Peter Behrens's Blog, page 162

1966 Chevrolet C20 Custom Camper

From Sam Harper: "Smells like oil, camel non-filters and bare feet…..Lenox, MA"And speaking of 1966 Chevrolets...

1954 Sunbeam Alipine

May be off by a year or two. Caught the car at Motorland in Arundel, Maine. Sunbeam-Talbot Limited was a British motor manufacturing business. They built upmarket sports-saloon versions of Rootes Group cars from 1935 to 1954. AL thinks this handsome car would look much better sans whitewalls, but then we always think that. We featured the NASCAR Hudson Hornet you see in the b.g, in one photo (below) in another post a couple weeks ago.

 

Humberford's Worst Automotive Trends of the Moment

"And while the world is thick with the musings of art and design critics, the specialist job title “automotive design critic” is one rarely bestowed. Indeed, the title didn’t exist until the mid-1980s when Automobile magazine assigned longtime car designer Robert Cumberford to the beat.Cumberford worked alongside legends like Harley Earl, the man who invented modern car design at General Motors Corp., and associated for decades with many of the people at the top of the industry.And while the world is thick with the musings of art and design critics, the specialist job title “automotive design critic” is one rarely bestowed. Indeed, the title didn’t exist until the mid-1980s when Automobile magazine assigned Cumberford to the beat." 
The above is from Automobile...as are:

Humberford's Worst Trends of Right Now: 
GRILLES"Last year we noted, and were discouraged by, the fact that grilles had been getting bigger to the point of excess and called for a reversion to the mean. Instead, some manufacturers have pushed farther than we ever expected anyone to go. Twin packing crate-sized substitutions for the classic BMW kidney shapes seen on the X7 SUV and Concept 4 coupe are showing up in production, and that's a shame.
Oh, at some point a few years from now they'll decide aerodynamics and electrification will best be served by smaller drag-producing openings in the skin, but we will have to go through a lot more silliness before the trend reverses.

                                                                           CHILLS
"Many of us are seriously concerned by the supposed looming onset of self-driving cars, and not entirely because we dread losing the kinesthetic pleasure of driving a good car on a fine road. There could be, as there have been with most new technologies, misapplications. You really don't have to be paranoid to worry about the potential effects of something new. When airbags were new, they appeared in several murder mysteries, the kind of "airplane books" of no literary importance consumed by many of us who flew across the Atlantic many times each year. In at least three of those read since Automobile began, the protagonist had to struggle to extract a knife from his pocket so he could puncture the airbag that held him captive after a crash. The authors of those books apparently didn't know the bags self-deflate after exploding in the face of people they saved. So far, we haven't seen any instances of criminal "kidnapping by car," but it's likely to come. It will certainly be as easy for Bad Guy Hackers to take over "invulnerable" autonomous cars as it has been for them to steal Bitcoins or alter election results.

THRILLS


"Most car enthusiasts love power and speed and want more of both. But the percentage of them who are really capable of handling either is small. It is hard for someone who is stressed and tired after a long, hard day to remember not to press too hard on the go pedal when there are more than 500 ponies underfoot. After you've seen hundreds of great cars reduced to trash in photos across the internet, you really don't want to look anymore. Maybe designers and engineers should develop a little video or skill test to check your state of fatigue before allowing you more than 200 ponies to get you home when you're tired.

BILLS "The problem with constantly adding neat little tricks to cars—like incorporating cruise control in cheap little cars like Ford Fiestas (they still exist outside of the U.S., where Ford only does trucks and Mustang derivatives)—is that all the incremental improvements in standard equipment add weight, and above all, cost. And not just initial cost, but the cost of maintenance and repairs if they go wrong. And once you're hooked on the value of electric windows that put themselves up and down at the flick of a switch or digital screens that give you immediate and aggregate fuel-consumption figures or doors that lock automatically as soon as the car starts to move, you become accustomed to the convenience and don't want to do without. Some additional features are trivially cheap and easy to incorporate and add weight in fractions of ounces, not multiple pounds, but once drivers are addicted, they won't want to let anything that breaks stay broken. And that means high service costs. "

1955 Chevrolet convertible, Riding Low.

Thanks to Bill Burleson for the photographs and the heads-up on the Low-Rider Arte and Culture exhibition at the Santa Fe Place Mall. "The mayor of Santa Fe proclaimed May 22, 2016, to be Lowrider Day. The occasion was a New Mexico History Museum exhibit celebrating lowriders and lowrider culture in Northern New Mexico. Lowriders from miles around cruised to the Plaza to show off their cars. In the years since then, a group called New Mexico Lowrider Arte and Culture has honored the day each May by holding a lowrider show downtown. Last year, the event was canceled. This year, they’re moving and expanding the event. The New Mexico Lowrider Arte and Culture Exhibit opens at Santa Fe Place Mall from noon to 4 p.m. on Saturday, May 1, with a public car show, lowrider exhibition, and art show. The event also features food, musical entertainment, and a lowrider hopping contest..." Santa Fe New MexicanThere are a bunch more great photographs to come from this show. And you may have seen our post a while back on the High Art of Riding Low exhibition at the Peterson Museum in LA in 2017. Here are some more Burleson photographs of the Low-rider street scene in Santa Fe. And Anne Lennox's '48 Pontiac low-rider in Chimayo, NM. Also a Dodge Dart Seneca in Chimayo.AL posted a few weeks ago on Kristin Bedford's Cruise Night, a stunning book of photographs on LA's Mexican American lowrider community. 

And that's a...90s? Cadillac

1987 GMC High Sierra 1500

  

Reid Cunningham caught the truck in Claremont NH..."This must have been someone's fun truck, with the short bed and High Sierra trim."  AL has posted a 1975 plainer-jane Sierra.

Land Rover Defender, Maine

Caught the Land Rover in Blue Hill Maine





 

1965 Plymouth Satellite

 from Reid Cunningham: "A pretty Satellite in Claremont NH.  My best recollection is the Commando V8 was the small block."                                                                                           AL caught a 1964 Dodge Polara out in Kansas a while back. And an Exner-era Dodge in Shediac, New Brunswick along with the million-mile Montreal Plymouth taxi.

Bank Parking Lot, Plains Georgia (1973 Chrysler Newport)

William Eggleston photograph  Bank parking lot, Plains.  1976.
Bank parking lot, Plains is from William Eggleston: Election Eve,  Steidl’s superb volume gathering 100 photographs that Eggleston shot in and around Plains, Georgia (en route from Mississippi), just prior to the 1976 Presidential election, when Democrat Jimmy Carter of Georgia defeated incumbent Republican President Gerald Ford from Michigan. “On the eve of the election, when nothing had yet been decided, when everything—whatever that everything was—hung in the balance, Eggleston made an elegy … a statement of perfect calm,” Lloyd Fonvielle writes. “To say, however, that these photographs are romantic, sorrowful and quiet is not to imply that they are easy or in any sense comforting. They are richer and more sensual in some ways than Eggleston’s other work, but they are not less penetrating or unsettling. In them Eggleston seems bent, as always, on recording those unremarked units of spatial perception by which the everyday world is unconsciously ordered.”

Lobsters are anxious

Boats and gear going in the water now, Eggemoggin Reach, Blue Hill Bay, Jericho Bay around Deer I., and  offshore.
 

1949 Jaguar XK 120

AL caught the Jag at Motorland in Arundel, Maine. Check our post "1959 Jaguar Mark IX Saloon, Joan Baez, and The Long Good Friday"