My son and I made our annual trek to the Double SARRC / Double MARRS club race Saturday morning. As in years past, it was a great event, featuring many classes of racing around Virginia International Raceway (VIR)’s full course.
Much better looking than its Rubbermaid-like sedan version, the first-generation Toyota Camry Solara is blessed with a remarkably cohesive, pleasing shape, neither too restrained nor too overdone like its successor.
Toyota finally decided to spin off the coupe version of their best-selling Camry in 1999, giving it a distinctive name and distancing it styling-wise—without completely severing all visual connections—from the Camry sedan. While most consider the Solara’s design just as bland as that of its four-door sibling, I think the (slight) bit of added design dash serves the shape very well, elevating it from “completely anonymous” to the realm of “tasteful and tailored.” The strong character line emphasizing the car’s beltline and tying its two ends together relieves what would otherwise be a very slab-sided, bathtub-like shape and gives the Solara just the right amount of visual detail.
The first-gen Solara had the added bonus of being available with a 5-speed manual transmission, generating a bit more interest as far as enthusiasts are concerned, though it will be said that particular option seems to be as scarce as hen’s teeth, the vast majority of buyers having decided to forgo the pleasure of rowing their own gears.
It’s a delightful shape. Find me a stickshift and I’ll happily assign it to commuter duty.
Image credits: edmunds.com, autos.msn.com, cardomain.com
Editor’s note: This post is part of an ongoing series featuring cars whose design we find appealing, in contrast to mainstream opinion. Read the other installments here:
Call it The Car Diet Hall of Fame. The automotive win-win scenario, losing poundage benefits every performance metric, from acceleration and braking to handling and fuel economy. The only conceivable downside, besides the potential for a loss of interior space, is the surrender of protective bulk attenuating the force of a collision, but careful engineering can mitigate that disadvantage almost entirely.
Adding weight, more features, more space, more heft seems to be the path of least resistance when it comes to car development. The following, then, represent somewhat anomalous engineering solutions; they’re the exceptions, and deserve to be recognized as such:
1993-1995 Mazda RX-7. Its explosive performance was as much a result of its 255 hp twin-turbo rotary engine as its 2,850 lb curb weight, a figure the wizards at Mazda managed to pare down by 100 lbs compared to the previous generation.
1994-1997 Lexus LS400. Already covered in our “Underrated Lookers” series, Lexus was able to trim the original LS400’s weight by 200 lbs for the follow-up, down to a remarkable (especially nowadays) 3,600 lbs. Its lighter weight directly contributed to a Car and Driver comparo victory over such lofty competition as the BMW E38 and Mercedes W124 E-Class.
2014-present Mazda 6. When I first got wind that a new 6 was forthcoming, as much a fan as I am of the looks and execution, I was nervous about its performance vis-a-vis its competition, since I thought a 145 hp 4-cylinder would be the only engine available with a manual transmission option. Turns out not only was my worry unfounded—the new 6 weighs in at a very trim 3,100 lbs, making it easier for the supposed engine’s meager power to move around—the 189 hp engine is the lowest output available, and that with a 6-speed manual option to boot. Looks, handling, weight, power: Win-win-win-win.
9th-Generation Ford Thunderbird. The 8th generation really represented the initial downsizing after the brutish land yacht wasteland of the ’70s, but the 9th generation was arguably when the Thunderbird finally found its newer, smaller footing, appropriating the very serviceable Fox chassis from the contemporary Mustang and the clean aero styling from the Taurus. The newer, smaller package holds a lot of appeal.
Lotus Elise. Singlehandedly responsible for the renaissance of the moribund brand, the Elise’s back-to-basics philosophy is almost entirely built around its featherlight, sub-2,000 lb weight. 500 more pounds and it would have been a non-starter, and Lotus would most likely be dead.
Given that cars that undergo a diet are almost universally praised for their dynamic qualities, while the additional space (if present) and features of the outgoing cars are rarely missed, it’s surprising that more automakers don’t prioritize light weight.
