“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 […]
(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 […]
(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 […]
Popular Science’s Jan P. Norbye and Jim Dunne criticized the quality and practicality of four 1972 premium-priced big cars. They road tested the Buick LeSabre, Chrysler Newport Royal, Mercury Monterey and Oldsmobile Delta 88. “It’s […]
Motor Trend was hardly known as the toughest of the car-buff magazines, but it nevertheless complained about inadequate brakes on the 1967 Cadillac Eldorado. A road test found that the Eldorado’s stopping distances from 60 […]
Last month Indie Auto made fun of articles written with artificial intelligence by running a fake piece about the 1950 Studebaker (go here). The infamous bullet-nosed car deserves more attention than that, so let’s take […]
The 1972 Ford Torino was a particularly big deal. The automaker had bestowed upon its mid-sized offerings the first all-new platform since they were introduced in 1962. Ford ditched unit-body construction and increased exterior dimensions […]
The argument that big vehicles are safer than small ones has been floating around since imports first made inroads in the U.S. during the late-1950s. For example, in 1958 Road & Track magazine quoted the […]
Jim Dunne, Popular Science’s Detroit editor, made a number of predictions in the first half of 1972 that didn’t pan out. For example, in the January issue he stated that for 1973 both AMC and […]
The shift to smaller cars was happening before the first oil embargo, which stretched from October 1973 through March 174 (Wikipedia, 2023). In an October 1972 column, Popular Science Automotive Editor Jan P. Norbye walked […]
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