Indholdsfortegnelse for January 1985 i MotorTrend

At Large Fuel Freedom = Cheaper Gas? Under terms of an agreement that will apparently end one of the longest-running anti-trust suits ever, franchised service stations will be allowed to sell gasoline obtained from sources other than the oil company that leases their station. You could pull into a station flying the Union ball and fill up with Shell SU2000. Proponents of the change (mostly station operators) say the retail price of a gallon of gas will come down now that dealers can shop around for the lowest wholesale gas prices. But other industry experts say that’s unlikely because stations must install separate pumps and underground tanks to carry an alternate brand, and that investment will be prohibitive for most dealers. Lido for President? In an attempt to kill that…

Return of the Designer Seville? Concurrent with the introduction of the allnew ’86 Cadillac Eldorado, GM’s premier division will also reveal an equally new Seville. For 1986, the 4-door sedan will once again be built off the corporation’s K-body, as is the case with the current versions of the same nameplates. Design of the new Seville is conceptually closer to the first-generation version of the sedan introduced as a ’76 model. Like that nine-year old Seville, the ’86 will sport a severe, almost vertical rear window line that contrasts with the rear decklid. While much of the ’76 Seville’s appeal came from the car’s dropped rear deck, the influence of aerodynamics has squared off the trunk of the ’86. Outside, only two design elements are carried over from the present…

When you are stuck on a crowded freeway it may seem that everyone and his brother has a car, and that they are all out driving right now, trying to get where you’re heading. But did you know that more than half of the world’s people still rely on their own or their animals’ muscles for transportation? We have about one car here for every two people, but in China, for example, only one person in 14,500 owns a car. Some other facts to ponder while waiting out the gridlock: Americans who commute to and from work by car quite often drive over an hour in each direction. If they take eight hours for sleep, then many people spend 15% of their waking hours in their home-away-from-home—the family car. Nicholas…

Toyota’s family of engines is bewildering and entertaining. For the domestic market, there’s everything from 1.0 to 3.0 liters for passengers cars (gas and diesel engines) up to 4.0 liters for commercial vehicles. The variations within each family of engines could keep a genealogist busy for months. The engines come carbureted, injected, SOHC, DOHC, 2 valve, 4 valve, turbocharged, intercooled, with or without hollow camshafts, with or without fiber-reinforced metal pistons, with acoustic-controlled induction chambers, swirl-port control valves, etc. The overriding philosophy behind all these engines is something they call the SR (Super Response) concept. The goal of SR is to make engines light, durable, powerful, fuel-efficient, quiet, and still capable of providing the kind of response you can feel in the seat of your pants. The major new direction…

Okay, so where’s Richard Dawson when you really need him? Here we are, facing the 1985 Car of the Year finals, and we find ourselves confronting a tangle of contenders that in contrast makes “Family Feud” look about as exciting as an ice fishing contest. Come to think of it, Dawson might not be up to sorting this feud out. Although the concept of the feuding families he faces is occasionally expanded to include distant cousins or casts of popular TV series, Dawson never has to moderate more than two families at a time. Two! Ha! We’re looking at three familial groups here—Family H, Family C, and Family N—as well as a second cousin from yet another family (Code S10) and a mysterious hybrid. To make it even more entertaining,…

A hologram is a strange and wondrous visual record, something like a three-dimensional photograph. Though we won’t wade into the mechanics of the process here, holograms do have one intriguing quality we’re going to apply in understanding the unique natures of three distinctive sedans. A holographic plate, analagous to the exposed film in photography, shows a recorded scene. Amazingly enough, you can shatter that plate, and every one of its tiny fragments will still produce a whole and complete image of the original view. True, the 3-D effect deteriorates, but the entire image is there. It’s as if you could snip a corner out of a slide, blow it up, and see the entire picture. Each bit carries the essence of the whole, something like an organism’s genetic code in…

Three kinds of Classified Ads are available to advertisers. Commercial Classified: $115 for 25 words. $3.15 for each additional word. One-inch photo or illustration, add $125. A 5% frequency discount for ads in six or more issues. Car Club Classified: $70 for 25 words. $1.15 for each additional word. Add $40 to include photo. Personal Classified: $40 for 25 words. $1.15 for each additional word. Add $30 to include a photo. Name and address free on all ads. 25-word minimum. Count telephone numbers as one word. Advertisers using P.O. boxes are required to supply permanent street address and telephone number. Closing date: All ads must be received by the 15th of the third month preceding publication date (e.g., April issue closes January 15). Payment must accompany order. Send order and…

