As the year moves forward to its eventual end, so do some of our current Cars Of A Lifetime (COAL) series. That means we’re looking for one or two new COAL contributors to take their place soon. If you’ve owned an assortment of cars over the years and have stories to tell about your experiences, we’d like to hear about them.
(Updated 10/20/2026)
Stallion CC, Take Two: I just deleted the first three paragraphs of what I had written. Starting on a new CC is always a bit of a journey into the unknown, but this one had a serious surprise for me, about half-way through. I was pretty much sticking to the facts and a few reminiscences, and planned to either totally avoid, or at the most barely touch upon the urban legend about the origin of the Starion’s odd name. Especially so, since I’d rejected its premise so vigorously in the past. And then I stumbled into an obscure but highly revealing piece of evidence that may solve it once and for all. You be the judge.
(Updated 10/20/2026) In Nineteen-Ninety, the approximate model year of the above car, I was a teenager and regular Billboard Magazine music chart devotee. The local newspaper, the Flint Journal, which I delivered, included the top-10 lists of four major charts on a weekly basis in its entertainment section: The Billboard 200 album chart, the Hot 100 singles chart, and the corresponding tallies for R&B/Hip-Hop songs and albums.
Once everyone in my family was done with the paper that day, I would take a scissors to it, cut out those charts, and paste them with Elmer’s glue into a spiral notebook in which I also documented my life. Both popular music and statistics have always interested me, and these music charts which tracked the numerical performance of songs and artists seemed to combine the best of both of these worlds for me.
Last time we covered the topic of pinstripes and trim, we left off in 1969, when muscle-car stripes were still relatively restrained. But by 1970, things were about to get a lot more interesting. Ford and Mopar, in particular, were getting creative with stripes and graphics, offering a dizzying array of treatments across their performance models. With horsepower becoming increasingly expensive to insure, perhaps a little extra visual drama helped make up the difference. I’ve gathered 14 variations from the year in scale-model form, and subtlety, as you’ll see, was no longer the order of the day.
The “fuselage” Chrysler of 1969 is, if I may say so, a “love-it-or-hate-it” bodystyle, meaning that if you want a big collectible Chrysler from the 1960s, the sweet spot seems to be 1965 to 1968. That means that this 1968 Chrysler 300 Convertible, which is being auctioned on Bring a Trailer in Erie, Pennsylvania, is the last stop for those who never warmed up to the fuselage cars. That’s not a bad place to be.
Although the mid-’60s AMC Ambassador was still firmly in the intermediate class in exterior size and interior space, American Motors encouraged buyers to compare the plush new Ambassador DPL with the full-size Chevrolet Impala, Ford Galaxie, and Plymouth Fury. Did the DPL’s fancy Custom Trim Package really merit comparison with bigger, roomier cars? You be the judge.
(Updated 10/19/2026) From the end of WWII until the minivan-Cherokee era, Chrysler rode a stylistic see-saw—as well as a financial one. One minute its designs were too conservative, the next they were aliens from another planet. As the perpetual number three, it lacked the gravitas to set market trends, at least for more than a few fleeting finny moments. With the exception of the Forward Look 1957s, Chrysler was perpetually chasing GM’s tail, or even the rumors of its tail.
After licking its ’62 wounds and playing it safe from 1963-1968, Chrysler once again got the gumption to get back in the ring with GM. Their dramatic new 1971 coupes were the second of its fuselage design one-two punch, after the 1969 big cars. While it may well have been a stylistic knockout, the punch missed its mark and hit a brick wall instead. This time, Chrysler almost didn’t get back up at all. But one has to admire their pluck, as well as the weapon of choice.
AI is here to stay, getting better (in some applications), and maybe someday will mean the end of websites like CC—it’s already affecting us in a number of ways, all negative. But as long as I’m still the publisher, CC will have a strict no-AI policy for its content as well as in the comments. The exception will of course be if we are doing an AI-specific post with images that are amusing, speculative, ironic or tongue-in-cheek, but they will be clearly marked as such. The whole point of this website is to use our cumulative historical knowledge, insights, perspectives, opinions and judgments on a subject we pride ourselves on knowing more about than most, including AI. CC is about either knowing the facts or being able to figure them out based on genuine research or even just good judgment to know what’s right and what’s not.
And this includes comments left based on an AI query, which have popped up recently. They will be deleted, as they invariably (so far) have had significant mistakes in them.
(Updated 10/19/2026) I vividly remember reading in Auto Motor und Sport the first time about BMW’s plans to build a diesel. Oh no! How can they sully their reputation for their engines, which invariably get described as being “turbine smooth” in every magazine review? What’s the world coming to?
But then after BMW unleashed their low-rev, high-efficiency eta gas engine, in the form of the 528e in 1982, which contradicted all of their efforts so far in building the ultimate engines, the writing was on the wall. And sure enough, just one year later, the 524td arrived, and it turned out to be, well, the BMW of diesels. It had the highest specific output (47.5 hp/L) of any diesel at the time, it revved cleanly to 5000rpm, it had a top speed of 112mph and clicked off the 0-60 run in 11.0 seconds, and was remarkably quiet to boot.
There was only one problem.
Mk1 Cortinas have me going full-on Brit, more than most English cars do. Minis and Range Rovers remind me of Paris, where they used to be default transportation in the swankier quartiers. Jags, R-Rs and Astons make me think of Geneva, as I used to see many of those when living there. But a Dagenham Ford is as British as Queen Victoria (Blackadder reference for those in the know), and its Lotus version is even more Albion-tastic.
Text by Patrick Bell.
A streetcar tour is on the itinerary today, as we view some vintage streetcars at work in various sites across the U.S. Of course there are towns and cars to check out as well, so let’s hit the tracks!
The most obvious thing about the 1970 Pontiac Firebird is that it’s almost distractingly gorgeous. Pontiac styling chief Bill Porter, a man who could talk about styling as well as he could design cars, not only differentiated the second-generation Firebird from the equally beautiful Camaro, despite using some shared components, but he also made it distinctly a Pontiac. It’s a pony car landmark, and this clean two-family-owned Esprit is up for auction on Hagerty Marketplace in Maple Grove, Minnesota.
I thought finding this was a rare treat–1958 Studebakers are so rarely seen. If you wanted to go one step up from the bare-bones Scotsman, this is what you could get: a Champion 4-door sedan with the base 6 cylinder engine and manual transmission. But as this example shows, a low-priced model doesn’t have to be plain–especially when you doll it up with two-tone paint, full wheel covers, whitewall tires, and lots of unique Studebaker options.
(Updated 10/18/2026) Como Park is located across a narrow road from the very exclusive Royal South Yarra Lawn Tennis Club. So a Ferrari-only day is an apt fit for the environs. In this installment, I’ve got a few of the lesser known models that are interesting in their own right, as well as some more famous examples. So slip on a tux t-shirt and follow me in.
(Updated 10/18/2026) Well, I didn’t actually, but in the not so long tradition of this Curbside Recycling series there have been multiple cars that look just too good to have been casually tossed adrift in the currents running toward the crusher. This may be the best of the bunch so far and if it really were possible to “rescue” cars from the junkyard, I can’t think of many that would be much more comfortable to drive the 900-ish miles from Phoenix back to my town or anywhere else in North America for that matter without needing any obvious work or parts grafted back on from other denizens of the yard. So let’s just continue this little flight of fancy and see what’s making this so compelling. Read the rest of this entry »
