I'm commenting only to say I enjoyed the story. I learned something new. I will also keep an eye out for flush-mount Cadillac headlamps when I go to junkyards. Kudos to Sajeev and Jack, two of my Hagerty favorites. And I just made $8300 on your employer's IPO. If it's necessary to leave a personal opinion, I'll just say the wheels aren't my thing. Neither are BMWs but I read those articles as well. In fact, if I could return the cars to stock condition, I'd prefer them over much of what the angriest commenters probably own. I can guarantee no one in this article is my worst enemy, nor the hobby's worst enemy. So I'll save my vitriol for nameless, faceless string-pullers who would prefer that I "own nothing and be happy". ... View more

Let me add another point for you to consider. At one time, this was how people bought televisions. When the technology advanced, the set was retired to a bedroom or basement.      A wide variety of styles and women wearing gowns just to operate them. The men who serviced them could afford commercial leases/property, a van dedicated to service, thousands of 1960s dollars in tools. They probably paid for a suburban home and a shiny new Chrysler. (My alter-ego repair man prefers Zeniths and Mopars.)   Now it's a black rectangle that you throw away when it dies or requires a software upgrade. There will be mechanics in the future, but they'll probably service other objects as well, just as the last remaining legacy TV repair store in my neighborhood also fixes tablets and laptops while displaying antiques in the store window.   That all said, this guy paid for his building and equipment decades ago. He is surely down to 1-2 employees and his largest annual bill is probably property taxes.  If you can't see the parallel, you aren't looking.   As the poet EZ-E used to say, "throw it in the gutter, an' go buy a'nother" Or in this case, "lease" another.  ... View more

You've made an excellent point. ... View more

If Canada starts using the paragraph, more people from outside Canada will know what's happening there. ... View more

HA! ... View more

In the words of the most famous Hyundai driver of all time, "can't we all just get along?" ... View more

Also Hagerty, please fix your security certificates so I can see ALL the photos.... "Attackers might be trying to steal your information from hagerty-media-prod.imgix.net (for example, passwords, messages, or credit cards). Learn more NET::ERR_CERT_AUTHORITY_INVALID" ... View more

1) I'm not going to see this movie because the phrase "comic book" is used several times and that is an immediate turn-off. It's no coincidence that "fairy tale" can be used interchangeably. 2) I love Mopars, but this is a decade-obsolete Hollydumb choice of vehicle for a 2021 action movie. I'd like to think they got those specs wrong on purpose, but I doubt it. I'm sure the actor had to be shown how to use a cassette deck. ... View more

The only debatable aspect of this former Detroit Edison vehicle would be whether it was motivated by diesel or gasoline. A little more time to write today...    I truly do believe in the idea of free markets, (which I've heard makes me a raging capitalist pig). As such I have no problem with electric vehicles. For the record, I ditched my gas-powered weed-eater for electric after I became fairly certain repeated pulls of the recoil starter are what damaged my shoulder... Repeated pulls because all two-strokes run like hot garbage due to emission regulations.   But I'm always struck by the fact that the very first logical place to use EVs is an electric utility. Despite tinkering with the idea for decades (the Google machine shows Public Relations experiments back to the 60s), the utilities, flush with cash, sitting on monopolies and able to pay their CEOs outrageously; have what percent of an electrified fleet? A good rule of thumb is that if such an otherwise positive piece of information is hard to come by, it's because it's embarrassingly low.      You know, vehicles that come to the same place every evening, with loads of commercial infrastructure, a building full of mechanics, etc. In other words, the perfect EV environment.  Meanwhile most local gas utilities have been running Natural Gas ICEs for decades, again because of the ideal infrastructure.   Yet we have Teslas all over the place before a serious percentage of utility fleets are electrified. And don't give me the idea that "It's because they are all trucks". A huge amount of what utilities do, does not require trucks. Site inspections, line planning, even meter change-outs. As a landlord/part-time builder, I've been around for all of these on multiple occasions. Electric cars have been local-practical for a decade. I've yet to see a worker arrive in one, unless low-bid Chevy Cavaliers and Cobalts came in an electric form I've never seen.  Wouldn't a natural progression be electric fleet vehicles and THEN widespread consumer use, WITHOUT mandates from uncle Fed? Or if there are to be mandates, why not on the PUBLICALLY REGULATED UTILITIES first and foremost?    Because they have more money to lobby with than you or I.  ... View more

Rest assured this column will be linked to a private Chrysler employee group.  ... View more

I have the money and means to buy a brand new HellKitty and mothball it (or drive it). But it's hard to imagine it being "useful" for anything but a road-warrior-type vehicle in the future, and I don't think they care about well-preserved paint.  ... View more

