Innehållsförteckning för December 2017 från Car and Driver

Malcolm Bricklin, like the others on this list, dreamed of slaying giants. Some succeeded, some didn’t, and some had a little too much Don Quixote in them for their own good. What each of them proved is how hard it is to build your own car. And so we celebrate their drive and ambition—even if one of them turned out to be a total con job. Malcolm Bricklin (1939–) General Vehicle (1971–1975) Known for: Introducing Subaru and the Yugo [see “Y”] to the U.S. market. Created his own car, the gullwing-door Bricklin SV1. Now promoting the three-wheel electric Bricklin 3EV. Cars produced: 2872 Alain Clénet (1944–) Clénet Coachworks (1975–1982) Known for: The neo-classic Clénet Series roadsters. Has since started and sold a company that builds adjustable bed bases. Cars produced:…

In the early ’70s, this magazine’s Brock Yates sensed a ripple in the American collective consciousness and decided to ride it across the country with his Cannonball Baker Sea-to-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash. So compelling was this transcontinental road race that its high degree of illegality didn’t matter much. The result permanently warped our culture. After Yates allowed the Cannonball Baker to end in 1979, imitators were inevitable. How do they stack up? Using our arbitrary rating system of 100 points, where the original scores a 100, everything else pales in comparison. Catalytic Converter An exhaust-mounted component that drives chemical reactions among the exhaust gases to reduce environmentally unfriendly emissions. The catalytic material is typically made from a combination of precious metals such as platinum, rhodium, and palladium. Coast- Down Test…

Unpadded metal surfaces, blunt knobs and rods, steering columns that impale—and seatbelts weren’t even on the options list. We may think highly of the 1955 Chevrolet, but like all cars of the era, it didn’t think much of its passengers. Yes, 62 years later, things have become much safer. by John Pearley Huffman A-Pillars: The ’55’s wraparound windshield was gorgeous. It also left the front of the roof supported by only thin pillars of sheetmetal, ready to collapse under the car’s weight in a rollover. But just look at them. Fuel Door: Located on the driver’s-side rear fender near the tail, where a collision virtually guaranteed a fuel spill. In ’56, it was moved behind the taillight, which was worse. Steering Column: Though the collapsible steering column was invented in the…

In the late ’50s and early ’60s, my father mandated a weekly Sunday ride, deploying our 18-window Volkswagen bus or our split-window VW Beetle or one of his massive black Cadillacs with bumperettes like chrome bosoms. I sat beside my sister, Angie, who told me not to touch her. The Sunday ride lasted from one to four hours, and there were three understandings: 1) There’d be no stated destination; 2) We’d eat ice cream from Isaly’sDairy, whose swarm of black flies was matched only by an outdoor Jakarta market’s; and 3) We’d buy a peach pie from the Amish in Plain City, Ohio. There was no traffic apart from the horse-drawn buggies, whose occupants glared at us. On every ride, it was my father’s habit to stop the car abruptly…

Long before the legacy of John Z. DeLorean was dusted with cocaine, stainless steel, and the Back to the Future franchise, it was secured with three letters: GTO. In 1964, car guy DeLorean, then Pontiac’s chief engineer, swiped those three letters from Enzo Ferrari and, along with the 389-cubic-inch V-8 from the brand’s big Bonneville, turned the mid-size Pontiac Tempest into a factory muscle car. There were full-size hot rods from Detroit long before the Pontiac GTO, but DeLorean’s smaller and lighter street-racer formula, combined with the marketing genius of Pontiac’s legendary ad man Jim Wangers, kicked off a horsepower war that lasted nearly a decade and created the blueprint for street performance that still exists today. Twelve years later, with big-block V-8s choked by emissions regulations and fuel shortages,…

