Peter Behrens's Blog, page 113

1962 Buick Invicta convertible.

Driving between Maine and Cambridge, saw the Buick near the chicken barn west of Belfast, Maine. Chickens--and eggs--used to mean more than lobster, economically, in some parts of the midcoast. The car's not for sale.  We posted a 1961 Buick Electra a while back. A 1967 Buick Electra is one of Langdon Clay's Night Cars. We saw a 1977 Buick Electra for sale in Fitchburg MA a couple years back.

 

Une autre Transporter.

from Don Culbertson,  à Paris. "You might want to add this to the previous VW Transporter pics."

 

c. 1964 Chevy II Nova

From Alex Emond: "Classic street machine, dazzling in the morning light. This is Banff. I remember a Nova from my youth named The Reverend Mr. Black  and owned by a character called Frank Snow. He eventually rolled the car; totaled it. Ooops. I went for a ride once and he scared the shit outta me. This blue jewel seems totally dialed-in. Looks fast, too."Alec caught another Chevy II--"Nova" was originally the top-of the-line Chevy II--in Banff a while back. We saw a quick Chevy II in western Maine this summer. Henry Behrens caught a '69 Nova in Freeport, Mane. And speaking of speed, here's a Nova SS in China, Maine that posted last summer.

 

Bryan Appleyard: The Car

THE CAR: The Rise and Fall of the Machine That Made the Modern World, by Bryan Appleyard.

reviewed by Jonathan Kellerman in NYT. Sept 6 2022

Ear-shredding noise, toxic air, interminable traffic jams, chaos and death — all the result of untrammeled population expansion. Is this a description of a contemporary urban nightmare? Not quite: We’re talking about 19th-century London, although the situation in Paris and other major cities wasn’t much better. And the cause of all this misery was … the horse.

As recounted by Bryan Appleyard in his compelling new book, “The Car,” by 1900 the 50,000 horses required to meet London’s transportation needs deposited 500 tons of excrement daily. Hooves and carriage wheels threw up curtains of fetid muck. Accidents caused by mechanical failures and spooked animals were often fatal to passengers, drivers and the horses themselves. New York City employed 130,000 horses and predictions were made that by 1930 that city’s streets would be piled three stories high with dung. Yet another dire prophecy fallen victim to the continuity fallacy — the belief that a current trend will endure forever.

Things change because when problems arise, people work at solving them, and sometimes they arrive at solutions. The answer to the psychosocial and physical degradation brought on by too many people employing too many horses in the burgeoning Industrial Age was, of course, the development of the motor vehicle. Specifically, one powered by the internal combustion engine.

As Appleyard points out, the concept behind the ICE — controlling fire to combine heat and compression in order to move mechanical parts — is ancient, dating back at least as far as 350 B.C., when a fire piston was developed in Southeast Asia. But channeling that technology to create an efficient mover of people would have to wait. The question of who actually invented the automobile is open to debate, with the German engineer Karl Benz, inventor of the three-wheeled Motorwagen (patented in 1886), most frequently cited. But there are other credible candidates: Etienne Lenoir’s Hippomobile preceded Benz by over two decades, and the Austrian inventor Siegfried Marcus was lauded as the true originator until 1938, when the fact that he was Jewish put the kibosh on his claim.

There were earlier promising attempts to harness power sources like steam and electricity, but none delivered the performance of gasoline-fueled vehicles. Whoever invented it, by the advent of the 20th century, the automobile as we mostly know it was here to stay. Initially used for racing and other amusements by the same moneyed folks who’d luxuriated in the velvet and marquetry cabins of horse-drawn carriages, car travel, for those who could afford it, brought about an intoxicating new freedom. As for the poor or rural? Their situation remained unchanged: they were limited by how far their feet could take them, and therefore rarely ventured far from home.

