Everything You Need To Know About Cars

Everything You Need To Know About Cars
(But didn’t know you needed to know)          

Man, I look around today at all the different kinds of cars there are and I marvel.  I mean, it’s not like I’m into cars, not even a little, certainly not like I was when I was young.  But I haven’t been living in a vacuum either.  And most of theses things I see today didn’t even exist when I was a boy.  It’s just that there’s so many.  Wow, it’s more than a guy like me can absorb.

Toyota, Nissan, Mitsubishi, Kia, Acura, Lexus, Donner, Blitzen.  And then there are the sub-names like Toyota Corolla, and The Nissan Maxima.   

What the hell’s a Corolla or a Maxima?  Or a Jetta, for that matter?  Car names used to mean something; they were named for something real … the Chevy Impala, the Pontiac Grand Prix, The Ford Victoria … real names, powerful names, elegant names.  409!!!!! 

Dodge Charger!  Now that said it all.

But today … you’ve got Camry and Scion and Impreza.  There’s the Opirus, the Magentis and the Picanto.  The Miata, now there’s a name.  What is it?

Or they give you letters and numbers.  RL, TL, TSX – LS, GS, ES – S40, V60. 

And I can’t overlook Volkswagen who in their marketing wisdom has given us, besides  the Jetta, The Passat, the Phaeton, and my universal favorite, the Touareg.  WHAT?

Granted, all of the examples I’ve given are from foreign manufacturers (‘cept Volvo, which is foreign but owned by Ford).  Maybe something gets lost in the translations.

All I can say is, thank God in America we still make the GTO and Grand Prix and Bonneville.  We have Corvette and Impala and Malibu – Mustang and Thunderbird – Monterey and Sable.  These are real things, real places, and they mean something.

But, alas, our manufacturers are not far behind in the naming game.  Ford has its “Focus,” Chevy has its Aveo. 

And all the new cars look alike.  Computer generated for aerodynamics.  Bull.

Once upon a time we had cars called Desoto and Plymouth and Packard.  We had the Studebaker Hawk, the first regular production car lower than five feet; a piece of engineering that reeked of speed when most cars still had running boards.  Cars had style. You‘d never (ever!) confuse an Impala with a Crown Vic.  Caddys had fins.  Buicks had portholes.  Distinction was the key word.

The car you bought spoke volumes about your personality.  Mr. And Mrs. Middle America with 2.5 kids probably drove a Chevy Bel Aire or a Ford Victoria.  If they were a little more upscale, they might have had a Buick or a Lincoln.  Top of the line, you drove a Cadillac Fleetwood.  Fleetwood: Now there’s a name.

Johnny Hotrod had a Chevy Impala with 327 cubes and sport’n three two-barrels and a posi-traction rear end.  Now that’s Zoom! Zoom!  He wouldn’t have been caught dead in a thing called a Passat – even if it had a rocket under the hood.

Dodge built the Charger – a hemi-headed, ram inducted beast that would blow the socks off small children. You could buy one off the lot, ready to roar.

These cars were powerful.  They had cylinders and pistons, typically eight of them. There were spark pugs. They had carburetors, maybe several.  If you had half an inclination, you could tune them yourself.  Hell, if you were so inclined, you could build one.  Guys were always tinkering – different cams, different rear-end ratios, different carbs (as in cars, not food), four on the floor. WOW!

Gas came from Texas and Oklahoma.  It cost, on average, $.35 at the pump – and someone pumped it for you.  They’d clean your windshield, too, and if you wanted, they checked under the hood.  Moreover, they generally knew what they were looking at. Every now and then, there’d be a gas war and fuel would drop to twenty cents, even sixteen.  You could drive forever on five bucks.

Not so today. Fuel costs an arm and a leg.  If your car mal-functions, you don’t call a mechanic, you need a programmer.  That mass of metal under the hood looks like a nuclear reactor.  Even the exhaust system is complex. 

They say these are improvements.  They say that much of this rocket science is to garner better fuel mileage. Unhuh.  And the word, “Touareg,” really means something.  I had a ’63 Pontiac Bonneville.  In town, it got on average 10 to 12 miles to the gallon.  My current, high tech car gets about 13.  Since they started posting projected EPA mileage on car windows, I’ve yet to own a car that meets those numbers.

Some of these newer cars are little more than supped-up lawn mowers – with cabs.  You start them and they sound like lawn mowers, their little four cylinder engines crying out, “I think I can, I think I can.”  Some actually do perform fairly well, early on, but baby if they ever get out of sync (or whatever word describes how they work), you could age three years before the mech-watcha-ma-call-it figures out why.

“Seats a family of five,” the add will say.  Yeah, five if their all under five feet and skinny.  Otherwise, somebody’s knees are in their chin, and no airbag in the world can save a rider in that position.

And the prices?  My ’63 Bonneville Convertible cost me $3,500 in early ’64 and it was loaded.  Size wise, there’s nothing comparable today, except maybe a Town Car.  But even a pint-sized version can run upwards of thirty grand.  Yeah, I know, inflation, progress and all that crap, but ten times the price?  Give me a break. 

Passat? Not this boy.  Psst.  That’s what it sounds like.  I’ve got news for you.  My cars only have names that are of things in the dictionary.  Grand (say it slow) Marquis.  That’s what I’m talking about!

(c) Rod Emmons, March 2004