Car Links

1957 Studebaker Commander

• The Old Cars Parked, July 2024 post is up at Down the Road


• The auto industry is a total sausage fest. That's a problem.


• The history of the Nash Metropolitan.

Sixty Years of ‘Stang

In early 1964, the first Ford Mustangs rolled into dealerships. The 1965 model year at Ford wasn't officially underway yet, so these earliest Mustangs are known as "1964½" models, like the Skylight Blue convertible above.

That particular Mustang has a 260cid V-8, sourced from Ford's midsize Fairlane line. With a two-barrel carburetor and 8.8:1 compression, the little small block was rated at 164 SAE gross horsepower.

Thirty years and three generations later, the Mustang nameplate was on its third platform: The initial Falcon-derived chassis had bloated to almost midsize proportions. The base model '64½ weighed in under 2500 pounds, while the final 1973 'Stangs tipped the scales at over 3500 in even their most spartan trim.

The second generation shrunk to a Pinto-based car that only weighed 2600 pounds in hardtop coupe form. After four years of the Mustang II, the all-new 1979 Mustangs debuted on Ford's Fox platform, the same as the compact Fairmont sedan.

My Laser Red 1994 Mustang GT in the photo above was the first of the fourth generation, called the SN95, thirty years after the the originals. While the basic dimensions of the small block 302 V-8 are shared with the old 260 and 289, it has thirty years worth of improvements. 

Tuned-port injection, electronic ignition, computerized engine management... the 1994's 5.0L H.O. V-8 put out 215 SAE net horsepower with no drama on midgrade pump gas. Bear in mind that under the old SAE gross brochure horsepower numbers, this thing probably would have been advertised as having something closer to 300 and in the days of carbs and no computers it would have taken radical cams, solid lifters, and a high compression ratio necessitating premium gas to put out these numbers.

Another thirty years on we see the first seventh generation Mustangs, like the Vapor Blue 2024 GT coupe above.

It's been three generations since the Mustang shared a platform with anything, and the new S650 7th generation is its own car. The 5.0L under the hood of this '24 has nothing in common with the 5.0 in my '94 except the name and the number and arrangement of the cylinders. It's a 307 cubic inch DOHC 32V motor rated at a whopping 480 net horsepower.

Sixty years is a long run for one nameplate. The only one with a longer uninterrupted run I can think of is Chevrolet's Corvette.

You gotta wonder if there'll be 75th anniversary editions of either one?

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The times, they have changed...

A few years ago, Car and Driver gathered the top-of-the-line variants of the Mustang, Camaro, and Challenger for a comparison test:

In previous incarnations of this journal, the procedure for writing a headline for a comparison test similar to this one would have been to add up the peak horsepower of all the participants, add an exclamation point or two or three, and be done with the thing. But in these more enlightened times, simply typing "2207-hp Smackdown!" just doesn't cut it.

Two thousand, two hundred, and seven horsepower...net horsepower...divided among three cars.

In the Eighties, when I was furtively reading Car and Driver in the back of Driver's Ed instead of paying attention to Blood on the Asphalt or whatever scare pic was showing at the front of the classroom, 2,207 bhp would have been ten cars, not three. And ten fairly brawny cars at that.

I happen to have C/D's 1985 Road Test Annual right here, so let's see...

• Chevrolet Camaro IROC Z28: 305cid V8, 215bhp (with the 4spd auto, the manual got you 190)
• Ford Mustang GT: 302cid V8, 210bhp
• Dodge Shelby Charger: 135cid I4 turbo: 146bhp (the Challenger nameplate was on hiatus)

Well, there's the Big Three's pony car offerings for 1985...okay, the Charger wasn't a traditional pony car at the time, but rather a sporty fastback coupe built on the floorpan of the Omni hatchback grocery-getter. (This was, incidentally, widely accepted as the fate of everything at the time. The front-engine, RWD eight-cylinder Camaro and Mustang were viewed as retro holdouts, desperately fighting the decline. There were even whispered rumors over the next few years that Ford was going to move the Mustang badge to a more fuel-efficient FWD platform.)

