OT: Talkin' 'Murican Cars
A day late with the holiday, but no matter. It's a simple question for today, the day after the 4th: What's the single greatest American car ever made?
Is it the Model T? which allowed everyday Americans to afford these new horseless carraiges? The Corvette? Mustang? Hellcat and/or Demon? Pickup trucks that can tow 30,000lbs that you can buy at a regular dealership and need a special driver's licesnse to use all that capability? The invention of the Minivan? The invention of the ORV (which became the SUV)? The Tesla Model S? (this is wrong)
What's your favorite red, white, and blue automobile? What's your greatest American Made car story?
I left out the correct answer in the OP. We had them, they didn't. We won. Causation & correlation.
Or not. Jeeps kick ass, but the other thing we had that won the war was a Soviet front.
Germany suffered 80% of their military deaths on the Eastern Front facing the Soviet Union.
If the Allies were characterized in MadMax terms, the US and England were Master, and the Soviet Union was Blaster.
/sorry digression
I'm sure he's not biased or stretching stats or anything....
of the Jeep as they used to with their horse, if the jeep broke down. The late Colonel Hackworth recalls how he saw a cavalryman do this in the Korean war and his bullet hit the rim, winged back up and got him between the eyes. It was said to have happened many times, they probably stopped doing it after that.
Either you and/or your partner are very small and/or flexible. Or you had a Cherokee or Grand Cherokee or Wagoneer.
That jeep was literally positively bangin colonel.
this comes to mind:
*I hate Trucks. And I don't want to pay for roads I don't drive on*
"But everything that you purchase at the local big box store comes on trucks, that traverse roads you don't personally drive on"
*I still don't want to deal with them*
"Okaaaayyyy"
1961 Lincoln Continental convertible, with suicide doors.
I loved this car long, long before Entourage ever came around.
They also were excellent vehicles to use to convert to parade floats at Faber College in the 1960's.
My choices would be a couple that are listed, Model T, Jeep, then whatever becomes the transformative electric/solar/? car that lets us finally break away from the outdated internal combustion engine on a global scale.
Yes. Whoever develops the technology that replaces the internal combustion engine will rule the world.
a good ride, and excellent handling for its class, but its GPM is a bit high....
The loyalty it inspired by its capability and cussed durabilty is legendary.
As a fan of motorsports (primarily endurance events like Le Mans and the WeatherTech series), I'd probably go back to the mid 60s with the Ford GT40. It showed that Americans could build racecars that would beat the dominant Ferrari-built machines of the day (Ferrari had won 6 in a row heading into the 1966 Le Mans race). To this day, it's still the only American-built car to actually win the overall race, which it did 4 years in a row.
got a ton of the credit, but I think its arguable that the GT40 was the real crown jewel.
All that said, no car in Ford's pantheon is cooler to me than the Cobra Daytona.
A fellow sports car fan!
Of course, there are a lot of reasons that American cars don't have more success at the top levels of Le Mans (though Corvette has been great in the GT division for almost 20 years), mostly relating to their focus on series that have more significance domestically.
I do occasionally wonder what sort of lap times the AAR (Toyota, granted) Eagles would have hit at the Sarthe.
I'd like to see some of the American prototypes in WTSCC race at Le Mans with the LMP2 cars. Now granted, cars like the series-leading Cadillac doesn't meet the LMP2 guidelines, since DPi and LMP2 are a bit different in build requirements/allowances, but I think it'd be a fun race.
What I'd really love to see is a true endurance series where there's little-to-no regulation outside of safety requirements. Build what you want, make sure your drivers don't die in relatively minor incidents, and survive 24 hours of near-constant racing. Basically, bring back the early days of Can-Am cars and have some awesome races and weird as hell cars.
On a side note, this may be the last year that an LMP1 wins at Le Mans while hybrid technology is basically mandatory. With Porsche pulling the 919s out, Toyota seemingly unable to keep the TS050s running long enough to win the race, and ByKolles being a joke, I wouldn't be surprised to see an LMP2 win next year (and Oreca almost pulled it off this year anyway). If it happens to be a Riley Tech/Multimatic car, I guess that would sort of half count as an American victory.
