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Lancia: The Death of a Marque?

Wednesday, February 16th, 2011

Car companies die. Like the great lost cities and civilizations of antiquity, what once seemed vast, vibrant and permanent can soon end up as ruins. While I don’t mean to compare Lancia to ancient Rome, I think they’re going the same way.

Why does it happen? Usually because the brand loses its mojo; the cars aren’t as exciting as they once were, quality slips, investment drops. We buy fewer of them, the investment falls further, and soon a famous badge is in a fast, fatal, vicious cycle.

It’s not unusual. The recent recession did for Hummer, Pontiac and Saturn, and very nearly killed Saab and Chrysler, among others. The list of famous British marques that went to the wall is too long to recount. Disappointed enthusiasts blame everyone from the management (often with justification) to the press (are we supposed to advise you to buy a bad car?). But the car-buying public is the guiltiest. We’re fickle. If something better comes along, we’ll buy it. And if we don’t buy the marque we love, its parent company can’t keep making it.

But sometimes, a car company needs to be allowed to die. Lancia is owned by Fiat. Fiat was on its death-bed until the Canadian-Italian business guru Sergio Marchionne took over. Now it makes a healthy profit. But Marchionne thinks that a car group needs to make six million cars a year to get decent economies of scale, and have a future. Fiat makes just over two million. So when the US giant Chrysler went into bankruptcy protection in 2009, Marchionne took a stake in it. It didn’t cost him anything; he just provided the small car and small engine tech that Fiat does so well and Chrysler needs so desperately to satisfy US buyers with a newfound interest in fuel economy.

Marchionne makes no secret of the fact that he’d like to merge Fiat and Chrysler, but he’s already working hard to rationalize the weirdly diverse range of cars he’s wound up with. Some of the cars on the edges of his new empire are so distinctive that they won’t be compromised; small Fiats, Jeeps, the big Dodge pick-up trucks.

But Lancia, stuck in the middle, its sales slow and its distinctiveness long lost, is suffering. There will be a new Ypsilon supermini, but the other three cars in the range will all be rebadged Chryslers, built in the US or Canada. One will be the Mondeo-sized Chrysler 200C, recently introduced but based on the old Chrysler Sebring and Dodge Avenger, the very definition of dull-driving automotive white goods, and the kind of unimaginative fodder that got the US car industry into such strife in the first place.

Next up is a Lancia-badged version of the new Chrysler 300C. This was a great car when it first went on sale in 2004; it probably saved Chrysler. But even then it borrowed some of its underpinnings from a 1996 Mercedes, and it’s unclear just how new the ‘all-new’ 300 Chrysler showed at this year’s Detroit motor show actually is. It’s certainly a lot more insipid-looking than the original.

And lastly, there will be a Lancia version of the Voyager people carrier, which is quite good as people carriers go. But what do any of these cars have to do with Italy, or Lancia’s storied past? Nothing, other than the badge stuck on the nose. Nobody who loves Lancia will buy them. You might suffer one as a rental car at Turin airport, or buy one if you just don’t care about cars and a dealer makes it so cheap you can’t refuse; even in 2008, desperate dealers were offering a buy one, get one free deal on the Dodge on which the mid-size Lancia will be based.

Nobody is fooled by cheap, cynical rebadging. This kind of farce has produced some of the worst cars in history. Like the ‘Saabaru’, officially the Saab 9-2X, a weird-looking mash-up of a Subaru Impreza with a Saab nose that US buyers didn’t suffer for long. Or the Alfa Arna of the mid-eighties, a car that famously attempted to marry Italian passion to Japanese reliability, but got it the wrong way round to the lasting shame of all concerned.

I’d actually rather see Lancia put into suspended animation than suffer this. It could always be resurrected when Marchionne’s plans for world domination have worked out and he has the cash to develop a real Lancia. At least we won’t have to look at them on UK roads, where Chryslers will stay Chryslers. But elsewhere, I worry the damage to Lancia’s image will be terminal, and ruins will be all that remain.

Tags: Chrysler, Dodge, Fiat, Italia, Lancia
Posted in Features | 26 Comments »

The Art of the Muscle Car

Thursday, December 16th, 2010

The American muscle car: whether you worship the road that they tear up or turn your nose up at their raw, unrefined power — deep down everyone harbours a secret desire to own one. A Dodge Charger isn’t a lifelong partner; it’s a heady fling that is bound up in the remaining threads of the American dream and wrapped in celluloid.

American muscle cars are synonymous with the open road of Vanishing Point, the hatred of The Man found in Two-Lane Blacktop and are achingly cool and beautifully offensive.

In short, part of what makes a Plymouth Hemi ‘Cuda and its brawny cousins so tempting is that top quality examples of this bygone genre are unattainable, and this side of the pond, wholly anachronistic.

Tear a genuine muscle car away from its natural habitat and import it to some bucolic, English scene and you’ll destroy their glamour and turn them into fairground attractions.

David Newhardt’s Art of the Muscle Car is the perfect coffee table tome for lovers of these beastly beauties. The book manages to quench your visual thirst for muscle without destroying the fantasy.

The format is simple and accessible: a short paragraph covers the necessary meet-and-greet, before four-to-five choice shots show the engine, badge, bodywork, and interior of all the most important muscle car models. There are the basic stats and facts, but this isn’t anorak territory.

And what accounts for the rise and fall of this brand of All American hero? For the author by the end of the 1960s the custom Hotrod scene had withered away from its post war roots. The manufacturers stepped up to the mark and released factory bred rods that could outrod the rodders.

Newhardt takes us through the muscle years of 1964 – 1979 in three sections; the innocent years, the excessive years and the declining years; covering 47 different incarnations of pure power. Among those are nestled a few firm favourites: the 1970 Dodge Challenger T/A, the 1970 Plymouth Road Runner Superbird and the 1965 Pontiac GTO.

Each has its own story, both on the street and on the strip. Take the 1970 Dodge Challenger. In spite of being firmly placed in the muscle car hall of fame thanks to Vanishing Point, it was a model that only lasted a year. Why? Because of the insurance companies growing reluctance to insure muscle cars. It wasn’t even a particularly successful model, finishing fourth overall on the Trans Am circuit.

That same year, the flamboyantly clad Plymouth Road Runner Superbird was released. With it’s enormous spoiler, Loony Toons badge and track hugging front end, visually the Road Runner verged on downright ridiculous. But this “substance over style” road guzzler was designed for success and succeed it did, accelerating all the way through the checkered flag at the Daytona 500.

As Brock Yates finely puts it in the book’s introduction; “We will never truly revisit the decade of the muscle car, but boy, what a ride we had.” This might just be the perfect antidote to an Englishman’s phantom nostalgia for a dream he never really knew.

Tags: Charger, david newhardt, Daytona, Dodge, GTO, Hemi, muscle car, Plymouth, Pontiac, the art of the muscle car
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Homage to the Winged Warrior...

Monday, November 1st, 2010

These pics of the homologation special from Dodge in 1969 really evokes the difference in approach to car design and marketing over these last forty years. The Dodge was an extreme machine, but still (almost) accessible.

Race specials of our current crop of supercars are only a realistic purchase for sports stars and oil oligarchs — the Daytona 500 retained an everyman accessibility. It retailed at relatively lowly $4000, but despite this very reasonable price point, they found it hard to shift the 505 cars they made to qualify for homologation.

The slippery profile, aerodynamic nose and huge spolier must have had something to do with it. With a drag co-efficient of 0.28 (approaching that of many sports cars of the last decade) the car was a groundbreaking piece of aero. Ironically at the time the fluid lines were considered a little ugly — against the grain of standard musclecar geometry.

It must have been a beast to drive, but this Nascar bred aerodynamic monster could negotiate the oval at 200MPH. No other car could match it for top speed — and in 11 years of racing the car won 124 NASCAR Cup races and took three drivers to five championships. The oval speed record the car achieved wasn’t surpassed until 1983.
From today’s perspective, the car is a period classic laden heavily with burly, pre fuel crisis portent. When you consider the age in which it was conceived and that incredible top-end speed, it’s hardly surprising that these cars are fast approaching legend.

Tags: Charger Daytona, Dodge
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Show Girls

Wednesday, September 29th, 2010

With the Paris car show looming in the headlights, we thought it timely to devote a daily post to our occasional study of automotive marketing.

One the the great and enduring perennials of any car industry event is, of course, the Promotional Girl.

And despite the fact that Beauty Contest –baiting political correctness is a little long-in-the-tooth and that even liberated laddettism seems quaint and sort of nineties-ish these days, there seems to be no sign of car companies slowing down there search for the perfect female figure to sell their product.