Never use a screen when a knob will work. Really, never use a screen when a knob will work. Because a screen is fiddly and lacking precision, But a knob, well, it provides such concision. You’ll find that when a car is moving, A touchscreen is always confusing. Screens make us crazy since we’re always a-tapping, But knobs make us happy even if they’re worse for mapping. Speaking of mapping, here’s one more groan: We want our cars as quick as our phones. This hardly seems to be asking too much, Especially in a world where we never declutch. Please, we beg you, make our cars as quick as our phones. Really, we mean it, please hear our moans. Never use a haptic button. Really, never use a haptic button.…

You’ve lost them and you’ve found them. The once humble key has grown up, gained utility, and may soon become obsolete. Here are some highlights of the key’s evolution: 1949 Chrysler: While the first key that turned on a car’s ignition arrived in the early 20th century, it required the push of a button to engage the starter. In 1949, Chrysler introduces the modern key that starts the car with a turn of the ignition tumbler. 1965 Ford: Ford brings out its double-sided key still used today in many modern cars. Unlike the single-sided keys preceding it, this one has cuts on both sides, allowing it to be inserted into the tumbler in either orientation. 1986 Chevrolet Corvette: To make the Vette harder to steal, Chevy adds a coded resistor…

Since 1940, General Motors has had only seven vice presidents in charge of design. VP number two, Bill Mitchell, held that title the longest, from December 1958 until his retirement in July 1977— though, to be fair, his predecessor, Harley Earl, headed design for 13 years before the title was instituted and for 18 years after, from 1940 to 1958. Mitchell ushered GM away from the flamboyance of the 1950s, inaugurating a new era of restraint in the ’60s and overseeing the dramatic downsizing of the ’70s. His reign spanned the height of GM’s dominance in the U.S. market and saw his designs realized in some 72.5 million cars and trucks. All seven of GM’s vice presidents of design have occupied the same office at the company’s Technical Center in…

Germany’s Nürburgring circuit is archaic, narrow, and surrounded by unforgiving trees. The Nordschleife (or “North Loop”) snakes through the Eifel mountains and is long enough, at 12.9 miles, that sunny weather on one part of the course doesn’t mean it isn’t snowing somewhere else on the track. Cenek Junek, a 34-year-old Czech banker with some talent and racing dreams, crashed his Bugatti Type 35B during the 1928 German Grand Prix, becoming the first driver to die there. Dozens have since met the same fate during races, testing, and public days. Niki Lauda was virtually incinerated during the 1976 German Grand Prix partly because rescue personnel needed so much time to reach his Ferrari 312T2 as it burned at Bergwerk, a corner halfway around the track. After that, Formula 1 would…

That the Kia Stinger looks as outrageously low and mean as it does is perhaps our highest praise for the new four-door sport hatch. Few and far between are cars that survive the bureaucracy-filled odyssey from show stand to showroom without suffering character-killing dilution. Yet the production Stinger’s shape matches nearly line for line that of the Kia GT Concept, which made its debut at the 2011 Frankfurt motor show. Production realities excised the concept’s rear-hinged rear doors, added B-pillars, and transformed its wing cameras into conventional door-mounted side mirrors. Otherwise, the similarities are as plain as day. The GT’s grille-flanking intake scoops remain on the production car, as do the wraparound taillamps, which terminate in reflectors on the rear quarter-panels. The rear side windows, too, share their distinctive quarterr-ound…

Jim Dunne modestly dismisses the idea that he is the father of automotive spy photography, noting that various newspapers in the 1950s had printed snapshots of development prototypes from time to time before he elevated the game to a professional level. But in 1964, Dunne and modern spy photography got serious. Employed at the time by Popular Science as its Detroit editor, Dunne had been augmenting his reports with photography of new cars as they were rolled out at official press previews. Dunne’s shots of the second-generation Chevy Corvair were different; they were snapped from a covert vantage point overlooking the fence of the secured General Motors proving grounds in Milford, Michigan—a hideout later dubbed Dunne’s Grove. The car was months away from its public reveal. Dunne sent the shot…