Image credits: autocognito.com, edmunds.com
I was against it before I was for it.
The standard line of argument against debadging hinges on pride in a particular make and model. I’ve heard variations to the tune of “such-and-such car is one of the most prestigious and revered models to be made by this-and-that automaker; you should leave it on as a tribute to the car’s pedigree,” and so on.
I understand that; it used to be my very own line of thinking, but several years ago, during an online forum discussion about the subject, a contributor gave me a new perspective on debadging. He wrote:
Take it off.
I take any adhesive badges off my cars. If there weren’t holes/indents on some, I’d take them all off.
In general, I’m sick of corporatism and being constantly marketed to. Why should I carry and display a corporate logo wherever I go?
I like the cleaner look. I don’t know why I need to clutter up the rear, just to make sure everyone knows it is what it is. Who cares? It really is silly when you think about it.
I wouldn’t go as far as removing the actual brand logos like roundels and emblems—larger design elements of the car are often built around them and don’t work without them—but his overall point really struck a chord. After all, who are the model badges intended to inform? Those who don’t know what the car is; true enthusiasts are aware of what they’re looking at by the car’s lines and details alone. Why festoon my car’s decklid just to advertise what I have to those who aren’t interested in the first place? Like the contributor points out, from a certain perspective, it is a bit ridiculous. And, like him, I appreciate the cleaner no-badge look as well.
Needless to say, all my cars receive the dental-floss-and-adhesive-remover treatment soon after the title is signed over.
As with single-point fuel injection, the design of Opel’s cam-in-head (CIH) engine was an attempt to bridge the old and the new, to incorporate some up-and-coming features while using as many existing parts as possible. It’s a transitional form, as it were, between ’60s and ’80s tech.
Fitted to the 1.9l, 4-cylinder blocks of the engines of Opel’s GT and Manta coupes, among others, the CIH head is a hybrid of overhead-cam and pushrod technology. The camshaft is located in the cylinder head, as in an OHC engine, but the valvetrain still uses a pushrod setup’s rocker arms and lifters. It’s as if someone had taken a pushrod design and simply moved the cam upward until the rods themselves were rendered superfluous.
Advantages? The CIH engine was obviously an easier sell to Opel’s corporate overlords at GM, reusing as it did much existing pushrod valve gear while still offering some of the benefits of a true OHC engine. The valvetrain is more compact than in a pushrod engine and its associated inertia is much less, allowing a redline north of 10,000 rpm for race-prepped CIH engines with roller rockers and suitable springs and cam profile. Hydraulic lifters can be easily used, and in case they aren’t, valve adjustments are much more straightforward than they would be if the cam operated directly on the lifters. And significantly for the Opel GT, with its low-profile hood, the location of the camshaft farther down meant the engine’s overall height is lower than if the camshaft were truly overhead.
Downsides of the CIH engine mainly revolve around the standard limitations of a non-crossflow, 2-valve design, including relatively poor airflow and necessary compromises in combustion chamber design. Also, the cylinder head casting is relatively complex, which introduces a risk of cracking, and the head was only ever made out of cast iron, incurring a weight penalty over an aluminum head. And whatever the valvetrain’s inertial advantages over a pushrod design, there still exists considerably more valve gear than a more direct OHC layout.
Opel’s cam-in-head engine was a stepping stone, but a unique and noteworthy one.
Image credits: curbsideclassic.com
Editor’s note: This post is part of an ongoing series spotlighting obscure automotive engineering solutions. Read the other installments here:
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Dug these up recently from an old hard drive. I don’t know about you, but whenever I’m interested in a car (I don’t even have to actually own it), I’ll create a new folder on my computer simply as a repository of noteworthy pictures and documents. This post illuminates the contents of one such folder. It’s neat to see Toyota’s advertising change over the years, and to a slightly lesser degree, the emphasis of the ads. Enjoy.