Fashions change of course, and the looks sported by promo people ebbs and flows with the cultural currents — but our favourite era remains the late sixties and early seventies, a time when a naïve sort of psychedelia seemed to infuse everything and knee-high boots were par for the course.

The concept cars from that era – all wedgy and space-aged — were fairly out there, and the look of the girls were pretty alien too. Here is a little selection of our faves.

Tags: Alfa Romeo, Chevrolet, Dodge, Ferrari, Girls!, Lancia
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Ben Oliver's Screen Burn

Wednesday, August 11th, 2010

The most famous movie car is James Bond’s Aston, but in Ian Fleming’s novels he drives three Bentleys, starting with a ’33 4.5-litre Blower and moving onto a MkIV and a MkII Continental. None features anything more impressive than a pistol in the glovebox. The only Aston mentioned in the books is a DB MkIII, which gets reinforced steel bumpers, a homing signal and a concealed drawer for Bond’s Walther PPK; the famous gadgetry only appears in the films. Our hero drove some terrible old crap too; our top three ‘cars Bond should never have driven’ are the 2CV from For Your Eyes Only, the AMC Hornet from The Man with the Golden Gun, and the insipid BMW Z3 which makes a mercifully brief appearance in Goldeneye.

Bond also drove a film fake. The Z8 which gets sawn in half in The World is Not Enough is actually a replica built over a Cobra kit car chassis. It wasn’t the expense of wrecking the real thing that made BMW build it; it just couldn’t risk the wrath of Bond fans by putting him back in the Z3, but production of the Z8 hadn’t started by the time filming began. Other screen fakes include Ferris Bueller’s dad’s ’61 Ferrari 250 GT California Spider, and Crockett’s black Daytona Spider in Miami Vice, which was actually a 1980 ‘Vette underneath. Outraged, Ferrari supplied genuine Testarossas for later series, but a ‘stunt’ fake version was also built on an old DeTomaso Pantera chassis using salvaged Testarossa panels.

The most famous kit car was, of course, KITT. The Knight Industries Two Thousand was a black Pontiac Trans-Am which first hit our screens in Knight Rider in 1982, when The ‘Hoff’s bubble perm was still the height of fashion and the year 2000 seemed impossibly far off. At the launch of the show, Glen A. Larson’s production team listed the car’s specification in great detail. The talking, sentient KITT boasted incredibly futuristic features such as the rocket-assisted Super Pursuit Mode, a ‘molecular-bonded’ armour system that rendered everything, including its tyres, impervious to all attacks, and, controlling it all, a then-unimaginably huge one-gigabyte memory, or as much as an iPod Shuffle.

We’d like to think that the nine minute, forty-two second chase scene in Bullitt just ‘happened’, but in fact it took three weeks to film, an age in the low-budget late sixties, and if you look carefully the same brief panning shot is used three times. When the rear-view mirror is tilted up to show the reflection of the driver, McQueen is really at the wheel; when it’s down his place has been taken by stuntman Bud Ekins. Director Peter Yates was personally requested by McQueen after he saw the chase scene Yates shot in London for Robbery, his film about the Great Train Robbery. But even McQueen couldn’t persuade City Hall to let them shoot on the Golden Gate Bridge, the most obvious setting for a driving scene in San Francisco.

You might think that Herbie couldn’t have been anything other than a Beetle, but the Bug was ‘auditioned’ alongside other ‘quirky’ imports to the US such as Volvos and Toyotas before being given the role. By contrast, the car came first in cult road movie Vanishing Point, starring Barry ‘Petrocelli’ Newman. Chrysler gave five Dodge Challengers to Twentieth Century Fox for the car’s launch in 1970, and director Richard C. Sarafian was asked if he could make a movie with them. Some of the engine sounds were lifted from Bullitt. By the end of filming, four of the cars had been wrecked, and the fifth was stolen from the set by a hooker, but later recovered.

If Herbie the Volvo seems odd, consider this; the DeLorean in Back to the Future was almost a fridge. Writer and director Robert Zemeckis scrapped his first idea because he didn’t want kids copying the movie, climbing into them and going hypothermic. But the gullwing doors on the DeLorean proved almost as dangerous; the scenes where Michael J. Fox repeatedly bangs his head on them weren’t scripted but were inspired by the accident he had when he first tried to get in. And who makes the tyres? ‘Good Year’, of course.