When Henry Ford’s hired goons slammed union organizer Walter Reuther into the pedestrian overpass at the Rouge factory, the future United Auto Workers president probably wasn’t thinking about speedboats. Or the trucks his members’ children and grandchildren would one day use to drive to cottages on pretty little lakes in northern Michigan, pulling trailers laden with watercraft in the summer and snowmobiles in the winter. It would be several years before someone coined the phrase “He who dies with the most toys wins.” But in 1937, the fledgling UAW was fighting, quite literally, for your right to party. Reuther survived the beating at the Battle of the Overpass, just as he survived a shotgun blast through his kitchen window in 1948, an assassination attempt that was never solved but indicates…

The Beetle evolved steadily throughout its long life, as Volkswagen geeks will be glad to explain in excruciating detail. Windows got bigger, fenders became more rotund, and the windshield gained a curve sometime in the mid-1960s. Lights, the electrical system, and the air-cooled engines grew more powerful, and the suspension was redesigned. Yet to the casual observer, this 1978 example, carefully preserved by Volkswagen U.K. as one of the final German-built Beetles, looks pretty much identical to the KdF-Wagen that Hitler had ordered in the late 1930s to motorize the Third Reich. That plan never unfolded, but the VW did survive both the war and the collapse of the Nazi regime that had commissioned it. This was thanks to several lucky breaks, the greatest being the inability of British automakers…

Here’s an inside look at Fiat Chrysler’s stamping and truck plants in Warren, Michigan, where parts for the Ram 1500 Quad and Crew Cabs are made and the trucks are built. The two factories cover more than 5.4 million square feet and produced 332,830 trucks in 2016. That’s a brand-spanking-new pickup truck every 94.8 seconds. Stage One: Stamping A team of 1732 hourly workers monitors 380 robotized presses and machines that stamp up to 12,000 hoods, roofs, liftgates, floor pans, and fenders per day for the Chrysler Pacifica, Dodge Grand Caravan and Durango, Jeep Cherokee and Grand Cherokee, and Ram trucks. Switching dies to change what’s being stamped can take as little as four minutes. Stage Two: Welding The 405 robots in this stage precisely weld steel frames and the…

History sometimes makes it seem as though the events of the past were inevitable. Gazing at photos of Dan Gurney and A.J. Foyt spraying champagne after winning Le Mans in a Ford GT40 Mark IV in 1967, it’s difficult to imagine any other result. Yet the Ferrari 330 P4s that finished second and third crushed the 11 other Ford GTs in the race, and the big-block beast driven by Foyt and Gurney was the only Ford to run trouble-free to the finish. So, in effect, Ferrari was only a silly mistake or a sheared bolt away from winning the great road-racing war of the 1960s. Of course, Enzo Ferrari had nobody but himself to blame. Not for losing the war but for starting it in the first place. He’d set…

Enacted by Congress in 1975, the Corporate Average Fuel Economy law was designed to reduce gasoline use by improving fuel efficiency. Starting in 1978, cars had to achieve 18.0 mpg in testing. Truck standards came a year later, requiring 17.2 mpg from two-wheel-drive vehicles and 15.8 mpg from four-wheeldrivers. The current regulation would raise these targets to 55.3–56.2 mpg for cars and 39.3–40.3 for trucks by 2025, although the Trump administration is reviewing that plan. Slow Build: The CAFE bogey was intended to rise steadily, but it hit 27.5 mpg for cars in 1985 and essentially remained there for 25 years. Trucks stagnated around 20 mpg for 20 years. Optimism Meets Reality: Congress required each new car’s mileage to be posted on its window sticker, hoping that buyers would select…

There’s no pretending anymore that a tectonic shift isn’t on its horizon, but the Chevrolet Corvette as we know it is still evolving as if it’s in a time-lapse video. In 2013, the Z06 was a 505-hp middle manager toiling in the shadow of the supercharged ZR1; just a generation later, it out-earns its former boss with a 650-hp blown LT4, establishing itself as the greatest performance value of all time. At Virginia International Raceway for our annual Lightning Lap track extravaganza, the current-generation Z06 fell short of an $875,000 limited-production hypercar by only a second and a half—at a savings of some three-quarters of a million bucks. It’d be pretty easy to make a Z06 faster with another $775,000. Or you could let Chevy do it for you at…

If engineers had had their way, front-wheel drive would have dominated automotive design from the beginning. But, in a victory for right-brain thinkers, stylists and enthusiasts actually have a say in the car-development process. Few can deny, though, that eliminating the large, heavy, costly, and inefficient rotating parts driving the rear wheels comes with numerous benefits. Namely, it frees up interior seating and cargo room and, in the case of transverse engines, provides more crush space between the front of the car and its occupants. And without a long driveshaft, rear axle (or axles), or rear differential, the car carries less mass; this, coupled with reduced driveline loss, aids efficiency Also, front-drive construction puts the heaviest components of the machine over the tires driving it, increasing traction on slippery surfaces.…

HONDA CIVIC TYPE R Price: $34,775 Power: 306 hp Torque: 295 lb-ft Weight: 3137 lb 0–60 mph: 5.2 sec FORD FOCUS RS Price: $39,780 Power: 350 hp Torque: 350 lb-ft Weight: 3465 lb 0–60 mph: 4.5 sec Making power is but one variable in going fast. The upper echelon of performance—occupied by the mega-output Germans, big-muscled Corvettes and Hellcats, and, of course, Italian exotica—now depends on automatic transmissions, launch control, track-bred tires, and often all-wheel drive to generate stupefying performance. That same phenomenon is just beginning to play out in our beloved hot-hatch segment, a first step on the factory-hot-rod ladder onto which go-fast technology slowly but surely trickles. With the spiciest hatchbacks making roughly 300 horsepower, the major players have turned to all-wheel drive to provide some relief to…

The interstate highway system was officially born on June 29, 1956, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act. Eisenhower’s interest in the concept was piqued during his tour of the German autobahn system in World War II, when he was Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe. Initially, he saw its significance in terms of military logistics. Today, almost everything we use in daily life—food, apparel, furniture, appliances, tools, building materials, medical supplies, you name it—has spent some time on an interstate highway on its way to us Distance: On its 60th anniversary, the system boasted 47,662 miles of expressway, including several east-west (even-numbered) and north-south (odd-numbered) transcontinental routes. Traffic: Though they make up only 2.5 percent of U.S. roadway lane miles, interstates carry 25 percent…

Remember the facehugger from the movie Alien? That was awesome, right? Well, we in the auto biz have our own facehugger. Its name is Jeep. Now, Jeep isn’t gross and doesn’t have a proboscis or acidic blood. But Jeep does have the tendency to send the company that owns it—let’s call it a host company— to its death while it thrives. When was the last time you bought a Kaiser? Willys-Overland (1941–1963) What we now know as Jeep is born in 1941 at the behest of the federal government. Willys-Overland and Ford Motor Company essentially crib the design from American Bantam. This makes American Bantam both Jeep’s parent and its first victim. The origin of Jeep’s name is up for debate: Some say it’s named after the Popeye comic-strip character Eugene…

A lot can change when a new generation of Americans discovers its wallet. World War II resentment of the Japanese people meant that Americans in the immediate postwar era avoided Japanese goods. Japanese stuff was the original junk, and their cars were nothing but tin cans. At a certain moment in time, this was true [see “Japan”]. But it neglected the divergent trajectories of growth and ambition. When Americans were getting rich postwar, honing their appreciation for fancy cars and other signifiers of wealth, Japan was honing its blade. This often meant exploiting some economic advantage. The first was the oil embargo of 1973, and Honda and Toyota had fuel-efficient commuter cars at the ready. When boomer Californians started buying them for the sake of home economics, they found that…

