Oh, and to get this back on topic, that’s the Acela Express, the American high speed rail that runs where the article alledges one would be, though it arrived more than 30 years later. (Not all THAT quick, eh?)

All this about it being “American,” but they mean “NORTH American,” Bombardier Rail is a Canadian company.

Well, hey, Uncle B, I guess my Dad was wanting those things you wanted in the 50’s, and he DID have a few MG’s. And he was working the races in Southern California when James Dean brought out his Porsche Superspeedster, and a few years later Dad had one. The Speedster line being the upside down bathtub on a Beetle chassis, but a cheap Porsche was still a Porsche. All this before I was born.

The point is, you bought what Detroit offered. Gas was cheap, it didn’t cost you much to drive it. Mom had those Detroit cars that she wanted while Dad had European cars. Maybe if more people like you made the point to Detroit that there were OTHER cars they could ALSO be building, by the time I was born these might have been available from an American manufacturer. Detroit was building 4 cylinder cars, they just couldn’t sell many. People familiar with the Gremlin will argue there was no 4 cylinder version, but that was how the car started out, and it wasn’t until the 3rd year there was a V8 in the little thing, and that year it outsold the two previous years combined.

When I was in college I had a number of my older teachers tell much the same story of their first car. There was this semiabandoned Model T in someone’s front yard that ran but wasn’t driveable because of miscellaneous parts it needed and the owners didn’t think they were worth fixing, and these kids got it for a price I assumed to be a few days pay at the time. The extent to which they patched it together depended on their ingenuity, but most of them said the car met its’ demise over the failure of one of these improvised repairs, often resulting in a wreck. And the little thing wasn’t worth fixing.

There were nearly 16 million 4 cylinder Model T’s sold in the 20 years Ford built it, and much happened with them once they became ancient. The most common thing to happen was it became a ‘T-Bucket,’ or some other form of ‘Rod.’ This meant it had that 4 cylinder engine swapped out for a V8. Detroit is watching as this happens, and of course SELLING the V8’s that are used.

Myself, I think like my Dad. I like nimble little cars. I don’t know many who share that with me. Most people think like so many Ford buyers of 1932-35. For those 4 years, Ford built ‘The Deuce.’ contrary to the speculations of so many, Deuce does NOT mean it was built in 1932. It refers to the original car in a new era for Ford, the company that did indeed have the founder who said “You can buy a Model T in the color you want, as long as you want black.” Ford had built one version of their current model, and one model only.

But in 1932 there would be a second car, which came to be nicknamed the Deuce. Their current production car of the time was the Model B, and they decided to offer the first factory built V8 car, hence it was called the Model 18. Which didn’t vary so much from the primary design, it just had a V8. Many didn’t even know what the car was properly called, just that it was the Ford V8. And it was wildly popular with Moonshine Runners, Bank Robbers, most anyone who wanted to outrun law enforcement, who stuck with the less expensive 4 cylinder cars. Henry Ford received a letter with the dubious signature of ‘John Dillenger,’ thanking him for building a car that could get him out of so many tight spots. Before long Bill France Sr. and other southern stock car racers had them on the tracks. And America’s love affair with the V8 was born.

There’s a lot that you can point the finger at Detroit for. There’s been some acknowledgement that they deliberately built bad engines to meet the smog laws of the 70’s, and there’s additional pouting over having to instantly transition to small cars as the price of gas rose. And they’ve been unwilling to compete with the fun to drive small imports in the last few decades, insisting they’d only offer econoboxes in the lesser sizes. But when it comes to them building larger and larger cars for a period of a half century, I blame the consumer. Because everytime someone who’d settled for a smaller 4 or 6 cylinder car decided they could have afforded more, they did indeed say “Wow, I could’a had a V8.” This was the demand of the buyer, and it was the era of ‘The customer is always right.’ I figure the foreign makers could get away with only selling a few in the U.S. because they were selling them back home, too. Detroit didn’t have it so easy.

I think it might have been fun to live in that era before I was born, when the car guys among the World War II veterans would come home looking for a Deuce to go run in the dry lake beds, dirt ovals, etc. I also think it would have been fun to be out on the road courses, where a few Model T’s were running with the 4 cylinder engines were still intact. Not so many, though. Most people weren’t going to be happy without a V8.

Sure would be nice if Chevrolet would compete with Mazda’s Miata with something other than the Cobalt.

Kruk