Actually, the Challenger defies conventional logic by selling more as it ages, AND prior to the Hellcat introduction. It really doesn't fall off until 2019, and we all know what that was about. 2019    60,997 2018    66,716 2017    64,537 2016    64,478 2015    66,365 2014    51,611 2013    51,462 2012    43,119 2011    39,537 2010    36,791 2009    25,852 2008    17,423 ... View more

The "new normal" is more about autonomous than "climate change". Electronic cars are simply easier to control. The next time (or the 20th time) we have an outbreak of something, it will be much easier to "quaranteam" us by shutting down the transportation grid. Safety First! ... View more

"The past year and a half had been depressing and restrictive, and I was finally going to be able to go out and experience something besides my house." That in itself should make you pause. In the past two years, (most) adults have failed their children miserably. Anyone who has spent time with children of the Great Depression knows that one of that generation's stock phrases was "we never knew we were poor". This generation will be shaped by "We knew they weren't diseased, but we treated others as if they were." ... View more

just praying it gets so bad there is a revolt at the ballot box; is the only way I can get through this. ... View more

Boomers and their love of denim are why we X'ers can't have nice things, like white leather interiors. ... View more

Oh I liked that one. A happy ending. ... View more

Very good. Very, very good. ... View more

I got the point. Don't let the fun-killers win. While I was amused at your Spinning Rock take, I'm surprised you didn't go Uncle Tom McCahill? I'm catching up on these during lunch, maybe I just haven't read it yet... ... View more

I think a version called "How to keep local bums from using your classic car as a toilet" will be out next week for people in non-privileged areas of California. ... View more

Thank you sir. I own '51, '61 and '69 Imperials (those are some of my landmark favorites, but I've had many others). Your comments helped me regain some of the brain cells lost from the article. I've thought about the mistakes made in the Imperial line; again, largely poor marketing, but I'm adding your points to my thought process as well. Once place where we have common ground is the idea of the 300 becoming a flagship personal-luxury (as in no 4dr) for the Imperial marque. If they had pursued this route, it would have brought aspirational prestige and youth to the brand. Shall we join forces on a time machine that has us appearing in the Chrysler Highland Park boardroom circa 1950 or so and show them how to make it happen? ... View more

I'm not enough of a Chevy guy to know, but please tell me that cowl hood on the turquoise Nova is aftermarket? ... View more

It's let down a little by the clunky side molding and lack of "jewlery", (boat-trailer taillamps, etc.) but I admire the effort + great story. ... View more

FoMoCo can shove anything it does, from this point forward, up Bill Ford's brain-slot. ... View more

"Belmont ain't got a doin' time kind of disposition." -Ordell Robbie ... View more

If the people who write anti-truck articles were aware of "regular people" using ICE vehicles for COMPETITION, (gasp!) they'd turn their venom towards you instead. No one NEEDS a track car for Spaghetti-Monster's sake! Couldn't you just play bongos or watch sportz instead? ... View more