When interest in the car crossed the Atlantic, the United States’s open roads and open markets made for a perfect match. The first American cars were made by small companies, like the one founded by Ransom Olds. A charming risk-taker named Billy Durant set about combining several of those concerns into the conglomerate that became General Motors. And when Durant managed to blow through a personal fortune of $100 million and die penniless, he was replaced by the gray-flannel-suit archetype Alfred Sloan, who grew GM into a dominant, international force.

The most important development in domestic and, ultimately, international motoring was that of Michigan-born Henry Ford: Ruthless businessman, self-styled progressive populist, reprehensible human being (his antisemitic ravings were cited by Hitler as a major influence) and organizational genius. Ford invented very little but he knew how to put things together. He abandoned the manufacturing model that had limited cars to the prosperous, in which customers purchased a chassis and engine from a carmaker then brought it to a coachbuilder, who fashioned a custom body. It was time, Ford reasoned, to bypass all that and create an inexpensive finished product that could bring the car to the masses. Utilizing assembly line construction and cutting frills to a minimum, he created the boxy Model T, only available in black, in 1908. By the time that model was taken out of production in 1927, 15 million had been sold, bespoke vanquished by off-the-rack.

The rest is, of course, history, and one that is recounted colorfully and wittily in this volume. Appleyard draws upon a vast knowledge of science, mechanics and cultural lore as he successfully supports his thesis that the car didn’t merely influence the modern world — it created it. Think of road construction, interstate commerce, the ability of emergency vehicles to reach critically injured victims, the advent of self-propelled travel and tourism for an unprecedented percentage of the population. Think too about the emotional freedom offered when one can get into a vehicle and simply drive.

Appleyard covers every conceivable automotive trend, from sleek Italian bullets honed on the racecourse, to meticulously engineered German land yachts, up to and including the Nazi dream car, the Volkswagen Beetle, ironically adopted decades after the fall of the Third Reich as a symbol of stick-it-to-the-man counterculture. Then there are the garishly chromed and murderously tail-finned midcentury behemoths conceived by American stylists like Virgil Exner and Harley Earl, who realized that selling sex appeal and self-esteem was a whole lot more important than pointing out mechanical excellence. The development of the high-quality Japanese compacts that eventually came to dominate automobile manufacturing is covered in fascinating detail. More limited print space is offered to seven-figure hypercars and the luxury items created by Rolls-Royce and Bentley. The author explores what he considers the inexplicable popularity of massive off-road vehicles that are never destined to be taken off-road, as well as the success of tricked-out pickup trucks driven by suburbanites hauling nothing.

Finally, the inevitable: The internal combustion era is likely over, to be replaced by the electric vehicle. Because solutions, even brilliant ones, can turn into problems, and as concerns about climate change have grown, the gas-guzzling automobile has begun to be seen as a force for evil. Whether or not Elon Musk and those who emulate him will succeed in mitigating the car’s effects on the environment is an open question. For all we know, an as-yet-undeveloped technology will turn out to be the eco-hero. Whatever the future has in store, Bryan Appleyard has written an important account of automotive history that avoids the frequent transgression committed by Those Who Know A Lot: tossing everything in and creating an unwieldy hodgepodge. This book is beautifully restrained, yet manages to communicate a wealth of fascinating information.

For all the carping and finger-pointing leveled at traditional automobiles — much of which Appleyard acknowledges as valid — he is unabashed about his appreciation for the most important machine in human history. As he points out, “The car emancipated the masses far more effectively than any political ideology; that it did so at a cost should not obliterate the importance of that freedom.”

Well said. Vroom.

1988 VW Transporter. New Hampshire

 

From Jonathan Welsh: "VW devotees will cringe if you call this a Vanagon. Volkswagen's crew-can pickup, known as the Doppelkabine or Doka for short, was never sold in the U.S. officially though the van version was at least a minor hit here. We spotted this one in Hanover, N.H. Looks like a 1988, give or take a year. Interior shot shows a USB connection -- the only update necessary. I kinda want one of these."

AL posted a Transporter from Texas last week.

1948 Standard Vanguard

 Do you recall the Unidentified Driving Object that we posted a couple of years ago, in one of Aidan O'Neill's station wagon photos from Québec in the 1950s?

