Hemmings Motor News

newer or new-ish-car tolerance, sometimes even bordering on grudging acceptance, I want out. When my 2010 commuter appliance can no longer commute, I plan to take a bold backslide into the bench-seat era. While the rest of the world is whooshing along inside their smart phones on wheels enjoying TikTok videos, I want to drive the vehicular equivalent of the avocado-green Western Electric rotary I ordered takeout pizza with in the 1980s, while waiting for the Dire Straits video to air on MTV. This vehicle doesn’t necessarily have to be crank start with a crash-box transmission, but it definitely needs to be devoid of: A. Tablet-sized touch screens; B.C.D.E.F. Driver assistances that apply the brakes on my behalf and;G.H.I.J.-Z. Creepy messages on the aforementioned touch screen telling me that my car wants…

"Think of Hemmings Auctions as a sort of dating app for the mechanically inclined…" Awhile back on Hemmings Auctions, we received a submission of a Full Classic: a once-glorious sedan restored some years ago that still carried the presence and elegance that makes such cars so unmistakably special. Like plenty of collector cars we see in the auction, this one had been inherited by a family member who possessed only limited knowledge of the vehicle. They knew it was special but had no clue as to the specifics of the car. Clearly it had been special to their dad, but perhaps not so much to the survivors. The photos of the interior included one of the back seat strewn with trash, highlighted by a half-empty vodka bottle. We rejected those images despite the…

"… what happened at the museum that day should put some wind in your sails." I’ll say this at the outset: I like car clubs. I believe I’m currently a member in good standing in five clubs, if by “member in good standing” we mean “his dues check cleared,” rather than “we can count on him to contribute something useful to the newsletter.” I appreciate what they do for the hobby, and for building support for some vehicles I’m particularly enthusiastic about. On a more personal level, fellow club members have gotten me out of deep holes I’ve dug for myself when trying to keep my cars running. So when I heard that the Owls Head Transportation Museum up in Owls Head, Maine, was holding its first “Maine State All Clubs Social”…

I enjoyed David LaChance’s article about the Triumph “Razor Edge” four-door Town & Country, which I was not familiar with. At 15 feet long, it was for all practical purposes a full-size automobile. I was surprised that the smaller, shorter two-door with similar styling, produced by Mulliners as the 13-foot long Mayflower, was not mentioned as those were imported into the U.S. As a long-term fan of British cars from MG TCs, TDs, XK120 (my college ride), a 3.8 sedan as our family car, and a slew of Morgans, I actually test drove a Mayflower. It looked like a budget version of a Rolls Royce. It was fun drive, but slower than slow and did not make the cut. Burt Richmond Chicago, Illinois Burt, you’re absolutely right, the Mayflower was intended as an…

William T. Collins Jr, father of the GTO, dies at age 90 William T. Collins, Jr., an automotive engineer known best as the father of the Pontiac GTO, and who was instrumental in the development of the De Lorean automobile, died March 5 at age 90. In a two-part interview published in the October and November 2014 issues of Hemmings Classic Car, Collins said that working at General Motors — specifically, Pontiac — during the 1960s and 1970s was fun: “A single person could make things happen,” he said. Collins did make things happen, not just at Pontiac, but also at De Lorean and in bringing his own Vixen motorhome design to market. The creation of the GTO wasn’t Collins’ only notable accomplishment at Pontiac, either. As the advanced design transmission development engineer for…

For more than a century, American automakers have looked outside of their home market for sales income. Sometimes this has meant building plants abroad to assemble vehicles for those markets. Other times, vehicles intended for sale in other countries have been made here and shipped elsewhere. The Chrysler Corporation began exporting U.S.-made cars in the 1930s, and that practice resumed in the postwar period with models like the De Soto Diplomat. The first Chrysler vehicles to be constructed south of the border were built in small numbers, starting circa-1939, by a Mexican-owned company called Fabricas Automex; the Chrysler de Mexico Toluca Car Assembly plant started producing Valiants, Dodges, and Chryslers for Mexican consumers in real volume in 1968. Between those dates, Chrysler’s U.S. and Canadian plants built export versions of Dodges…