Peter Behrens's Blog, page 111

Born to Run:1968 Plymouth Roadrunner

  "Beyond the palace, hemi-powered drones scream down the boulevards. Girls come their hair in rearview mirrors and the boys try to look so hard.."

Thank you, Bruce. Not quite born to run: by the late Sixties, the Big 3 were taking their mild-mannered/ midsize/ salesman cars (Dodge Darts, Plymouth Belvederes, Chevy Novas, etc.) stuffing them with enormous engines and sending them to play in the street.

Vanlife: c. 1980 VW Westfalia, Brattle Street, Cambridge.

  All the way from France, too. On y va. We caught a later edition Vanagon in Somerville a few months back. Here's another Westfalia with 300k miles on the body. And we posted a sequence of Transporters in September.

Québec profond and the Mercury truck.

 

Maybe you saw the NYT piece on what they call "the new nationalism" is Québec, which has been around forever, and isn't much different from any other nationalism. Other people's nationalisms always do seem ludicrous, (see MAGA) based as they are on mythologies that any reasonable person who doesn't happen to be a member of that particular tribe would... well...question. American nationalism is usually called patriotism. But, anyway, what really grabbed out attention in the NYT piece was that handsome Mercury M-1 truck. We posted a Mercury M-47 a while back, and the M-3 in Nova Scotia. Then there was the M-2 that showed up outside our Manitoba correspondent's house in August. And a 1966 Mercury M100 in Saskatchewan. A lowslung Mercury, also in Saskatchewan.

One of the favorite cars we ever caught in Quebec was this '58 Chevrolet Biscayne we saw in Cookshire, en route to the Maine border. Always thought the '58s more appealing than the famed '57. If you try 58 Chevrolet in our search widget you'll see a bunch more from all over, Québec to Nouveau-Mexique.

2021 Land Cruiser and Subaru Outback

  Autoliterate decries the gargantuan. Why does almost everything in American life, including most Americans, relentlessly expand? Is it Manifest Destiny? Check the brutal antelope grill on this baby. It would make marmalade out of a moose, so lord knows what it would do to a bicyclist, and they're the wildlife here in Cambridge.Oh, and the wild turkeys just up the street. And the Canada geese waddling along the banks of the Charles. Land Cruisers are no longer sold in North America; perhaps they didn't get big enough. Maybe this unit is a 2021. (We posted on other Toyota hillclimbers, including an earlier edition Land Cruiser, back in the Spring.)  The over-several-tops décor on these machines...we never have been able to grasp who would take a glossy $90k swag wagon rock-climbing in the wilderness or sloshing up a riverbed, or do all the other he-manly stuff they're supposed to be capable of doing, at least in Super Bowl commercials. Is mock-utilitarian an automobile genre? The LC probably is fairly capable off-road, and maybe there is a useful stripped-down edition sold in the Asian and African markets, but after paying $90k, AL certainly wouldn't want to scratch the paint on this unit. Starting with that antelope grill, the LC teems with self-presentation–but bullies are often boastful, and if you've watched the classic Westerns, you might recall it's the slender, quiet types who often win the brawl in the saloon. Or the snowstorm on the Mass Pike.


And speaking of manliness on steroids, we noticed a hulking Subaru Outback Wilderness Edition also taking a break in our urbane Cambridge neighborhood. Do families really plunge deep into National Forests in these things? Or is some...fear --call it paranoia--that's present in the culture now raising the anxiety bar higher, year by year, for parents, and drivers, until they feel they need something like this to shuttle kids school and maybe to the weekend house in Vermont? What's next, armor-plating? Of course that is what's next. Every run-of-the-mill billionaire  will want his own version of The Beast. Already almost standard in other rich poor countries in the hemisphere, like Brazil. 

 The future of American motoring! Overdressed bulkster SUVs say something about who we are now, or whom we want to be. They're the 1958 Buicks of our era. The Buick's chrome grille–and the get-outta-my-way steel snout buckled to the front of the LC speak the same language of excess, using a different syntax. The tough wanted to look rich, with their hyper-chromed Buicks. These days, in their over-equipped SUVs, the rich want to look tough.

Dodge Ram 250 Cummins Diesel

 Michael Moore caught the Dodge in Walsenburg, Colorado, and it reminded him of Donald Judd's D-250.  I wonder What Would Donald Judd Drive today?

1994 Volvo 145 wagon

 

You know we have a thing for Volvo wagons. This unit is on the block at Hemmings this week. Did you see the 1996 960 wagon we caught in the neighborhood last year. Don't often come across a Volvo P-210, but we did find one in Portland , Maine.

John G. Zimmerman, Auto America

                

Photographs from John Zimmerman's Auto America, just out.

Truck with brains

 

As an alumnus, we're relieved that Harvard's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study has an intelligent truck. Yer basic Chevrolet Colorado,  the reasonably-sized General Motors pickup, sans braggadacio. We're always happy to acknowledge a truck that looks like a truck, not a chrome-crusted avatar of American masculinity-in-crisis. 

AA/Modified Coupe

Caught this a while ago, in Santa Barbara. Speaks to me of early-mid 60s drag-racing in So Cal. I think that's a Chevy 350 under there. 

Church of Ford

 Alex Emond photo. South Saskatchewan.