With the exception of the Transit Connect and Transit City (a BEV from China), all Ford commercial vehicles for the European market are made by Ford Otosan, headquartered in Turkey. Early September, I caught their full-size tractor and smallest cargo van at the same event.
I wasn’t even half serious when I opened Craigslist and typed “Mazda Miata” into the search bar. But it led to something that couldn’t have turned out any better.
Automatic all-wheel-drive is so common in modern trucks and SUVs that its hard to remember a time when it was a novelty, but it certainly was big news when Jeep introduced Quadra-Trac in 1973; it was an automatic all-wheel-drive system that required no getting out to lock hubs and no shift mechanism for the transfer case (in its standard form). Like most elegant engineering solutions, Quadra-Trac is a simple concept with simple execution.
(Updated 11/7/2026) Most people, when they hear the word Lincoln, immediately think one of two things: Abraham Lincoln or the Lincoln Town Car. Now because we’re talking strictly cars, I’m going to exclude the former from consideration. After the Town Car, vehicles like the Continental, Mark Series, Navigator, and more recently, MKZ come to mind. But what if I say “sporty Lincoln”, what comes to mind now? Abraham Lincoln in a running singlet? Although many, even the Lincoln Motor Company, seem to forget it, there was in fact, a sporty Lincoln.
(Updated 11/7/2026). The annual London Motor Show is long gone, as is the replacement event in Birmingham. The last formally industry sponsored event was held in 2008, and the only remaining major European shows are in Frankfurt and Geneva. The events of 2020 have obviously impacted both of these, and maybe they too will not come back in the familiar form.
But this is CC, so we can look back to the great days, through the medium of the Pathé newsreel, originally designed for the cinema. Here’s a small selection. Read the rest of this entry »
When it comes to vintage dealer photos, few are as exciting as those capturing new-model-year unveilings, particularly as they took place in the 1950s and 1960s. These were true community events, and you can almost feel the excitement in the images: dealerships prepared for the occasion, sometimes after days of keeping their window displays covered to conceal the new looks. As we’ve seen in previous posts and photo series, there were spotlights, coffee, donuts, and lots more to make the occasion special. Expectations were high, and between the festive surroundings and the latest models sporting their trendy new looks, there was plenty to make an impression. This was especially true of GM’s products, whose fashion-oriented styling of the period remains a subject of conversation to this day.
Today’s photos come from Ripley Buick in Springfield, Ohio, and capture several grand scale events. The one above is undoubtedly the main attraction: the unveiling of the 1954 Buicks, promoted that year in brochures as “The Beautiful Buy.” Buick was riding one of its styling peaks in the 1950s, making that slogan more than just talk
(Updated 11/7/2026)
The 1954 GM PDX-4901, better known as the “Golden Chariot,” was an extraordinary bus that was decades ahead of its time. The 40′ high-floor coach with large underfloor storage became the standard configuration for practically all modern highway buses. But just who pioneered that? The 1956 Kassbohrer-Eagle was the first production bus of that kind. But there was a precursor to it, the 1954 GM PDX-4901 (“Golden Chariot”), a giant of a bus that GM had high hopes for, but one that was rejected by potential customers and never made it into production.
For years, its fate was unknown, and it seemed likely that this important piece of transportation history had disappeared for good. Now there’s good news: the long-lost prototype has been found, tucked away in a Massachusetts bus company’s storage facility, with hopes of a full restoration. It’s a welcome opportunity to revisit one of GM’s most intriguing experiments—and a bus whose influence far outlasted its brief career. Considering that GM utterly dominated the bus market at the time, and its other buses were copied by everyone else, the failure of the PDX-4901 is a surprising aberration. Read the rest of this entry »
My first VW, a white ’64 1200, had served me superbly, and I sold it for what I had paid for it ($400). When I found myself back in Baltimore in late 1974, having quit the experimental theater company, I needed some wheels, and quick, so when I found an ad for a white’63 for only $200, I bit. White had quickly become my good-luck color for cars; it still is. It ran very poorly, so, I offered them $150, and they accepted. Driving it back to Towson on the Beltway was a nail-biter, but something told me it was going to be ok (it just needed some new points).
But before long I talked myself into rebuilding the engine (a steady job will do that), and adding big bore cylinders as part of the equation. I loved the way my brother’s ’66 1300 had run, so I figured a 1385cc would do about as well. It did, thanks to that and some decambering of the rear wheels. It was closest I’d ever get to my dream car, an old Porsche 356.
A lot of car buffs understand engines pretty well, but seem to blank out when it comes to automatic transmissions and how they change gears. Today, we can cheat a bit and say, “Well, the computer does it,” but what about the 40 or 50 years of automatic-transmission cars built before electronic controls became universal? Here’s how most automatic transmissions since the original 1940 Hydra-Matic have “decided” when to shift — which even in those pre-electronic days was more computerized than you might think.
(Updated 11/6/2026) What do you get when you cross the marketing savvy of Lee Iacocca, the star power of Frank Sinatra, and an attractive personal luxury coupe with tried and true Mopar mechanicals? You get a beautiful and intriguing car that became a failure of epic proportions. Is there a better recipe for a Curbside Classic?
(Updated 11/6/2026) Even though air-cooled Volkswagens are hardly common in Indiana anymore, they’re still not exactly rare. I don’t keep track in my head of all the old cars I find; it wasn’t until I looked through my photos recently that I found that I’ve seen four air-cooled VWs recently. The first was this Thing. You never know just what will show up on my mechanic’s lot in Carmel, and one day when my Passat needed a brake job this Thing was there. Read the rest of this entry »
The diminutive Subaru 360 (1958-70) was, without a doubt, the most successful of the first wave of kei cars. They remain beloved in their home country as a symbol of the dawn of mass-motorization, a Model T of sorts. Only a lot smaller and with a 356cc two-stroke parallel twin in the rear. The Lady Bug even had a long-roof variant – not the most obvious development for a rear-engined car.
Text by Patrick Bell.
Station wagons are the feature today, the family cars that have all but disappeared from the roads. We have many that were very common, and a few that were not as common, with most of them doing some kind of family trip as they were back in the day. Take a look and see if any trigger some memories.
As I sat contemplating a room full of General Motors Motorama dream cars, I said to my lovely bride, “I don’t want to live a life where I don’t get misty in a room full of Motorama dream cars.” Luckily, I don’t have to, as the Gilmore Car Museum in Hickory Corners, Michigan, has showcased the collection of Joe Bortz, a well-known dream-car fanatic, as the centerpiece of its 2026 season. One of the standouts is this completely original 1954 Pontiac Bonneville Special.
By the mid-1960’s, White Motors offered a very wide range of commercial trucks. Thanks to their acquisitions of Autocar, Diamond T, and REO, along with their marketing agreement with Freightliner, White offered trucks for just about every requirement, from over-the-road to heavy duty vocational and plenty of specialty models for specific applications like refuse and aircraft refuelers. However, despite this wide variety of makes and models, White was weak in one important market: The low-cost basic medium duty truck.
Their answer was the Trend, which featured a lightweight plastic body, a Chevy 327 V8, and a “Country Wagon” version with an RV body that could be swapped out with a regular truck body. Not too surprisingly, the Trend was a total flop. Read the rest of this entry »