The government’s fuel economy numbers are in for the 1985 models, complete with the new “adjustment factors” and the old two-number reporting style. City and highway consumption figures both appear on the sticker again, but they have been downgraded from the actual dyno results (city rating by 10%, highway by 22%) to bring the published estimates a bit closer to reality. Once again, Honda’s CRX coupe led the field, though the super-economy version gets a new name—Civic Coupe HF—and a 1.5-liter engine in place of the original 1.3. In 2nd was Chevrolet’s Suzuki-built Sprint, winning the Domestic Class, Immigrant Division; best-placed U.S. Native was the Ford Escort/Mercury Lynx diesel. The EPA reports that, based on projected ’85 model sales, the country’s passenger car fleet average will be 26.8 mpg, compared…

Here’s a prototype Chrysler P-car undergoing the corporation’s rigorous fill-up trials during a Detroit deluge. The P, originally envisioned as a replacement for the aging but durable Omni/Horizon series, now looks as though it will co-exist with smaller L-bodied Omnirizon cars. With a public introduction set for October of next year, the P-cars will be moved slightly upmarket, aimed at GM’s J variants, Ford’s Tempo/Topaz lines, and such foreign competition as the Honda Accord, Mazda 626, Nissan Stanza, and Toyota Camry. Unlike most of its competitors, the P-car won’t be offered in singularly boring vanilla flavorings. While the entry-level powerplant will be a reduced-displacement (1,8-liter) version of Chrysler’s excellent 2.2-liter OHC L-4, the engineering mule that shutterbug Jim Dunne snapped was propelled by the corporation’s ultrapotent 150-hp turbocharged 2.2. And…

One’s for the street, the other for rallying. Ford of Europe has upped the performance of the Escort with the addition of a Garrett T3 turbocharger. The RS Turbo, as the new model is called, now makes 132 hp, up from 105. Boost starts at a very low 1500 rpm and climbs to its maximum 7 psi at 2500. The RS Turbo is also the first-ever frontdrive street car with a limited-slip differential. A viscous coupling in the diff eliminates the unpleasant steering characteristics common with a fully locked differential. The other blown Ford is the Sierra (Merkur to us). The 2-liter 4-valve Merkur motor with KKK turbocharger makes 330 hp and will be built by Ford for Louise Aitken and Ellen Morgan who are currently leading in the British…

The specifications are as seductive as they get: two seats, mid-engine, dual overhead cams, 4 valves per cylinder, 7500-rpm redline, fuel injection, 5-speed manual box, and 4-wheel disc brakes. How could those specs add up to anything but pure mechanolust? A decade ago, the only place you’d find a car fitting this description would be somebody’s racing shop or maybe dribbling out at the rate of a few per week from a northern Italian fabricca. Either case would put it out of financial reach of most of us. The fact that a car such as this is being offered up by one of the world’s largest producers of mass consumption automobiles has to tell you something about the proliferation of technology and our willingness, almost compulsion, to embrace it. Talk…

Each month, the staff of Motor Trend assembles to discuss things of the past and plans for the future. During one such meeting, my mind was jarred out of cruise control by the mention of a name from the past. Messrs. Swan and Grable were quibbling about how difficult it would be for Grable to add yet another story to his already staggering work load for the month of January. But what caught my attention was a reference to TVR. As a budding car freak growing up in Florida, my standard M.O. was to hitch-hike to whatever racetrack was in action on a given weekend, plant myself outside registration, and wait for a likely racer who could use my services—wrench, car-washer, or what d’you need?—in exchange for a pit pass.…

Alternative Engine Cooling, or Who Needs Radiators? Any reduction in the total drag of a body moving through a fluid (which includes air) proportionally reduces the amount of power required. Recently, aero-drag has been the operative buzz word in Detroit, as squadrons of engineers drag their latest clay models to the wind tunnel in pursuit of lower drag coefficients and subsequent increased fuel efficiencies. The result of all this wind tunnel experimentation is the aero-look car we see on the roads today, featuring smooth rounded front end, severe windshield rake angle, flush glass, etc. In their attempts to present the smoothest front profile to the air, some manufacturers use a layout where the engine cooling air is pulled from beneath the car. This “bottombreather” configuration allows the front of the…

The fellows at ERA Replica Automobiles in beautiful New Britain, Connecticut (203/229-7968), set out to see if they could build their own 427 Cobra kit in a day, specifically, three 8-hour work shifts. They could. And did, pretty much. Site of the effort was the ninth annual Shelby American Automobile Club convention in Anaheim, California. The “real Cobra” crowd has taken an interest in the replicar movement, and as part of the festivities, the ERA boys pitched their tent in the Anaheim Marriott’s parking lot and got down to it. They had just started work (well, it was almost noon) on Thursday when we first checked in, and around 1 pm on Saturday, the 427 side-oiler fired and ran. The car was driveable shortly thereafter. ERA’S hedging was minimal (they…

