Indie Auto

2001-10 Chrysler PT Cruiser shows limitations of retro design

by Steve in Gallery 5

One of the qualities that distinguished the 2001-to-2010 Chrysler PT Cruiser from most other retro designs was that it wasn’t an homage to a specific car. That presumably gave designers more flexibility to improvise. However, the downside was that the PT Cruiser didn’t have an obvious next step design-wise because there was no legacy to build upon like, say, with the Volkswagen Beetle. In a very real sense, the PT Cruiser was a disposable design exercise. It had a postmodern quality in that it evoked 1930s cars while being so generic that it could have been built by [...]

1965-68 GM big cars: The end of different strokes

April 28, 2025 12

(EXPANDED FROM 7/21/2023) General Motors had one of those “be careful what you ask for” problems. In 1962 the automaker captured three-fourths of the premium-priced, big-car market. This was a key reason why GM sold roughly half of [...]

The San Juan Islands force car drivers to slow way down

April 27, 2025 0

America’s automobile culture tends to encourage doing everything fast. However, if you insist on taking your car to the San Juan Islands, you have no choice but to slow way down. That’s because you can only get there by ferry. The San [...]

Should the Ford Motor Company have kept the Edsel alive?

by Steve in Quotes 4

Automotive historian Thomas E. Bonsall argued that the 1958 Edsel wasn’t a flop and that the Ford Motor Company shouldn’t have given up on the brand so quickly. The “real failure in the Edsel saga” had little to do with the car itself, Bonsall insisted in his book, Disaster in Dearborn: The Story of the Edsel. Instead, Ford management failed to recognize that the [...]

Will the Slate Truck be the closest thing you can get to a modern simple car?

April 29, 2025 14

(EXPANDED FROM 4/25/2025) With average new-car prices exceeding $50,000 and tariffs threatening to push them higher, now would seem to be an ideal time for the return of the simple car. A particularly intriguing example is a [...]

How Brooks Stevens’s designs for a postwar compact Willys evolved

April 24, 2025 8

(EXPANDED FROM 4/15/2022) Lately we have been talking about early-50s compacts, so I thought it was a good time to expand on aborted proposals from Willys. Prior to World War II this automaker had the strongest presence in the compact [...]

Was the 2002-5 Ford Thunderbird two-seater inspired or stupid?

by Steve in Fake Design 10

I have mixed feelings about the 2002-5 Ford Thunderbird. I am glad the automaker brought back the storied nameplate and think that this generation had a few interesting design touches. That said, the car strikes me as bigger than was appropriate for a two seater. That resulted in it looking like an embarrassing caricature of the original T-Bird. Indeed, [...]

It’s too bad that the late-70s big Chrysler didn’t become a stretched Volare

April 21, 2025 34

(EXPANDED FROM 12/30/2022) This story operates on two levels. The first one is how the car-buff media could be wrong in its predictions about future products. The second level looks at how slow the Chrysler Corporation was in coming [...]

Knudsen’s favored 1972 Mark IV design borrowed from the Eldorado

April 16, 2025 7

(EXPANDED FROM 8/5/2022) A few years ago Dean’s Garage posted a fascinating story about the battle over the 1972 Lincoln Continental Mark IV’s styling. Jim and Cheryl Farrell (2022) described how a design proposal championed by [...]

Richard Teague interview hints at why he needed stronger oversight at AMC

April 8, 2025 10

Lately I have been listening to an interview David Crippen did with Richard Teague in 1985. This was a few years after Teague retired from leading the design staff of American Motors (Wikipedia, 2025). The interview was frustrating because [...]

Richard Langworth’s death raises questions about auto history’s future

by Steve in Readings 0

Indie Auto reader Zachary Morecraft suggested in the “Story Idea Bank” that we do a piece on Richard M. Langworth, who died February 20 at the age of 83. Langworth was such a towering presence within the American auto history field that I am surprised his passing has not generated more attention. Wikipedia (2025) lists three-dozen auto history books that [...]