Given that a total of 309 had to be built, it’s unsurprising that there are some glaring continuity errors on the Dukes of Hazzards’ General Lee, the most obvious being the different numbering used for the ‘01’ on the door. Warner Bros took the construction of the General Lee in-house when it discovered that the Valuzet brothers, who had been building and renting them to the studio under contract, had been ‘ringing’ cars deemed unsafe and written off after jumps, and sending them back to be used again. Warner Bros. issued a strict specification that every General Lee had to be built to, including how the underside should look, in an attempt to slow the tide of complaints from anoraks. But it was running out of suitable Chargers to convert, and even resorted to sending light aircraft out to spot them. Only 23 genuine Lees survive.

For attention to detail it’s hard to beat the movie adaptation of Stephen King’s novel Christine, about a possessed 1958 Plymouth Fury. By the time the movie was made in ’83 most Furies had rotted away, but the rather than switch to a more convenient car the producers seriously delayed the film’s release by spending two and half years placing ads in newspapers to assemble the 23 cars they needed to make the film. Four survive.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, no original Bluesmobiles survive. Transport for Jake and Elwood in The Blues Brothers, a dozen ’74 Dodge Monacos — “cop tires, cop suspension and cop motor — a 440 cubic-inch plant” — were prepared for the production, including one built solely to fall apart in Chicago’s Daley Plaza at the end of the film. Watch the speedo in the chase scene under Chicago’s elevated railway lines; director John Landis insists that the 120mph it shows is genuine.

Like the Bond movies, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was an Albert ‘Cubby’ Broccoli production of an Ian Fleming novel. The movie might have been ruined by the execrable Dick van Dyke, but the story has a far more credible inspiration. There were two real Chitties, both aero-engined Brooklands racers built by Louis Zborowski in the early twenties. The first, built in ’21, featured a Mercedes chassis and a 23-litre Maybach engine and was so loud that the local council in Canterbury, where it was built, passed a by-law preventing it from being driven into town.

Tags: aston martin, bmw, Charger, DeLorean, Dodge, Ferrari, James Bond, Plymouth, Pontiac, Steve McQueen, Trans-Am
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Wheels on Reels

Wednesday, August 11th, 2010

Cars started rolling just about the same time that movie cameras did. More than a century on, the movies are still in love with smell of burnt rubber. Every bit as much as their human occupants, bikes and cars are the stars of some of the greatest films ever made.

Wheel and reels collided with giant cultural impact in the ‘50s – Marlon Brando and James Dean both owe a portion of their iconic immortality to a bike and a car. Based on the infamous Hollister motorcycle-rally riot in 1947, The Wild One put a leather-clad Brando on a Triumph Thunderbird 6T as the leader of the Black Rebels Motorcycle Club – and a new symbol of masculine cool was born. Just two years later in 1955, James Dean captures the raging spirit of youth playing a deadly game of chicken in a 1946 Ford Super De Luxe in Rebel Without A Cause. The scene instantly grew in power when Dean died in a car crash just before the film was released.

But to talk about cars and bikes in the movies is really to talk about one man. Appearing in rear-view mirror of a sinister-black Dodge Charger, Steve McQueen wrapped his hands round the wheel a Ford Mustang Fastback and tore up the streets of San Francisco in ‘60s cop thriller Bullitt. Over nine minutes of tyre-screeching, wheel-locking, shock-clattering action, man and machine glinted with cool. McQueen was just getting started. He’d famously swap four wheels for two in The Great Escape, pulling off one of the greatest motorcycle scenes of all time as he pelted away from the Nazis through open countryside on a TT Special 650 Triumph. Along with the barb-wire-fence jump (pulled off by stuntman Bud Ekins), it’s been inspiring people to climb on motorbikes ever since.

McQueen loved wheels so much he even starred in Le Mans, a movie with that swapped script and story for stunning cars and incredible driving sequences. After watching McQueen rag a Porsche 911S down some deserted French lanes, we hit the track to look in awe at the speeding beauty of the Porsche 917 and the Ferrari 512S.

Only one other big-screen hero owes cars as much as McQueen: Her Majesty’s finest, Commander James Bond. Pimped out with ejector seat, machine guns and tyre-shredder, the Aston Martin DB5 became an essential 007 iconic in Goldfinger. You had to feel sorry for 007 when, in For Your Eyes Only, his Lotus Esprit Turbo was blown up and he was forced to battle gun-toting killers in a Citroën 2CV.

No question, the ‘60s were a golden age for cars and bikes in Hollywood and Britain. Despite cruelly crushing a Lamborghini Muira with an earth-mover in the opening scene, The Italian Job made Mini Coopers an unmistakable part of the first version of Cool Britannia. Then runaway bride Marianne Faithful slipped naked into a leather jumpsuit for Girl On A Motorcycle, a psychedelic cult classic about, well, you know.

But while Brando’s The Wild One got the motor running, the chopper really became a big-screen icon when Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper made Easy Rider. Powered by a Steppenwolf soundtrack the film became a counter-culture classic that changed Hollywood and made the choppers legendary. Ironically, the bikes were former police bikes – one was burned on film, the others were stolen.

It sparked a cavalcade of shonky biker flicks and a few interesting ones, including Electra Glide In Blue, in which hippie cop Robert Blake rides a Harley Electra Glide.The Harleys didn’t have it all their own way: Gregory Peck famously romanced Audrey Hepburn on a Vespa in Roman Holiday, the same scooter that would later represent youth, cool and freedom in Brit coming-of-age drama Quadrophenia.

Back on four wheels, the ‘70s taste for cool running continues with Two-Lane Blacktop, which saw musicians James Taylor and Dennis Wilson ( ‘55 Chevy) stirring the box alongside Warren Oates (‘70 Pontiac GTO) in motors that empower them to escape from The Man.

Weirdly, though, it was love bug not a speed machine that captured the hearts of ‘70s cinema-goers. Disney’s Herbie franchise saw a little white VW Beetle become one of the popular characters it’s ever created. Cars often had more personality than the stars. Anyone who’d seen the demonically possessed 1958 Plymouth Fury in John Carpenter’s cult thriller Christine knew this already.

As a new generation of teenage kicks began in the ‘80s, motors continued to be a yardstick of cool. Ferris Bueller did it all for his dad’s replica 1961 Ferrari 250 GT Spider California (“It is his love, it is his passion… it is his fault he didn’t lock the garage”). Back To The Future turned the gull-winged 1981 DeLorean DMC-12 into a time-travelling mean machine. And even sci-fi masterpieces Akira and TRON are remembered best for their neon, streaking future-bikes.

As if to strap into empty driver’s seat left by McQueen, Tom Cruise treated a Kawasaki GPz900R like an F-14 with wheels in 1986’a Top Gun. Cruise hadn’t ridden a motorbike before, but he learned in the parking lot of a California bike shop and promptly found himself in motorhead heaven. You’ll see him on a bike in everything from Mission: Impossible II to Knight & Day. His record-smashing, wheel-tilting appearance on Top Gear proved that NASCAR actioner Days Of Thunder wasn’t all acting.

Another famous Hollywood biker is Governator Arnold Schwarzenegger, who chased Sarah Connor on a Honda 750 in Terminator, before upgrading to a Harley Davidson Fatboy in the sequel and uttering the immortal line: “I need your clothes, boots and your motorcycle.”The Big Oak remains an avid motorcycle enthusiast to this day, while the Terminators in Terminator Salvation actually became motorbikes themselves.

Over the past few years of movies, bikes have been at the heart of some of cinema’s most inspiring true stories, including The Motorcycle Diaries (Che Guevara travels across South America on a a 500cc single cylinder Norton Motorcycle named La Poderosa, ‘The Mighty One’) and The World’s Fastest Indian (Anthony Hopkins stars as Kiwi speed-bike racer Burt Munro, who set an under-1000cc world record on a modified an Indian-brand motorcycle).

The Fast And The Furious reignited a taste for modified cars and street racing, spawned three sequels (and counting), but when it comes to real car-nage – even after the souped-up battle rigs in Mad Max Road Warrior or Jason Statham’s Death Race remake – you still can’t beat Gone in 60 Seconds. Not the Nic Cage remake, the ‘70s original. Real cars, real stunts, really bad acting. It ends with a 34-minute car chase that’s one of the most spectacular in film history. Writer/director/producer/star H B Halicki wrecked 93 cars in this 96-minute film. That’s 0.97 cars per minute. It’s been pointed out that Rambo only kills 0.72 people per minute in First Blood Part II. Talk about hitting the road.