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Interesting that neither of the Mark 2 Supra ads feature the nose of the car…
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Have I mentioned lately how much I miss my old ’88 Turbo?
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Editor’s note: This post is part of an ongoing series chronicling interesting automotive advertisements and brochures. Read the other installments here:
A couple of New Years ago, I drove the kids in my 1995 BMW 525i back to my parents’ house for our annual holiday visit. My car’s original owner is a lady who lives on their cul-de-sac. She replaced the E34 with a new-ish E90 325i, but still misses her old car quite a bit.
I parked by the curb on a Friday afternoon, and she saw her old car for the first time since selling it to me that past spring. She had to run to an appointment, but the incident reminded me to ask her something I’d been wondering about for a while. So I sent her an e-mail later that weekend asking for her story of the car’s purchase.
Here’s her reply. It made me really happy. Enjoy:
I would love to tell you the story:
In about 1994 or sometime around there, I was in Germany on business and rented a car for business purposes, as I was traveling to another city for a second meeting. The car they offered me was a BMW 328i, and I drove it from Frankfurt far into the countryside (I can’t remember the town), on the Autobahn. OMG, that just took me right out re: BMW’s. It was a manual shift.
I had driven a manual shift earlier in my life (school bus in high school, old Volkswagens, Mazda 626, which I had at the time), so a manual shift was very much at home to me, and frankly, what I consider…shall we say…driving.
Back in the US, I started thinking about how nice it would be to have a BMW, but what a dream that would be. I went to the first dealership, and thought they were snotty and arrogant, but I did connect with a sales person there who took me for a test drive in a white 525 with black interior. It was pouring rain and we’d stopped on a dime in the rain on a back road, so that was impressive to me.
But black interior? High price? Arrogant dealership? Automatic? That was 4 votes for NO.
Sometime later I was having dinner with my then insurance agent, Peggy, and her husband Ed. Over the course of dinner I learned that Ed loves BMWs and is always on the lookout for good deals. In fact, Ed loved hanging out at a second dealership in Raleigh and knew the guys there. He’d be on the lookout, but you know how people say those things, so I didn’t think much of it.
And then, about 4 or 5 months later, out of the blue, it was December, and Ed called and said that the second dealership had a 525i with manual shift in house, at the price of $34,000. It had 4,000 miles on it because it had been driven by an Executive at the recently opened BMW plant in South Carolina, so it had been really packaged nicely for the Executive (hence the burl dash, which was new at the time). He talked to the sales person and they would hold it for me if I was interested.
I went to the dealership, drove the car, and (remember this was December, 1995, and car salesmen were not as egalitarian or enlightened in the awareness of Women as Legitimate Customers). The sales men (I emphasize the men word here) were commenting with some shock that I could drive a manual shift. (Huh?) They couldn’t imagine that I would want a manual shift.
OK, but I did and yes, I bought the car. I had incorporated my business, so bought it with profits from my business. I paid cash for the car. That same unenlightened salesman said (brace yourself for what’s coming), “So, little lady, who’s going to be paying for your car?” I replied, “I am.” “Well, I know that you will be making the transaction today, but who holds the loan, or who is giving you the money?”
I looked him square in the eye and said, “I own a business. I earned money in my business to buy this car. There is no loan. There is no one else. I am paying cash for this car. TODAY. If you have a problem with that, I can speak with someone else.”
He sputtered and said something about little ladies today, blah blah blah, and we proceeded with the transaction.
I only mention that as laughter as to how times have changed. I noticed that salesman was not there very long afterwards.
For the entire time I owned that car, I had all service done at the dealership, as you can see from the records. I never had one lick of trouble with it (except for a water pump that went out 3 years ago in 100 degree heat, and a local tire shop replaced that in an emergency).
All service was performed by the same mechanic, Conrad, their top mechanic, until he moved to Virginia. Then I interviewed Conrad’s recommended replacement, who I think was William.
