reputation for routinely generating four- and five-figure shop bills for owners who don’t understand the car and don’t know how to drive it properly, and who are bled dry until they scream, “Enough!” and send their rejected plaything to the nearest auction, there to be fobbed off on the next star-struck pushover with more money than brains. And the Countach has been buried by endless magazine stories and by the internet echo chambers that repeat the same tired orthodoxies: that the Countach is brutal, that it’s hard to see out of, impossible to work on, and pretty much unusable as anything other than erotic garage sculpture.

Holtorf was so eager to stick pins in these widely held notions that he tossed us the keys to three examples for a romp in the rolling hills near his home. We set forth at dawn’s early light, an Italian air raid of sorts on the Colorado hinterlands, powered by 36 cylinders breathing through 120 valves and wailing out a combined 1285 horsepower. What we learned over two days is that Holtorf has a case: The Countach is indeed a great car. It goes and stops and turns and dazzles a crowd with outlandish abilities that were unknown in any other road machine of its era—and which are perhaps even more thrilling in the all-electrified, push-button, pull-paddle, 128-gigabyte reality of today.

That is, as long as you fit in the car, can get it started, and don’t slip the clutch too much because it’s easy to fry the clutch—and it costs 20 grand to yank the engine out and replace it. “These are high-speed toys,” allowed Holtorf, “and if they are not treated accordingly, they will cause problems, but that is not the car’s fault. It’s driver error in poor planning and execution.” Sure, you can do a quick kombucha run in a McLaren 720 without having to worry about yanking the engine afterward, but is that really living?

When Mick Jagger sang that he was “born in a cross-fire hurricane,” he could have been referring to the Lamborghini Countach. It arrived after the golden years of Automobili Ferruccio Lamborghini were behind it, right as speed limits, inflation, regulation, and a worldwide energy crisis bore down on the auto industry like so many flaming Molotovs. A Countach was the first Lamborghini to die against a crash-test barrier. It suffered the ignominy of grafted-on bumpers and choking emissions controls. The workers who built at least the first ones were on strike so often that the company’s own founder and namesake, Ferruccio Lamborghini, walked away in disgust before the Countach reached full production. Its chief engineer and test driver followed soon after.

Yet, miraculously, in a world where sequels are rarely as good as the originals, Lamborghini was able to follow the breathtaking Miura with a car so shocking and louche that it came to overshadow its predecessor and define both the company and the exotic-car game for the 16 years it remained in production. About 2000 Countaches left the Lamborghini plant at Sant’Agata Bolognese, more than twice the number of Miuras. Into the 1980s, new Countaches rolled out of the factory against practically insurmountable odds, weathering Lamborghini’s repeated ownership changes, its eventual bankruptcy, the onset of catalytic converters and computerization, and nearly two decades of fashion flux among the mercurial arrivistes who craved it.

It didn’t seem possible that such a bonkers machine could survive for so long as I contemplated the skyward-pointing driver’s door on Holtorf’s well-worn 1975 LP400. Holtorf bought this early Countach in 1992 when he was living in the Bay Area and, seeing no reason to do otherwise, raced it at local club meets. On racetracks. With other cars. Apparently, back then you could go wheel-to-wheel in anything at some events so long as you wore a helmet—no cage or five-point harnesses required.

One day at Thunderhill Raceway Park, a rollicking ribbon about an hour and a half north of Sacramento, Holtorf became the salami in a race-car panini that left scars gouged in his Lamborghini’s millimeter-thin aluminum body. He applied Bondo and a spritz of primer and called it a day—actually, a couple of decades, as that was more than 20 years ago and Holtorf has been driving the car with its primer patches ever since (though he long ago retired it from racing).

I assumed the position, taking Holtorf’s direction to plant my butt on the Countach’s wide sill, then slung my right leg over the sill, followed by my left leg. From there, you easily slide in, like a bullet clicking into a chamber. The car’s two leather chairs look like wave chaise longues that contort your body into one non-adjustable rocket-sled position (the seats do slide back and forth). The shape and square-patterned tufts are surprisingly cushy and comfortable, despite what magazines said at the time.

Space inside these early Countaches is at a premium; the flat roof is ridiculously low, the center tunnel hilariously high, and the foot pedals are mere millimeters apart. The small, thin-rimmed steering wheel is, like those of most Lamborghinis of the period, situated for gorilla body types—meaning people with short legs and long arms—and with non-simian-shaped humans, it lands just inches from the knees. A few cryptographically marked rocker switches and some rotary knobs suffice as the car’s lighting and climate controls. The instrument binnacle is a mail slot sporting a line of miniature Stewart-Warner Stage III gauges that look like they were selected from a 1960s mail-order racing catalog—except for the analog odometer on the 320-kph speedometer, which instead of displaying its numbers horizontally is oriented vertically, like an old hotel marquee on Broadway. It somehow seems the most exotic thing about the LP400’s interior.

The V-12 at our backs fired immediately after the frenetic whirring of the starter, and the car moved off on a surprisingly light clutch. You have to lean on that gas pedal, however, against the drag of a long cable tugging on a bell-crank-and-pushrod affair that cracks open the throats of the six Weber 40DCOE, or doppio corpo orizzontale E, carburetors. The horsepower and torque all live at the top end of Bizzarrini’s 8000-rpm cathedral organ, so there’s no point in shifting early. The revs rise not to a deep, booming baritone of a large-bore engine, but to the ripping tenor vibrato of a relatively small but many-cylindered mill, that euphonious intake snarl from those 12 velocity trumpets hiding in the airboxes behind your head.

You have a lot of time to soak it in because first gear is so long. “Back then,” explained Holtorf, “ Lamborghini and Ferrari were trying to outdo each other in 0–60 times, so first gear is tall so you can go past 60 without shifting.” That explains why so many owners go through clutches so quickly, immolating obscenely large piles of Ben Franklins in the process. Baby a Countach clutch if you want it to last, insisted Holtorf—repeatedly. Which means planning in advance where you are going to drive the car so as to avoid stop-and-go traffic and clutch-frying parking ramps. “It’s like an airplane,” he explained. “You have to flight plan with a Countach or you’re going to have problems. You can’t just jump in it and go to dinner somewhere you’ve never been before.” None of this disqualifies the car for greatness, in his opinion.

Though the Countach is no quicker than a modern Mustang GT, its howl and drama in full rage is one of the motoring life’s divine experiences—especially in this, the purest of all Countaches. At speed, it feels like a Lotus Europa stuck on the nose of an F-16, an intimate capsule with surprisingly light controls and an entirely unexpected eagerness to dive into corners with neutral balance. This isn’t the brute I thought it would be. When I shared these observations with Holtorf, he simply nodded. It is what a Countach does when it’s maintained and set up as the factory intended. Lamborghini may have been a house on fire in the mid-1970s, but they still knew what they were doing.

Paolo Stanzani, who had come over from the firm’s tractor business in 1963, had taken Gian Paolo Dallara’s place as Lamborghini’s technical director when Dallara bailed in 1968. Involved in turning the company’s venerable four-cam, 3.9-liter V-12 sideways in the Miura, Stanzani in 1971 proposed rotating it yet another 90 degrees to face backward. Instead of the Miura’s frame of box-section welded beams perforated by weight-saving holes, Stanzani chose for its successor a pure race-car spaceframe of welded steel tubes, which would be lighter, stiffer, and—worth mentioning considering the time and place—easier to rustproof.

Turning the engine in alignment with the car’s center axis and slotting the transmission between the seats would centralize the engine’s mass better than it had been in the Miura and move some weight forward to the front axle, even if the propshaft running aft through the sump would raise the engine slightly. Instead of placing the radiators up front, as in other mid-engine cars such as the Miura and Ford GT40, Stanzani wanted them off to the sides, thus allowing a dramatically low nose and better forward visibility.

The basic concept was handed to Bertone to see what could be made of it. Nuccio Bertone had been Ferruccio Lamborghini’s closest collaborator and booster. His Turin design house and its styling chief, Marcello Gandini, had taken up the challenge of the transverse mid-engine Miura in 1965 with obvious relish. At the time, Bertone saw Lamborghini as a potential counterweight to the indomitable Ferrari, and Bertone’s burgeoning relationship with the tractor magnate as potentially yielding the greatness and riches that the long association with Ferrari had done for Pininfarina.

Building on the global plaudits for the Miura, Bertone envisioned a more angular, folded-paper future for sports cars in the late ’60s with a string of “hyper-wedge” design concepts. They included the Alfa Romeo Carabo of 1968, an impossibly low, emerald-green shingle with prescient scissor doors, and the 1970 Lancia Stratos HF Zero, which, at 33 inches tall, barely rose as high as the average cowboy’s belt buckle. Into this wedgy stew was thrown the Project LP112, Lamborghini’s internal designation for its Miura replacement.

However, by the early 1970s, Nuccio Bertone had lost his enthusiasm for Lamborghini, whose founder proved less dedicated to beating Ferrari than growing wine on his vineyard near Lake Trasimeno in central Italy. Bertone was also souring on his gifted protégé, Gandini—who, because of the Miura and other successes, was developing both international acclaim as well as a cocky attitude toward the boss. Nuccio figured it was only a matter of time before Gandini, like his predecessor, Giorgetto Giugiaro, would leave to open his own firm (in fact, Gandini stayed until 1980).

These intramural fissures are highlighted by the fact that the Countach, one of Gandini and Bertone’s most universally recognized designs, is barely mentioned in the carrozzeria’s two-volume boxed history by Luciano Greggio. “I remember that Stanzani, the engineer, asked Gandini to design the flanks specially so that the radiators could be mounted laterally,” recalled Nuccio Bertone years later for the book, sniffing, “the result was interesting, but not beautiful. Rather it looked like an attractive girl with her nose a bit crooked; people were more interested in the door-opening system than anything else.”

Perhaps, but one Bertone metalworker assigned to the team building the first full-scale mock-up—and who spoke the language of his native Piedmont region that encompasses parts of northwest Italy, France, and Switzerland—was moved to repeatedly exclaim, “Contacc!” It was basically the equivalent of “wow” or “dang,” and the word, with slight phoneticizing, stuck.

With no advance fanfare, Lamborghini and Bertone debuted the Countach LP500 concept at the 1971 Geneva motor show. The reception was uproarious. Ferruccio Lamborghini, whose heart really lay in building big, comfortable GT cars for, as he put it, “serious guys,” was once again compelled as he had been with the Miura to put into production a two-seat psychedelic road burner “for crazy guys.” The thinking was that the company might build only a handful, with no air conditioning or other creature comforts, for a select few fanatics who were already good customers (how many times in recent years have we heard the same said about limited-production hypercars?). Even Ferruccio saw the car as something of a throwback, recalling for an interviewer in 1980: “I said to myself: This is going to be the last chassis coming direct from the racetracks, the last birdcage frame. This time is past.”

But Ferruccio couldn’t refuse the money being thrown at him by the crazy guys. In 1972, without warning, the Bolivian government defaulted on a huge order for Lamborghini tractors. That and a canceled order from America left 5000 finished units sitting in yards with no customers. The ensuing cash crunch forced Ferruccio to sell off his beloved tractor company as well as 51 percent of his carmaking operation to a Swiss businessman, Georges-Henri Rossetti. He was seen even less around the plant, where union militancy had become so intense that production frequently ground to a halt. According to one account by the late Claudio Zampolli, an engineer at the time, leftist agitators slashed tires in the parking lot and lobbed missiles through the windows at the salaried front-office staff still at their desks. Ferruccio finally unloaded his remaining stake in 1974 to retire to his vineyard. “When I was still building Lamborghinis,” grumped Ferruccio a few years later, “people were talking about women and cars—maybe about football. Nowadays, they talk only about football and politics. The women and automobiles went into oblivion.”

He left Stanzani, the remaining engineers, and New Zealand–born test driver Bob Wallace to make the LP500 a viable car that wouldn’t melt its engine. It was a challenge given that Gandini’s original concept offered precious little in the way of a cooling strategy. Another problem was that the designer apparently had not given any thought to rain. After trying various unsatisfactory wiper solutions, Stanzani settled with pasting on a single large wiper arm with primary and secondary blades to sweep the sprawling glass. Then he resigned, walking out shortly after Ferruccio and shortly before Wallace quit, too.

From concept car to assembly line, the Countach sprouted NACA ducts in its flanks and scoops on its shoulders. Nevertheless, Gandini’s vision remained largely intact, except that there had been no time or resources to develop the proposed all-digital dash or the 5.0-liter V-12, the reason for the original LP500 designation. The 3929-cc V-12 that had served Lamborghini so ably since 1965 was sent into the breach yet again, meaning the production Countach would carry the designation LP400. Turned backward, the all-aluminum 375-hp mill put just 266 lb-ft of torque to the five-speed transmission between the seats. Still, it was an audacious design from a tiny company with extremely finite resources, and the core powertrain layout was to serve the Countach for its entire production run, as well as its replacement, the Diablo, and the Diablo’s successor, the Murciélago.

Only 150 of the first series LP400s were built, and the best ones go for over a million dollars now. With their skinny Michelin XWX tires, uncluttered lines, and small roof cutout intended for better rearview visibility (hence the “periscope” or “periscopio” nickname), they represent the closest thing to the original blueprint of the Countach’s creators.

Holtorf happily pointed out the differences between the various Countaches. After the first LP400, Lamborghini’s remaining engineers took note of some performance mods done by one of their favorite customers, Canadian oil-drilling-equipment mogul Walter Wolf, as well as the development of the new Pirelli P7 high-performance tire. To fit the new, wider P7s, the Countach sprouted flares packing deep “phone-dial” magnesium wheels patterned after those on the 1974 Lamborghini Bravo concept car. These and a detuned 350-hp emissions model, explained Holtorf, were the so-called LP400 S “low body” models, now highly sought after as the poster Countaches we all know and love.

The darkest days were in 1980, when Lamborghini was under court-controlled receivership after a series of disastrous management schemes. Plenty of plutocrats wanted a Countach, but Lamborghini was so short of money that its two oldest distributors, EmilianAuto in Bologna and Achilli of Milan, offered to pay cash for cars in advance so there would be enough money to pay suppliers. It wasn’t clear whether the few loyal Lamborghini employees and acolytes left were saving the Countach or if it was saving them.

In 1981, the factory was flush with fresh capital from a new owner, the Swiss Mimran family, which had built a generational fortune in Africa from sugar farming. Lamborghini raised the car’s roof by 2 inches and jacked up the suspension, all in anticipation of—at last!—sales in the U.S. Until then, the car had been locked out of that lucrative market because the company lacked the resources to federalize it. These so-called “high-body” Countaches had five-hole OZ alloy wheels, often painted gold, and were a little heavier and slower owing to the larger body and emissions controls. The high-body cars also initiated the Countach’s long, sad battle with U.S. bumper regulations; the various solutions developed by the factory never looked any better than rhinoplasty gone awry.

The Countach’s second wind—literally—came with the development of a 4.7-liter V-12 in 1982, followed in 1985 by the 5.2-liter Quattrovalvole. The four-valve engine finally took full advantage of Giotto Bizzarrini’s original decision in 1963 to flout Ferrari’s then- standard of single overhead camshafts and instead design Lamborghini’s first V-12 with four cams. Horse-power in the Countach jumped to 455 in the European carbureted version, which replaced the sidedraft Webers of the previous models with racier downdraft carbs. A federally compliant version with Bosch K-Jetronic fuel injection was rated at 425 horsepower.

Holtorf’s carbureted black 1988 5000QV, with its gold rims and archetypal rear wing scything the air, is pure schoolboy fantasy. The QV is identifiable by the humps in the engine hatch (one hump for carbureted engines, two for U.S.-spec fuel-injected versions), and the “Quattrovalvole” badge on the rump. These high-body cars indeed offer more space inside even as the seats and basic goony ergonomics remain largely unchanged from the original LP400. The interior is altogether more deluxe in the QV, although there is a wider deployment of plastics, as befitting a car from the 1980s.

Maybe it’s me, but the additional weight and rubber on the road seem to counteract the benefits of extra horsepower, though the torque off idle is distinctly stronger as the enlarged engine takes bigger gulps of air. Testers who suppressed their mechanical sympathy to extract 5.6-second runs to 60 mph in the original periscope Countach—nearly a full second quicker than the contemporary Ferrari 365 GT4 BB—returned to find the QV could do the deed in about five seconds flat on its way to a 180-mph top speed (the later Ferrari 512 BB and BBis were also quicker). It was a blinding acceleration figure in the 1980s.

Again, the QV chassis has a certain grace to its movements even if the steering is much heavier at lower speeds owing to the fatter front tires. Holtorf explained that the suspension doesn’t use conventional rubber bushings but racing-type uniball and heim joints with plastic inserts to reduce friction. Over time, these wear out and impart a rattly looseness to the ride and handling that many drivers mistake for bad or antiquated engineering.

Which is why owners who take their cars in for something minor are so often presented with unexpectedly gonzo repair estimates. If the mechanic is willing to do the whole job (many aren’t, or can’t), he’ll walk the owner under the car and demonstrate how the sloppy joints clank and twist as the wheels are tugged. From there, the bills rain down like hellfire. “Worn joints, plus fat sticky tires, usually past their replacement dates, cause lousy handling in poorly maintained cars, which is most cars,” said Holtorf. “As do incorrect aftermarket shocks, worn weakened coil springs, and other changes. Stock is always best.”

And then there is the 25th Anniversary model, which commemorates not the model anniversary but that of Lamborghini’s founding in 1963, and which one magazine described as looking like a QV that had been “dragged through a J.C. Whitney catalog.”

An unfair characterization, perhaps, as the Countach can’t be faulted for keeping up with the neon-lit, permed-hair, acid-washed, spandex-shod fashions of its moment (and all the strakes and filigrees very much make it of its moment). The restyling was attributed to work done by Horacio Pagani, who later founded his own car company but was then a Lamborghini employee who developed new composite materials and fabrication techniques.

The Mimrans were probably the only investors ever to make money on Lamborghini, as they bought it for only $3 million and unloaded it to Chrysler in 1987 for $25 million. To recoup its investment, Chrysler immediately stepped on the gas, and Countaches poured forth from Sant’Agata in previously unheard-of volumes. About half of the total number of Countaches ever made were built in the last three years of its existence.

Holtorf’s own black Anniversary was down with a problem, so one of his customers, Stephen Tebo, kindly stepped in with the superb, low-miles white one photographed here. The modernization is all too apparent in the digital stereo and climate-control displays. No doubt Chrysler chief Lee Iacocca thought manual windows and seats were a crime in a car priced at $225,000. But the new and bulky power buckets robbed the cockpit of both its distinctive original couches plus whatever extra space was afforded by the shift to the high body in 1981. The seat controls, behind a flip-open panel in the sill, barely adjust the seats, moving them just a few short inches, but at least they are adjustable.

Everything seems heavier in the Anniversary, partly because the whole car is, since it gained almost 600 pounds during its long life. Yet it’s definitely quicker, even if you need to hold the wheel and shifter as though they’re attached to a rodeo bronc. It seems like all the Countach clichés stem from the Anniversary model, as it’s less initially friendly than the periscope and even more demanding of compromise than the QV. Perhaps it’s simply that by 1988, it seemed silly to buy any car with a shoebox trunk and footwells sized for the soles of children. But then that is often the case with cars left in the market too long: They age out of their moment of newness and novelty and get saddled with equipment they were never meant to have.

There’s no question that the Anniversary is an exhilarating brain fry that sucks down superlatives as quickly as its 32-gallon fuel load. You develop a rapport with it over time and begin to think maybe—just maybe—you could drive this thing to work, maybe a couple of days a week while the electronic climate control maintains a perfect 72 degrees and the stereo belts out Joan Jett.

And yet my mind kept drifting back to the periscope, and how badly I wanted to take it home and love it. It’s ridiculous, absurd! A piece of 50-year-old art with crotchety mechanicals and bodywork so thin that to lean on it is to damage it. Access to the V-12 is effectively through a ship’s porthole. You need weird, four-prong socket wrenches to do any serious work. You need special oil, special water, probably special air for the tires. The QV has a better suspension, and the Anniversary is better still, benefiting from experience and investment dollars from Detroit. And most people would agree that a Miura is more classically beautiful.

And yet. That original origami vision—so mod, so kinetic, so lurid. If it had, as Bertone said, a crooked schnoz, it was the crooked schnoz of the century.