Reliant, but Does It Leak Oil? The entry-level British sports car is all but dead. Witness the demise of the MGB, Midget, Spitfire, TR7. Trying to fill the void created by the departure of these cars, Reliant, the Staffordshire boutique car maker, has just introduced the SS1, a $7800 opentop, rear-drive 2-seater designed by Michelotti. The SS1 uses a tube-frame substructure onto which is bolted a fiberglass tub. Exterior body pieces are made of molded polyurethane and fiberglass-laminated urethane. Engine choices include a 69-hp 1.3-liter and a 110-hp 1.6-liter, both 4-cylinder motors coming from Ford. Production will be around 2000 units per year, and Reliant hopes to start selling in the U.S. by 1986. Jaguar Sale Amidst fears that Jaguar shares would go unsold, the British government put the big…

The battle for the medium subcompact market in Europe is resulting in an impressive array of small-caliber autobahn bullets that, despite their 4-cylinder engines, are demonstrating they are true leftlane runners. The high-speed theater of this war has been dominated by Volkswagen’s GTI in the past, but more recent combatants, such as Ford’s XR3i, the Lancia Delta HF Turbo, Renault’s Rll Turbo, and the Peugeot 205 GTI, have led to a maelstrom of competitive activity. The most recent aspirant to the Golf GTI’s throne, the Opel Kadett GSi, is also one of the fastest, and most slippery, of the lot, and caused immediate consternation among its rivals when it debuted at the Paris Auto Show last fall. The GSi’s styling is reminiscent of other aerodynamic exercises—Civic, Ford Sierra, and Alfasud…

An American, one Ray Saidel, was the cause of the TVR going into production. The first car, built in 1954 by Trevor (TreVoR, you see?) Wilkinson at his engineering works in the seaside resort of Blackpool, so commended itself to Mr. Saidel that he ordered six more. Wilkinson, thus encouraged, went into partnership with an erstwhile nearby glassfibre works called Grantura Plastics. Laying in stocks of steel tubes and welding rods, they commenced production in 1956. Those commodities were essential: The car had a robustly boxy and well-braced multi-tubular backbone chassis. Where this spine splayed out into the corners there was an independently suspended wheel, the geometry of its movement being the work of Dr. Porsche. That is, the trailing links came from the VW Beetle. It followed that everything…

A scarlet machine named Ferrari Testarossa was the focal point of the Paris Salon last October, displayed alongside the GTO model that captured attention in Geneva six months before. But whereas the 400-hp GTO is now in limited production and will become a collector’s item when 200 examples have been produced, Testarossa is the series replacement for the 512 BBi, due to reach the States in March with a pricetag not far from $100,000 and production set for about 500 per year. Testarossa. Redhead. Blood-red covers over the twin camshafts on each bank of the flat-12 engine and a total of 48 valves. Five liters of sheer power, not a turbocharger in sight, but still a total of 390 hp in European form and 375 hp for the States. The…

Subaru, pride of Japan’s Fuji Heavy Industries, Ltd., has become quite adept at maintaining its own little niche in the U.S. import market. Its unique combination of offbeat styling, economical service, and legendary reliability have led some to dub Subarus as the ultimate automotive appliances. But the times, they are a-changing. And as the company moves to broaden its appeal, the appliance age is giving way to a whole new era in the firm’s U.S. marketing game. While Subaru’s hatchback and Brat models carry over largely unchanged for 1985, the 2-door hardtop, 4-door notchback sedan, and station wagon have undergone a major revamping and represent the firm’s first all-new offerings in half a decade. As a result of the transformation, these new models are the biggest, roomiest, best-looking Subarus ever.…

It’s not destined to go down as one of the greatest Showroom Stock races in history; and with a somewhat Spartan 22-car field, it certainly wouldn’t qualify as one of the biggest. But the inaugural 12 Hours of Willow Springs, aka A GSS Classic, was important in its own right. The race marked the first, and what many feel a woefully overdue, West Coast appearance of the SCCA’s new breed of Showroom Stock enduro cars. It also forged the final link in a nationwide chain that included 24hour contests at Nelson Ledges and Mid-Ohio and a three-hour Little Le Mans race at Lime Rock, Connecticut. The 12 hours at Willow Springs was a late addition to the SCCA SS Endurance Championship schedule, which itself was only announced after the two…

Camel GT Champ Lanier Works the Miracle of Blue Thunder And so it came to pass that a relative unknown put it to the Jrw veteran hotshoes in IMSA’s Camel GT. Randy Lanier, the series’ best-kept secret at the start of the 1984 season, demonstrated over the following eight months that his early promise was no fluke. At Watkins Glen, he took his sixth win in 16 starts as part of the Blue Thunder Racing juggernaut, and the 30-year-old Floridian put a lock on his first championship in three years of Camel competition. Although a little slow out of the blocks, Lanier needed only 16 of the 17 scheduled Camel GT races to mathematically eliminate all other contenders, including his BTR teammate and admitted on-track mentor Bill Whittington. His first…