“The entire environment is incestuous. They introduce new cars. They fly journalists in and put them up at really nice hotels and, you know, treat them to experiences that they would never possibly in a […]
(EXPANDED FROM 4/2/2021) After Studebaker and Packard combined in 1954, Motor Trend anticipated the possibilities of the two automakers sharing resources. For example, the magazine imagined Studebaker’s lightweight cars getting Packard’s “monstrous new V8 engine, […]
Motor Trend magazine’s 1974 road test of seven personal coupes may have been rather vapid in many respects, but it did offer one useful critique. Writer Jim Brokaw complained that the largest models — the […]
I would like to offer two additional thoughts about Paul Niedermeyer’s (2024) recent article that discusses the auto industry abandoning low-priced cars in the U.S. market. First, the election of Donald Trump as president increases […]
(EXPANDED FROM 10/18/2023) David E. Davis often wrote about his road trips when he was editor of Automobile. Jack Baruth (2011) suggested that the magazine’s motto, “No Boring Cars!” served as “an excuse, er, reason […]
(EXPANDED FROM 5/16/2023) In response to the interesting conversation in the comment thread about Chrysler’s early-70s compacts, I thought it could be useful to expand on a data dive I did a while back on […]
CEO Lynn Townsend hinted at why the Chrysler Corporation arguably neglected its aging line of compacts in the first half of the 1970s. Townsend told Forbes in 1973, “The subcompacts are just too small. The […]
I recently paid Indie Auto’s quarterly sales taxes, so this is a good time to publicly thank all of you who have made a donation. Because we don’t run advertising (at least that isn’t satirical), the survival of […]
(EXPANDED FROM 4/23/2021) A few years ago our story on Brooks Stevens’s redesign of the 1964 Studebaker generated enough debate that I decided to further flesh out an alternative scenario. To wit, Studebaker would have […]
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