To Holtorf’s point, the Countach is a great car. It was when it debuted as the last-of-an-age lightning flash out of Italy, a chin-flick and vaffanculo! to all the self-appointed guardians of virtue who were laboring so righteously to legislate the end of fun and freedom. And the Countach finished strong, still leaving the boombox burghers slack-jawed at the curb. In no universe that we know of can it be used as ordinary transportation. The Lamborghini Countach is pure hedonistic, licentious, nihilistic entertainment. As we all know, that is usually the best kind.

The post The Case for the Countach: Lambo’s bad boy seeks redemption in the Rockies appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Smooth, powerful, and exceptionally quiet. These are the three targets that Bentley has been aiming for since W.O. Bentley opened his factory in the London suburb of Cricklewood in 1920. However, after more than a century of battling the inherent racket caused by exploding gasoline, Bentley (as well as every other luxury marque) is aiming to conquer these demonic forces and produce the smoothest, fastest, and quietest cars they have ever built. They will be electric.

Hybrid models, however, will bridge the gap. That’s either because Bentley doesn’t think its highbrow customers are ready for full electrification, or because Bentley’s parent company, Volkswagen Group by way of Audi AG, isn’t yet ready to give its British subsidiary the necessary tech and investment to go all-electric. It’s coming, we’re told, along with a complete company-wide carbon neutrality plan that will see Bentley’s lineup fully transition to EVs by 2030. (Won’t it be grand to step out of your carbon-neutral Bentley and into your 400-gallons-per-hour Gulfstream G550?) Until then, there’s the Bentley Flying Spur Hybrid with a roughly $220,000 base price, about $30,000 more than the base-model Flying Spur and its non-hybrid V-8.

Our bonnet-blue test car with blackout trim looked like it had been spec’d for a Russian dacha infamous for wild parties, standing strikingly apart from the more common black/grey/silver hues this car tends to wear around Los Angeles. The spec sheet showed $68,500 in options, including a single $20,925 line item for the Mulliner Driving Specification, which brought in diamond-quilted seats, 22-inch wheels, leather headliner, sports pedals, plus a few other trinkets like a metal oil-filler cap. The next biggest hit was $12,245 for some exterior carbon-fiber bits such as a front splitter, rear spoiler, side sills, and rear diffuser. In case there’s any doubt, the car flaunts the famous Bentley “B” logo in about 30 places, including projected on the ground from the bottom of the doors. Amenities such as digital OLED screens abound, but a standout is the night-vision camera with projected heads-up display (part of the $8640 Touring Specification package of driver aids). The screens have hybrid-specific displays including painting a very handy range circle around the car on the moving map.

The Flying Spur operates like most plug-in hybrids of today, in that you can drive it with or without the gasoline engine and select from a few gas-electric driving modes. They include an EV Hold function that lets you retain the battery charge until you want it, such as driving into a city center where ICE cars are banned. Or creeping back into your own garage late at night. The 5600-pound luxury liner is able to operate in near-silent, pure-electric mode until it drains the 18 kW/Hr battery under the trunk floor. For us, that was about 30 miles. After that, the 410-hp 2.9-liter V-6 alights, and it will run until the 21-gallon fuel tank goes dry, which should be another 500 miles or so given our observed fuel economy of 24 mpg. The hybrid system’s combined power rating is 536 horsepower and 553 pound-feet of torque.

Oh, how wonderful those first 30 miles are after you disconnect the charge cord. The Flying Spur squirts off the line and wafts along on a thick impulse of torque, silently gliding toward its destination as the occupants enjoy a lavishly trimmed isolation chamber ready to be filled with music, talk radio, or polite conversation about the price of patisserie macarons. Then that V-6—the first six-pot Bentley since 1959—erupts like your cousin Ace busting in reeking of Coors. It’s a little too loud and a bit too coarse and it doesn’t have V-8 courage despite being puffed up on boost.

This direct-injected and turbocharged engine only goes into a few select Audi and Porsche products so it would be unfair to call it a Volkswagen mill. But it is definitely not Bentley material. Part of the problem is that the Flying Spur is quiet as the York Minster crypt in electric mode, so any internal-combustion engine would sound like a trash can rolling down stairs. The other problem is that the engine has a mind of its own. Sometimes it awakens like a startled cat and burrs at 2000-3000 rpm for several minutes for no obvious reason. Then it shuts off with equal abruptness. Coasting down to a stoplight with the engine at idle, it can suddenly quit, causing a bucking in the driveline that is very un-Bentley like. Then again, sometimes it doesn’t.

These may be small complaints in car that otherwise looks fabulous and handles with ridiculous competence given its dimensions and weight. But now that virtually every brand offers a hybrid, and many now have full electrics in their catalogs, it’s a little embarrassing that the drivetrain in this Flying Spur isn’t as fluid as that of, say, a Kia EV6.

Remember that up until 2006, the top-of-the-line Bentley Arnage ran a pushrod 6.75-liter V-8 that dated to 1959 with a four-speed GM Hydra-Matic transmission. The 6.75 remained in production in various forms until 2020. It’s not obvious that Bentley buyers care if their car is state-of-the-art under the hood. They’re happy just to be coddled in perfumed leather, plush-pile wool carpet, and heavily lacquered wood, as is their right.

Granted, part of the charm of owning a Bentley—at least in the last 50 years—has been its somewhat antiquated mechanicals. This hybrid powertrain possesses nothing of that tradition. One emerges from the Flying Spur’s gorgeously appointed interior feeling it would be much more suitable as a pure EV. Its combination of limited electric performance and usable real-world range, for now, is the best Crewe can muster. If nothing else, this imperfect effort will prepare Bentley’s highly particular clientele for the inevitable.

***

2022 Bentley Flying Spur Hybrid

Price: $210,000 / $278,500 (base / as-tested)

Highs: Rides and handles with the best 5600-pound sedans out there. Coddling interior. Better economy than typical for a Bentley and usable in European city centers with emissions restrictions.

Lows: More expensive than a V-8 yet lacks similar powertrain refinement.

Summary: An imperfect, in-between step between Bentley’s past and future.

The post Review: 2022 Bentley Flying Spur Hybrid appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Strange shotgun marriages happen in the cylinders of engines due to the intense heat and pressure of internal combustion. For example, nitrogen and oxygen are not naturally attracted to each other, chemically speaking, but they are thrown together by the detonation of fuel to produce oxides of nitrogen. Likewise, carbon and oxygen get it on during the explosion to form carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide.

Unusual pairings are also happening in the auto industry these days. Under intense pressure to increase electric vehicle output this decade, car companies hope to save money by sharing the multibillion-dollar costs of converting to electrification. In what is likely the biggest deal yet, General Motors and Honda announced back in 2020 that they would couple up to develop an electric crossover set to debut in 2027 with a highly ambitious price point of under $30,000. “By working together, we’ll put people all over the world into EVs faster than either company could achieve on its own,” said GM CEO Mary Barra.

GM has been in bed with Japanese automakers before, having produced cars with Toyota, Suzuki, and Isuzu at various times. Honda remained self-reliant during the wave of corporate mergers that rushed through the industry in the 1990s and 2000s, although the fiercely independent automaker did form some limited strategic partnerships. Perhaps you recall the 1993–2002 Honda Passport, which was built by Isuzu, or the 2004–07 deal in which Honda supplied GM with V-6 engines for the long-gone Saturn division.

It’s thought that GM’s early bet on battery development combined with Honda’s long experience in packaging and producing smaller vehicles at a profit will complement each other. Also, Honda is behind in electrification and surely needed a friendly partner outside of Japan, now that the demand seems to be rising for EVs. First-quarter 2022 EV registrations in the U.S. were up a startling 60 percent over the same period last year, totaling nearly 160,000 new battery-electric vehicles, or 4.6 percent of the market.

The first cars to appear under the GM-Honda alliance will be the Honda Prologue (get it?) in 2024, plus an EV for Honda’s luxury Acura division. The sub-$30,000 crossovers will come later as the industry works through the daunting cost disadvantages of electrics.

Meanwhile, Toyota has taken on multiple partners to speed EVs to market. In 2017, it formed an EV-development cooperative with Mazda, and starting this year, Subaru dealers will stock a $46,220 electric crossover called the Solterra, which is just a Toyota bZ4X wearing the thinnest of brand disguises.

Toyota’s motivation for sharing with Subaru may be that Subaru has barely touched its supply of tax incentives that rewards buyers of EVs with a $7500 federal tax credit. Each automaker can sell up to 200,000 electric and plug-in hybrids before the tax credit starts phasing out under a plan passed by Congress in 2008. Tesla and GM have hit the limit, and Toyota and Ford are expected to this year, but EV newcomer Subaru is only getting started (a proposal to drop the 200,000 limit and expand the credit to $12,500 appears dead in Congress).

Though some marriages may flourish, others are already on the skids. Last November, Ford broke off its engagement with electric pickup maker Rivian, ending their agreement, announced in 2019, to jointly develop an electric pickup and SUV. A few months later, Amazon—an early Rivian investor that had previously said it would buy 100,000 electric delivery vans from the startup by 2030—hopped into bed with Chrysler’s parent company, Stellantis, instead. The retail behemoth said it would purchase the company’s electric ProMaster van, due in 2023, as well as supply in-car software and cloud services. As Shakespeare observed, “Hasty marriage seldom proveth well.”

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The New Standard of the World. The New Measurement of Greatness. Cadillac ads have been promising buyers something new for so long that the whole line has gotten pretty old. Except that this time they really mean it. The all-electric Cadillac Lyriq is so new that it is quite literally unprecedented, an entirely fresh rethink of how an automobile should be constructed around a wholly new form of propulsion, wrapped in an absorbing design largely unlocked from the handcuffs of overbearing brand-identity templates. The Lyriq is as new as new gets.

However, it won’t be so new by the time you get one. The 2023s are all sold out, so folks getting in line now won’t receive their 2024 Lyriq for almost a year. That’s the forecast, anyway. And that is not necessarily a bad thing. After Cadillac executives boasted how the Lyriq’s engineering timeline was yanked forward an incredible nine months—this despite the pandemic shuttering GM for a crucial stretch—it was obvious from our brief drive in Utah that this bun, while yummy, could stand to bake in the oven just a little longer.

We’re not surprised; we did say this car is unprecedented, and even getting it out the door after two years of Covid was a feat. GM has been promising us new vehicles on its Ultium electric architecture for a while, and, technically, the Lyriq isn’t the first. Technically, the first one out of the gate was the gonzo GMC Hummer EV, a $110,000 leviathan weighing three-and-a-half tons and able to out-accelerate a Lamborghini. The first of those are just now reaching buyers. Here on planet Earth, however, the Lyriq is the first real mass-market Ultium-based vehicle. It also marks a turning point for Cadillac; the division says it will not introduce another new internal-combustion-engine vehicle after the Lyriq, as it marches toward an all-electric future.

Aimed at the heart of the midsize luxury crossover segment, the Lyriq 450E (the number roughly approximates the drive-motor’s torque in Newton-meters) carries a base price for of $59,990, with a projected EPA range of 312 miles. These first 340-hp Lyriqs will be rear-drive, but an as-yet unnamed 500-hp all-wheel-drive version with a second motor up front—the 900E?—will hit dealers starting next January priced at $64,990.

As with the Hummer and other EVs, the Lyriq is no featherweight. The base model weighs 5610 pounds by the factory specs. Unlike some other EVs, this five-seat hatchback offers no front trunk, depending instead on its generous interior acreage which includes 28 cubic feet of cargo space with the 60/40 back seats raised, and 61 cubic feet with them folded to near-flatness at the push of a button. Anyone getting out of a sedan or similarly sized crossover will not feel at all shortchanged in this department. In fact, under the load floor is another hide-away storage area, and the cargo shade also stores under the floor in a handy holder so you don’t have to leave it in the garage during trips for bulkier items.

Aside from the vertical light bars in the front and rear, the Lyriq presents as something new for Cadillac. From the side it reads more like a slightly tall wagon than an SUV, with a long hood and low roof reminiscent of recent Volvo products. The “grille” is not a grille at all, but a piece of translucent polycarbonate that has been painted black on the backside and then etched by a laser to create a pattern that, from a distance, resembles pinstriping on a Savile Row suit. At night, these stripes are backlit via LEDs to create some arresting patterns, part of a whole kinetic-light motif for the Lyriq with simulated “movement” elsewhere in the car’s external lighting.

Another bold design element is the wrap-around tail lamps that sweep all the way up into the roof, creating the illusion of a conical rear glass and evoking the aft profile of the Jensen Interceptor, of all things. The otherwise clean and windswept shape becomes a bit fractured in back where panels both vital and decorative come together in a riot of intersecting parting lines. It’s down to the eye of the beholder, but this is not the singular droplet of sculpted metal that some cars are, such as the aforementioned Volvos.

Another wince point is the Lyriq’s door latches. Instead of conventional pull-handles, Cadillac just had to be different with a touch button that causes the door to unlatch and be pushed outward a few inches by a mini motorized plunger that deploys from inside the door. Then, on the front door, you must move your hand to a little finger pull at the base of the glass that lets you draw the door open, thus making what is a one-step process in every other car into an annoying two-step action. And there’s no such pull for the back doors, meaning you must wrap your fingers around the door edge or glass to pull open the door. Smudgy fingerprints ensue, and more than a few baby Jills will get their digits smashed by evil baby Jacks throwing themselves at the door just at the wrong moment. How this design blort got past GM’s usually overcautious lawyers is beyond us.

Inside, the designers went all the way downtown, gussying up the organically shaped cockpit with a myriad of materials and treatments, not all of them harmonizing. For example, in the center stack, the enormous, curved, 33-inch high-res touchscreen is backed up by a panel of what looks like frosted aluminum with an interesting diamond-pattern texture. Directly below is another bezel, this one of bright chrome that clashes with the one above and beams an incandescent reflection into your eyes when the sun shines through the glass roof.

The metal brightwork for the interior door releases features a third, deep-brush finish that isn’t used anywhere else. And more diamond-pattern knurling rings the cupholders and the vent controls. The designers, who perhaps did the whole job over Zoom between binges of Mad Men, also couldn’t agree on a shade of black. You get glossy piano black on some bits, a sort of black-ash wood on the doors and center console which doesn’t feel real if it is, and the dull flatness of hard, molded black plastic in a few too many places. Eye-catching laser cuts in the wood door trim means more opportunity for light shows. However, unfinished mold flashing on the steering column and the telltale creak of plastic-pushing-on-plastic in the center console are painful screams of cheapness. Overall, it is not GM’s best effort.

The wide-as-Cinemascope touchscreen is divided into zones and works like an iPad with menus that you can swipe right or left, either with your finger directly on the screen or via a do-everything knob on the center console. The graphics are super sharp and the processor is lightning quick. For navigation and tunes we plumbed Google apps off our iPhones through the screen using its phone mirroring function, which taps the mighty Googleverse (the best ‘verse) for navigation. Voice commands are one way to direct it, another is to just tap out what you want on your phone. Software glitches plus an external motorized charge door that wouldn’t motor properly punctuated our test drive, meaning the Lyriq’s bugs are still being exterminated. Why the charge door has to be motorized is a mystery. Will it even work when a layer of ice covers it?

One thing GM does seem to know better than most car companies is how EV driving is different from ICE driving. One-pedal motoring via regenerative braking is one area, and the Lyriq gives the driver precise control of it with both selectable regen modes plus a manual paddle on the back of the steering wheel. Unlike a similar paddle in the older Chevy Bolt, the Lyriq’s offers more capability, such that it can be used in conjunction with the throttle pedal to get the exact amount of regen braking desired. If you’re cruising an avenue at, say, 20 percent throttle and the car ahead is turning, you can pull the paddle—a little or a lot, depending on the situation—without taking your foot off the accelerator. If you need to brake harder, lift off the accelerator and/or pull the paddle harder. Or just pick an auto regen mode; you can one-pedal drive in both the low and high settings, though even the low setting is fairly aggressive such that it will bring the car to a complete stop. Basically, the Lyriq is like a Nikon SLR camera with respect to regen; you can just set it on auto and forget about it or take full control with the buttons (the accelerator and steering wheel paddle) to make your own magic.

Ultium is GM’s name for its slick new EV architecture, and it indicates how electric vehicles will be built in the near future by major car companies wanting to do serious EV volume. The core philosophy is stackability; the Ultium battery can grow or shrink as needed for a specific product. The basic building block is a rectangular box called the Cell Module Assembly which contains 24 flat, sheet-like lithium-ion battery cells. There are 12 of these CMA boxes crammed under the floor of the Lyriq, twice that number in the Hummer, and as little as eight CMAs in future smaller crossovers yet to be announced.

Each CMA is just 4.3 inches tall, meaning that a tray of them can be packed under the feet of passengers without raising the floor significantly. Moreover, the CMAs talk to each other and the car’s brain via wireless communication, a tricky bit of engineering that lets the car closely manage battery temperature and charge state—keys to getting both range and fast recharge capability—while reducing the amount of wiring and weight. Further, GM claims it has cut its usage of cobalt, a conflict mineral used on the anodes of lithium-ion batteries, by 70 percent, and reduced the pack’s overall cost by 40 percent.

Charge flexibility is another sales point for the Lyriq. You can plug the supplied cord it into anything from a 110-volt wall socket—it’ll need a few days to fully recharge—to a 240-volt dryer outlet. The latest DC fast-chargers can supply as much as 76 miles of driving in only 10 minutes of charging. Assuming you can find one (there are apps for that). As with other automakers, Cadillac has created a program to assist buyers in getting their garages wired up with a least a 240-volt Level 2 charger, which can pump in about 40 miles of range per hour.

Around the Lyriq’s guts, the plant at Spring Hill, Tennessee (remember those schmaltzy 1990s Hal Riney ads for Saturn: “It’s spring in Spring Hill…”) constructs a mostly-steel cage optimized for electrification, with far different load paths for managing crash energy than a conventional ICE vehicle. After 50 years of making cars that can manage the rearward thrusting mass of an engine being pushed backwards in a federally mandated barrier test, now the engineers must deal with a 1000-pound-plus, bolted-in battery pack that wants to rocket forward in the same test. Top of mind, as well, is preventing the battery pack from deforming or otherwise being damaged internally enough to cause a fire. It’s been a steep learning curve, but GM shows with the Lyriq, which shares virtually no parts with any other GM vehicle except the Hummer, that it’s well ahead in attacking the problem.

Between the motors and the 102-kWh battery pack, the assembly plant applies a thick layer of soundproofing as well as an active noise cancelling system, such that the Lyriq may just be the quietest vehicle you’ve ever driven. Until you light up the 19-speaker AKG audio system. Say what you will about the design, it does not generate discernible wind noise, even at freeway speeds. Cadillac engineers claim the 265/50R-20 and optional 275/40R-22 Michelins are bespoke to the Lyriq and the sidewalls were even shaped to reduce drag (though we couldn’t see much difference). Such wide, low-profile meats rarely offer low noise or a cosseting ride, but the Lyriq glides without any harsh chop to its movements.

The Lyriq’s acceleration is typical for an electric, meaning immediate and swift. But even in sport mode it’s only medium-spicy, not hot, and definitely not chasing Tesla. Not yet, at least. Expect an as-yet-unannounced V version to be the tire fryer. Meanwhile, no struts on this Cad, the suspension is more interesting with a five-link setup at all four corners. Cost considerations prevented GM’s killer MagneRide magnetic shocks from coming aboard the 450E. Yet the “Passive-Plus Premium Dampers,” with valving that lets them self-adjust their damping rates for low-frequency rollers or high-frequency slams, does a credible job of keeping it serene while providing good body and path control for this weighty machine. If you don’t wish to drive, SuperCruise, Cadillac’s name for its self-driving mode, will come a little later in the production cycle as an over-the-air update.

The biggest knocks against the Lyriq are its portly weight and an interior design that may not suit everyone. Plus a shortage of availability for pretty much the next year. However, it has a lot going for it, including respectable ride and handling, exceptional quietness, and fairly efficient interior packaging. It is the future—or at least an early draft of the future, and it is finally, without question, and most definitely “all-new.”

***

2023 Cadillac Lyriq 450E

Price: $59,990 base, as-tested price TBD

Highs: Quieter than a church on Monday, roomy, mod styling, an arresting use of light.

Lows: Some interior cheapness, silly door handles, almost three tons of heft.

Summary: The New Standard of Cadillac is handsome, quiet, and all-electric.

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My friend Bob Huber, the Lamborghini restorer, texted me recently. He wanted a picture of the corner of the windshield of my Espada because he’s having some windshields made and he wants to get the factory etching right. He wondered if the glass on my 1970 model was marked with a DOT stamp. Some cars have it and some don’t. The text exchange sent me down a glass-lined rabbit hole.

My windshield mark starts with “Made in West Germany,” followed by the name of the glassmaker, Sigla, an old supplier that also glazed windows for VW, Porsche, and others. Under that is the designation AS-1, which is found on windshields today and is shorthand for the light-transmittance standards drawn up by the American National Standards Institute. The 1 denotes the most clarity, meaning 70 percent of light transmits through the glass, thus making it legal for use in a windshield. AS-2 and -3 glass can be used for tinted side windows. Look on the windshield edge of a modern car and you’re likely to see “AS-1” etched in the glass about two-thirds the way up with an arrow pointing down. That means the windshield is AS-1 below that mark and something else above it, usually because of a shade band across the top of the windshield. Under AS-1 on my Espada’s windshield was “IGM” plus a number, a reference to the Ispettorato Generale della Motorizzazione, basically the Italian department of transportation. That was followed by “M 101,” which is Sigla’s own code for the windshield’s type of construction, including its color and thickness.

No DOT mark. That’s because the Department of Transportation, which was formed in 1966, didn’t get around to mandating a DOT mark on glass until 1973. Regs were coming hot and heavy back then. In his seminal book, Unsafe at Any Speed, Ralph Nader raised the issue of glass safety and specifically distortions caused by curved glass in ’50s and ’60s cars. You can’t say he didn’t have a point; anyone who has driven a ’60s Cadillac knows that the world gets wonky in the corners of its windshield.

Like a tire, glass is one of those car bits that you just have to buy. It can’t be repaired when it’s broken and it usually can’t be made at home. I had to replace the cracked left pane in my ’49 Buick a couple of years ago. Life was simpler in the ’40s, as the glass in most cars was completely flat and therefore extremely easy to replace. Glass shops had huge scrolls of paper with patterns for every pane used in every car under the sun. The scrolls were fixed to rollers at each end of a glass-topped table and the paper fed through. Thus, all you had to do was look up the customer’s make and model in the accompanying book, get the part number, wind the scrolls until the correct pattern appeared in the window, and cut the piece.

Carson Hobson at Street Rod Glass in Riverside, California, has been in the auto glass business since he was 18 (“My dad told me if I didn’t have a job by the end of the week, I had to move out. The joys of growing up in a military family”). Hobson managed to obtain two complete sets of these now very rare scrolls, containing some 2000 patterns each. He keeps one set at the shop and one at home because if the shop burns, “My life is basically those tables.”

Hobson’s cost for glass has risen 300 percent since he cut me the Buick pane for $75. He usually buys about $7000 worth of glass a week, but his suppliers are now rationing him due to supply chain chaos, and since the run-up in gas prices, he’s also paying a 15 percent fuel surcharge on deliveries. Most auto glass and especially curved glass, he says, comes from Taiwan, and a shipping container that once cost $3000 to put on a boat now costs $17,000. Which is why he has over 4000 unanswered quotes for glass sitting in his inbox. No time, no supplies.

“If China invades Taiwan, it will shut the whole glass industry down,” predicts Hobson. “You won’t be able to get glass for your car, for your shop window, for anything.” Well, I hadn’t expected my rabbit hole to end in Taiwan, but that’s the thing about glass: It helps you to see the world more clearly.

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Nobody knows exactly why the Felicity Ace caught fire in the North Atlantic, sinking on March 1 and sending its cargo of 1900 Audis, 1100 Porsches, 500 VWs, 189 Bentleys, and 85 Lamborghinis nearly 2 miles to the bottom. Some of those cars were electric, and if a lithium-ion battery didn’t start the fire, the packs—which are stubbornly flammable once ignited—probably made it worse, according to the Portuguese Navy, which rescued the Felicity’s crew.

Thus, the industry was shaken by yet another complication in its trillion-dollar conversion to electrification: how to ship vehicles whose batteries are potential fire-bombs. It comes amid a swell of optimism for EV demand that has automakers racing to rewrite their product plans. Hyundai has nearly doubled its projected EV volume, to 1.7 million a year by 2026. And Ford, with 200,000 reservations for the electric F-150 Lightning, and amid hot demand for the Mustang Mach-E, has delayed two future EV models so it can catch up.

Ford president Jim Farley has also taken the dramatic step of cleaving his 119-year-old company into two entities. Ford Blue will continue to produce internal-combustion vehicles while Ford Model e will be the all-electric division, with Farley as its head. “The reality is our legacy organization has been holding us back,” Farley said. Wall Street approves; investors have pumped up auto stocks in general by nearly $2 trillion.

Still, cars must get to market, which mainly means going on boats. Fires on drive-aboard car transporters—what the shipping industry calls “roll on-roll off” or “ro-ro” vessels—are not uncommon. Five ro-ro ship fires between 2017 and 2019 were attributed to various causes, none of them related to EV batteries. However, the industry is now worried that EV batteries could make any ship fire much worse. Marine shippers are looking at the implications for passenger ferries, too. The notion that dubiously maintained, 10-year-old EVs—along with electric tractor-trailers packing enormous batteries—will eventually be common on long-haul ferry crossings has the ferry industry studying new fire-suppression, gas-detection, and air-circulation tech. Any change creates its own challenges; if a ferry’s sprinkler system is upsized to deal with tenacious battery fires, the capacity for pumping water overboard also needs to increase, lest the sprinkler system founder the ship.

The air cargo industry began tackling the problem years ago when device makers like Apple started shipping their most in-demand products by air. If you own an iPhone, it likely came across the Pacific in a Boeing 747-8 freighter, which can haul about 200,000 devices per run. The International Air Transport Association figures billions of cells have gone by air, and all it takes is one damaged or mis-manufactured cell to cause “thermal runaway” and a fire. A few aircraft fires in the early days of lithium-ion technology led the IATA to recommend rules around packing and charge state, also encouraging air carriers to accept only batteries already fitted into factory-packaged devices, thus avoiding the risk that badly made counterfeit cells will spark an air disaster.

As we all know, shipping oil on the high seas carries its own catastrophic risks. However, as the EV revolution accelerates, new hazards promise to make the industry’s learning curve very steep.

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Proudly parked among all the gleaming zillion-dollar custom coaches lined up in orderly rows in the paddock at the recent Acura Grand Prix of Long Beach was an ancient Ford Condor II motorhome that looked like it had just driven off the set of Vanishing Point. The mustand-and-white paint job and old-school “McLaren Engines” stickers hint at the rig’s reason for being at a race, and a roll-out canopy serving as shade to lunching crew members of Arrow McLaren SP, the modern-day IndyCar effort of McLaren, proves that this 50-year-old motorhome still works for a living.

The rig belongs to Zak Brown, the chief of McLaren Racing. He was in Long Beach to not only oversee his company’s recent investment in an IndyCar team, but also to race his own 1989 Jaguar XJR-10 IMSA GTP car in the event’s supporting historic race. Explains Brown of the 28-foot-long RV, which is the real deal, having formerly served as a McLaren Engines team support and trackside hospitality vehicle at Can-Am, F1, and USAC races back in the 1970s: “A buddy of mine found it on Bring-A-Trailer, so this was a must-buy.” Brown had had his friend bid for it “because I figured a McLaren CEO buying a McLaren motorhome is not a good way to start negotiations.” It sold on BaT last June for $32,500.

If you’ve been watching the Netflix series Formula 1: Drive to Survive, you’re familiar with Zak Brown, the seemingly unlikely American in charge of McLaren Racing. In a series dominated by cutthroat Europeans with ice water in their veins, Brown comes across as the sport’s real-life Ted Lasso, a slightly folksy leader of an underdog team who gets his pouty young stars to perform through repeated enthusiastic attaboys and high-fives. The truth may be slightly different; the native of North Hollywood, California was a racer himself, then made a considerable fortune in sports marketing before joining McLaren in 2016 and signing on as chief executive officer of McLaren Racing in 2018. You don’t get to the top by being a nice guy—at least, not all the time.

Now Brown, based at the company’s headquarters in Woking, England, swims with the sharks of F1, where the top teams employ 1000 people and annual budgets are around $350 million. Last year he orchestrated the purchase of the Arrow Schmidt Petersen Motorsports IndyCar team, which fields a pair of spec Dallara IR18 chassis for drivers Pato O’Ward and Felix Rosenqvist. Compared to F1, in which the teams build and develop new cars every year, McLaren’s 150-person IndyCar team is one-tenth the size and cost to run, says Brown, thanks largely to the limited travel and the spec Dallara chassis, which the team buys for $1.5 million each (plus a few $250,000 2.2-liter twin-turbo Chevy V-6es) and can do little to change.

“We have a long history here,” says Brown of McLaren’s interest in IndyCar. “We’ve won Indy three times, and the North American marketplace is important to the McLaren brand, our fans, and our corporate partners.” Yeah, but was it so important to have an IndyCar effort with the 2023 F1 schedule now containing three U.S. races, the most ever? “Even though Formula One is growing here, we wanted to have a bigger North American platform than all the other F1 teams,” answered Brown. “Being in Indycar allowed us to double down on the market.” McLaren’s drivers finished 5^th and 11^th in Long Beach, which was round three of the 17-race IndyCar schedule for 2022.

In his precious few minutes of spare time, Brown also collects vintage racing and road cars, and now boasts a collection of 33 racers and 13 road machines. Highlights include a ’65 289 Cobra, a Ferrari 288GTO and F50, one of the World Championship-winning John Player Special Lotus 79 F1 cars driven by Mario Andretti, Alan Jones’s 1980 championship-winning Williams FW07B, several significant Indy and rally cars, Ayrton Senna’s 1991 McLaren MP4-6 as well as a DAP go-kart that a young Senna raced in 1981.

Thus, the vintage Condor II, based on a Ford M-504 motorhome chassis coaxed forward by a big-block 390 FE V-8 and Cruise-O-Matic three-speed auto, wasn’t much of a stretch for Brown. “This was a personal purchase,” he says of the motorhome, which now lives at Arrow McLaren’s race shop in Indianapolis and goes by flatbed to races. “I haven’t driven it yet, but I have started it up. It goes to all the (U.S.) races I go to, it becomes my office.”

Brown says the RV needed some mechanical work underneath, but otherwise is all original, down to the acres of laminate walnut paneling, forest-green carpet and cushions, trumpet-shaped lamps, four-hob stove, and large embedded wall clock above the driver. Among the documentation that came with the purchase were yellowed McLaren promotional brochures and Friday qualifying sheets from the 1978 Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach. McLaren drivers James Hunt and Patrick Tambay were running seventh and eighth, respectively, that day.

Los Angeles-based Condor Coach Corporation aimed high with the Condor II, marketing it as “the yacht that is not a boat.” Standard features included a 70-gallon fresh-water tank and 80-gallon holding tank, a generous six-feet, six inches of interior headroom, a full kitchen with gas stove and oven, a bathroom with shower, loungers in the rear that converted into a master bedroom, tuck-away double bunk beds up front for the kids, color-coordinated drapery, and an 8-track player in the “wraparound aircraft-type dash.” The reverse-slope windshield so common in RVs of the period promised better forward visibility if no better fuel economy. We’re guessing well under 10 mpg, which is why it’s probably cheaper to flatbed it to races than it would be to drive it.

When we met Brown, he was about to jump into the Castrol-sponsored TWR Jaguar GTP car, which ran from 1989 to 1991 and won four races in the IMSA Camel GT series. American Price Cobb, Dutchman Jan Lammers, and Danish driver John Nielsen all took star turns in the turbocharged, 800-hp V-6-powered sports-prototype back in the day. Says Brown: “It’s geared for 195 mph on the front straight. It’s as fast as the IndyCars.”

At Long Beach, which Brown considers his “home race” since racing here in Indy Lights a quarter-century ago, his Jaguar would be up against other hero prototypes of the era, including a Porsche 935 and 962, a Mazda 787 and RX-792P, and Toyota AAR Eagle Mk III from 1991.  Brown said his goal for the race over the bumpy street circuit where concrete walls stand ready to punish even minor missteps, was “survival.”

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Justin Bieber likes hockey. Who knew? Well, apparently a lot of people in Toronto, as the Canadian-born singer is a regular at Maple Leafs games. But fellow Canadian slap-shotter Trevor Johnson didn’t know until a few years ago, when he was playing in the Italian national league. A friend approached him about setting up a private hockey game for Bieber, who was passing through on tour. This led to a side gig for Johnson organizing Bieber’s private games, which involves renting a rink, finding players, and booking rooms and catering wherever the entertainer is traveling. That led Johnson to another job they don’t tell you about in high-school career counseling: organizing car rallies.

Which sounds like a pretty fun way to prove your parents wrong about never amounting to anything because you like cars (or hockey) more than studying geometry and French. At least, it is if you enjoy spending hours negotiating with hotels that don’t appreciate their parking lots getting oiled, being on 24-hour call for wealthy folk who are used to getting their way, having contingencies at the ready for a gaggle of cars that might be a century old, and generally ensuring that a weeklong traveling roadshow with a million possible disaster triggers runs on time and without incident. “So far, no cops, no lawsuits,” says Johnson.

He had no idea that hockey would lead to Bieber, which would lead to old-car rallies until 2018, when another friend asked Johnson if he wanted to help with a 100-years-of-Bentley tour being run by a friend of mine, Craig Ekberg, who has put together several Bentley rallies on the West Coast. Ekberg and his co-organizers wanted to step up the rally’s game, with fancier hotels, finer food, gift bags for the co-drivers, and other accoutrements of the good life. “They’re paying you to drive their cars on public roads, which they could do for free, so you need to make it pretty damn cool,” Johnson says. The Bentley run was a hit, and it led to Johnson founding his own travel and events company, the Luxury Rally Club, in 2019.

Since then, and despite the pandemic, he has organized rallies along the old Route 66 and staged a run of 50 Lamborghini Countaches during the 2021 Monterey Car Week. He’s currently working on one-make rallies for the Mercedes-Benz 300SL and Porsche Carrera GT. The challenges can be daunting. Just finding cars with owners willing to pay $5000 to $15,000 to come along is his biggest task. “A lot of these guys don’t have Instagram; they can be hard to reach,” says Johnson. Another is picking the right regions and routes.

Do the job long enough and you’re going to see some stuff. Like the guy on the Countach rally who didn’t know how to put gas in his own car just minutes before the start. Or the Bentley owner who overslept and then loudly demanded that the organizers of the illustrious Quail Motorsports Gathering rip down a fence to let him in late (they did). And the mid-’60s Corvette Sting Ray that plowed into a feral hog at speed near the Grand Canyon, hosing the driver’s wife with pig innards. “She was actually pretty cool about it,” insists Johnson, though we might need a second source on that.

The point of telling you this: There are ways to be involved in and make a living from the car world that may not be obvious to young people of modest backgrounds who wonder if they’ll ever get to see a Ferrari in person. At Pebble Beach, at Scottsdale, and at every car auction and gathering that is more than a cars and coffee, paid staff make the wheels turn. It’s a business that runs on relationships, not on résumés or college degrees, meaning it rewards initiative more than much of the working world. And those relationships often forge best in buzzing auction tents or in hot hotel parking lots or out on lonely roads where an owner needs a flashlight held while he futzes with a Ferrari.

For most of us, this is a hobby; for people like Trevor Johnson, it’s a job—and by the looks of it, a pretty fun one that I wish someone had told me about in high school.

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Rethan Robison was a 21-year-old car mechanic living in San Antonio, Texas when he decided to join the Navy. Now his shop is at the very back of a thousand-foot-long, 97,000-ton, $8.5-billion, nuclear-powered instrument of U.S. foreign policy. The aviation machinist, third class repairs jet engines aboard CVN-68, the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier, including the low-bypass turbofans that drive the Navy’s F/A-18 Super Hornet fighters. Common problems include fluid leaks and hard landings on the carrier deck above, which, Robison says, shake the 2100-pound turbines so badly that their whirling blades momentarily scrape the inside of the engine housing—to disastrous effect.

Robison’s shop can tear down and rebuild a Hornet’s F404-GE-400 turbofan in as little as a day and a half. “It’s a lot cleaner than working on cars,” he says, of the job he’s had for three years. “There’s more moving parts, but they’re a lot bigger.” When the engine is back together, Robison and his crew wheel it out to a patio on the ship’s fantail where it can be tested and run all the way up to screaming afterburner.

If that sounds like a cool job, it certainly looks like one. Robison—he says his mom made up the name Rethan—seems to think it’s cooler than fixing cars, though he admits to missing his ’85 Chevy El Camino back home.

The Navy invited us, along with a dozen other civilians, for a 24-hour stay aboard the original supercarrier, which launched the Nimitz Class of nuclear carriers when it was commissioned in 1975. Variously nicknamed “Uncle Chester” and “Old Salt,” the Nimitz was on a seven-week training cruise from her home port in Bremerton, Washington, when we came aboard, steaming about 75 miles offshore of San Diego. Besides hosting “CQs,” or carrier qualifications for Naval aviators, it was also a training run for everyone from jet-engine wrenches to electronics specialists to cooks to nuclear reactor techs to the bosun’s mates who oversee the ship’s gigantic steering, berthing, and anchoring equipment.

It takes 3000 people to run the Nimitz, a number that swells to over 5000 when the carrier’s eight separate squadrons come aboard with their aviator and ground crews. One-third of that number turns over every year as sailors go on to new jobs in the Navy or muster out. Thus, the Nimitz has spent far more of its nearly 50 years in America’s arsenal not as a weapon, but as a giant technical college at sea.

And what a place to go to school. Some stats: the ship is 1092 feet long and 23 stories from keel to mast, with a 4.5-acre deck and similarly sized hangar bay underneath that together pack in 65 aircraft during full deployments. Two Westinghouse A4W nuclear reactors flash enough water into steam for the ship’s turbines to produce 140,000 shaft horsepower each. They also supply the ship’s four catapults with up to 65,000 pounds of instantaneous airplane-flinging thrust. At the ship’s published flank speed of 33 knots, her four screws are turning about three times a second, which doesn’t sound like much until you realize that each five-bladed brass prop weighs 33 tons and is 25 feet in diameter. The ship’s range is characterized as “unlimited,” the reactors being refueled only once every 20 years (the last pit stop being a top-to-bottom refit that took four years).

After some cursory instructions on how to don a self-inflating flotation collar and the “cranial,” the snug-fitting helmet/ear protector worn by deck hands, we were ushered through hot turbine blast and into the belly of an idling Grumman C-2 Greyhound. The twin-turboprop Greyhound has been the Navy’s prime “carrier on-board delivery” transport, or COD, for longer than the Nimitz has been afloat. Everyone just calls the airplane “the Cod.” Passengers sit in its uninsulated, mostly windowless hold, facing the rear cargo hatch, separated from their belongings lest a loose item go flying during an arrested landing or catapult takeoff.

During the deafening, 39-minute trip out to the Nimitz, there was little to do but, as they say on the airlines, sit back, relax, and await the bang of the tailhook smacking the deck, followed by the attendant three or four Gs of lung-squeezing deceleration. After a hand-wave of warning from the crew, the Cod crossed the Nimitz’s threshold at 120 mph, snagged a wire, slammed onto the deck, and came to a stop in less than two seconds, ramming us deeper into our seats with an audible “oof!” The airplane’s beaver-tail rear hatch immediately dropped, a shaft of light pouring in. We could see ship’s hands milling around and, in the distance, the cobalt-blue Pacific.

A small team of public-affairs officers, some of whom were pulled off other jobs for our visit, hustled us belowdecks and to the commander’s office. Carrier commanders come from the ranks of naval aviators, and Captain Craig Sicola was a helicopter and Hornet driver before being sent to “nuke school,” where future commanders are trained in the ways of atomic ships. Aboard the carrier, he sits at former Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz’s actual desk and works on a glass top under which is a full-scale reproduction of the man’s hand-drawn battle plan for the world-changing Battle of Midway. Old Salt himself, minus the finger he lost to a ship’s machine in his early years, stares down from a life-size portrait over the desk. If that isn’t daunting enough, Sicola’s job as mayor of a small, nuclear-powered city keeps him endlessly busy.

