GM likely has a “Raiders of the Lost Ark”-style warehouse full of forgotten artifacts from the company’s century-plus in business. All the Chevrolet production records? In there, probably. Harley Earl’s frozen head? Stuffed away back there too. And right between them, maybe, are all the hundreds if not thousands of Fisher Body Craftsman’s Guild models that boys across the country sold to GM during the decades-long run of the contest. As Dean’s Garage noted this week, the models are collectively one of the greatest missing pieces of GM history.
* Anybody can throw together some “inspirational” quote-laden image and throw it out on the Internet: Take for instance the Henry Ford quote I slapped together in less then a minute here using a Creative Commons image and a half-remembered, unresearched quote. (It’s actually “History is more or less bunk,” from a 1916 Chicago Tribune interview.) Mac’s Motor City Garage took a look this week at other unresearched, misattributed, out-of-context and outright fabricated quotes from automotive history that too many people take as gospel.
Photo by TTTNIS.
* In the United States, the four-door hardtop petered out in the Sixties and Seventies, but as Aaron Severson at Ate Up With Motor showed us this week, the Japanese carmakers kept the bodystyle alive for decades afterward.
* We know that Ben Smith, the originator of the Ford Skyliner retractable hardtop, tried it out on both the Continental Mark II and on Ford Mustangs, but the design also made its way to at least one other 1960s Ford vehicle, the Australian Falcon. Curbside Classic has more on the car.
* Finally, probably one of the most unremarkable features of any car, the glovebox, does have a history of its own, as Patrick Smith related this week.
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