Hemmings Motor News July 2022

The good news is, I just burned through another birthday and I’m still in okay-enough condition to complain about it among the pages of The World’s Greatest Book of Vehicles and Vehicle-Related Stuff for Sale. I’ll take it. I celebrated the milestone in the proud tradition of post-middle agers everywhere: Dinner at 4:30 p.m., Wheel of Fortune, then off to bed. Of course, I had a doctor’s appointment earlier in the day too. It was a routine visit. After check in, I groused under my breath about the decline of print magazines. Mumble, mumble… for Pete’s sake, really? Not even a five-year-old copy of Car and Motor Driver Trends? What is this world coming too? Then, into an exam room where I lied to the nurse about my height. Definitely within…

“Who needs a transfer case? Not the French!” I was born in Connecticut. Do you know what that means? Absolutely nothing. The state is famous for… pretty much nothing. Our claim to fame is that we were able to keep the King of England’s hands off the official colonial charter by hiding it in an oak tree. In 1687. We’ve apparently done nothing worth noting since. It seems that some royal goons were sent to physically grab the charter, but judicious colonists hid it in that tree for a few years until regime change happened on the British throne. That’s why we got an oak tree on our state quarter in 1999. New Jersey got Washington crossing the Delaware, Massachusetts a Minuteman with his musket, Indiana a bona fide Indy car, and…

GM Promises “An Electrified Corvette As Early As Next Year” An all-wheel-drive, hybrid Corvette could hit showrooms as early as next year and an all-electric C8 will follow at an undisclosed date, according to an announcement in April by General Motors President Mark Reuss. “We will offer an electrified and fully electric, Ultium-based Corvette in the future,” Reuss wrote in a post on the social media site, LinkedIn, and that GM “…will offer an electrified Corvette as early as next year. Details and names to come at a later date.” Following the statement GM posted a video online showing what it called an electrified Corvette launching on a snowy surface and clearly spinning the front wheels under power. Presumably, an electric motor will power the front wheels of this ’Vette and provide…

The Lane Motor Museum, Nashville’s quirky collection of offbeat automobiles, announced April 11 that it had appointed Derek E. Moore, former director of collections and curator at the National Corvette Museum, as its new curator of collections, replacing artist Robert Sparrow Jones. The Lane, Derek says, is “a diverse collection of European and American vehicles” that “has an exciting feel” not found at most transportation museums, and that he looks forward to developing the collections and exhibitions “to highlight the exceptional nature of the stories that are being preserved.” Founder Jeff Lane gave the museum a mission to “collect, preserve, document, and interpret an eclectic and technically interesting collection of cars and other transportation-related objects,” with a core focus on “educating the public about the history of transportation.” Derek, Lane says, “has the…

I own a 1998 Dodge 4x4 pickup with a 12-valve Cummins (Below the Hood, April). It is an extended cab with the dual rear half-doors, short box, and standard transmission. The only modifications are a Gear Vendor overdrive that was with it when I bought it, and LINE-X applied at the belt line. The truck is white, and the LINE-X is halfway down the doors, the factory wheel arches, and the bed and fenders along that belt line. It has just over 120,000 miles and is in mint condition. Someone told me it’s the most sought-after combination and called it a “holy grail.” I never imagined trucks would go the way of muscle cars and sports cars. If so, do I have a collectible? I will make sure it doesn’t see winter…

Why kill La Salle? The brand was created as a style leader back in the mid-1920s. Though the marque’s influence ebbed and flowed through its lifetime, its original forward-looking mandate carried clear through to the 1940 Series 52 Special Coupe we’re featuring here. Why kill a marque that was selling better than the companion marque it was assigned to? Concrete reasons why are speculative at best. Some may well see La Salle as having gotten too big for its britches. The so-called companion division outsold the established nameplate by nearly double in 1940: 24,133 La Salles to 12,984 Cadillacs. (Not that this was an issue for Pontiac and Oakland. The Chief of the Sixes stepped in to plug the gap between Chevrolet and Oldsmobile and was so successful that the Oakland…