Forget the cigar-chomping, order-barking Top Gun stereotype of a carrier commander; Sicola is rail-thin and soft spoken, with trace flashes of grey at his temples. His biggest problem isn’t cocky jet pilots wanting to buzz the tower but maintaining morale and work efficiency with a crew that may be gone from home for more than six months. He said, “You have 18-19-year-old sailors away from home for months at a time, I’ll let you work out the rest.” During our visit, he was unsuccessfully petitioning his superiors to follow the lead of most states and remove the Covid-19 mask rule, still in place aboard (though, we saw, unevenly followed).

At that point, the ship’s executive officer, Captain Joshua F. “Spoiler” Wenker, a former flight officer on the E-2C Hawkeye, showed us how he got his call sign by noting that there would be no fixed-wing operations during our visit. Which meant no jets. The Hornet squadron that had been qualifying shortly before our arrival had finished early—a tragically timed case of military efficiency—and the deck would be much quieter save the arrival of a trio of new CMV-22 Ospreys. Already in service with the Marines and Air Force, the CMV-22 is the Navy’s version of the standard tilt-rotor, V-22 cargo hauler, and scheduled to replace the Greyhound by 2024. Osprey rookies, many of them former Greyhound drivers, would be attempting their first carrier landings in the twin-rotor craft during our visit.

I wasn’t aboard five minutes before I met someone from my hometown of West Bloomfield, Michigan. Lieutenant (j.g.) Alex Przeslawski works in information technology, probably a code for electronics warfare, when he isn’t showing visitors around. Everywhere you look, pipes, valves, cables, and electronic boxes line the ceilings and hallways of the Nimitz’s endless miles of passageways. Much of it appears to have been slapped with a coat of white paint about a dozen times. Przeslawki told me that probably ten percent of the wiring aboard the Nimitz is derelict, overtaken by newer technology in the nearly 60 years since her keel was laid, but never removed.

Cranials, goggles, and double ear protection are required on the ship’s deck. After a seemingly endless climb up the ship’s near-vertical stairways, we walked out on “vulture’s row,” an observation balcony overlooking the vast flight deck. The Ospreys were coming in for practice touch-and-goes, their pilots gingerly approaching the ship’s fantail, hovering, and setting down with the twin rotors—Osprey pilots call them “pie plates”—visibly pitching and shifting to keep the craft stable in descent. A few pilots misjudged the heaving deck, coming down hard enough to give a good shake to the wings and engine pod, before bouncing back into the air for another try. As the Ospreys taxied past the ship’s island in preparation for take-off and go-around, the noise and air pulses from the beating props shook the carrier’s superstructure and the chests of those watching.

The current Navy Osprey, the CMV-22B, looks like two helicopters strapped to a beluga whale. It is identifiable by larger sidepods on the fuselage that hold another 300 gallons of fuel (equal to an hour in cruise and thirty minutes in hover) compared to the Marine and Air Force versions. The downwash from the twin 38-foot-diameter rotors is such that most of the deck is cleared of personnel lest someone be blown overboard. That necessary operating room is one of the downsides to the complex Osprey, which has also proved a problematic maintenance hog during its time with the other armed services.

Compared to a jet or even the MH-60 Seahawk and Knighthawk helicopters that deploy with the carrier, the Osprey has an incredible number of moving parts. Not only do the huge rotors tilt to turn the Osprey from a helicopter into a faster, more efficient, and longer-range turboprop aircraft, each 6000-hp Rolls-Royce Liberty turbojet engine is interconnected through shafts and a central gearbox. Thus, each engine can operate the opposite rotor in case of an engine failure. When parked, the blades fold up and the entire wing swivels in alignment with the fuselage, for tighter packing on the ship’s crowded deck.

Upsides of the Osprey include the ability to fly to other vessels in the task force, an option not possible with the Greyhound, as well as the ability to land ashore just about anywhere. The Osprey does have one other very cool feature: rotor-blade tip lights, which turn the pie-plate edges an interstellar green for pilot and ground-crew reference at night. Later, as we watched the same pilots do their night qualifications in heavier winds and seas, the eerie green rings, rapidly teetering and changing shape, served as vivid illustration of just how hard the Osprey’s flight computer works to keep it stable.

The pilot doesn’t have collectives to control the rotor pitch as in a helicopter, just a control stick and a throttle, explained lieutenant commander Charles “Chuck” Yeargin of Independence, Missouri. Yeargin is a former Greyhound driver who was qualifying that night as part of VRM-50, one of the Navy’s fleet-logistics squadrons just transitioning into Ospreys. The V-22’s computer takes the simplified inputs from the pilot and translates them into pitch and power changes. “The aircraft is fly-by-wire,” he told us later. Was it harder than flying the 60-year-old Greyhound? Yeargin paused, obviously weighing the cons of the Osprey’s complexity against the pros of not having to slam a large airplane onto a carrier deck at 120 mph at night and in weather. “It’s definitely different,” he said, finally. “It’s smaller inside than the Greyhound, so you run out of space before you run out of power.”

When the Nimitz was new, wags said the U.S. could hand the ship over to the Russians and it would take them a hundred years to figure out how to operate it. It’s certainly taken the Navy that long, starting from the first shipboard landing, in 1911, flown by Eugene Ely in a 75-hp Curtiss A1 Triad. Now, as the nearly 50-year-old Nimitz sails along, she’s in a constant state of falling apart. Plumbing drips, wires fritz, hydraulics fail, paint peels, and any metal exposed to the salty sea air immediately rusts. Despite having four desalination plants aboard that produce 400,000 gallons of fresh water daily, supplies are said to be chronically short. Thus, in addition to the endless training, much of the crew’s dawn-to-dusk, seven-days-a-week work routine is consumed by endless maintenance.

Way up front, in a huge triangular room called the fo’c’sle, the two 60,000-pound anchors hang from chains the thickness of tree trunks. Lieutenant commander Clint Tergeson, a straight-out-of-high-school enlistee who now runs a 77-person department responsible for the sailing of the ship, described the anchoring procedure. Everything is done in careful, well-practiced steps, with orders called and repeated back before the friction brakes are released on the giant capstans and their attached wildcats (a sort of anchor-chain sprocket). At that point, gravity does the rest, ending with a big splash.

Here’s an example of just one maintenance item on an aircraft carrier that you should consider before buying one: The Nimitz’s thousand-foot anchor chains are comprised of 360 chunky iron links, each three feet long and weighing 250 pounds. The whole chain is divided into 12 sections, or “shots,” each section tethered to the next by a special link with a removable center piece. Every two years, the 45-ton chains must be run out onto a barge and the shots disconnected and moved around so that they all serve equal time at different points of the chain, thus evening out the wear from stress and salt-water exposure. And you thought it was a pain to change your oil.

If the ship goes out on a deployment, typically six months, it will spend at least that much time in maintenance after. In June 2020, the Nimitz left port in San Diego on what sailors now call the “Covid Cruise,” an unusually long and infamous deployment that stretched more than 11 months and over 99,000 miles. The ship was headed home and turned back five times for naval needs in the Middle East and far Pacific. At sea, it was impossible to fly in refrigerated vaccine, so the crew was instead isolated and only allowed off the boat once in that period, in a secure parking lot where the Navy set up carnival rides and games to take the edge off. It only partially helped; ship’s chaplain Charlie Mallie, a New Jerseyan with tattoos up both arms from his “punk era” days, told us his counseling sessions leapt by almost 400 percent. But at least there were no reported coronavirus cases, unlike other ships.

“They did the best they could to keep up morale,” said Jalen More, a Covid Cruise veteran and culinary specialist from Virginia Beach who sat down with us for breakfast in the sprawling enlisted mess. After the third turnaround, he said, “you could see it on their faces, everyone was sad.”

Still, that was an outlier in a national service that tries to keep its young enlistees motivated by moving them to new jobs every two or three years. More was soon to be reassigned, he said, and hoping for a posting in Italy or Florida. Aaron Robison—he was surprised to learn of another Robison in the jet-engine shop—is a parachute rigger chief from Coos Bay, Oregon. After 15 years in the Navy and 11 supporting SEAL team desert deployments, Robison was on his first ship assignment and heading a seven-member rigger team whose motto is “The Last to Let You Down.” Fighting monotony among his reports and keeping up the attention to detail required to safely maintain parachutes and other safety gear was his greatest challenge. “The way I look at it, the final, last-ditch effort to save a pilot’s life is our equipment, so that brings me a lot of job satisfaction,” he said.

Our group hiked past many closed doors and darkened utility rooms as we navigated the confounding maze that weaves through the Nimitz’s bowels. The night we spent in the double-bunk-bed visitor’s quarters was, we were told, exceptionally peaceful. The quarters are right underneath the flight deck—indeed, right underneath the jet-blast deflectors that pop up behind the aircraft before they launch. A shared head—a bathroom—was down the hall, through a couple of “knee knockers,” or oval passageways through the ship’s bulkheads. With a reduced complement aboard during our visit, the passageways leading off into shadowy reaches, lit red at night, were eerily quiet save the ever-present hum of unseen machinery.

The whole feeling aboard the Nimitz is that of a medieval castle at sea. Generations of sailors and aviators have walked the ship’s hallways in service of their country and their own betterment. Perhaps no generation needs the latter more than today’s, in the age of digital ephemera, where nothing seems to matter but clicks and likes. For young people—the average enlisted age on the Nimitz is 23, just 26 for officers—who are seeking more substance from life and aren’t ready for or don’t need college, the military is a good place to start. Hook the three-wire in your supersonic F/A-18 and the kid maneuvering you to your parking spot may only be a couple years out of high school. Ditto the kids who pumped your fuel, overhauled your engines, fixed your avionics, served your breakfast, and steered the thousand-foot ship on course.

It’s not Top Gun. There’s no pounding rock soundtrack or horsing around in $60-million jets, but it does look like an adventure. We met tired people, we met some people who seemed bored and homesick, but we didn’t meet a single person who said they wished they hadn’t joined up. Several said the Navy was way better than what was available to them back home.

Engines roaring, the C-2 lined up on one of the Nimitz’s forward catapults. Facing backwards in our seats, we were told to put our chins down on our chests. I hooked my thumbs around my shoulder belts and waited. And waited. BANG! The 44,000-pound airplane lurched forward, hitting 120 mph in less than two seconds. Our heads snapped forward, then backwards, as the catapult released and the airplane, now aloft, momentarily decelerated. Cheers erupted in the cargo hold, barely heard over the straining turboprops.

No, we didn’t get to see jet operations, but literally every single other thing we saw and every person we met was fascinating. We hope to get back soon to see some Hornets, or maybe even the new F-35C Lightning II, the Navy’s first stealth jet, catching some traps. You know, if the Navy will have us.

The post Flat Toppers: On the USS <em>Nimitz</em>, young people do serious jobs appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Whether you slept in one at Woodstock, passed the many that once clogged the right lanes of America’s freeways, or inherited one when your grandparents finally bought an Acura and moved to The Villages in Florida, the VW Microbus has spent six decades clattering into our hearts. Now, after many broken promises, VW plans to bring back the Bus, minus the clatter, in about two years. For real this time, it promises.

Buyers are pretty meh on minivans these days, but VW’s new all-electric ID. Buzz could be the 400-volt jolt that the segment needs to be hot again for the first time since magician Doug Henning was hocking Plymouth Voyager “magic wagons.” The Buzz uses much of the electric hardware from the ID.4 crossover including its 82 kW/hour, 240-mile-range battery, DC fast-charging capability, IQ Drive suite of safety tech, and 201-hp/229 lb-ft electric drive motor mounted in the rear—just as the engines were in the old Bus. Cue the Purple Haze.

The only whinge-point is that the U.S. won’t see its first ID. Buzz until 2024, assuming production schedules hold up in the face of a global semiconductor shortage as well as other supply chain issues. And we won’t get the plucky compact people-mover you see here, which goes on sale in Europe this fall in passenger and cargo versions. Rather, we’ll get a longer and more loaded three-row version with optional all-wheel-drive via a separate front motor. A “hand-raiser” page for it goes up today, March 9, for people who want to get in line early.

Because this is Volkswagen, which often seems to give buyers what they really crave only by sheer accident, the company won’t commit to offering a U.S. camper version. You can hear the arguments in Wolfsburg: “I know Ford is making bank on off-road nostalgia with the Bronco, and Subaru sells 600,000 units a year to people whose highest aspirations are sleeping in a tent on a car roof, but we … are … Volkswagen!”

So, the U.S. gets a long-wheelbase urban family mover for now, because “Americans need more space, right?” Those are the words of Jeffrey Lear, Volkswagen of America’s program manager for the electric MEB family, which so far includes the ID.4 crossover and the forthcoming Buzz. MEB is a German acronym for Modularer E-Antriebs Baukasten, or modular electric-drive kit, the mechanical basis for what is expected to be 80 percent of VW’s electric portfolio by 2025. Lest you think Lear is part of the problem, he describes his job as “spending all day fighting for stuff.” He allows that in 2025 there will be an ID. Buzz California (the camper version, sold in many places but not currently California or any other U.S. state), and he will probably have to fight the Germans for it with the same conviction that it took to capture Metz. We wish him Godspeed.

Does the Buzz look like the original Bus? Well … sort of. A flat nose, slab sides, clipped overhangs, and a squared-off rear are all vintage Bus cues. Of course, safety wins out and the driver and front passenger retreat behind the front axle, as they did back in 1990 with the T4 Eurovan. The driver and front passenger seats are also positioned inward for side-impact safety, meaning it’s a bit of a stretch over the wide sill to climb up into the driver’s seat. VW scalloped out the threshold to make an obvious footstep there.

At least the Buzz has less of a schnoz than its T4-T6 forerunners because there’s no internal-combustion lump up front making heat or threatening to pile-drive into the front compartment in a head-on collision. The result is a side profile that is new to the industry. If the original Bus was a “1-box” design per industry lingo, this is a 1.15-box design and perhaps the first entirely new car shape to come about strictly because of the switch to electric power. Late-model Japanese domestic microvans such as the Mitsubishi Minicab and Suzuki Every are perhaps the ID. Buzz’s closest analogues.

The Euro-spec Buzz—don’t call it the T7, that’s a separate gas-powered model for overseas markets—has a 117.6-inch wheelbase, 8.7 inches longer than the ID.4. We’d expect the Yankee-spec Buzz to get another four to six inches. The designers pushed the wheels out to the corners, making for hangar-like interior space under the tall roof. It needs it because the middle and third seat rows don’t fold down into the floor as they do in most current minivans owing to the 1100-pound box of lithium-ion batteries and the electric drive gear already taking up the basement. Instead, the Buzz’s seatbacks hinge down flat and VW will offer an optional platform that will extend from the middle row back to make for one continuous (though relatively high) load floor.

Dual power-sliding side doors join the front doors and the power tailgate to give entry to the Buzz. Minimalist design reduces the instrument panel down to two high-res screens. It echoes the cockpit of the ID.4 in almost every way, including the screen graphics. One big change: the drive-mode selector has been moved to a more conventional and convenient location as a column stalk. On the ID.4, it’s a twistable, misshapen wart on the side of the driver’s instrument binnacle, a feature that no doubt looked futuristic in the design studio but apparently hasn’t been a hit with drivers.

A center cabinet between the front seats features slide-out drawers and can be removed for walk-through access to the rear. Look closely; among the various Easter eggs the designer planted on the Buzz is a map of the world molded into one of the drawer sides. A glass roof and two-tone paint, such as this combo of “Lime Yellow” over “Candy White,” will be among the Buzz’s options.

It’s taken decades to replace the Microbus, but it is finally happening. Can’t wait till 2024? Well, there’s always EV West in California, which will convert your old Microbus to electric for something like $30,000. What would Ken Kesey do? Sit down, light a joint, turn on the Dead, and wait it out, man.

The post Revealed: 2024 Volkswagen ID. Buzz appeared first on Hagerty Media.

In Syd Mead’s future, everything is clean, sleek, and supersonic. The one-time car stylist left Ford in the 1960s to embark on a freelance career designing products and workspaces as well as envisioning mankind in a future state of harmony with technology and nature. Often resembling the lavishly rendered car ads of the 1960s, his early works of wedge-shaped sedans and levitating sportsters gliding up to structures comprised of glass orbs and soaring arches were advertisements themselves for a future that you want to be around for. They also served as inspiration to legions of car designers who followed.

“You absolutely believe it will happen,” said the late artist’s nephew, Monte Mead, who runs his own advertising and design firm in Denver and was attending the opening gala in California for his uncle’s works. “How could it not, it’s perfect.”

An exhibition of Syd Mead’s art, titled “Syd Mead / Progressions”, is on display through the end of March at the Laguna College of Art + Design gallery space in Laguna Beach, California. The exhibit is a rare chance to see 50 of Mead’s works up close. It features some of Mead’s earliest commissions for U.S. Steel in 1961, when the artist produced a portfolio of futuristic concepts highlighting potential uses of steel in transportation and construction. The exhibit also features Mead’s final work before his death in December 2019. It’s a painting called Shoulder of Orion which was inspired by the last words of the android Roy Batty in the 1982 sci-fi noir thriller, Blade Runner. Mead provided much of the design work for the film, set in a dark, techno-punk version of Los Angeles of 2019.

Blade Runner aside, Mead’s work was largely optimistic about the coming eras, depicting the genetically perfected (and often barely clothed) citizens of vividly rendered Edens enjoying the fruits of mankind’s ever evolving technology. “Nobody did chrome like Syd did chrome,” says Mead exhibition manager Mike Lund, referring to the artists fascination with highly reflective surfaces, such as in Hypervan-Crimson Plaza, painted in 2003 and depicting a sort of ultra-streamlined minivan seemingly finished entirely in polished chrome. Mead also often chose unusual perspectives for his vehicles, eschewing simple three-quarter views for angles from above and behind, sometimes to incorporate more of the “immersive scenarios” that Mead created around the subjects to accentuate the work. “It looks so simple,” says Monte Mead, “but it’s the hardest thing to do.”

The exhibit is hosted by the Laguna College of Art + Design, a private, 700-student school nestled in the canyon behind this sunny surfside village in Orange County, California. The exhibit was created to highlight the school’s entertainment design program, says gallery and collections manager Bryan Heggie. “We decided to choose Syd Mead because he was considered one of the eminent visual futurists of his time, and that fits well within the whole entertainment design field.”

The school’s gallery is at 374 Ocean Avenue, Laguna Beach, California, 92651. The exhibit is free, and the hours are Wednesday – Sunday, 11:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m.

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The mission was simple enough: drag a trailer 600 miles from Los Angeles to Winnemucca, Nevada, load up a car, and haul it back. There were, however, some interesting nuances. The car was a 1972 Lamborghini Espada, a derelict rolling chassis with no engine or transmission. The intention is to convert it into an electric vehicle—an E-Spada, if you will. And when our local Volvo PR man heard about this insanity, he suggested taking a Volvo XC90 Recharge plug-in hybrid, because electrified cars gotta tow (eventually) electrified cars, right? Nods all around.

Don’t waste your time commenting that we should have taken a Rivian or a Ford Lightning. Sure, a pure electric truck towing a soon-to-be-electric Lamborghini would have made more perfect symmetry. But because we would have been forced to stop a whole bunch of times to recharge the rig, it would have also verified to another set of would-be commenters that electric cars are just a silly comedy of magical thinking. Our mission brief involved 1200 miles of towing over two long, back-breaking days (did I mention that two other forsaken Lamborghini Espadas were also being snatched in this raid, along with a truck full of parts?), which meant that at least some internal combustion would be necessary. The future is not now, it’s still in the future.

Enter the XC90, a $70,000 luxury crossover ($81,290 as tested) with handsome styling. While it’s not uncommon to see vehicles of the XC90’s size towing small utility trailers and camping “caravans” in Europe, that’s not exactly a regular thing in America. Even so, the plug-in-hybrid XC90 has a 5000-pound towing capacity, and Volvo offers a very Volvo-ish towing kit. It includes a stout-looking, cast-iron Class II receiver hitch. That hitch sits tucked up behind the bumper, out of sight, until you push a button inside the cargo area. A solenoid releases the hitch, which then drops below the bumper, where it must be manually pulled and twisted down to lock into place. After that, you install the special banana-shaped ball insert available from your Volvo dealer, because nothing else fits. To hide the hitch, you must remove the ball, push the button to release it again, then tuck it back up behind the bumper. Nobody in the school pick-up lane will be any wiser.

