(UPDATED FROM 10/9/2020) Cars plastered with bumper stickers are a relatively rare occurrence in western Washington state, but they are most likely to be found where college students frequent. When I started taking pictures of well-decorated cars, […]
“Chrysler says its financial troubles are caused, in part, by safety and emissions laws that penalize it more than GM or Ford. It costs Chrysler ‘almost twice as much as it will cost GM’ to […]
My undergraduate education mainly focused on journalism, but I did take a public relations class. What I remember most about it were case studies that analyzed how corporations responded to crises. The faculty member emphasized […]
(EXPANDED FROM 5/2/2022) Whatever else one might say about the 1971-73 Buick Riviera, its styling did represent a heroic level of resistance to the brougham look then sweeping through the U.S. auto industry. Instead of […]
(EXPANDED FROM 7/10/2023) Last Friday the Public Broadcasting Service aired the second of Joe Ligo’s six half-hour episodes about American Motors, which focused on how the automaker navigated the 1960s (go here). In sync with […]
Automotive News’ April 28 front page reminded me of a daily newspaper announcing the start of a war. Rather than the usual assortment of product launches and resume-polishing profiles of auto executives, the industry journal […]
(EXPANDED FROM 3/27/2023) A Popular Science road test ranked the 1971 Plymouth Valiant four-door sedan above its newest rivals among the low-priced brands — the Ford Maverick and AMC Hornet (Norbye and Dunne, 1971). That […]
Olympia, Washington was incorporated way back in 1859, and you can still see a few vestiges of its carless past in the victorian decor of some downtown buildings (Wikipedia, 2025). However, like many West Coast […]
Jack Mueller’s book on Kaiser-Frazer weighrd in on the question of why General Motors did not end up selling the automaker its Rocket V8 engine. He pointed to evidence that the Oldsmobile Division initially showed […]
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