DAN NEIL: LUTHERAN-OBSESSED

Dan Neil, the Los Angeles Times’ Pulitzer Prize-winning automobile critic, gets off a nice dig at us Lutherans in today’s review of the Volvo C70 convertible:

To the point, then: There is something inexpressibly illicit about a convertible Volvo, a Nordic brand that has spent much of its history buttoned up to the chin, literally and figuratively (the sleek, be-finned Frua/Ghia-designed P1800 of the 1960s being the exception that proves the rule). Just consider the ideography of the company badge, the grille with the left-to-right slash across it, so much like the forbidding red circle-and-slash symbol. How Lutheran can you get?

This mark the second time in recent months Neil has skewered Lutherans in a car review. (See details here.) Bad form, Daniel. Surely you know that in North Carolina we’re known as “the wet Christians”? I mean, you have to know that.

CARSPOTTING, 06/22

Spotted the other night at W*l-M*rt: an early 90s Olds Cutlass Ciera with a spoiler on the back. I’d ask “Who you tryin’ to kid, other than yourself?”, but if my experience with a nearly-identical Buick Century is any indication, a rear wing on a Ciera may serve another, more practical purpose; namely, the extra weight is probably the only thing keeping the trunk closed.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: How GM survived past 1995 is a mystery to me.

CARSPOTTING, 06/12 (AGAIN, LATE)

Spotted Monday afternoon in Mason City, Iowa: a Chevy Citation four-door. I can’t honestly think of the last time I saw one of these, running or not.

As a non-upwardly-mobile teen driver in the late 80s, it’s not a question of if I had a Citation; it’s a question of what color it was. Dark brown, if you must know.

CARSPOTTING, 06/07

Spotted on the way home from church tonight: What appeared to be an early-90s Ford Escort wagon. I say “appeared to be” because there was not actually enough of the car remaining to make a positive ID. But I thought I recognized the basic body contours (wait, Contours were different cars) and that semi-hideous tealish green that blighted 75% of all Escorts in the early 90s.

The car was missing its:

• Front bumper
• Headlights
• Grille
• Hood
• Windshield
• Seat belts
• Window glass . . . all of it
• Roof
• Right rear door
• Tailgate
• Rear bumper
• Exhaust system

In addition, the three remaining doors were all bent in particularly obscene fashions. It looked like something out of “Planes, Trains, and Automobiles.”

I kid you not. This thing was an engine, a transmission, three doors, at least one working brake, and a floorpan, rolling down the road under its own power. I only wish I’d had a camera with me. Not so much because I’m afraid you won’t believe me; I’m worried that tomorrow morning I won’t believe what I know I saw.

Clearly this isn’t anybody’s daily driver. It was probably being ferried to one of the local elephant graveyards. But I can’t help but imagine that maybe somebody bought it, thinking, “Well, it just needs a little work . . .”

CARSPOTTING, 06/05 (BUT LATE)

Spotted whilst dropping off Daughter 1.0 at school yesterday morning: an Isuzu Axiom, the last Isuzu you could buy in the US that wasn’t just a rebadged General Motors product.

That’s a little ironic when you consider that Isuzu got its start in the US by building Chevies, specfically, the atrociously-named Chevy Luv (1972-1981). Isuzu also built a few Buicks, after a fashion: the “Opel Isuzu” which was later sold under Isuzu’s own name as the I-Mark. Isuzu also produced the little-remembered Chevy/Geo Spectrum from 1985 through 1989.

Trucks have always been Isuzu’s métier, however. They even managed to snag Honda as a customer. The Honda Passport was naught but a rebadged Isuzu Rodeo. The Isuzu Trooper maintains a considerable cult following . . . and then there’s this thing,, which appears to be styled after a dental appliance which once frightened Lisa Simpson.

But let’s face it . . . this is what we remember Isuzu for:

CARSPOTTING, 6/1

Saw a Pontiac T1000–the utterly redundant version of the Chevette–on the drive home today. This one looked to be a survivor, with nice, glossy paint the approximate color of pork gravy.

I’ve always loved what Consumer Guide had to say about the Chevette back in the day: “Millions of people bought Chevettes, and millions of people were happy with them.” They went on to explain that just about any subcompact was a better choice than the Chevette, but if it was all you could afford, it beat walking. And I guess that explains my weird, grudging affection for Chevettes. They promised little, but they made good on all that they promised.

I had a classmate/co-worker once who, in the mid ’90s, was still driving his ‘83 Chevette and feeling a little self-conscious about it. I pointed out to him that there weren’t all that many American cars of the early ’80s which could even last a dozen years. He should’ve been proud to have squeezed so much life out of a humble car. I think he actually was proud, but he was afraid to admit that an ‘83 Chevette suited his needs so well.

