I got to thinking about cars last night. We drive a Corolla which, while very fuel efficient and quite a nice car to drive but it is not what I would call stylish. One of the things that is a hallmark of any trip taken with people from work is that we discuss cars. This is a logical sort of a thing to be doing as we are typically driving around.
There are several cars that, while I would almost certainly never own one or probably even test drive one, really catch my eye. As an example, the current rebirth of the Dodge Challenger is awesome to look at in just about every measurable way.
That is just a very, very cool car. Every time I see one on the highway I track it until it blows out of sight (though the first time I saw one, it was doing about 85kph in the far left lane on the 401 just east of Whitby. Sort of an odd way to drive such a beast). If Chrysler weren’t tanking terribly now, things like this would be making money for them hand over fist as the Boomers get to their ‘all this disposable income’ stage of life. Somewhere in my parents’ house there is a half-completed model of an original Challenger (real rubber tires and functional rack & pinion steering!) that I should maybe go and find and finish.
As much as I like the above, I would really, really like to see styles like this come back (and maybe in something a little more useful than PT Cruiser, thanks):
We could also stand to have more Zeppelins around and if we could make ‘wearing a fedora’ a more socially acceptable habit at the same time, that’d be neat. I’m pretty sure I was born at just about the right time, technology-wise but I do not care for what passes for fashion. This is a whole ‘nother post that will probably occur at some future date, though.
The specific car I was thinking about today was one that an old friend’s boss owned. I got to go to Mopar fest about 8 years ago because my friend had charge of his boss’s 1957 Imperial (I’m not sure which model it was, but it looked very much like the one below:).
His was marginally less Americanized but was otherwise very similar in appearance. The thing had a train whistle instead of a horn. Cars like this, I’m pretty sure, are the reason we had a Baby Boom in the post WWII years. It definitely had something to do with the troops coming back from war but I think the ridiculously over-sized back seats that are part and parcel of behemoths like this played at least some kind of role. I got to ride in the front seat of the vehicle in question and it was bigger than the couch in my living room in just about every dimension.