Buttons and special banana-bits are never cheap; Volvo charges $1530 for the hitch and another $207 for the ball insert. Sure, you can slap a Draw-Tite receiver and ball onto your pickup for a couple hundred bucks, but there isn’t a ton of cross-shopping between pickups and Volvos. And if you are in the Volvo lane, at least the company offers a towing option.

One problem I did encounter is the eyelets for the trailer’s safety chains. They are Euro-small, no doubt so the whole thing can tuck neatly behind the bumper. Most Yankee trailers have giant meat hooks or big D-rings on the end of their safety chains to prevent runaway trailers, and they are too big for the Volvo’s attachment points. For our purposes, a sketchy fix was engineered involving ratchet straps and zip ties. That is, until we reached an Ace Hardware, where our crew found a couple of five-dollar, 20,000-pound-rated rings capable of both fitting through the holes and accepting our trailer’s hooks.

Backed up to a borrowed Trailex CT-8045, an all-aluminum tandem-axle that is basically the BMW M3 of open-deck trailers, I headed out to pick up a Lamborghini.

This deal was two years in the making, starting from a chance encounter on Facebook with a guy whose passions are split between airplanes and goony old Italian cars. Sometime in the 1980s, he acquired three Lamborghini Espadas in varying states of decrepitude and brought them home to an airplane hangar in northern Nevada. Our man intended to restore these cars, but there they sat, as our man was also the sort who accumulates projects. The Espadas shared space with a Lotus Europa in pieces, a Formula 2 car, a partly disassembled North American NA-64 Yale, a wingless Boeing Stearman, a Bellanca Super Decathlon, and a whole bunch of other car-airplane-boat stuff. At home, he’s building another airplane in the garage.

For our part, a coalition was formed among individuals interested in the Espadas. Negotiations commenced on a full buy-out of the lot. A year passed. The deal was finally sealed this past December, over text message. The scramble was on, a chase to procure trucks and trailers for three Lamborghinis that hadn’t moved under their own power in more than 30 years.

The XC90’s spec sheet does not exactly scream “tow vehicle.” Under the hood is a 2.0-liter four suffused with both a turbocharger and a supercharger. Twofold boosting is definitely required to move the car’s 5100-pound bulk, not to mention the seven passengers you might put aboard and the 5000 pounds of trailer a person might hang off the back. In the Recharge model, an 87-hp electric motor drawing from an 11.6 kW/hour battery also comes to the aid of this hardworking little engine, for a combined output of 400 hp and 472 pound-feet of torque.

The Volvo cossets you in comfort. There’s a distinct Swedish flair to the sparse design, and the dash is a suitably modern assemblage of high-res digital screens. Volvo gives you some control over the hybrid system, letting you recharge the battery off the engine and then hold the juice, worth about 35 miles or so of electric driving, until you want to use it. The power demands of pulling a trailer over 7000-foot passes meant that our battery depleted fairly quickly, so at some point charge state ceased to make any difference.

If you want to watch a small engine suck premium fuel, latch a trailer to the back of an XC90—even the M3 of trailers, which weighs only 900 pounds. The EPA rates the XC90 Recharge in the mid-20s when not in electric mode. The burn rate rose substantially with trailer attached, leveling off around 16.5 mpg. Sure, towing. But another issue quickly presented itself: With the Volvo carrying so much hardware, there isn’t much room for a fuel tank. The 18.5 gallons stored seems decent until your mileage crashes in remote wilderness.

Fuel stops were many, often because the XC90 couldn’t be driven to the limit of the tank in unpopulated Nevada, where the next station might be a hundred miles distant. One last observation about fuel: for a company as dedicated to environmental issues as Volvo purports to be, their capless filler seems designed to cause spills. No matter how long I waited after the pump clicked off, every time I extracted the filler spout from the hole, the flap would snap close and direct a dribble (or a deluge) of un-swallowed fuel down a separate relief hole and onto the ground.

Which partly explains why I want to build an electric Lamborghini. I have an old-fashioned gas Espada already—in fact, I’ve owned three Espadas in my life. They leak and they stink. I would drive them more often, but it takes a solid 20 minutes to warm up the 17 quarts of oil in the car’s 3.9-liter V-12. The cams are set up with massive overlap, for 7000 rpm zings, so the engine pushes out a toxic cloud at idle. Something is always dripping out of somewhere, and the clockspring mechanism that serves as its ignition advance system only has a few thousand miles in it before it needs attention. If I had an electric Espada, 90 percent of a vintage Lamborghini’s infamous reliability issues would be erased, and I could putter to the store and the post office and on any other quotidian chores for which one would not ordinarily use a vintage Lamborghini.

I don’t want an electric Espada to save the world; I want an electric Espada because then I can drive an Espada every day. (Whatever you’re smoking here, Robinson, maybe cut back a little? —Ed.)

I arrived in Winnemucca after ten hours on the road, reasonably fresh thanks to the Volvo’s firm but well-shaped seats. It was already dark, but our little team decided to head to the seller’s hillside house to collect the assorted boxes and two loose engines that had been included in the sale. Those went into a U-Haul van procured for the occasion. The next morning, after a fitful night in the local casino hotel, we caravanned out to the airport to load the cars.

Mine was the easiest, as it had four wheels attached. It rolled freely and was perhaps 800 pounds lighter than stock owing to the absence of a powertrain and other bits. Loading it behind the XC90 took ten minutes—and then we spent another four hours getting the other cars and their assorted detritus packed away for travel.

Some bits were obviously missing, and though the seller swore we had everything and thus we departed, about 90 minutes down the road, he texted to say there were six boxes of parts in his garage that he had forgotten about. No turning around at that point, as the hour was already late and the miles ahead were many. (The boxes would be retrieved later, via a 1950 Beechcraft Bonanza B35 whose owner, a retired United captain and friend, is always looking for a reason to fly).

The Volvo’s little 2.0-liter took no notice of the extra weight. The combination of derelict Espada and trailer was about 3800 pounds, well within the XC90’s tow capacity. Still, it’s a feat of modern engineering that such a small engine can generate so much torque.

I’d like to write that there was action and drama on the drive home, down through the 147,000-acre Hawthorne Army Depot, the largest munitions depot in the world (226 square miles containing 2427 bunkers), along the eastern slopes of 14,505-foot Mt. Whitney and the Sierras, across the Mojave Desert and back into Los Angeles. But there was no drama. Except at one point the Volvo’s tire-pressure monitor swore the pressure was low in a tire, but a gauge proved otherwise.

The black and gold Espada, which I’ve taken to calling the Bandit Espada—or, as one friend suggested, the Aaron Player Special—drew a few confused looks but gave no trouble. Back in LA, the car rolled off the trailer with ease and disappeared into another airplane hangar, there to await the firming up of electrification plans. Right now, it’s not clear if I should use currently available hardware—a drive motor from a wrecked Tesla, say, paired with a homemade pack of likely Panasonic lithium-ion cells—or wait for better and cheaper stuff to come along. Recently, while attending the launch of the Lucid Air, I got to put my hands on a motor that makes 700 hp, weighs 164 pounds, and is the size of a case of wine. This hardware is only going to get smaller, lighter, and cheaper as the electric vehicle industry and the electric-conversion industry mature. So, for now, the E-Spada waits.

And the XC90 went back to Volvo with its tow hitch tucked up under its bumper, perhaps never to be used again. Which would be sad, as the sleek SUV has the ability move more than just people, and in modern, swift style.

***

2021 Volvo XC90 Recharge T8 Inscription

Price: $70,845/$81,290 (base/as-tested)

Highs: 7149-foot Montgomery Pass in Nevada, handsome styling for an SUV, a 2.0-liter that thinks it’s a 6.0-liter, 30 electric-driving miles if you need them.

Lows: Drinks fuel while towing, spills fuel while refueling, the ride is a little choppy on low-profile tires.

Summary: A sensible around-town runner and suitable travel partner, with a dose of style and EV behavior.

The post Review: Volvo XC90 Recharge T8 Inscription appeared first on Hagerty Media.

While driving the 2022 Mercedes-Benz S500 4Matic, I glided—it glides everywhere—up to a four-way stop in Los Angeles about the same time as the driver of a two-tone, late-model Rolls-Royce Ghost. He looked at me. I looked at him. He went. I followed. A thought occurred to me: Yes, I know his car is more expensive, by roughly a hundred grand. He knows his car is more expensive, even if he doesn’t know the Benz’s $127,330 price exactly. I know his car does pretty much the same thing as the Benz, and I wondered who was entitled to feel superior: The Rolls owner, who clearly enjoys exclusivity and prestige, or the Benz driver who enjoys pretty much everything else the Rolls has to offer but for a lot less money? Is having anything more luxurious than an S-Class anything more than pure vanity?

Putting aside the question of who out-snobbed whom at that intersection (there’s a Maybach S-Class for those compelled to pay more for a Mercedes), the 2022 Mercedes-Benz S-Class remains as the model ever was since its formal launch in 1972: an opulent shipping container for the elite who wish to express wealth and taste but with more sotto voce then those rolling in a Rolls or Bentley. And let’s face it, Mercedes isn’t the same company it was in 1972. It now sells many flavors of highly affordable vehicles, the cheapest A220 sedan starting around $34,000. Some people just don’t want to buy their six-digit luxury cars from a dealership that also offers lease doorbusters, and we get it.

That makes this former apex sedan now something of a middle-market car, with much newer comers from Lexus and Genesis nipping at its heels. When an S-Class meets a Genesis G90 at a four-way stop, a reverse dance of the snobberies happens, as the G90 base price is roughly $35 grand less than an S-Class’s (the ratio is likely even more skewed in South Korea where imported cars are taxed to the hilt). Yet despite the heel-nipping, the S-Class endures with dignity, the company dominating its little niche with just over 14,000 sales last year, almost twice rival BMW’s sales of its 7 Series and blowing the G90 into the weeds. Lexus, with just under 4000 sales of the LS, is barely on the map. Rolls and Bentley sales are in the hundreds.

We’ll avoid the subject of boat-anchor depreciation, a weakness that affects all in this segment, and celebrate the S-Class as the reigning queen of the limos. The 2020 redesign kept the flowing roofline but shrank the previous car’s oblong tree-leaf taillights to simpler horizontal bars. It cleaned up the side graphics, shrank the headlights, and, in sportier models, pastes on the now portfolio-wide flaring-mouth lower grille. More significantly, the interior ditches any design nods to heritage, as in the old car, and yields fully to the march of the iPads. A 12.8-inch OLED touchscreen dominates the center console, powered by the company’s latest MBUX do-it-all operating system and “Hey, Mercedes” voice-activated cloud computing function. Weren’t you just saying you wanted an Alexa in your car?

Which makes the S-Class just another example of a model changeover that is more about software and screens than it is about styling or powertrains. Not that there isn’t a story under the hood, for while the S500 badge used to only go on cars with V-8s, it now rides the rump of a car powered by Benz’s new 3.0-liter inline-six. Here in what is likely to be the final decade or two of internal-combustion passenger cars, Mercedes has returned to an all but extinct architecture with a compact and sublimely smooth mill that lines up its six pots in a row. The all-new M256 engine, which first arrived in the U.S. in 2019, features both a turbocharger and an electrically driven 70,000-rpm supercharger to take full advantage of its long stroke. It partners with a 48-volt flywheel starter/alternator/propulsion juiced by a 0.9-kW battery unit to softly whoosh out a table-top torque curve for moving the car’s 4800 pounds.

The car’s rated 429 horsepower and 384 pound-feet of torque are healthy figures, but it’s the way the electric motor works with the engine to assist in acceleration and smooth over torque holes while the nine-speed automatic is shifting that are the system’s highlights. All of which are mostly transparent to the driver, who only feels a seamless shove in the shorts and hears a faint whirr from up front, even when asking for full acceleration. Not bad, considering there’s a thingy spinning at up to 70,000 rpm under the hood.

The car we drove had a handsome AMG tire/wheel pack ($1950) with Pirelli PZero PNCS tires, for Pirelli Noise Cancelling System. It’s one of several tire models the S-Class offers that has foam liners inside to quell tire noise. Further anti-noise efforts include strategic foam “hot dogs” placed in the body during assembly and baked to expansion during the paint process, and the widespread use of laminated acoustic glass. It all makes for a pretty hushed motoring experience.

We don’t have to ponder how much quieter and smoother the S-Class will be when it’s all-electric; the car is already here in the form of the 1000-pounds-heavier EQS we drove a few weeks before. The subsequent arrival of the S500 gave us more time with the same basic car, its four-wheel steering, and its MBUX operating system. Navigating the many submenus became easier with practice, and we even figured out how to change the interior ambient lighting color (you have a zillion options). The navigation screen is gigantic, and it can be echoed in the car’s cluster, where the driver can select from several gauge displays depending on how interested they are in the state of the car’s machinery.

However, persistent software bugs kept us from enjoying the full experience. The car almost never immediately recognized its own key fob, demanding the owner drop it in a designated fob spot—check the owner’s manual, it said—before it would start. It also periodically flashed messages about aligning the steering wheel with mystery dots somewhere in the three-dimensional digital instrument cluster, and it occasionally called out warnings in a female voice about approaching speed bumps when in fact it was just an imperfection in the freeway due to decayed infrastructure. Obviously, they don’t have decayed infrastructure in Germany.

Once it deigned to start, the S500 was otherwise a joy to pilot. It has moves, and it responds sharply to helm inputs, encouraging the driver to push hard in the left lane and seek holes to swoop around dawdlers. Unlike some cheaper pretenders, the S-Class’s body is as stiff as a hunk of tungsten, yet the constantly adapting air suspension sops up the road imperfections with astounding elasticity. Near the author’s house is a pronounced depression in the right lane of a busy roadway that abruptly yanks the asphalt out from under a car. Any speed over 20 mph causes most cars to hit their bump stops; the Benz barely noticed it. But throw it into a corner and it hunkers down with restrained roll and terrific grip. The S-Class is the ultimate argument against luxury SUVs, if you like to drive.

If you don’t, go ahead and plotz in the back of the S-Class and let someone else do it. The rear seats are lavishly dimensioned and welcoming—another departure from the EQS. The diamond-pleat stitching of the caramel-colored hides in our car is part of a $2290 leather package and well worth it. It’s opulent eye candy, as is the $1300 interior trim package that lays a band of black-lacquered panels around the cabin accented by silver pinstriping. Really, $3600 to make your Benz interior kick the butt of a Bentley’s is bargain shopping at its best, and it made our not-so-optioned EQS tester feel like a Plymouth inside. The S500 proves that Mercedes has still got it—when the buyer ticks the boxes.

At least the S500 has the all-important self-sealing doors, unlike the EQS we drove. But just as in the EQS, the new slide-out door handles are mega annoying. Mercedes claims they are quieter at speed, but the motors that move them are louder than the car’s engine, and you can hear the handles “whump” back into place when you put the car in drive. Also, their operation is clunky. When you pull the door handle outward, it doesn’t send the signal to the electric solenoid to release the door until the handle is all the way out at its stop. Meaning, exactly when the door should be yielding to your hand, the solenoid is only just receiving the signal to move the machinery to release it. Thus, the door always feels slightly snagged, resisting you for half a heartbeat. Every time. If you buy a car like this, you want the doors to swing as if they are the daily lubricated gates to Valhalla. Ditch the whole thing, Mercedes, or redesign it so the solenoid gets its signal at the start of the pull, not the end.

Well, sniffs the Rolls owner, perhaps it’s true; you get what you pay for.

2022 Mercedes-Benz S500 4Matic

Price: $111,100/$127,330 (base/as-tested)

Highs: Wafts in quiet, plush comfort, well over 20 mpg achieved despite spirited driving, feels lighter and with a bigger engine than the spec sheet says.

Lows: Bugs in the software, doors that fight you.

Summary: You can spend more money on a luxury limo, but why?

The post Review: 2022 Mercedes-Benz S500 4Matic appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Recently I stumbled on a used book online that I hadn’t seen since I was a kid, a collection of illustrations by the industrial designer and futurist Syd Mead called Sentinel II. Ten-year-old me bicycled over and over to a bookstore at the mall to flip through its color-saturated images of cars and machines and cityscapes of tomorrow. The store owner eventually bade me to buy it or stop dog-earing the pages. I should have, because four decades later, the book is long out of print and really expensive. I closed my eyes and clicked.

Mead started as a Ford designer. If you own a ’62 Falcon, then you own a Mead original: the afterburner taillights. Around then, U.S. Steel commissioned him to illustrate a book extolling the role of ferrous metal in the coming Space Age. Perhaps the company worried that the clock was winding down on its heavy, rust-prone product, but the moonlighting Mead went to town. He painted levitating (steel) sportsters gliding up to glistening (steel) spires as tanned and fit futurelings held the reins to exotic alien pets while kibbitzing, probably about the many wonders of steel. My favorite image, then as now, is of a rain-soaked New Jersey Turnpike of tomorrow, waist-high iridescent wedges coursing through the gloom and spray beneath lit signs advertising exits for “BSTN” and “NYRK.” It’s such an ordinary scene—but from a dreamy, hypersonic future.

The commission changed Mead’s life, and he soon quit Ford to make a full-time job out of envisioning what he saw as humanity’s inevitable arc of progress. I met Mead shortly after I moved to Los Angeles in 2004, at a vintage dress-up party in an old rail car at Union Station. For a guy known for looking forward, he was strangely attired in a pinstriped mobster suit and white fedora. He gamely pressed a business card into my hand when I asked if he would sit down for an interview. Sometime later, I was invited to his low, midcentury house in the hills above Pasadena, which was lined with wall-size murals of his own paintings and knickknacks from his design work on sci-fi films such as Blade Runner and Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

Mead was charming and immensely quotable. He explained that he drew not just vehicles but whole “immersive scenarios” in which the car, the city, the people, the striped catlike creatures, and the mysteriously levitating glowing cubes all had a story. “It’s an underground polar launch facility,” he would say, or, “They’re arriving at the local time portal for a party.” Mead liked to paint arrival scenes, echoing the car ads of the 1960s, but he sprinkled in fantastical elements such as people in ballistic suits admiring their towering, genetically modified racehorses. Sometimes the people were modified, too.

The book’s preface, written in the late ’70s, describes Mead as a “visualizer of the American Dream,” and states that the year 2000 was his reference point—which seems quaint today considering that back in 2000, you could still buy a car with roll-up windows. But it’s easy to forgive Mead for his overly optimistic timelines. For one thing, as he says, he did much of the work in the Sentinel series in the 1960s, a “time of exuberance” for technology and its rapid advancement. It certainly looked like the hereafter we all hope for, everything new and streamlined and scrubbed clean. And it shows how our view of the future is heavily shaded by the mood of the present.

Nowadays, Mead’s visions seem slightly anachronistic given the negativity that prevails, and it’s impossible to flip through the book with the same gobsmacked wonderment. Being an adult does that to you, chokes your brain with weeds of cynicism and inserts the word “but” into all your sentences. However, Mead, who died in 2019 at the age of 86, didn’t seem to suffer that malady. “I am an optimist as an intellectual insistence,” he told me in a quote I will take to my grave. “To be otherwise plays into the ignorant purview of those who still think that medieval life was glamorous.” Meaning that the past was a lot worse than is often remembered or depicted, and we can’t go back anyway.

The post Syd Mead’s <em>Sentinel II</em> thrills and excites now as it did in 1987 appeared first on Hagerty Media.

The problem with the future is that it doesn’t come with an owner’s manual. If it did, everyone would get their first electric-revolution vehicles exactly 100 percent right. For example, can Mercedes-Benz be faulted for execution flaws on its EQS all-electric luxury liner? Well, can Porsche with the Taycan? Okay, they both had Tesla (and now Lucid) to show them the way, but the EQS is better than the aging Tesla Model S in a few areas, namely luxury appointments and refinement. And it whomps the Taycan in range, owing in part to Porsche’s obsession with meaningless performance metrics like 100-to-150-mph acceleration. Which leaves the EQS, base price of $103,360, as a decent first draft.

The sleek, interstellar EQS is the flagship of Benz’s forthcoming EQ sub-brand of electric vehicles, which at this point includes the EQA small crossover, EQB medium-sized crossover, and EQE mid-size sedan. Obviously, the names track their gas counterparts, the 17-foot-long, 5600-pound EQS being comparable—despite having a hatchback—to the company’s S-Class limo. The car squats and sprawls over the pavement like the glistening globule of future-vision that the designers were undoubtedly aiming for. With the flush grille and flush wheel covers with tiny flush Mercedes stars in them, it practically dares the wind to take offense at its passing. Indeed, Mercedes claims a 0.20 drag coefficient, the slipperiest of any current production car.

Walk up to it with fob in hand and the onboard brain senses your presence, the illuminated door handles silently gliding out from recesses to accept your reaching hand. That’s when the trouble starts. The door-release mechanism is clunky and reluctant, and the doors don’t self-seal as they do on the S-Class (granted, the EQS is heavy enough as is). While everything is neat and orderly inside, with designated parking spots for phone, keys, and Slurpees, the cockpit lacks the epicurean richness you’d expect in an S-Class, even while handily outclassing the blow-molded Model S. The palette is muted and somewhat plain and the sliding door that hides the center bin has a slightly flimsy, plastic-meets-plastic feel that betrays where a cost was cut.

The bottom cushions of the rear seats, which can fold to create a huge cargo area, are downright skimpy—at least in this, the base EQS—and they’re high off the floor, shoving the heads of taller folk into the headliner. Also, duck your head to get in, because that wind-cheating roofline cuts a low arc towards the back. We did like the four soft pillows that Mercedes affixes to the headrests to give your noggin something plush to sink into on longer drives.

An illuminated band of light rings the cockpit and, like the face of Dr. Theopolis, the brainy computer disc in Buck Rogers, expresses the car’s mood in color. It’s a cool blue when everything is cool, flashing to red if you do something dumb, like try to merge into the next lane while a car hides in your blind spot. Better get used to cars that scold, for that is the future and you won’t have to wait until the 25th century for it.

One quirk we found annoying is the lock function for the charge port. Insert a standard J1772 charging gun and the car locks it in, presumably so others won’t steal it at communal chargers and stick it in their own cars. Mercedes (and some others) have gone to great lengths to stop it, but is this really a problem? The EQS requires that you to fumble for the fob, unlock the car, then push an unlock button next to the charge port before it will release the charger. Every time. No doubt, the many EQS owners who will do most of their charging at home will find this utterly maddening.

Our EQS didn’t have the optional new Hyperscreen, a massive 56-inches-long wrap-around digital experience that turns the dash into one gigungus touch screen. Which is fine, because the 12.8-inch OLED central display and digital instrument cluster seems iPad enough for one car. It took three days of tapping screen icons in Mercedes’ proprietary MBUX interface to figure out how to dim the dash lights. Elsewhere in the system, the car will hunt down charging stations for you and presents a fairly complex picture of your range and driving consumption. The navigation screen is huge and can be echoed in the driver’s cluster, all in 11-zillion-color high-def and via fast-acting processors that react about as quickly as your fingers can. Indeed, there are no real buttons in this car; even the seat controls on the door and the steering-wheel “buttons” are touch-capacitive surfaces awaiting the heat of your digits to activate something.

While in motion you can dial up sporty or range-minded modes, and the EQS will even do decent one-pedal driving when you select max regen with the steering wheel paddles. However, the car defaults back to “normal” on shutdown and you must select those modes every time you get in. This car wants desperately to be “normal.”

Potentially the biggest design problem is that there’s no front trunk as is the case with the Tesla and Lucid. You can see buyers quickly dismissing the EQS on that basis alone without taking time to study the stats. The EQS rear cargo area offers up to 63 cubic feet of space with the split rear seats folded, a little more than a Model S, and 22 with the seats up, a little less than the Model S. But the Tesla also supplies 5 more cubic feet up front (the Lucid has almost twice that much in front).

The EQS450+ definitely isn’t chasing those other guys in horsepower, with an advertised 329 horses, 406 pound-feet of torque and 5.9-second zero-to-60 time. The hotter EQS 580 4Matic all-wheel-drive version, base price of about $121,000, offers a combined 516 horsepower and a claimed 60-mph time of 4.9 seconds, and a forthcoming AMG EQS will beckon the real pilotos with money to burn. Will it be as quick as a Model S Plaid? Who knows, but so far Mercedes doesn’t seem interested in scrumming with Tesla or Lucid for acceleration supremacy.

Range is this EQS’s métier, up to 350 miles on a juicing, 80 percent of which can be done in 30 minutes off a 480-volt DC fast charger. Between charges, the EQS 450 floats, silently levitating its bulk up the freeway with a spongy ride and some agility thanks to a competent suspension aided by a rear-steer system. As in all current EVs, the majority of the weight is below the floor, so the subsequently low center of gravity gives the car a planted feel that any gasoline car in its weight neighborhood would struggle to achieve (though Bentleys do a decent job of it).

But despite its overall agility, the EQS never feels anything less than 2.5 tons of an electric future … that is still TBD.

2022 Mercedes-Benz EQS 450+ Sedan

Price: $103,360/$107,389 (base/as-tested)

Highs: A slinky vision of the future. Nicer inside than a Tesla. All ate up with range. Quiet as a church on Monday.

Lows: Not quite an S-Class inside. Not Tesla fast. No front trunk. That locking charge port, argh!!

Summary: Benz’s first draft of the future is lovely and quiet, but it could stand a little editing.

The post Review: 2022 Mercedes-Benz EQS 450+ appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Skeptics of the autonomous, battery-electric, carbon-free future heavily hawked by the auto industry have found an unlikely ally in the nation of Japan. Or,  at least, in Akio Toyoda, the president of Toyota Motor Corp. Running the largest automaker in both Japan and the world, as well as serving as the current chairman of the Japan Automobile Manufacturers Association, Toyoda is a de facto spokesman for the industrial might of what westerners used to refer to with dread as Japan Inc.

In a wide-ranging press conference on September 9, 2021, Toyoda poked holes in the inevitability of autonomy and electrification as governments and industries move to decarbonize in the face of climate change. Toyoda said it was more important to focus on cutting emissions than on pie-in-the-sky goals of full electrification by arbitrary dates. “In pursuing carbon neutrality, carbon is our enemy, not the internal combustion engine,” said Toyoda. Rather than legislating full electrification by a set date, a costly and disruptive mandate, governments could achieve a quicker near-term reduction in CO2 by encouraging a variety of technologies, including gas-electric hybrids and hydrogen fuel cells, Toyoda said.

Toyoda also warned that EV mandates may destroy Japan’s export-oriented car industry, which employs 5.5 million people in Japan, exports half of its annual vehicle production of 10 million, and earns the nation roughly $136 billion in annual trade surplus. And after one of Toyota’s e-Palette autonomous buses bumped into a vision-impaired athlete at the Tokyo Paralympic Games, Toyoda—an avid race car driver—threw cold water on the technology: “I don’t think autonomous driving has reached the level of my driving technique yet. Currently, the level of autonomous driving is on par with good beginner drivers.”

Critics say Toyoda (and Toyota) is just trying to buy time because the company misread the winds in the industry and, after flushing billions on hydrogen fuel-cell vanity projects, is behind in developing rechargeable battery-electric vehicles. Indeed, Toyota has actively lobbied both in the U.S. and overseas to delay stricter emissions laws, and in 2019, it sided with the Trump administration in its battle with California over Obama-era fuel-economy standards. It was a fight that drove a wedge into the industry, with some automakers supporting California and others the administration.

To some extent, Toyoda’s position is highly Japan-centric. For starters, he was commenting shortly before a November national election in which some candidates were embracing full-electrification mandates. Also, hydrogen holds more appeal there because of constraints on electricity production due in part to Japan’s wholesale abandonment of nuclear power in the wake of the Fukushima disaster.

And, at a broader level, Japan Inc.’s caution may be a side effect of its worrying demographics. Japan has a low birth rate and an aging population; some estimates predict the island nation of 126 million will shrink by about 800,000 people a year between now and 2050. The original Asian Tiger once admired and feared for the technical prowess of native firms such as Toyota, Sony, Hitachi, NEC, and Mitsubishi has been displaced by fiercer (and younger) competitors in neighboring China, South Korea, and Taiwan. After Japan’s bubble economy burst in the early 1990s, it seemed to slip into a decades-long funk that sapped much of its pioneering momentum. Japan produced half of the world’s semiconductors in 1988; today, it produces fewer than 10 percent.

Still, there are some who echo at least part of Toyoda’s argument. The peer-reviewed journal Environmental Research Letters published a paper in June proposing government subsidies for gas-electric hybrids rather than costlier EVs as a quicker way to achieve net emissions cuts. The authors agreed with Toyoda that the goal of governments shouldn’t be to simply get citizens to buy electric cars but to reduce emissions, and hybrids are a faster and more affordable path given the current costs and technology.

Last month, of course, Toyota did introduce electric concept cars and announce plans for 30 EVs by 2030, including an LFA successor and an MR2-sized sports car. But even amid this apparent onslaught, one still suspects Toyoda’s personal perspective hasn’t dramatically evolved in such a short time span. In an industry prone to crowd-following and overly optimistic predictions, only time will tell if Toyoda’s contrarian views are tragically misguided, blatantly self-serving, or, indeed, shrewdly prescient.

The post Unlikely Skeptic: Japan Inc. expresses doubts about the all-electric future appeared first on Hagerty Media.

In 1911, the morning after the first Indy 500, The Indianapolis Star listed on page one the butcher’s bill: Samuel P. Dickson, mechanician, Amplex No. 44, “dead;” David Lewis, mechanician, Lozier No. 34, “fractured left hip and left foot cut;” C.L. Anderson, mechanician, Case No. 8, “run over; bruised knee and shoulder,” and so on. When Brian Blain called me the week before this year’s Rolex Monterey Motorsports Reunion to ask if I would drive his 1911 National 40 Speedway Roadster for four days at Laguna Seca, thoughts of that carnage went barrel-rolling through my mind. For half a second. Then I said, “Yeah, absolutely.”

You may recall from our 2018 magazine feature, “Ragtime Rush,” that Blain is a former California walnut farmer obsessed with race cars from before the Great War, when the young automobile was like your typical 2-year-old kid: loud, messy, leaky, difficult to handle, and prone to breakdowns. Blain—who liked our headline so much that he swiped the name for his group, Ragtime Racers—runs vintage events each year with like-minded old souls who bring out their Marmons and Knoxes and Model T speedsters for “demonstrations.” No, they don’t actually race because they don’t meet any of the safety requirements adopted after about 1922. For one thing, the Ragtimers prefer to don period coveralls and leather helmets (when they can) because you look a bit silly dressed like today’s carbon-Nomex cosmonauts while gunning for a corner in an Edwardian parlor chair 4 feet off the ground. They also eschew seatbelts; in this time period, your chances in a crash were better soaring on the winds than staying aboard.

When I arrived, Blain’s team—including staff mechanic Bill Bennett, his volunteer squad of high school shop students, plus anyone wandering past with a vague understanding of magnetos—was absorbed. Blain gave me a quick tutorial on the National’s start-up procedure: Open the fuel valve; furiously stroke the cockpit hand pump that pressurizes the fuel tank; pour raw gas into the primer cups atop the 450-cubic-inch four-cylinder that has pistons the size of mayonnaise jars and valves bigger than the forget-me-nots at Windsor Castle; have your mechanic advance the throttle slightly and fully retard the spark so the hand crank doesn’t break your arm; and give the handle a swift yank. Do it right and the engine Chitty Chitty Bang Bangs to life. Oh, if you’ve forgotten to first select neutral, the car may then run you over.

I had questions, but Blain was off, trying to sort out why his 1916 Sturtevant Romano Special was throwing a conniption. When the paddock stewards blew their whistles, about a dozen ancients rolled out. The National’s clutch was easy, the center gas pedal at least as progressive as that of a Caterpillar D8. The transmission felt like it had the same gears that raise drawbridges. Without synchros to help, moving the three-speed shifter that rises up like a brass-plated ski pole outside the cockpit was like shepherding Hannibal’s elephants over the Alps; both force and finesse were required. Once, I tried downshifting to second to hasten the slow chug up the hill to the Corkscrew. I thought I matched the revs like Barney Oldfield, but the rear tires locked up and the whole car slewed sideways like it had just dropped anchor in the next county.

Throughout the week, various friends took turns in the mechanician’s chair, madly fibrillating the fuel pump while holding on for dear life and reciting the Lord’s Prayer. We weren’t racing, but at one point, the National hit 65 red-hot mph in pursuit of another National that had actually run in the first Indy 500 (winning average speed: 74.6 mph). Right after we passed them, I nailed an inside curb hard enough to launch the left front wheel in the air. My friend John Lacey swore he saw both the front and back of the wheel at the same time. Back in the paddock, we tugged on it. It seemed OK, you know, for wood.

I’m hoping Blain calls again. I’m pretty sure I can shave another minute or two off my lap times. Not that I was racing.

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Engineers, scientists, investors, and philosophers have now generated enough exhaustively researched, extensively footnoted, and assiduously peer-reviewed scribble on the subject of driverless vehicles to fill up one whole medium-size internet. But the stark reality of driverless cars and their current limitations went punching through the darkness early one morning this past July on a suburban San Diego freeway. Somehow, neither the 29-year-old drunk behind the wheel of a white Tesla Model 3 nor the computer she entrusted to drive for her noticed the flashing police lights of a freeway closure. The Tesla barreled past the barricade and rammed into a parked California Highway Patrol cruiser that had responded to an earlier collision.

Miraculously, nobody was killed, but it was only the most recent of 12 cases of Tesla mayhem against public-service vehicles cited by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) in launching an investigation of Tesla’s self-driving Autopilot system. As of this writing, the safety agency tallies 17 injuries and one fatality to Tesla Autopilot mishaps in this one narrow subset of crashes with emergency vehicles. In response, Tesla tweeted that cars running on Autopilot in 2020 had an accident rate nearly 10 times lower than the U.S. average (though in a statistically odd pandemic year when miles driven dropped while accidents of all types rose).

Well, plopping robots in the driver’s seat is supposed to be safer. At least, that’s the promise offered by the many companies, lobbying groups, and venture-capital investors pushing autonomous driving against the enormous headwinds of technical and regulatory challenges. Computers don’t drink, they don’t get tired, they don’t get mad, and they don’t check their Instagram at 70 mph. They could make taxi travel a fraction of what it costs today, reduce car ownership and thus congestion, and free up highway travelers to do other things.

“The stuff is coming because of supply and demand,” says Jon Riehl, a University of Wisconsin transportations systems engineer who works on autonomous technology. “There are simply a limited number of people who actually like driving, and I don’t see that changing.”

Despite the rosy predictions of a few years ago, the arrival of computer chauffeurs in any significant numbers remains decades away. And even when they do arrive—and it could still be 30 years before they are a common sight—autonomous cars are unlikely to affect the people who do like to drive, most likely for the life span of anyone reading these words.

Indeed, the goal of the autonomous test fleets already operating in sunny climates such as Chandler, Arizona, where Google spinoff Waymo circulates automated taxis through that city’s relatively simple and predictable grid of streets, isn’t to replace human-driven Mustangs and Miatas, exactly. It’s to make money, whether through ride-hailing apps, automated delivery vehicles, or other commercial applications. “Three trillion miles are driven [annually] in the U.S. alone,” said Bryan Salesky, the CEO of Argo AI, Ford’s partner in autonomy, on a recent podcast. “So I think that the opportunity is enormous. I think you’re going to see different companies specialize in automating different fractions and slices of those miles.”

However, the forecasted timelines have begun stretching out as realism creeps into the hype surrounding autonomous vehicles. A few cities were supposed to have commercial driverless taxi fleets by 2019, according to several optimistic projections a few years ago, including one by GM’s Cruise subsidiary. “Now the companies are saying ‘sometime in the next 10 years,’” says Richard Windsor, founder of Radio Free Mobile, a tech-research company and investment-advisor firm. “That means they have no clue.”

The future is proving maddeningly elusive to predict as the technology inches from familiar driver aids such as blind-spot detection and lane-keeping assist—the so-called Level 1 and Level 2 tiers of the vehicle autonomy scale established by the Society of Automotive Engineers—to the much trickier Levels 3 and 4, where computers have increasing independence without needing human intervention.

“Frankly, a true Level 5 [total driverless autonomy] is probably a pipe dream. Someday we might get to Level 4.99,” says Wisconsin’s Riehl. He adds that Levels 3 and 4 are still up to 10 years off, maybe even 20 before the tech becomes mainstream. That’s because each step up the autonomy staircase necessitates confounding improvements in artificial intelligence, sensor performance, cost, and communication infrastructure. And each step also comes with its own dangers.

“We call Levels 3 and 4 the ‘messy middle’,” says Riehl, “because there is lots of potential for new types of crashes.” Tesla’s troubles at what some in the industry call “Level 2-plus,” where drivers are still supposed to drive but can take their hands off the wheel under limited circumstances, are a harbinger of the near future, many believe. In the upper levels of autonomy, the computer does more while the increasingly detached (and possibly inebriated) humans do less. But people are still needed, and they will suddenly be called upon to intervene with expert driving skill when the computer blinks off because it can’t deal with fog, freezing rain, or a police barricade. And that’s assuming the computer even knows when to hand back the controls, a problem that challenges Tesla’s technology, judging from the recent crashes.

So, what needs to happen to make autonomy safe and affordable, and why isn’t it happening faster?

The tech side requires better artificial intelligence combined with improved perception of the world around the car. A computer brain, like a human brain, sits in a dark, windowless void and is only as good as what it can see of the world and how it interprets that data. Back in 2012, when the first big advances in machine learning were being made, explains Windsor, people thought that in just a few years computers would learn enough to drive. Hence the optimism.

The trouble with today’s artificial intelligence is that it’s all about pattern recognition, and “when you have an environment that is as random and crazy as a road, the AI breaks down,” Windsor says, because the patterns are way too complex and changeable for a computer to manage them. One way to improve the artificial brain might be to develop better software assistance that could help the computer stack its duties into smaller and more manageable tasks. Another is to improve the eyes that the machine relies on to see the world.

Teslas, with their relatively inexpensive camera-based Autopilot system, lack a conspicuous feature that companies such as Waymo and Cruise have on their autonomous prototypes: a laser radar sensor called a lidar. Shorthand for “light detection and ranging,” the lidar commonly stands out as a coffee can or a beanie on the roof or sides of an autonomous vehicle. Some units are fixed and some spin to create a 360-degree view, the sensor spraying out an invisible blitzkrieg of laser beams that, based on their echo return, create a three-dimensional pattern of the car’s surroundings. Lidar literally reduces the world to digital patterns. Compared to a camera, its data is far more digestible for a black box trying to determine if, say, an object crossing a road ahead is a human or animal—and whether it is walking, running, or riding a bicycle, and if its path is perpendicular to the car’s or at an angle.

Waymo has studded its fleet of Jaguar I-Pace electric prototypes with more than 30 sensors, including a rotating lidar on the roof and fixed lidar units at the car’s corners for seeing around objects such as parked cars. The problem is cost; what a human does instinctively with a pair of eyeballs and some cheap mirrors takes tens of thousands of dollars in sensor equipment.

The cost of lidar is dropping and may soon slip under $1000 per unit, notes Windsor, but in five years, it may still cost $6000–$7000 to outfit a car with the requisite equipment (GM currently charges up to $6150 to equip a Cadillac with Super Cruise, a “Level 2-plus” system with restrictive use limitations). While an individual buyer might balk at the premium, to taxi and other ride-service providers, the cost is acceptable considering that the most expensive component in any vehicle is the driver.

Which is why the autonomous industry is focusing so heavily on the taxi business right now. In Manhattan, taxi fares run as much as $10 a mile. Autonomous taxi operators hope to eventually drive their rates down to 25 to 35 cents a mile by removing the driver, who may go to a remote location where he or she could manage several autonomous taxis at once (that Level 4.99 thing). At that point, “many people will stop owning cars,” predicts Windsor, pushing even more of the nation’s transportation spending toward the autonomous industry. However, that won’t happen on a widespread basis, he believes, until the 2030s or 2040s, and profitability is an open question considering that the competition will be vicious once autonomous technology is a cheap commodity.

Some experts say that the full potential for autonomous vehicles will only be realized once cars join communication networks that allow them to “see” beyond their immediate surroundings. And by “see,” we really mean “hear,” as in the car’s ability to hear the radio calls of other cars reporting their location, speed, and direction, as well as the radio calls of infrastructure such as traffic signals and even the individual smartphones of pedestrians. Vehicle-to-vehicle, vehicle-to-infrastructure, or so-called “vehicle-to-everything” communication would allow even today’s cars to adopt more safety enhancements such as a warning when a car approaching from an intersecting street is about to run a red light. But at the moment, networked cars are just a future vision as governments, telecom companies, automakers, software suppliers, and other interested parties argue over how this communication will get done.