The service manager at the dealership in Raleigh, Kelly, knows me and this car like his own child. They were always good to me.
And that car represented my business ownership, my success beyond my dreams as a small business owner, and a real sense of pride for me. It also drove like a dream. I “fit” in the bucket seat (no small feat for a 5′ 1″ tall woman with short legs)
I had grown up in a large family where we were always limping along with second hand cars and Dad doing the repair, and we crossed our fingers on big trips, so it was important to me to be religious about preventative maintenance.
Mostly that car represented to me Dreams Realized, and I’m not just talking owning a BMW (I was always a little embarrassed about that, I don’t like the Ego stories that people make up. It was always less to me about having a BMW as having a nice car that I had didn’t have to worry about, that I could be proud to drive up in, that I paid for from my business and that I loved loved loved to drive…It was so much about the way that car drives).
Thank you for taking such good care of this car, and for understanding that sometimes a car is more than a car.
And thank you for asking…
Happy New Year,
B.
I realize some of you will always be partial to beauties such as the delectable E9 coupe, the exquisitely-proportioned E31 8-Series or the swoopy 507 roadster, but to me, BMW hasn’t made a better-looking car than the E24 6-Series. They just nailed it.
Frankly, the bumpers make or break the styling. Up until the final two years of the car’s long 13-year model run, the E24s bound for the US were fitted with hideous, protruding “diving board” crash bumpers—functional to be sure, but an order of magnitude worse to look at than the lovely, discreet Euro-spec pieces. But in 1988, BMW standardized the design across all markets with their so-called “world bumpers,” fitted to the E24 seen here. They still don’t complement the car’s lines quite as well as the Euro bumpers, but if the example seen in these photos is any indication, they do a fine job in their own right.
As an aspirational car, fit center caps to the 17″ wheels and position the badges correctly, and wouldn’t be ashamed in the least to be seen behind the wheel of this machine. Quite the opposite, in fact.
The rest of this photo collection can be viewed on the BigCoupe.com boards.
Image credits: Gregory Markarian
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I recently bought this issue on eBay. It has a fantastic review of the then-new Mazda RX-7 GSL-SE, an uprated variant of the first-generation car powered by larger 13B rotary engine. Between that and a road test of the contemporary Audi 4000 quattro (which I have owned and loved), I decided it was time to be able to turn the pages of the issue for myself.
Reading it was a delight. The road tests seemed to be far more detailed then than now, with fewer pictures and more involved descriptions of the driving experience. And then there were the advertisements, nearly worth the price of admission alone. I’ve scanned a few notable ones.
At top is great spread beautifully detailing Audi’s new quattro AWD system, and below is an ad for the Mercury Cougar, a car whose looks have not aged quite as gracefully as its (now defunct) manufacturer might have hoped:
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Mazda purchased the centerfold spread of the magazine to bring the buying public up to speed on the intricacies of its newest flavor of RX-7:
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Chevrolet’s ad is a bit of a head-scratcher, juxtaposing jaunty Southwestern enthusiasm with words like “synonymous,” “vernacular” and “refined:”
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The angle of the photograph in Ford’s spot for the Mustang SVO cleverly disguises the fact that the aero headlights intended for the car were not okayed by the feds until the middle of the following model year:
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Only a couple of pages apart, contrast Alfa Romeo’s wholehearted embrace of the emotional sell…
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…with BMW’s resolutely serious approach to advertising their 533i:
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Finally, we have a couple of non-car ads; first, one for Kenwood’s cutting-edge tape deck audio system with “wings” that swing out:
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And one featuring Recaro seats, examples of which many enthusiasts would pay dearly for nowadays:
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My automotive history sweet spot exists somewhere around the mid-’80s, so having the issue on hand to peruse was a real treat.
Editor’s note: This post is part of an ongoing series chronicling interesting automotive advertisements and brochures. Read the other installments here:
