That Land-Rover is from the first series. The flat sides is the giveaway. The next series (II or III) had slanted sides from halfway up. I don't know when the next series began. Later ones of course had the headlamps on the front of the fenders. In theory the aluminum body work would not rust...
Oh, and about those cars. Ramblers, if you remember them (haven't been mentioned lately), were considered to be basic, sensible cars. Maybe they quit making them because people stopped being sensible. The Land-Rover that I had, purchased at an American Motors dealer in Fairmont, West Virginia...
I'm not so sure we're really always believed "our" great truths. But, we manage, just the same. That's the same and I've mentioned this before in so many words. We've always had a highly refined sense of hypocrisy, of pretending things weren't what they really were. We can't fix everything...
I have also heard some things from my father (not my mother, though, who was an invalid and could barely speak) and other relatives that, shall we say, made me feel very uncomfortable. Some of the things my father said, however, only sounded bad because he was using common language of the day. I...
There's another side of the story that asks "How much difference does it make?"
Some would say, referring to almost anything, that it makes all the difference in the world. Health food enthusiasts believe what you eat can be measured down to the Nth degree and that if you deviate from the...
Part of what you're describing is called sales resistance. The rest is nothing more than deciding on what you think will satisfy you the most. I'll be the last to deny that I want things that are not necessarily the best, the most practical, the best value, the cheapest, and so on. Were it...
Oh, yes, I agree completely. It comes through in so many advertisements and commercials. It is an appeal to very natural impulses and desires, although I'm sure it predates the 1950s. You wouldn't have to do any market research to create an advertisement to appeal to one's desire to have...
I imagine that it's sometimes difficult to separate downright lies from the hyperbole that advertising has always included. Much advertising is very subtle, too. Think of the Ralph Lauren advertisements that depict a group of very well dressed young men and woman (and older folks, too) lounging...
In the early days, many car makers did not have a lot of different models in their line-up. So when GM had five or six divisions, the cars did not compete with each other so much. But when more and more really different models were introduced, probably beginning in the early 1960s when the first...
There's more to the car business than selling the most cars. They're really in the business to make money, although not necessarily for the stockholders. It's really more about making money for the upper (meaning upper, upper) management. But there's a whole bunch of business equations that...
My main point was the American car makers gave up market share to imported cars by either ignoring or abandoning certain markets. It was their decision and I'm glad they never asked me. I wouldn't have had any idea what the right thing to do would have been. Of course, ten years after the fact...
When you pose the question, what the difference between a Dodge and a Plymouth, I am reminded of the question, what is the difference between a violin and a fiddle: about $500.
Okay, it's been nearly nine hours. Nobody will admit to wanting to be a cowboy?
How about a logger? It's hard work, to be sure, maybe not as much adventure as all that, but you still get to get out of town. No one lives in a logging camp anymore, though (as far as I know), so no bunkhouse and...
The fact that Pontiac was a competition with Chevrolet, although not perhaps with Buick, was probably assumed and thought to be a Bad Thing. But that was still an assumption. When Olds disappeared as a brand, did the consumers shift to Buick? Who knows? Probably someone does but in the meantime...
You miss my point, Miss Lizzie. There were in fact different niches to be filled and my point was that GM, mainly, simply vacated those niches in the name of industrial efficiency. Critics of the automotive industry, meaning Detroit and no where else, weren't in the business of making money by...
That also reflects the way people 70 years after the fact see things differently from the way they did when the war was actually going on.
A similar argument has been made that using the atomic bomb was unnecessary because the Japanese were just about to give up anyway. Such a viewpoint has...
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