I’m sure by now he’s driving the nice extended-cab pickup he wanted . . . and I bet it’s a Chevy.

HIGH-OCTANE MEMORIES

Ten automotive-connected things that make me feel hopelessly nostalgic:

1. Matchbox cars. The first great indulgence of my obsessive streak. I had hundreds of these things and barely played with anything else. And please–no Hot Wheels. Those were for amped-up sugar junkies who loved to crash things into each other. My Matchbox cars obeyed the speed limit and always used their turn signals. My favorite was a white Ford pickup, ‘73 to ‘77 vintage.
2. Giant 2-door cars. Another 70s excess from which I cannot disassociate myself. I’d love to have a big ol’ 2-door hardtop from my youth. Preferably something avocado green or some other cringe-inducing color, and a vinyl top is not optional. I’ll live with 12 MPG and feeling like I’m driving while sitting in a bathtub. Just give me two doors, a hood the size of a king-size mattress, and eight cylinders driving the rear wheels.
3. The opening of ‘Newhart’. OK, so the car (an early-70s Olds Delta 88) is only peripheral to Newhart’s opening credits. What really matters is that they show this car (ostensibly, Dick Lowden’s) cruising gently along rural Vermont roads on what looks like the most perfect day ever, past a white clapboard church and up a village main street, while the last great TV theme Henry Mancini wrote lolls gently in the background. The opening credits may have had little to do with the inspired craziness which followed, but they were both perfectly unforgettable.
4. The smell of old magazines. It’s summer 1996 and I’m temporarily living in North Dakota. I discover a used-book store on the north side of downtown Fargo, a place that never should’ve passed fire inspection. Stuff was stacked from floor to ceiling, seemingly unsorted, but the owner somehow knew where everything was. I spent a good part of my meager intern’s salary buying up all the back issues of car magazines I could get my hands on. One sunny Saturday morning the owner told me, “You know, I’ve got all kinds of that stuff downstairs in the basement. You catch me on the right day, I might let you dig around and see if there’s anything you want.” I never did ask, though, but I’ve got to wonder: What sort of stuff was in that basement? Talk about a missed opportunity.
5. Hatchbacks. When I was a bite-size car enthusiast, I thought hatchbacks were so cool I could never imagine why anybody bought anything else. Why wouldn’t you want to be able to haul big things around in the back of your car? As it turns out, nobody did, because hatchbacks were cheap, and nobody wanted to be seen driving a Poverty Special. So, car companies stopped selling hatchbacks in America. Remember that next time you’re at the big-box store, trying to fit flat-packed furniture into the trunk of a Taurus.
6. 1979 Toyota Celicas. Some people grew up in Ford families, some in Chevy families; I grew up in a Toyota family. One day in first grade, Dad picked us up from school and drove us the six blocks to the Toyota dealer. He took us into the showroom and asked us which car we thought he should buy. My eyes immediately lit on a bittersweet-orange Celica liftback. I couldn’t wait for us to pull up at school in one of those. Turns out Dad had already signed for a leftover ‘78 Corolla four-door, which served us well over 180,000 miles of driving. But I still wish he would’ve gotten the Celica, even though I know now it only looked sporty.
7. Non-remote keyless entry. Some distant elderly relative of mine had this on a mid-70s Lincoln Mark Something-Or-Other. It was naught more than a keypad mounted above the door handle upon which you entered a secret code, thereby unlocking the door. Nobody would want this now, but back then, it was so James Bond.
8. ‘Euro’ cars. Perhaps the only automotive thing from the mid-1980s worth remembering is the brief fashion for flat-black trim and understated paint colors, qualities usually associated with BMWs and Audis. Such fashion trends eventually found their way onto seriously humble machinery like Ford Escorts, Chevy Celebrities, and Dodge 600s. You may not have been able to afford a yuppie wallet-wagon, but at least you could look like you had similar tastes. Even though the Chevy Celebrity Eurosport was misnamed twice over.
9. Conversion vans. These are still around, so somebody must still be buying them. There’s no better way to travel in bourgeoise style. Great quantities of road are best eaten up with your eyes six feet above the highway and your butt planted on a flocked-velour captain’s chair. Some of the better models even had refrigerators and card tables.
10. Chevettes. I never wanted one of these, but when I was in high school, they frequently contained big-haired girls in college sweatshirts and stirrup pants . . . and maybe we’d just better leave it at that.

I’M . . . FLATTERED?

Dan Neil gets off le mot juste in today’s review of a ‘low-priced’ Aston Martin:

Astons are still special, rare, exotic, devoutly to be cherished. Like funny Lutherans.

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry–but I guess I’d better laugh.

FIFTY YEARS IN FIFTY MINUTES?