https://www.npr.org/transcripts/904660038 ... View more

The Pinto gas-tank story has always been of minor interest to me, which means I'm more knowledgeable than most. Who really looks into such things if they have no interest? Today in doing some reading on the Capri design, (which simply doesn't work for a hatchback, and would put gasoline within the passenger compartment if tried) I came across this interesting story from NPR. I'm cut pasting and adding brackets to cover the most important part of the story, but I'll post the whole link at the end. ----- "The same thing could be said of the Ford Pinto. Once something terrible has occurred, it becomes nearly impossible to look back on the actions of the people involved with any sense of dispassion. Our psychological defense systems demand a tidy explanation. We shrink away from anything that suggests messiness, randomness, uncertainty. (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) VEDANTAM: It's possible there was negligence or wrongdoing at Ford. Over the years, some have claimed that Ford didn't intentionally make a dangerous car while others have argued that the early Pinto crash tests reveal that executives at Ford knew the Pinto was a dangerous car even before it left the assembly line. [Competitive domestic car car fuel systems ruptured at best 27.5 MPH, the Pinto at 25 MPH, some imports did worse] We reached out to Ford for comment, and they declined our request. But our story isn't about the executives at Ford and what they did or did not know. It's about Denny Gioia, a mid-level employee who says he did not know about the Pinto's fuel tank problem until he discovered the mysterious report on his desk in 1974. Up until that moment and through the end of his tenure at Ford in 1975, Denny followed a clear process for deciding whether to recall cars. Since the company couldn't initiate a recall every time something went wrong with any car on the road, it needed a system for determining if a problem was a real problem or just a fluke. If Denny wanted to recommend a recall, he needed to be able to show two things - evidence that something was broken and a pattern of failure. The Pinto never rose to that standard. Denny sent up red flags about the car twice. But both times, he looked at the evidence himself and voted not to recall. (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) VEDANTAM: You might hear this and think we're letting Denny off the hook. Maybe Denny should have resigned in protest when he saw the burned-out Pinto in the company warehouse. Or maybe he should have blown the whistle to the media when the mysterious report turned up on his desk. Or maybe he should have just voted to recall the Pinto even if it meant ignoring his standard. That last thought has plagued Denny himself. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) GIOIA: In certain circles, I'm a certifiable villain, guilty of not protecting innocent, unsuspecting people driving a patently dangerous car. VEDANTAM: This is tape from a voice memo Denny sent us in 2019. It was in response to a call out seeking stories from listeners who felt haunted by something in their past. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) GIOIA: Am I haunted by those decisions? My answer is a resounding yes and an ambivalent no. Because after all these 46 years later, I remain of two minds about whether I did the right thing in voting not to recall the Pinto. VEDANTAM: Denny's conscience is heavy with the same question that Duncan Watts is asking. Just because the outcome was bad, does that mean that Denny did the wrong thing back when he was at Ford? Do the terrible deaths of the t hree Ulrich girls mean that Denny's criteria for instigating a recall were bad? Or is it possible that sometimes bad things happen even when good people are doing their best? This is very hard to accept psychologically. Bad outcomes cast a halo around everything that came before them, and it's next to impossible to see through the halo to reality. " These were the facts that Denny was dealing with, from earlier in the interview...   --------------- VEDANTAM: Still, when he got back to the office and looked in his Pinto file, he only had five cases involving rear-end fires. He had no identifiable cause or pattern. In other words, he was nowhere near his usual standard for recommending the case for a recall vote. But he decided to do it anyway. GIOIA: So despite my training, when I saw that car - and despite the fact that I only had 5 field reports, I nonetheless put it on the docket for a vote. VEDANTAM: And when you brought it up to the five-person committee, was there a robust argument? Was there discussion? Did people just sort of, you know, roll their eyes at you? What actually happened? GIOIA: Oh, I could (laughter) - that's a good description. Yes, they rolled their eyes at me. Why are we doing this? Because you had an emotional response to seeing a burned-out Pinto? That's not good enough. We got to have data. How many you got? What's the pattern? That's not a pattern. Those could all be outliers. If you're an engineer, you have to think that way. VEDANTAM: Now, there's actually - you know, you can criticize this, but you can also say this is actually the correct way to think because, of course, anecdotally, things happen all the time that are idiosyncratic to a particular car or a particular situation. You know, there's - the weather conditions might be bad, something happens. And if you basically base your judgments on one case, I mean, presumably we'd be recording every car off the road because every car is probably going to have some idiosyncratic case where something goes wrong. No? GIOIA: Oh, absolutely. Now, think about this. We're looking at a car that has been built in the cheapest way possible. And given that it's a cheap vehicle, you can identify 50 things that cost $5 to $10 to fix. If you want to take a blanket approach and fix everything, suddenly you've got a car that nobody's willing to buy. That's not OK, especially in an era when the only thing people are buying is a Pinto. VEDANTAM: When it came down to a vote, Denny's office elected 5-0 not to recall. Even Denny voted against himself. It's a good story actually... ... View more

Insisting on an EV for something that makes an occasional 18 mile round trip is about as stupid as banning horses from use on cattle ranches circa 1925. Why not insist on a zero-emissions lunar mission as well? That will have a more significant, positive impact on earth-mother than electrifying something that gets used once a year... if they're lucky. ... View more

I'm going to make a few points here before the comments and anecdotes really kick in. It was nice of you to include "The Myth of the Pinto Case", because few people know of it. It's existence on the internet only as a PDF keeps it from being widely/easily quoted. But if one takes the time to read it, you'll learn a few interesting facts.   1) In the most famous case, Grimshaw, there is dispute as to whether the (much heavier) vehicle which struck a stopped Pinto was traveling at 50 mph, or had braked down to a slower speed.    2) The Pinto's "average" number of fires after collision, and only slightly higher than average in rear-collisions; when compared to other popular subcompacts, certainly doesn't suggest a glaring design defect. In fact, one should consider that some subcompacts would need to be worse for the Pinto to be near-middle of the subset.    3) In the second most famous case, where the state of Indiana actually attempted (and failed) to prosecute Ford Motor Company, this fact is not in debate:  "They had just filled up the Pinto’s gas tank, but when driver Judy Ulrich peeked in her rearview mirror, she noticed the gas cap cover yawning wide open and remembered leaving the gas cap on the car’s trunk, but not putting it back. She flicked on her hazard lights and nudged the car to the shoulder, hoping that the cap hadn’t tumbled off yet."  Again, a stopped Pinto was struck by an much larger vehicle, in this case, a van. Not surprisingly, fuel was atomized from an open filler neck attached to a just-filled tank.    4) The initial reporting on the Pinto was done by Mother Jones Magazine, not exactly a paragon of journalistic truth, claiming that "thousands" had been killed/maimed by the Pinto. This story was then picked up by more mainstream outlets who did very little vetting of the research.    5) The much vaunted "profits over lives" memo comes from an out-of-context 1967 document prepared at the request of NHTSA, using their own $200,000 figure for human life. The document itself pertains to the cost of implementing proposed roof-crush standards.    I don't own a Pinto, nor am I a particular Pinto enthusiast. I just hate seeing bad, sensationalistic, 1970s-hippie reporting perpetuated, as I suspect it will be in the comments.    One table from the report:   ... View more