Fresh off the Edsel catastrophe, which cost Ford $200 million and earned it a nameplate that would take one of the company’s heroes and make him synonymous with failure, Ford’s leadership was dubious of any big product launch. So when Lee Iacocca, then vice president and general manager of the Ford Division, approached Henry Ford II with his idea for a novel youth-oriented vehicle, the Deuce was suspicious. One look at the data should have been enough to convince him. In 1964, the year this new car, the Mustang, was released, there were 72.5 million Americans in the baby boomer cohort. By the following year, people under the age of 20 made up 40 percent of the U.S. population and the median inflation-adjusted household income had increased by more than…

Oldsmobile hit production and sales peaks in 1984, but 20 years later, the carmaker was gone. In the ’80s, the brand was everywhere. The Cutlass Ciera and Cutlass Supreme were best sellers, and Olds’s diesel engine moved millions of GM cars, despite its problems. Rear-drive Cutlass production ended in ’87, and sales of the front-drive Cutlass Supreme never reached the level of its predecessor. Olds kept producing the Ciera until 1996, well past its best-if-sold-by date. The “Not Your Father’s Oldsmobile” ad campaign didn’t help matters, nor did the quite good ’95 Aurora. GM gave up on the 103-year-old brand in December 2000, and the last Olds rolled off the line on April 29, 2004. Oversteer The engineering term for when the back of the car hits the wall before…

U.S. vehicle sales data since 1980 confirm the changes we’ve witnessed on the roads. Midsize cars are no longer the dominant mode of mainstream transportation. Buyers have been gradually moving away from them and into SUVs, causing a contraction of family and mid-size-sedan sales. Pickup trucks remain ubiquitous, van sales neatly follow the popularity of the minivan, and the luxury segment has doubled. Since the source for our data, WardsAuto, began tracking car-based crossover SUV sales in 1995, the segment has grown to become the market’s largest, roughly twice as big as the next closest, the small car. A record 17,465,020 new vehicles were sold in 2016, a number that’s not expected to be matched in 2017. Saab In 1949, a Swedish aircraft maker began building eccentric little front-drive two-stroke…

I’m behind the wheel of a 34-year-old Mustang GT. A soft burble from its V-8 lolls in the air. The tach needle lazily rises and falls as the manual shifter eases through all five gears. I’m rolling down Telegraph Road, not far from Ford’s Dearborn, Michigan, headquarters. My destination is 1983. That was a banner year for Car and Driver—and for Ford’s pony car. It was the year we inaugurated our 10Best awards and voted the Mustang GT onto that first 10Best list. I was there, which is why I borrowed this all-original, 17,000-mile beauty from Mustang collector Mike Berardi: to take a pony ride back to the genesis of 10Best in one of the cars that won, for a look at how it all began. This generation of Mustang…

Before the word “vaporware” existed, there was the Vector. The promises were big, the styling jaw-dropping, and a drivable production car elusive. That’s the thing about vaporware—it’s all too easy to be seduced by a great-looking body and assurances that it works as advertised. Vector struggled to build a production car in the ’80s, but the W2 prototype enjoyed supercar mystique and street cred nonetheless. C/D was guilty of helping to foster that image. It started with a story in our December 1980 issue in which then associate editor Larry Griffin heaped praise on the car and its creator, Gerald Wiegert. But Griffin never drove the Vector. Arty shots on a dry lake bed helped make a car years away seem real. The publicity that ensued made us Wiegert’s best…

A Good Thing Gone Rudy Stanko, a man of many court battles, has had only one that matters to driving enthusiasts. And his win is our loss. Stanko is the man who challenged Montana’s “reasonable and prudent” speed law, which stood between 1955 and 1974 and again between 1995 and 1999. It was Stanko’s case that gave the Montana legislature reason to impose a highway speed limit. In March 1996, Stanko was ticketed for traveling 85 mph on Montana State Highway 200. He contested the charge in justice and district courts and was convicted by a jury twice. His second appeal landed the case in the Montana Supreme Court in December 1998. That court, in a four-to-three ruling, reversed the district court’s judgment. It called the “reasonable and prudent” clause…