But we only have less than six hundred horsepower accounted for, here. If we're going to have a 2207-hp smackdown, we have to find another 1,600ish horsepower. I suppose we could include some other domestic sporty cars:

• Pontiac Fiero GT: 171cid V6, 140bhp
• Chevrolet Corvette: 350cid V8, 230bhp
• Merkur XR4Ti: 140cid I4 turbo, 170bhp
• Dodge Omni GLH Turbo: 135cid I4 Turbo, 146bhp

Well, that gives us another 686 horsepower, bringing us up to just shy of 1,300. Only nine hundred more horsepower needed for our "2207-hp Smackdown!" I guess we could include imported models to buff out our totals:

• Toyota MR2: 97cid I4, 112bhp
• Isuzu Impulse Turbo: 122cid I4 turbo, 140bhp
• Audi Coupe GT: 136cid I5, 110bhp
• BMW 635CSi: 209cid I6, 182bhp
• Porsche 928S: 303cid V8, 288bhp

Well, there's another eight hundred and thirty-two...so close! We only need another hundred and eighteen horsepower to finish it out:

• Chevrolet Cavalier Z24: 173cid V6, 125bhp

Well, that puts us a little over the top, but the '85 Mirage Turbo (102bhp) or VW GTI (100bhp) would have left us short. And besides, a "2214-hp Smackdown!" is seven horsepower more exciting than a "2207-hp Smackdown!", especially when you get to spread that smackdown over thirteen cars instead of a mere three, right?

Sisyphus in the Styling Department

I'd never paid much attention to the '80s-'90s Buick Century. It just wasn't the sort of car someone in their teens or twenties pays a ton of attention to.

Built on GM's A-platform, darling of rental car lots everywhere, it's what happened when you took a Chevy Celebrity and added plush velour and plastic woodgrain. (If you added alloy wheels and fog lamps you got a Pontiac 6000.)

Going to school for automotive design and winding up at Buick in the Reagan/Bush Sr. years must have been like getting picked last at kickball and parked way out in the outfield: A sign that others were less confident in your abilities than you were.

So I'm walking through the parking lot at Meijer's one day and I really looked at the prow of a late fifth generation Century (I had to look them up on Wikipedia to verify the year) and I felt sorry for the guy in Buick's styling department.

The model received a mid-cycle facelift in '89 and from the leading edge of the hood forward was actually a sharp-looking car.

The thin, dangerous-looking bumper and reverse-sloped front end have a sort of Eighties BMW 635CSi thing going on. The grill has a hint of that throwback Buick waterfall and it's framed by narrow, mean-looking flush glass headlights that flow into wrap-around glass for cornering lamps. The whole thing is obviously supposed to generate a bit of brand identity that marks it as being from the company making the Reatta.

That fascia is actually pretty nice. Some dude worked hard on that. And then it's bolted to one of GM's dullest, most plebeian transportation boxes. Because the rest of the A platform is the Brutalist architecture of automotive styling, carrying forward the torch originally lit by Ford's Granada. "There will be no fun to be had behind the wheel of this car," is emphatically stated by its lines.

Cargo Cult Car Stop Cult

I don't know exactly when the red caliper thing started. Italian brake manufacturer Brembo was an OEM supplier to a lot of companies dating way back before brightly colored calipers were a thing.

Late Eighties and early Nineties supercars may have had Brembo brakes, but the calipers were fairly normal colors: black, gray, metallic, whatever. Some were finished in a gold color. It was hard to tell, though, because wheels were 17" and smaller and also tended to have a more "aero" appearance; a flat disc with fewer, smaller holes.

While I don't know who Patient Zero in the Red Plague was, I do know that by the close of the Millennium, as larger wheels with spindlier spokes left more of the braking system in view, racy cars started getting brightly-colored calipers, most often in red.

This, of course, led to goobers spray-painting calipers with high-temperature engine paint, a "performance enhancement" along the lines of a fat exhaust tip and a J.C. Whitney decklid wing.

Possibly my favorite example of this was the dude I saw in the Meijer parking lot who had rattlecanned the rear drums on his early '90s Toyota Corolla red.

