Driving in my car
I got nothing I feel like talking about today so here's something out of my email. I owned this exact 60 Dodge Dart. Bought it as a relic in the late 80s and spent a lot of time and money restoring it. Sadly, I lost it in the divorce and the ex managed to trash it in a just a few weeks, as was his wont. Anyway, the photo comes from this place where he has a whole lot of old cars that old fogeys like me will remember.
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Labels: my life
posted by Libby Spencer at 3:06 PM
6 Comments:
Sorry about the mean ex, Libby ...
Love the car link, so I guess we have one thing in common besides partisan hostility toward the other.
Yeah, the ex was really bad. Made me give him everything I owned before he would sign the papers. But, it's just stuff. It was worth it.
What ever happened to the optimism and exuberance behind those designs?
Now we'd rather cower in giant, unwieldy, military looking vehicles or buzz around in nasty-looking bits of boxy, grinning Japanese futurism with our hats on backwards.
Really Fogg. I miss the days when cars had personality.
One used to be able to tell what was following you from the headlights alone - an important thing to some of us.
Now they all have the same lights, the same little flap in the back, the same downward sloping roof line, the same grinning grill. . .
As any industry matures, we get fewer suppliers, fewer choices from each one and more supremacy of style over engineering as form swallows function. It makes less and less economic sense for industry to cater to anything but the median consumer and anything outside the needs of the first standard deviation becomes more expensive and less available. It's more profitable, for instance, to make a slow car and advertise it as fast than it is to make a fast car.
I don't know that I ever could tell what was following me by the shape of the headlights, but I do remember when the cars all had different faces. I loved that. And you could tell something about people by what car they drove.
Nowadays I could care less about having a new car or what car I drive. They all look the same to me.
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