 After much trawling, and some advice form experts ("British, 1948-52?" we've decided it's 1948 or '49 Standard Vanguard. These were produced by the Standard Motor Company in Coventry from 1948 to 1963 and exported across the Commonwealth-- e.g. Canada- and into other markets as well.

From motor-car.net: "The car was announced in July 1947. It was completely new with no resemblance to the previous models, and was Standard's first post-Second World War car. It was also the first model to carry the new Standard badge, which was a heavily stylised representation of the wings of a Griffin.

"In the wake of the Second World War many potential customers in the UK and in English-speaking export markets had recently experienced several years of military or naval service, therefore a car name related to the British Navy carried a greater resonance than it would for later generations. The name of the Standard Vanguard recalled HMS Vanguard, the last of the British Navy's battleships, launched in 1944 amid much media attention: permission to use the name involved Standard in extensive negotiations with senior Royal Navy personnel.

"The styling of the car resembled the pre-war Plymouth with a sloping 'beetle-back.' Russian media claimed that styling of this car had been in part influenced by Russian GAZ-M20 Pobeda, which had been in development from 1943 and went into production in 1946. In 1952 The Motor magazine stated that the Soviet Pobeda 'shows a certain exterior resemblance to the Standard Vanguard', disregarding the fact that the Pobeda had been launched a year before the Vanguard. In Scandinavia, Standard marketed the Standard Ten saloon as the 'Vanguard Junior'."

Jeeps, Deer Isle Maine.

 Basha Burwell caught the 2 Jeeps on a Deer Isle, Maine drive-by. The first is one of the Brooks Adams' line, and we have posted on it, and him, before. The J10was a 4wd pickup, now a stake-bed. Here's another J10 we posted from Vermont, and J2000 Gladiator.

Basha's 1904 Deer Isle cottage,"Reach Winds" is located on the shore of Eggemoggin Reach and is available for rental June through September. Find Reach Winds on Airbnb or at Reach.Winds on Instagram

1967 Eldorado, N.J.

 

From Jonathan Welsh: "These low-slung land yachts must have turned heads back in '67, the debut year for the front-wheel-drive Eldorado. They were cleaner and less chromed-up than other Cadillacs. This one, in flamenco red and parked in Montclair, N.J., turned out to belong to a guy I knew in high school. I think Generation X likes heavy iron of this era for it's novelty today. Such a contrast next to an Escalade!"   

AL: we posted a 1976 Eldorado convertible , "the definitive Cadillac?"--from Maine this summer.                                   

1978 Ford Bronco

  We caught the Bronco in Lexington, Mass., but it was probably a Western truck, given the dealer sticker and the sun visor. Most of the Broncos we've posted have been from the earlier incarnation, like this 1967 Bronco in Banff and another '67 that was for sale a while back in the Springs. The original Bronco came out to compete with the I-H Scout. The current Bronco, was to have been launched by Ford July 9 2020 but a couple things got in the way, like the coronavirus, and O.J. Simpson's birthday. So it was pushed back to July 13.What happened to O.J's Bronco ride on the 495? Find out Seems like the current version is supposed to take a piece of Jeep Wrngler's pie, boasting all kinds of faux-outdoorness to a suburban nation.

1971 Pontiac Le Mans (poem)

  

Thanks to Eva H.D. for the Thomas Bolt poem, from The Paris Review, issue 109 Winter 1988

1971 Pontiac LeMans

Auto in sunlight: every trace of gloss
Is dulled a rusting green.
Even the fenders are a dirty chrome
Which blunts light like a pine log;
Still, it runs.

This is the car someone abandons
At a grassy roadside,
Like an old punt, rotten-hulled.
Sunk in river muck above the seats.
Near this realization.

It will do 90 still.
Or, filled with gasoline, will drive all night
Toward any destination;
It can kill.
This is the real world
AL: We posted the 1971 Le Mans (above) from Maine where we also found a 1968 Pontiac Le Mans convertible