Mercedes!   Bastards! ... View more

Nothing like an interesting article on post-WWII auto manufacturers to bring the tin-foil hats out of the closet. ... View more

Or he just liked to buy cheap Hoopties. ... View more

I'm a little late to the party... When Chrysler was developing what became the 1981 Imperial, a knock-off of the Aston Martin Lagonda steering wheel was on the wish-list. It was a perfect compliment for the digital dash, EFI and all the other "tech" goodies. However, the budget wasn't there to develop/test it within the required time frame, so it was stuck with a conventional looking wheel. By 1984, it was ready. But unfortunately, it was no longer "Time for Imperial" so the design was used on the company's most traditional looking, lowest-tech, RWD car... And the about-to-segment-bust magic wagons. ... View more

Still have the Veterans for Biden sticker one year hence? Asking for a friend. ... View more

Thank Spaghetti Monster everyone is wearing masks in the photo! ... View more

"How many other brands stuck with an interior conceit for that long?"   (I'll assume you meant "concept"... darned spell-check robot)   I submit to you the Chrysler Highlander interior (which debuted in 1940).     and the 1976 Chrysler Newport w/Highlander interior...     I also recall seeing some promo photos of a 1982 Lebaron Convertible with plaid interior, but I don't know if that made production and Google can't find it either.  ... View more

If you cannot distinguish the difference between asking for a statement and a statement made organically, you probably shouldn't toss around words like "journalism".  That you would think this so-called scoop praiseworthy and even write your own version (and defense) confirms what I'd already thought.     So tell me, when did you stop beating your wife?  Did they explain that logical fallacy to you at "journalism school"? Since when did it become the job of an auto writer to provoke a response to a question having far more to do with social-justice issues than reviewing the latest press car? Come to think of it, given that auto writers are the regular recipients of favor from auto companies... C&D is no Consumer Reports after all; how can I even be sure the question was asked organically and not in return for a weekend with the latest Jeep™ competitor?     Stay in your lane, or have the guts to write for a more socially-aware (and consequently lower-paying) publisher.  ... View more

I can also say this; being "directly connected" to the Fiat-Chrysler experience... Most of what he's written was wrong there as well. ... View more

"Chuck Hoskin, Jr., principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, told Car and Driver in a written statement responding to our request for comment on the issue..." Cut/Paste from the source. So let's be honest, the Chief didn't organically send a letter to C&D as your article implies, "a prominent Cherokee chief issued a surprising statement..." He was asked by a magazine trying to remain relevant in an era where fewer people are interested in a dwindling supply of modern sports cars than read print media in general. And this time, it worked. C&D got their name out into the blogosphere by being "edgy". You have the insurance money Hagerty; you don't need to sink to this. ... View more

No one should be traveling about the country willy-nilly. Pandemic. #stayhome #staysafe ... View more

Don't forget the added safety of shutting your car off during times of pandemic. A law officer could be summoned to your home in real time and sanction you if your most recent trip isn't justified. Remember, if it saves one life, it's worth it. #stay home #stay safe! ... View more

Seriously? I expect lines like "they speak French (or Italian)" from kids on the internet.  ... View more

" Its size, ruggedness, and spaciousness make it the perfect vehicle for transporting high-ranking party members—"   Fixed it for you.  ... View more

Thanks for the reply... Having spent some time in mainland Europe, I will admit that I liked it more than expected. It was exciting to spot American vehicles which seemed so out-of-place, yet in a good way. Mostly I miss looking out over a long, broad hood (bonnet), eating up miles. It is an era that will never return; to which I return as much as possible.  ... View more

Through the 70s until 2000, my mother worked for the State of Michigan with offices located at East Grand Blvd. and Woodward (actually a former FoMoCo warehouse). Sometimes I would visit her at work and noticed the derelict buildings with "Jam Handy" signage. Eventually I learned what was done there, but I definitely learned a few things by reading this! ... View more

great story! ... View more

I just realized this edition of Avoidable Contact is the reason "they" broke the comment feature. ... View more

When will you go into detail and explain driving the '79 T-bird through London? No one expects new vehicles to look any better than two-box, high H-point, pedestrian-safe aerodynamic transport pods; so you might as well talk about designs that were exciting and full of great detail. ... View more

I think it's nice that they included a provision for crank-start in the event of a discharged battery. ... View more