Has Porsche's withdrawal been announced? The rumors are floating around, but to my knowledge that has so far been all that they are. I have to believe Toyota is going to get over the hump at some point soon, anyway--they've been trying on and off for 30 years. Besides, if they're running next year without legit competition, they can afford a proper tortoise/hare strategy that should see them get at least one care cleanly home.
The glorious thing about top-end prototypes is that they are absolutely spectacular. The problem is that they're spectacularly expensive, and that makes them vulnerable to shifting industry winds. Unfortunately, Le Mans is just too remote from our market to draw legitimate American prototype money.
I don't think it's been officially announced, but Porsche has been really hush-hush about their future involvement in the LMP1 class, which isn't a good sign. The 919 is already slower than the Toyota (see every other race result besides Le Mans), the hybrid systems in general aren't reliable (see failures in every LMP1 car this year, where only two of the seven entered cars actually finished the race), and then factor in the exorbitant cost associated with developing the 919's successor. Basically, Porsche won't enter the current 919 next year because it won't be competitive, and I doubt they'll spend the capital to evolve it to be so.
What Le Mans (actually, WEC in general) really should do is change the rules and allow the DPi cars to enter and relax a lot of the extremely expensive and unreliable hybrid tech requirements for LMP1. They killed Audi by changing the fueling allowances for diesels, they'll kill Porsche by requiring more and more out of the hybrid systems because that makes Toyota happy, and then once Toyota is the only one left, WEC LMP1 ceases to exist because a one-make race won't get anybody interested (and also runs afoul of the WEC-FIA contract requiring at least two LMP1 manufacturers, and ByKolles probably doesn't count).
on Monday. Pale blue. Had never seen or heard of them before that. Just googled it and best I can figure it was a 66. Really sweet looking ride.
Ah yes, that great story where the underdog fails, fails, fails, and THEN beats Ferrari! (Most people don't like to talk about the first few races for the GT40).
Well yes, the GT40 did lose it's first two times at Le Mans. Pretty much the entire '64 and '65 seasons were terrible for the GT40s, aside from the one race win at Daytona in '65. Sometimes it takes some time to find all the failure points in your cars - racing history is littered with cars that failed before winning big. Even Audi, the most dominant Le Mans program ever, lost the first year they entered the R8. But once Ford figured the GT40 out, it won 4 times in a row, including beating the Porsche 917 in the '69 race, a car that dominated much of early 1970s racing.
Audi actually entered two entirely different prototypes in the same season before it developed the proper R8 that won everything in the early 00s.
Saw those cars up close and personal at Mid-Ohio and Mosport, they were magnificent.
To your point: Yes, it takes time to develop a winner, unless you hit on a magical formula blows everything out of the water right away. Le Mans history is littered with makes that took time to develop the right package, and so is the old IMSA GTP series.
I got the worst sunburn of my entire life at the ALMS race at Mid-Ohio in 2008. Still totally worth it.
I still remember first seeing minivans on my own street right there in the 1983-84 timeframe, and within a few years, being that it was a neighborhood with a ton of school-aged kids at the time, it was almost the only car you saw for considerable stretches. We even had an Astro from one of the first years they became available. Definitely a game-changing introduction to the American market.
Very very functional.
However, I wish they still made more AWD minivans.
I love Jeeps and they are super reliable. My current favorite is the Challenger. I have a Scat Pak and I love it and what they have done with the Hellcat and Demon is amazing! Pure American muscle car power at its best.
Great in tough driving conditions - especially snow and ice. Not the smoothest of rides and are usually gas hogs but that's ok by me. The reliability may vary by model. My experience is more with the offroad geared vehicles such as the Liberty and Wrangler moreso than the Cherokee, Patriot, Compass,etc.
#/media/File:World-War-II-military-deaths-in-Europe-by-theater-year.png){kind=link}
at that greenhouse.