One part of the dispute centers on the hardware. For years, the auto industry has been testing networked autonomous vehicles with an older but reliable form of wireless communication format called dedicated short-range communication (DSRC). A much newer and better type of communication called cellular vehicle-to-everything (C-V2X) has been developed that is based on the same type of technology used in today’s smartphones, but it is still experimental. The former offers low cost, familiarity, and ready availability; the latter offers better communication using a globally adopted format that has clear upgrade paths in 4G, 5G, and so on.

Besides that dispute, there is the battle over available frequencies on the radio spectrum. Radios, including everything from your smartphone to your Wi-Fi modem to your future autonomous car, operate by sending electromagnetic radiation in the form of carrier waves. To avoid overlap and signal noise, each type of radio uses a different wave frequency. The spectrum of these frequencies is limited by technology and physics, and it’s the job of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to determine what radios use what frequencies.

About 20 years ago, the FCC selected a frequency range around 5.9 gigahertz for “intelligent transportation systems,” including autonomous vehicle applications. It was chosen in part because the relatively high frequency would allow more data to be transmitted and would also be better for reducing what the telecom industry calls “latency,” or the delay in the wireless transmission of data from the source to the destination. Low latency is considered vital for autonomous vehicles, because if a car that is five cars ahead of you in a 70-mph platoon nails the brakes, your car would need to know it within one- or two-tenths of a second to do any good.

However, automakers and autonomous technology suppliers haven’t really moved into their designated frequency band as the tech is still being born, so it has sat largely empty and fairly quiet. Meanwhile, the frequencies on either side, at 5.8 and 6.0 gigahertz, are bursting at their seams. Both are dedicated to wireless networking, or Wi-Fi, a technology that has boomed during the same period and even more so since the pandemic and the national movement to work from home. Demand for Wi-Fi spectrum has been fierce, and thus last year, the FCC let the Wi-Fi party kick in the door and take over 60 percent of the bandwidth that had been reserved for networked transportation. The Commission’s ruling, published in May 2021, came with unusually pointed language: vehicle-to-vehicle communication, it said, “has not been widely deployed, potential future advanced applications are still under development and have not been deployed, and widespread commercial deployment would at best still be years away, if it occurs at all.”

The FCC’s ruling, now being contested in court, was a blow to advocates of networked vehicles, signaling to participants and investors alike that the government has low confidence that networked autonomous cars will be here anytime soon. The remaining 40 percent of the spectrum could quickly max out and suffer “channel saturation” if NHTSA suddenly ordered that every new car have vehicle-to-vehicle communication, notes Douglas Gettman, global director of Smart Mobility and AV/AC Consulting Services at Kimley-Horn, a public and private infrastructure consultancy in Phoenix.

“Since NHTSA hasn’t mandated that C-V2X be installed [in new cars], we’re in the same situation as we were seven to 10 years ago with blind-spot warning, forward-collision warning, and lane-departure warning systems,” says Gettman. “Yes, you could get a car with those features back then, but only in premium packages. Now almost every vehicle except the most basic models has those features. That is my expectation with vehicle-to-vehicle radios without a mandate; yes, the OEMs will install them, but it will be a very slow rollout.”

All of which means that fully automated cars and a base on Mars are roughly on the same hazy forecast schedule. And Tesla has shown us what happens when a Silicon Valley start-up tries to speed things up by applying a tech disruptor’s urgency to the otherwise glacially cautious auto industry. However, much more is at stake than a fritzy smartphone app when Tesla’s Autopilot fails (many observers feel the Autopilot name itself is a tragic misnomer for a flawed and incomplete self-driving system). Basically, Tesla has enlisted a 765,000-strong army of owners to be beta testers with their bodies, and everyone else’s, for the furtherance of autonomous driving technology. “It’s enough already,” lamented a police officer responding to the scene of a Texas Tesla crash.

Will missteps by Tesla or other pioneers sour the whole world on autonomous cars? It seems unlikely, and the biggest threat to driverless technology may not be from Tesla but Zoom, the online videoconferencing app, as well as Amazon, DoorDash, and other companies that save you the trouble of even leaving your house. Remember that FCC ruling that hands much of intelligent transportation’s bandwidth over to Wi-Fi? Changes in communication technology are rapidly outpacing those in transportation technology. Bloomberg recently reported that a survey of large companies around the world revealed that most plan to permanently slash their travel budgets post-pandemic because of improvements in digital communication and imperatives to reduce carbon emissions. The FCC was only yielding to reality, which is that rather than travel, people increasingly prefer to work, socialize, and shop without ever leaving home.

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Few who have been to the Goodwood Festival of Speed or the retro-themed Goodwood Revival would disagree that the 11th Duke of Richmond puts on one hell of a weekend. Indeed, some consider the two events centered around the Duke’s baronial Goodwood Estate to be the best car festivals on the international calendar. The only problem is that they’re in England, far away from the U.S. which perhaps plays second (or third) fiddle in hosting motorsports events that both draw top-drawer vehicles and create a memorable visitor experience. Jeff O’Neil, the founder of the Velocity Invitational, wants to change that.

This past November 11–14, O’Neil, a California wine-industry jefe and vintage racing enthusiast, staged the first ever Velocity Invitational at the Weathertech Raceway Laguna Seca in Monterey, California, which he hopes will be the go-to event for the kinds of cars and crowds that Goodwood attracts. “I’m not trying to replicate Goodwood,” says O’Neill, who spent “multiple millions” to put on Velocity but didn’t go so far as to require participants wear vintage clothing. “This was an attempt to answer the question, ‘can we not make a beautiful, special experience for everyone?’ The canvas was blank in the U.S.”

Velocity, which offered gourmet food and wine tasting as well as a brace of pre-war Bugattis and Porsche 917s, drew 195 race cars, another 75 cars for display, and around 4500 ticket-purchasers for about 12,000 bodies through the turnstiles over the whole event. At times the cars in the VIP lot for participants exceeded those in the general parking for spectators, and O’Neill admits the event has a way to go to break even. Pushing costs up were a partial makeover of the track, including removing some trackside signage to tidy the place up and the erecting of long, white tents in the paddock to house the race cars by class, much as they do at Goodwood. Acres of bright green Astroturf and miles of white picket fencing gave the affair the feeling of a day at the derby.

Racers competed in 11 run groups plus several demonstration sessions, including two later-model McLaren Formula 1 cars, one of them a wailing V-10 powered 1998 MP4/13A which was reunited with its original driver, Mika Hakkinen. O’Neill was proud of the fact that the event secured six of the Ford GTs that have run at Le Mans between 2016 and 2019 (O’Neill owns one himself) as well as a 1955 Mercedes-Benz 300SLR out of the Mercedes collection. Your author drove a 1912 Packard in the pre-World War I class called Ragtime Racers.

O’Neill says his goal is to create a venue where owners feel comfortable bringing out the best of the best, some of which haven’t turned a wheel in 20 years or more. “Why in the world would you take a $4 million car and put it on a track with 50 other cars? People want to bring these cars out but they need the right forum.” By carefully selecting the participants—O’Neill says he maintains a strict “no assholes” rule—and limiting the grids to 20 to 24 cars, the Velocity Invitational can be such a forum, he says.

The Velocity Invitational evolved from the former Sonoma Speed Festival which ran in 2019 at Sonoma Raceway north of San Francisco. O’Neill says moving the event to November conflicted with Sonoma’s schedule, so he moved the event 150 miles south to the available Laguna Seca, where it is scheduled to repeat October 14-16, 2022, possibly with a theme centered around the forthcoming centennial of the 24 Hours of Le Mans. But going forward, the event will be about more than just old race cars, says O’Neill. For example, this year’s Velocity featured a hybrid-electric hypercar called the Czinger 21C, a 1350-hp two-seat limpet that uses extensive 3-D metal printing in its construction.

“We want to provide education, electrification, what is the future of cars in a carbon-neutral world,” says O’Neill. “We want to show the evolution of racing and speed and how it’s made cars better.”

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Occasionally, you can achieve a narrow and fleeting kind of celebrity by appearing in a car magazine. As did my 15-year-old nephew Lucas when I wrote earlier this year about his plight. He’s a teenager with an obsession for old things and old cars at a time of life when most kids are preoccupied with social media and its demands for pop-cult conformity. Lucas’s passions have only sharpened as he’s aged, and at a cost; if you want a social life at 15, it might be best to keep to yourself the wonders of Cuphead, an eccentric video game with a jazzy 1930s cartoon theme and soundtrack, or old 16-millimeter newsreels unearthed in antique shops.

Emails flowed in, one even offering a cash donation to Lucas’s future car fund. A beguiling note came from Scott Dorsey at the Freedom Road Rally, inviting Lucas to join Dorsey’s next six-day, 850-mile vintage-car tour, which this year was aimed at the Adirondack hinterlands of New York. Dorsey has been organizing tours under his Freedom Road Rally brand since 2004, and though he makes efforts to encourage youth participation, teenagers are not his prime demographic. Nonetheless, after reading about Lucas, he figured the kid would enjoy a week in the company of like-minded antique-car lovers, especially after more than a year of closeted pandemic isolation. Really, Dorsey had no idea. Lucas was over the fence and around the moon with joy when we told him, and for the next three months, he periodically texted me updates of the number of seconds remaining until departure.

Unfortunately, Lucas is still too young to drive, so the duty fell to your humble narrator to obtain a suitable vintage car and act as chauffeur. Lately, Lucas had been texting me a string of ads for late-1940s and early ’50s cars, so I requested the 1949 Cadillac Series 62 sedan out of the Hagerty garage. It was an unknown quantity, an unrestored original showing 47,000 miles on an odometer that probably hasn’t spun much in the past couple of decades. Thankfully, I didn’t learn until after the rally that the car previously belonged to old friends of the Hagerty family. “Anything can happen or nothing can happen,” summed up our fleet manager, Tony Pietrangelo, and with that, the Cadillac was booked in.

We rolled out from Lucas’s house precisely at 7:00 a.m., just as the sun was starting to cook up yet another muggy late-July day in Detroit. Due to a shipping snafu, the Cadillac had only been trucked as far as Canton, Michigan, on its journey to the rally start in Syracuse, so the job landed on Lucas and me to jockey it the extra 500 miles out (and back), more than doubling our anticipated mileage. If the old Cad was intending to blow, it would have ample opportunity.

By the time we were passing The Glass House, Ford’s aquamarine headquarters near Detroit, Lucas had the tunes up and running, streaming from his phone to a Bluetooth speaker he borrowed from his mom. It started with Kitty Kallen songbirding “It’s Been a Long, Long Time” in 1945 with the Harry James Orchestra, then Bobby Darin belting out “Mack the Knife,” then Sinatra doing it “My Way,” and so on through a collection of brassy American standards. Lucas sang right along, knowing all the words, as we whisked through Motown’s concrete canyons, the wind wings cranked out on the old Cadillac, and, as Kerouac wrote of his own journey in a ’47 Cad, “nowhere to go but everywhere.”

Out on the Ohio Turnpike, Cadillac’s first overhead-valve engine, a 331 V-8 still wearing its original chipped and stained navy-blue paint, inhaled the miles without a wobble. But the four-speed Hydra-Matic was prone to snap our heads with a hard shift, and it was leaving unseemly puddles of ATF at every fuel stop. In a ’49 Cadillac, you pull up the carpet in the passenger footwell to check the transmission dipstick, and it showed full. Actually, more than full (a fact that would become revelatory later), and we figured that as long as the transmission could lube itself, it probably wouldn’t strand us. Probably.

After nine hours of superslab covered at the Cadillac’s most comfortable speed of 63-ish mph, Syracuse finally rose on the horizon. The meet-up hotel was in the process of converting from a Holiday Inn to a Ramada, and it was suffering from glaring lack of upkeep—including a broken water boiler, meaning cold showers for all. While I was in the lot checking over the Cadillac and the other cars in the rally, Lucas texted from the room that there were stains on the walls and some kind of unidentifiable ick on the TV remote. When faced with such situations, with trifling imperfections in the otherwise antiseptic polyester norm of modern highway travel, I always relativize. “Well, it sounds better than a foxhole on Iwo Jima,” I said. Lucas proved immune to this teachable moment about maintaining a broad perspective and instead texted his mother, who then texted me with an offer to pay for a room at another hotel.

“So that’s how it’s going to be,” I ranted to myself with a flash of irritation. When the going gets tough, the kid gets on iMessage with Mom. Then followed the same huffy observation that every adult has made at one time or another since Adam and Eve: “Things sure have changed since I was a kid!”

Dorsey’s concept of a road rally can be summed up as follows: Pick a scenic corner of rural America, give everyone exceedingly clear directions, limit the daily slog to between 100 and 200 miles, and sprinkle in lots of stops at the type of little museums and offbeat roadside attractions that rushing travelers never seem to make time for anymore. While the name of the event, the Freedom Road Rally, seems pregnant with political overtone in this overheated age, Dorsey actually came up with it not long after terrorists in 2001 forever ruined his birthday of September 11. And about four years ago, he declared his rally a “politics-free zone, because we’re all on vacation and there’s no point in arguing about sh*t we can’t do anything about.”

On the first day, our band of old-car rallyists cruised a two-lane back road to our first stop, the historic Fort Ontario, a star-shaped citadel on Lake Ontario that dates back to before the Revolutionary War. It was captured, destroyed, and rebuilt several times, most recently after the Civil War, when gun ports for 32-pound howitzers were installed into a V-shaped cauldron of walls that lead to the main entrance. During an attack, the guns were there to fire canisters full of iron tennis balls at the oncoming enemy, the walls constructed of jagged stone in order to scatter shell fragments for maximum carnage. Fortunately, it was never needed.

After that, we motored on to the Antique Boat Museum in Clayton, New York, a tribute to the golden age of stained and shellacked watercraft from a bygone era in the Thousand Islands region of the St. Lawrence River. Among its pristine Chris-Craft cruisers and Gar Wood runabouts is La Duchesse, a 106-foot houseboat built in 1903 as a summer getaway for hotelier George Boldt of the famed Waldorf-Astoria in New York. After years of neglect that culminated in its sinking, the craft has been refloated on a new hull and restored to some of its original, if somewhat musty, grandeur.

The relaxed cadence of the Freedom Road Rally began to emerge. Cars drifted in small groups and with no particular hurry from destination to destination. The $2400 entry fee included all hotel accommodations and venue tickets, but dining was on your own, leaving participants to pick their own poison, whether it be a hurried McDonald’s or a waterside bistro patio with a view of the 1000-foot bulk freighters plying the St. Lawrence. “It’s like leaving the 21st century,” said JoAnn Martinec from Corning, New York, who was navigating for husband George in their turquoise 1957 Chevy Bel Air. “You breathe slower, you breathe easier, there’s no fast pace, and you discover so much about the country over these road rallies.”

People stayed as long or as little as they desired, then moved on. We toured Boldt’s island palace known as Boldt Castle, which the hotel magnate built for his wife Louise and then in despair abandoned upon her premature death. Lucas was enamored by the graffiti on the unfinished upper floors that went back decades, including a visitor from Bay Shore on Long Island who wrote on the wall in 1928. We visited a museum devoted to the western-themed sculptures and paintings of Frederic Remington, and the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. At a nature park called the Adirondack Experience, we saw otters frolic in a man-made waterfall and hiked an elevated walkway through the forest canopy.

Fans of the original 1960s Star Trek series were bedazzled by a meticulous re-creation of the show’s sets constructed in a warehouse in the unlikely locale of Ticonderoga, New York. Tour guide Drew Malone, a dead ringer for next-gen Star Trek cast member Wil Wheaton, explained how the Federation of Planets flag in Captain Kirk’s conference room was just a lightly disguised Cuban flag, a tribute to Desilu Productions co-founder Desi Arnaz. And how the original Trek was one of the first television shows aired entirely in color, causing set designers to comb hotel and restaurant catalogs of the 1960s for their wildest fabrics. Those are now unobtainable and thus the Enterprise’s original psychedelic bedspreads were remade at great expense by the museum. “This is basically a 13,000-square-foot man cave,” boasted Malone.

In between stops, Lucas would rattle off conversation topics rapid-fire, his head a vast storehouse of factoids about the world’s tallest buildings, the events of 9/11, the history of the Walt Disney Co., the history of the Tucker automobile, and so on. I made him write down each new topic in a notebook kept on the floor of the Cadillac, partly just to slow him down. Entries included:

“Terminal velocity, falling from Empire State.”
“Hawaii plates.”
“T. Dewey Highway.”
“Huntsman spiders.”
“Model T that drove around the world.”
“RHD vs LHD. Why??”

He also called out all the antique stores he spotted (or, those he didn’t miss because he was staring at his phone—sorry, Lucas), and our finned Cadillac dutifully screeched to a halt. The shops ranged in ambience from Main Street resale storefronts full of worthless detritus to ancient old houses with tilting floors and dusty artifacts from America’s past. A practiced shopper of such castoffs, Lucas knew what he was after: any 1980s electronics, and 16-millimeter films to run through his 1943 Bell & Howell projector, which we had lugged along on the trip despite it weighing about as much as a Muncie Toploader.

In one shop, he found one, packed in a canister with no markings. After examining only enough frames to determine that the reel was black-and-white and probably very old, he bought it for 20 bucks and a promise to email the shopkeeper with details of its contents. That night at the hotel, he told our fellow rallyists, gathered around the lobby to watch some of the films that we had lugged out from Detroit—including a Donald Duck short and a news documentary about the 1968 presidential primary—that the new reel would be unveiled the following night. Anticipation buzzed through the rallyists, for by now, Lucas’s evening screenings were legendary.

We were getting to know our fellow rallyists. Bob Oliver and Bill Stryker were two old friends from Jersey crewing a 1964 Chrysler Newport convertible with a leaky power-steering pump. A retired IRS accountant and Vietnam vet, Stryker also drove buses as a side hustle for 42 years and maintains an active interest in them. “I’ll vouch for that,” said Oliver, who worked for the power company, “because we go to every bus show in the country.”

Scott and Shelly Thams of Clarkston, Michigan, were driving a pristine red 1967 Chevrolet Camaro SS, a long-term restoration project. Thams has done the Great Race twice in a 1914 Model T Speedster capable of 60 mph. The difference with the Freedom Rally: “We get to see things; in the Great Race, you never get to see anything.”

Eugene Toner and Ben Renninger were two young mechanics paid by Dorsey to crew the rally’s sag wagon, a Ford F-150 full of tools and towing a flatbed tandem- axle trailer. By day five, the trailer had yet to see use, the worst problems thus far being the Newport and its trail of iridescent power-steering fluid and a 1940 Ford with a small-block Chevy bucking from fouled injectors. The Ford’s performance improved greatly after Toner suggested that its owner try administering a full-throttle Italian tuneup. Toner told me later that loading one or two cars a day on the trailer was normal for a Freedom Rally.

We were happy to stay off of it. At some point, the leak in the Cadillac’s transmission slowed to just the occasional drip, and it simultaneously started shifting more smoothly. We realized that the Hydra-Matic, which holds a voluminous 11 quarts of fluid, had simply been overfilled at some point and was shedding its unwanted excess. It gave us no more trouble for the rest of the trip.

At moments during the long hours, I wondered if Lucas was having any fun. I was doing all the driving, so there wasn’t much for him to do except stare out the window or look at his phone. Some of the stops, including the Baseball Hall of Fame and the Star Trek museum—a sport he has barely played and a TV show he had never seen—were only marginally interesting to him. The buildup to this trip had been so momentous, his parents and grandparents all telling him it was the opportunity of a lifetime and that he would see and learn and change so much. Was I failing him as an uncle? Was this supposed to be like one of those road movies where a musical montage plays while a slow but lasting bonding happens and life destinies are changed?

Eventually, there was a moment of clarity: Lucas has been on this earth for 15 years and I, the uncle who lives 2400 miles away in Los Angeles, was getting him for six days. The main objective was to have a good time on a summer romp, not to make this trip a series of teachable moments. And I realized in my own teachable moment that my parenting skills are dubious (I thought nothing of taking a 15-year-old kid on a 2000-mile drive in a car with no seatbelts, a steel dashboard, drum brakes, and 6-volt headlights) and that it wasn’t my job or Scott Dorsey’s job or the Adirondacks’s job to teach Lucas anything. He would see what he would see and learn what he wanted to learn, and if it was nothing beyond that it takes three pumps to start a stone-cold ’49 Cadillac, then so be it.