I hadn't given it a lot of thought, assuming the fad would kind of reach peak silly with spray paint, but I was wrong.

The other day I spotted what I initially thought was a pretty trick Volkswagen Golf GTI in the parking lot at the Preston Safeway.

As I was processing the RAW files in P-shop, I first noticed that it wasn't a GTI. The calipers looked unusual, too. I zoomed in to read the lettering on them...

"MGP? I've never heard of a brake manufacturer with that name..."

Which was because MGP doesn't make brakes; they make anodized aluminum bolt-on caliper covers. They sell them on Amazon and they ain't cheap.

I guess they must add more horsepower than a spray can of engine paint. They'd sure better, for that price, at least.

Car Links

1972 MG Midget at 49th & Pennsylvania in Indy

• Car and Driver drives each generation of VW GTI.


• Iain Banks (yes, that Iain Banks) drives a Formula 1 car.


• P.J. O'Rourke drives a Ferrari 308GTS.

Wheels of Time

I got my driver's license in 1985. My folks had been holding it back as an incentive for good grades, but I was an incorrigible slacker and daydreamer and the GPA stayed relentlessly mediocre. With my 18th birthday approaching (and with it, my ability to go get it on my own stick) they relented and granted permission before I could present them with a fait accompli.

I bring this up because the year 1985 was nineteen years after the last Studebaker, a 1966 Cruiser, rolled off their Canadian assembly line. Their South Bend, Indiana plant had been shuttered a few years earlier, in December of '63.

Growing up in the Seventies and Eighties, Studebakers were old cars. I don't really recollect seeing any around when I was in high school, but this was still the era when domestic cars had five-digit odometers and were considered a pretty well-knackered hooptie when one passed the 100k mile mark. This was also the days before galvanized body panels; it wasn't too bad down south, but north of the Ohio River, cars would often be rotting before your eyes before the note was paid off. (I vaguely remember family members exclaiming at visible rust on my uncle's fairly new mid-'70s Camaro during a holiday visit back north.)

Anyway, if a high school student in 2024 goes to get her driver's license, nineteen years in the past is 2005.

Oldsmobile produced its last vehicle in 2004.

Plymouth went under in 2001, and Eagle...the last non-Jeep vestige of AMC, by then just a division of Chrysler...in 1998.

To the Zoomer, the names "Oldsmobile" and "Plymouth" are as quaint as "Studebaker" and "Packard" are to Gen X, with the difference being that by the 1990s rust-proofing and cars that would run with some degree of reliability for a couple hundred thousand miles had become a thing. I don't recollect seeing Packards when I was a teenager, but you can't swing a jumper cable in a grocery store parking lot today without hitting a clapped-out Oldsmobile still limping along.

The Olds in the photo is an '01-'04 Silhouette in Light Sanddrift Metallic, a thoroughly forgettable badge-engineered GM minivan of the era. It was photographed in December of 2021 with a Canon EOS Rebel T3 & EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS II zoom lens.

Hello World.

Setting off on a new blogging journey in 2024 seems counterintuitive, but it's a way of pushing back. Multimedia has swallowed the web. Everything seems to be done in the form of video or audio these days, but that leaves a fan of text and still photos like myself feeling cold.

Microblogging sites like X (née Twitter), Bluesky, or Mastodon don't allow room for fully developed thoughts. The indexing and searchability of the big Meta properties like Facebook and Instagram are awful. All of the above are completely ephemeral. Want to find and revisit that image, essay, or discussion from four months... or four years ...ago? Tough bananas.

Anyway, while I have an old blog that's been around for almost twenty years now, it's a barnacle-encrusted thing and very general interest. I want a place where I can nerd out about cars and show off pictures of the cool vehicles I encounter in my daily wanderings, unencumbered by politics or current events.

This is gonna be that place. Here's where I can show you pictures of the cars I've gone by, and the cars that have gone by me, as well as general interest automotive stuff I stumble across on the wider web. If the occasional motorcycle or truck sneaks in, don't hold it against me as my tastes are pretty catholic.

Hop in, sit down, buckle up, and hold on. Let's take this thing for a spin...