Now up at Blogcritics: my review of a new 50-year retrospective of Car & Driver magazine.

ON BEAGLE’S WINGS

For the last three and a half years, I’ve driven a four-door Ford Focus. It is, by far, the coolest car I’ve ever owned, which should tell you something about my dull and miserable life. But you can’t tell me my car isn’t cool. It has to be. How do I know?

My car has a wing on the back. Ergo, it’s cool.

It’s not like I ordered it with a wing. First of all, I bought it used, so I didn’t technically order it at all. Secondly, the presence of the wing did nothing to sway me towards my purchase. I don’t even think it looks very good. In fact, I’d gladly remove it, except doing so would leave me with four gaping holes in my trunk lid. So there it sits, day after day, doing . . . well, what is it doing back there, anyway? After semi-exhaustive research, I’ve learned that the only thing it’s doing is making my car look “cool” while worsening my gas mileage just a tiny little bit.

There are circumstances in which having an airfoil on the back of your car serves some detectable purpose, maybe. Certain high-performance rear-wheel-drive cars need the downforce created by a wing to improve their handling and acceleration at very high speeds. My Focus, being front-drive, doesn’t have that problem. I’m no engineer (I failed Calc I twice, which put the kibosh on any engineering dream I might’ve had), but I think you could make the case that a rear wing would make the handling and acceleration of a front-wheel-drive car worse. Traction is a function of weight over the driving wheels, after all; if you push down on the back of the car, aren’t you simultaneously pushing up on the front? There’s something Newtonian in that, right? Well, if you transfer weight from the front to the back of a front-drive car, that should reduce the traction available to the drive wheels. (Enough readers of this page have enough of a technical background that somebody is bound to tell me if I’m all washed up. Remember, the science classes I took in college were Man’s Geologic Environment and Cultural Physics.)

The only other benefit bestowed by slapping an airplane part on the back of your car is that, again at very high speeds, the wing/spoiler will create enough turbulence to improve stability and reduce body lift. If it even works at all. Which, on most winged cars, it probably doesn’t. About the only thing most wings do is increase weight and drag, both of which hurt fuel economy.

So why, then, have these wings and spoilers proliferated like mosquitoes, bunnies, and webpages with the prefix ‘my’? At first, I’m tempted to call it the Gran Turismo factor. Young people (especially males), smitten by the popular road-racing video game series, want cars that look as much like their cybersiblings as possible. That explains the wing on my Focus, which is a low-cost car aimed primarily at young buyers.

It does not, however, explain wings on Chevy Impalas. Or Mitubishi Galants. And it especially doesn’t explain wings on Toyota Camrys.

I have a half-hour rural commute. On my way home this afternoon, since I was stuck behind an unending parade of farm implements, I decided to watch the cars going the other direction. I wanted to know how many of them had wings or spoilers. (Technical jargon: if air can flow under it, it’s a wing; if not, it’s a spoiler.) About one-third of the cars I saw had something affixed to the trunklid. I saw only one spoiler, on an Olds Achieva, a car many people would say came from the factory already spoiled. But there were lots and lots of wings.

Pontiac is the King of Wings. I saw close to 40 Pontiacs, and only three didn’t have some sort of airflow-management device (a Bonneville, a Sunfire, and a 6000 which look like it may have dated back to the time before man discovered the secrets of flight). But scarcely a manufacturer out there has been able to resist the temptation to smite the butts of their cars with a wing of some sort. Chrysler, for example started out with a demure wing on the first-generation Neon; the second-generation cars look like they have tabletop ironing boards glued to their trunks. I saw a wing on a Dodge Intrepid. On several Ford Tauri. Even, like I said, on multiple Camrys, and if there’s a Camry out there that’s ever been driven over 50 MPH, or in the right lane of a freeway, I’d like to hear about it.

I mean, seriously. What’s the point of slapping Formula 1-inspired wings on cars that are about as sporting as “The MacNeil-Lehrer Report”? I realize that all cars these days basically look alike, and if I owned, say, a silver Taurus (which I do), I’d want something to make it stand out from the 73 other silver Tauri in the mall parking lot. But how does a factory-installed wing make that happen? Do we all honestly think that putting a slightly aerodynamic piece of lowest-bidder plastic on our cars turns us from solid-citizen commuters into Speed Racer? “I know this looks like a rental car, but trust me, I could take the pole at Daytona if only those nitpickers from Accounting would stop bugging me for the fourth-quarter sales estimates.”

Cars today are better than they ever have been, that much is certain. In fact, cars today are so nearly perfect that they’re starting to get a little dull. If screw-on gizmos make us all feel like we’re being wild individualists who don’t play by society’s rules, it’s time to remember Hasty’s Law of Automotive Selection: What you drive says nothing about who you are–but it says a lot about who you wish you were.