Automotive American – Classic Vintage & Modern
Category: Autoweek
In the middle 1960s, North Americans weren’t limited to just Chrysler, Ford and GM when shopping for a new Midwest-built pickup truck — they could buy a Gladiator from Kaiser-Jeep or a C-Series made by International Harvester as well. Here’s a magazine advertisement for the 1966 IHC pickups.
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Like the Chevrolet Corvair that preceded it by a couple of decades, the Pontiac Fiero became a pretty decent sports car… just before The General killed it off. The 1984-1987 Fieros had Chevy Citation front suspensions in the back, Chevy Chevette front suspensions in the front, weighed 200 pounds more than the Toyota MR2… but looked pretty sharp for cars intended for low-cost penny-pinching commuter duty. You won’t see many Fieros today, but I see the occasional example in junkyards, especially in California. Here’s an ’85 in a Silicon Valley self-service yard.
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Want GTO or Mustang “wheels” for cheap? Magnificent mags? J.C. Whitney had you covered in 1972.
Chicago’s J.C. Whitney has been around for 104 years now, though most of its business today happens online. Back in the printed-catalog era, the J.C. Whitney catalog was the source for parts and accessories
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In the early 1960s, nearly everyone with a driver’s license was trying to make their aging sedans look like something from one of the magazines of the day with the pennies they saved working after school. If you weren’t buying speed parts to make your car faster, you were sourcing custom work from local body shops to make your cruiser stand out. There was no shortage of local body shops churning out bespoke builds for neighborhood kids and adults alike. But there’s one major problem with custom cars: changing trends. As the 1960s slipped away, maintaining your now extensively modified, decade-old car could become a hassle. Especially if you’d rather be rowing through the gears of a Pontiac GTO.
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One of the biggest-selling motor vehicles of late-1970s America, now used up.
The 1973-1977 Oldsmobile Cutlass, and particularly the sporty-yet-affordable Cutlass Supreme, proved perfectly suited to the automotive needs of a gigantic swath of North American car shoppers during the dark days of the Malaise Era. The Cutlass was comfortable and reliable, and it looked sharp; it stayed at or near the top of the vehicle best-seller charts during its production run. Though millions of these cars were made, you won’t see many of them today. That makes today’s Junkyard Treasure an especially noteworthy one.
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That other Bill of Rights was having its 200th anniversary that year.
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A bit of fun from Autoweek
We return to the Car Clock of the Week series with a type of clock that was all the rage in the 1970s and well into the 1980s: the mechanical “digital” timepiece with motor-driven reels. Honda used this style of clock in Accords and Preludes and Ford installed them in Lincolns; General Motors ran mechanical-digital clocks in some higher-end cars of the period, but nearly every last one I’ve tested has been dead for decades. Yes, you were lucky to get five years out of one of these clocks, but I’ve found one in a discarded Olds in Denver and it works perfectly.
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With Detroit Autorama getting shockingly close, Scott Sheehan — our hero — has turned what looked like a car into a bare frame. That might seem like Sheehan is taking a backward step, which wouldn’t be ideal with the show’s move-in date approaching, but in order to get the Ford Model T’s hand-built frame finished and painted, everything had to go. At least, everything had to go away from the car’s frame.
The ’93 Cobra and Lightning were the first machines out of the Ford Special Vehicle Team program. The Contour SVT came out a few years later and was the factory-hot-rod version of the Detroit-ized Ford Mondeo
Article from Murilee at Autoweek, I can say with some confidence that this car would not be in a junkyard in the UK 🙂