On our last night, Lucas loaded up the mystery reel. It opened with none other than Charles Lindbergh explaining the freshly invented wonders of transcontinental air travel, and it followed a group of passengers as they hopscotched across America in a gurgling Ford Trimotor. Coast to Coast in 48 Hours was the breathless title of this 10-minute film, probably shot around 1930, when taking two days to get from New York to Los Angeles was science-fiction stuff. The rallyists watched, transfixed. Then, right after the last bit of film went clacking through the projector, its bulb burned out. Movie night was over, as was our journey.

We parted company from the 2021 Freedom Road Rally after touring the incomparable Northeast Classic Car Museum in Norwich, New York, which constantly churns its borrowed collection of pristine classics to keep things interesting. We also visited the considerably quirkier Wheels in Time Museum in a house across the street. Proprietor Eric Andrade describes his personal collection of 5000 miniature vehicles as “telling the story of American history through die-cast.”

Then we hit the road for home, doing one last slow cruise up Woodward Avenue past the former General Motors Building, the words of that old Johnny Cash song playing in my head: “I left Kentucky back in ’49 and went to Dee-troit working on an assembly line, and the first year they had me putting wheels on Cadillacs…” However, before we pulled into the driveway, we completed one last mission: Lucas slid into the driver’s seat. We did several slow laps around a large hotel lot, Lucas getting the feel of the steering and brakes. He would make a turn, then forget that you have to unwind the wheel if you wish the car to go straight again, and we nearly ran over a hotel staffer sitting on a curb having a smoke break. But she was a good sport about it, and I realized Lucas had never driven a car before. “Nope, this is my first one,” he confirmed. A 1949 Cadillac—it seemed fitting.

1949 Cadillac Series 62 Sedan

Engine: 331-cid V-8
Power: 160 hp @ 3800 rpm
Torque: 292 lb-ft @ 2200 rpm
Weight: 4000 lb
Cruising Speed: 63 mph
Price when new: $3050
Hagerty #2-condition value: $26,500–$38,000

Lucas’s trip, in his own words

The day had come at last. I was so excited, I got up an hour ahead of my alarm and thought about the interesting and amazing things we’d be doing and seeing. The past year and a half had been depressing and restrictive, and I was finally going to be able to go out and experience something besides my house.

On the way to New York, we got quite a few thumbs-up and waves from people passing by. Each time, it reinforced the elegance and beauty of the Cadillac we had chosen, which carried us along without a single issue. Whenever we stopped for gas, people would come over and compliment the car, at which point I would take the opportunity to show them how the gas cap was hidden under the taillight. What a feature, by the way. I don’t think you would see that level of creativity in cars today.

When we pulled into the hotel on the first day, we were met with a parking lot full of different cars, from 100 percent stock cars to ones with overhauled engines and modern interiors. There was a 1950s Thunderbird, which I adore, and a Volkswagen Thing with a nautical theme, including a life preserver and an outboard motor, which was just fun. Going down the road, we saw a red 1951 Oldsmobile for sale. I adore those Oldsmobiles. Something about the little tab under the headlights really ties the whole thing together. We pulled over and I made sure to write down the number—though after chatting with the guy a bit, I had to admit to myself that I didn’t have the money to buy it.

All the while, the Cadillac kept on moving, and (according to Aaron) it handled beautifully. Along the way, we stopped at a few antique stores. One store was full of war memorabilia, and another had a box of butchered car radios and headlights. By the end, I had picked up such gems as an old eight-track cassette, the film titled Coast to Coast in 48 Hours, and a Life magazine from July 4, 1969, titled “Special Issue: Off to the Moon.” When I showed it to another rally participant, he said he didn’t believe Americans went to the moon, and we had quite a discussion.

On the last day of the trip, at the Northeast Classic Car Museum, there was a 1947 Hudson with an interesting-looking grille, a 1959 Edsel (I prefer the ’58; the ’59 is too tame!), a rare Cadillac with a V-16 engine, some motorcycles that looked more like rockets with seats and handlebars, and a Packard with a hood ornament that was so sharp I bet you could cut carrots on it.

But my favorite thing there was a 1956 DeSoto Firedome convertible. I love the 1956 Chryslers. In my book, 1956 was the last year of a prewar era of styles, and Chrysler hit it home that year. Not to mention, this one had the optional built-in record player! It was a sight to see and a perfect ribbon on that whole museum.

I thought I would miss the modern amenities of AC and reclining seats, but wind wings and vents kept the car cool, and the Cadillac’s couch-like seats were plenty comfortable. On our way back through Detroit on the last leg of our journey, the cozy interior and elegant exterior of the Cadillac solidified my love for these classics. I will have one, someday.

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The word “lucid” refers the quality of clarity or easy comprehension. It seems the perfect name for a company so plainly conceived to take on Tesla, which has during its brief history been neither easy to understand nor famous for its clear thinking. With the Air, Lucid delivers an electric all-wheel-drive sedan with a few brave engineering choices sprinkled into an otherwise straightforward proposition: long range in the lap of luxury, for lots of money. The brand’s arrival seems a, er, lucid moment amid the raging hype surrounding the coming electric-vehicle revolution.

If you haven’t been following Lucid’s story closely, let us update you in a nutshell: As you read this, cars are rolling off the line of a gleaming new assembly plant halfway between Phoenix and Tucson in Casa Grande, Arizona. The first deliveries to customers are slated for October 12; some cities including Los Angeles already have empty Lucid showrooms waiting for cars. The Air is the publicly listed company’s first product, an elegant and modern luxury liner that aspires to outclass the Mercedes S-Class. The top trims, including the 1110-hp Dream and 800-hp Grand Touring, pack a mammoth 112 kW/hour battery under the floor that the EPA just certified as having a 520-mile range, while the lower trims (the 620-hp Touring and entry level 480-hp Pure) max out at about 400 miles with their smaller 88 kW/hour packs. The Pure will start at $77,400 and the prices escalate from there to $139,000 for the GT. Reservations for the limited-edition $169,000 Dream Edition, such as our test car, are now closed. Lucid’s manufacturing capacity will expand to bring to market the Gravity SUV by the end of 2022, using the same platform and hardware as the Air.

At first glance, there’s nothing particularly revolutionary about what seems a fairly straightforward luxo-limo with exceptionally good road manners and bang-your-head-back acceleration. But start opening doors and pushing buttons and peeling back fenders and you quickly discover that the Lucid has some fascinating tricks in its pockets. There’s the 7-cubic-foot front trunk, for example, fronted by an array of LED headlights fixed in a massive and inordinately complex single-piece plastic molding that has won engineering awards. The 16-cubic-foot rear trunk is accessed by a large composite clamshell that wraps around the rear corners and, when open, resembles a military cargo plane in full gulp. This is the car you want to take on airport runs.

The unique roof, which is available on every version except the base Pure, consists almost entirely of smoked, infrared-resistant glass set in a latticework of silver-painted roof beams. Look up from one of the seats and you are reminded of being in the glass cupola of the fictional Nautilus submarine. Whatever is in that glass works well to block infrared rays, because a piercing Arizona sun couldn’t do much to warm the car’s cockpit on our drive. Thus, all that heavy material seems worth whatever it adds (and it adds a lot) to the prodigious 5200-pound curb weight of the up-trim cars.

There’s also the guts of the car, which demonstrate that Lucid is in no way half-assing this project. The all-aluminum structure incorporates technologies such as thin-wall high-pressure die-casting and spin-friction self-piercing riveting that were novel in the industry just a few years ago. Lucid has also taken the brave step of designing and building its own battery packs and electric motors, finding nothing to its liking out in the global supply base. The 924-volt packs have more voltage than the 400-volt packs used by Tesla and the 800-volters in the Porsche Taycan, all in order to reduce the amperage loads in the car’s drivetrain and thus improve efficiency. Because of the high voltage, they can also charge at the quickest fast-chargers slowly spreading across America, as well as supply AC power to your house via a hefty onboard charger which Lucid has dubbed the Wunderbox.

Lucid’s parent company, Atieva, has built the battery packs for several seasons of Formula E. It thus knows a thing about high output and resulting heat. In a separate facility, Lucid builds the Air’s pack starting with 21700-size cylindrical lithium-ion cells from Korea’s LG (and others, we’re told), with 300 of the cells fitted in neat rows to a single module and 18 to 22 modules assembled within a sturdy aluminum tray. Thus, each car’s pack contains 5400 or 6600 individual cells, which are about the size of a .50-caliber shell casing, glued in place in their specially designed module boxes to maintain perfect equidistant alignment for temperature control. When the fully assembled pack (a single massive robot arm that looks like something out of The Iron Giant and lifts the finished tray onto a carrier for shipment to the nearby final assembly plant) is bolted to the bottom of the car, the heavy tray acts as both a structural element and, because of subtle sculpting, an underbody aerodynamic element.

In contrast to the Lucid’s battery pack, its motors seem a miracle of miniaturization, the coaxial units (meaning they sit in the centerline of the axle) being not much larger than a bowling-ball bag and weighing in at 163 pounds, yet capable of enormous power for sustained periods without overheating. We’re told this performance capability has much to do with the design of the non-moving ring-like stator and the identification of inherent electromagnetic “dead zones” in it; other motors don’t utilize these zones but in Lucid’s motor they are packed with liquid cooling tubes to keep the unit chilled and efficient without compromising any efficiency loss from the stator.

One thing Lucid would not divulge is how the advertised torque-vectoring differentials work. But during a 20-minute drive that allowed us to throw it around a couple of freeway on-ramps and one decreasing-radius turn, the system proved subtle to the point of total transparency. It’s hard to tell if it’s the differentials that are the stars, the bespoke 21-inch, 35-series Pirelli summer tires (all-seasons are available along with 19- and 20-inch wheels), the electronically adjustable suspension, or the fact that the car carries more than a quarter of its weight below the floor, but the Lucid is an agile road machine, especially for its weight. It corners with huge grip and a reassuringly quick response to steering inputs.

And once the road straightens again, the Air launches at the horizon with the vertebrae-stressing blast we’ve come to expect from the electrics at the top of the food chain. We weren’t even allowed to try the car’s randiest setting, called “Sprint”—a more buttoned-down name for what is likely something similar to Tesla’s “Ludicrous” mode. (Excuses were made about wanting to stretch the car’s range out so that all attendees could get a chance to drive.) The two other modes, “Smooth” and “Swift” proved that Swift is the most natural-feeling, while Smooth goes heavy on the regen to permit one-pedal driving in traffic. We did not get to explore the Air’s “Dream Drive” function, which incorporates cameras, ultrasonic sensors, and a forward-looking LIDAR laser-radar unit to provide limited autonomous function. Incorporating the LIDAR unit, the Air promises more reliability to its self-driving function than Tesla’s camera-based Autopilot. One thing we liked and experienced at every stoplight: The Lucid does not crawl forward when you lift the brake from a stop, as some electrics do to absurdly mimic the behavior of old-school automatic transmissions and torque converters.

The Air’s cockpit will feel like a major step up for anyone stepping out of a Model S. One problem with Tesla is that it doesn’t do much inside to distinguish its different trim levels, while Lucid goes to greater lengths to make all of its customers feel special—especially its top-tier buyers. Various leathers, woods, and metal-like surfaces mix together with today’s de rigueur high-def touch-screen displays in a pleasing way that evokes the latest home décor catalogs. Our favorite was an optional fabric trim known internally as “Jade,” even though it’s not green but rather a sort of brushed-steel gray. Apparently it is woven from polyester and Alpaca wool and was one of several experimental materials that Lucid went to lengths to validate for durability and ease of assembly. If you desire something a little different in your luxury electric, you’ll want to extensively peruse Lucid’s online configurator.

The space inside the Air is, well, airy, if not surprising given the 116.5-inch wheelbase, which is about the same as the current Benz S500. If you opt for the 520-mile pack, extra battery modules get stuffed under the front seats so the rear passengers lose some toe space, but enough that you would notice unless you’re exceptionally tall. The drivers controls have an instant familiarity and sit in a good relationship to each other, but the steering wheel could use a little more telescope reach. Unlike Tesla, which brooms almost all car functions into the giant central touchscreen, the Lucid reserves some controls for dedicated buttons and twin thumb-wheels on the steering wheel. In our brief drive, and with a Lucid employee assisting, we plumbed the depths of the Lucid’s various menus and found them to be not all that deep, a blessing for people who are fed up with the overly complicated menus found in many high-end cars.

Above all, the big surprise here is how well-finished and integrated the Lucid Air is. It drives and feels like the product of a much larger car company. No surprise that many of its engineers are graduates of other carmakers, some coming to Lucid via Tesla. Our factory tour in Casa Grande was led by a kind of United Nations of car builders, with engineers from Detroit, Wolfsburg, Crewe, Stuttgart, and Seoul all taking turns to explain the Air’s many attributes. If the auto industry is ripe for disruption (it definitely is) then some of its fiercest disruptors have come from within the establishment’s own ranks, exhausted by stifling corporate cultures and brands that wear their history as millstone around their necks.

At Lucid, these disruptors are creating a whole new car, for a whole new brand, in a whole new factory staffed by people infused with different experiences and best practices from across the industry. It is an incredibly daunting challenge mixing all that into a salable automobile, but the Air is a convincing indicator that Lucid is anything but vaporware.

2022 Lucid Air Dream Edition Range

Base Price: $169,000 (excluding destination fee)

Highs: Superlative range, neck-snapping acceleration, spacious interior with several different flavors.

Lows: Expensive, heavy, not everyone cares to be beta testers for a new car company.

Summary: Tesla has a direct competitor on its hands, and Lucid’s arsenal of expertise from across the industry promises an interesting rivalry ahead between the two California brands.

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When you’re the car guy, you are often relied upon to counsel other folks on the subject of buying or fixing cars. And you should give your knowledge freely, because the rules of the advice bartering system mean that someday, when you need an asparagus steamer or an automatic tennis-ball launcher, you will have questions. Also, you must be prepared to have your sage advice ignored, as mine frequently is when I rant against leather.

So here is leather in a nutshell: They strip the living skin off a bovine, treat it with a lot of toxic stuff with five-syllable names, smoosh it through rollers, chop it into pieces, stitch it up, and then stuff it into the hottest, driest, sun-bleached environment devisable by mankind. In a few short years, it stiffens and cracks, and then develops the flaky consistency of baklava. When it’s hot out, leather is hotter. When it’s cold out, leather is colder. It makes annoying scrunching noises when you move in the seat. It requires periodic smears of icky goo such as lanolin—basically, sheep fat—to stay pliable and soft, or at least a spritz with some over-the-counter preservative. But who does that? Lots of folks have trouble just remembering to change their oil. Leather will inevitably shrink. It will crack. And it will spend every minute as a car seat trying to die. And if you were a car seat, if your mission on this earth was to keep people’s butts off the floor—even those who never miss a Taco Tuesday—wouldn’t you want to die?

Originally, the industry used leather because it was cheap and plentiful. Newer and better products came along. Mohair was popular for a time, a renewable resource that is mowed and collected like lawn clippings off the backs of goats and sheep. Then vinyl arrived to offer the feel of leather but more durability. Car companies often call it leatherette, but nobody is fooled. Mercedes calls its vinyl MB-Tex, because, let’s face it, vinyl is a sucky word. Heck, it’s not even spelled right. It’s spelled like “vin-yell” or “vine-yull.” BMW gives its vinyl the fancy title of SensaTec, because BMW itself died years ago and was replaced by a robot. Toyota calls its vinyl SofTex, which sounds like a porn site for rodeo clowns.

Of course, leather must be used to restore a classic that had leather originally. I am not looking forward to encountering my first Ferrari 250 Cal Spyder lined with terry cloth. And I don’t advocate people trying to stitch leather themselves. I tried, on my mom’s old Singer Touch & Sew Model 603E. I actually got a decent French topstitch going, the metal gears of the Singer—made when stuff was made right—ramming the needle through multiple layers of hide. But when I gazed back at my work, the stitch line looked like the tracks of a rabbit leaving a bar. I gave up and vowed to hate leather.

All of which made me snicker when I read an opinion piece in the trade rag Automotive News headlined, “Yes, using leather in EVs is good for the environment.” The writer, you will perhaps not be surprised to learn, is president of the Leather and Hide Council of America. He states that leather’s main alternative, vinyl, is just petroleum-based plastic wearing a tuxedo and that you might as well upholster your car with an oil spill. Also, he continues, not selecting leather means millions of cowhides go to landfills. Apparently, about 120 million are dumped every year, an unnecessary waste when everything down to the Little Tikes Cozy Coupe could have leather seats.

Which raises the question: If we’re tossing so much leather, why do automakers charge more for it than cloth (ha, when you can get it!) or MBSensaSofTex? What doesn’t need an answer is why this guy didn’t mention the other obvious solution to all this wasted leather: eating less meat, which would also cut methane emissions. You didn’t think that rich leather smell was natural, did you? If it were, cattle feedlots would be tourist attractions. Think about that the next time you’re rubbing lanolin into your buckets.

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A helicopter and three Coast Guard cutters backed up the 35 federal marshals who swarmed Alcatraz Island on June 11, 1971, to end a 19-month occupation of the abandoned prison by Native American activists. An outgrowth of the 1960s civil rights movement as well as the general turmoil of the times, the Alcatraz occupation is today considered a cornerstone of a Native American awakening that included marches and mass protests in Washington, D.C., in 1972, at South Dakota’s Wounded Knee in 1973, and elsewhere throughout the 1970s.

Against that backdrop, American Motors launched the first Jeep Cherokee, basically a wagon version of the existing Gladiator pickup. At the debut in Burlington, Wisconsin, in August 1973, AMC president William Luneburg and CEO Roy Chapin Jr. presented the first truck off the line to John Crowe, principal chief of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. In turn, Crowe and other tribal officials traded Luneburg and Chapin ceremonial headdresses. A pact was formed that, nearly 50 years later, has survived better than many of the failed treaties that litter America’s history.

Until this past February, when a prominent Cherokee chief issued a surprising statement to Car and Driver, urging Jeep to drop the tribe’s name from its vehicles. “I’m sure this comes from a place that is well intended, but it does not honor us by having our name plastered on the side of a car,” said Chuck Hoskin Jr., principal chief of the Oklahoma-based Cherokee Nation, one of three federally recognized Cherokee tribes. “I think we’re in a day and age in this country where it’s time for both corporations and team sports to retire the use of Native American names, images, and mascots from their products, team jerseys, and sports in general.”

Jeep produced 434,000 vehicles branded with the Cherokee name in 2019, making it essential to the portfolio and the corporation’s profitability. In 2013, when Jeep revived the Cherokee after an 11-year run with the Liberty, the tribe took no position on it. Hoskin’s statement rocked Jeep’s new parent company, Stellantis, as chipping the nameplate off the Cherokee and Grand Cherokee now would sink decades of brand heritage and marketing, forcing Jeep to start over with a new name in a crowded, noisy market.

Even so, Stellantis chief exec Carlos Tavares replied that the company was open to dropping the name. All parties have gone quiet now and the only statement we could obtain was from a Stellantis spokesman: “As you would expect, we have a respectful and direct dialogue with the leaders and members of the Cherokee community on this and on other important matters. These are discussions we value and are ongoing.”

That the Cherokee was ensnared in the latter-day controversies over Native American names seems inevitable as pro and amateur sports teams face mounting pressure to change their mascots. The auto industry carries some baggage in this department, too, from the Dodge Dakota to Indian motorcycles to Winnebago’s extensive line of RVs. They are holdovers from a time when Native American names were freely used to connote agility, nobility, or battlefield prowess. There’s a reason the Army continues to call its helicopters the Apache, the Chinook, the Black Hawk, and the Lakota—apparently with tribal blessings.

To AMC’s credit, even the Cherokee’s earliest ads were limited to the truck’s selling points while avoiding racist tropes—unlike General Motors when it created a new division in 1926 named after “the greatest Indian chief who ever lived on the American continent.” For Pontiac’s launch party, GM rented New York’s Commodore Hotel and renamed it “The Wigwam,” inviting dealers to a “powwow” for “heap big eats.” Some dealers hired local Native Americans to dress up and hang out in tepees in their showrooms.

Was Pontiac exposing Americans— albeit in a narrow, crude way—to our Native heritage or just ripping off a culture for profit? Nearly a century later, as sensitivities change, it seems that people are still debating the question.

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