The 1974-76 Ford Elite highlights one of the Ford Motor Company’s bigger mistakes of the 1970s. The automaker was too slow in entering the mid-sized personal coupe field. The Elite was a cobbled-together design that […]
The 1963 Mercury Marauder “fastback” two-door hardtop represented the beginning of a new era for the Ford Motor Company. The utilitarian sensibilities of its former leader, Robert McNamara, were eclipsed by an emphasis on sporty […]
Reasonable people can debate what was the most excessive car of the brougham era, but I would propose the 1978 Cadillac Eldorado for top honors. To be more specific, I would point to the top-of-line […]
Road & Track complained that for 1960 the Auto Union’s two-door hardtop was given a “crude ‘American’ touch, a clumsy wrap-around” windshield (Bond, 1959). That made this body style look even more incongruous than previously. […]
Even though Ford came out with one of the first mid-sized cars in 1962, only three years later it was pummeled by General Motors and Chrysler. In 1965 even American Motors’ mid-sized lineup outsold Ford’s […]
One could point to a number of car designs that represented the turning point where foreign automakers began to outshine Detroit in the late-60s and early-70s. The first-generation Jaguar XJ strikes me as particularly important. […]
The Studebaker pictured above was a mid-year redesign intended to catch up with the Big Three, which at the beginning of the 1955 model had largely switched to so-called “dog-leg” windshields. That term refers to […]
Histories about the Stout Scarab tend to emphasize that it was the first production minivan (Peek, 2021; Wikipedia, 2023). However, this innovative 1930s car strikes me as also being the granddaddy of the 1960s camper […]
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