It started with “Turn Your Hymnals to 2002.” That invocation, penned by the late David E. Davis Jr. in his paean to the 1968 BMW 2002 in our April 1968 issue, marked the beginning of the sports-sedan era. The 2002 wasn’t the only car of the time that synthesized the agility of a European sports car and the practicality of a compact sedan, but we instantly recognized it as the best and heralded the news to our readers. Back then, of course, no one could know that the 2002 would give rise to the enthusiast-oriented vehicles that flourish to this day. We certainly didn’t know that the 2002 and the 3-series it begat would win 23 10Best awards. Or that the 2002’s popularity would lead BMW to cultivate, own, and…

Automobile emissions are regulated in the U.S. by the Environmental Protection Agency on the national level, though states can elect to follow an even more stringent set of rules enacted by the California Air Resources Board. In fact, enough states have adopted these standards that the EPA is collaborating with CARB on its vehicle emissions rules for the 2022–2025 model years. Although cars aren’t the biggest polluters, cleaning up their emissions has paid dividends in the air quality of places like Los Angeles. Here are some of the devices that help keep California’s San Bernardino Mountains visible from the L.A. basin and the air we all breathe clean. Exhaust Gas Recirculation: EGR redirects a portion of an engine’s inert exhaust gas back into the intake tract to dilute the fresh…

g A unit of measure for acceleration, commonly used to describe cornering grip. One g is equivalent to the rate at which any object accelerates when dropped at sea level. In a car cornering at 1.00 g, the driver is pushed against the side of the seat by a force equal to that of gravity keeping us stuck to the ground. Gated Shifter A manual-transmission interface that defines the shift pattern with a plate featuring cutouts for the lever to slide into (as shown above on a Lamborghini Miura). The United States burned through about 143.4 billion gallons of gasoline in 2016, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. That’s a bit more than 1.2 gallons for each American—all 324 million of us—every day. When is this stuff going to…

1985 Chevrolet Corvette The ’85 Vette represented a major upgrade for the fourth-gen (C4) model. It got more power and a suspension that worked nearly as well on the street as it did on the track. We immediately ordered a long-term tester and dispatched then associate editor Rich Ceppos to collect it as it rolled off the line at GM’s Bowling Green factory. It was not a happy 30,000 miles (the length of our long-term tests at the time). The transmission, air conditioner, heater, ignition system, windshield wipers, and windows all misbehaved. Then it got worse. At the end of the test, we found a sheaf of work orders inside the car. After it was built in Bowling Green, Kentucky, our “factory-fresh” Corvette had been trucked to GM’s proving grounds…

In 1978, Volkswagen became the first foreign auto manufacturer to build cars within our borders. The German assembly plant, a converted Chrysler factory in Westmoreland, Pennsylvania, closed after a decade due to slow sales. But where VW failed, others succeeded. In 1979, Honda opened its Marysville, Ohio, manufacturing campus and began producing motorcycles. Largely in response to the U.S.government limiting Japanese-car imports in 1981, Honda started building the Accord there a year later, a move that inspired the 1986 Ron Howard– directed cult classic, Gung Ho. Toyota has even used the movie as an example of how not to manage an American workforce. Honda continues to build our favorite mid-sizer in Marysville in addition to a number of Acuras. Plants from Nissan, Toyota, Mitsubishi (since closed), and Subaru soon followed.…

Car enthusiasts rightly demonize Ralph Nader for his role in the death of the Chevy Corvair, a sporty, rear-engined, air-cooled, space-age compact. But while we can’t forgive Nader for helping bring us infuriating automatic seatbelts and for sounding sanctimonious and brash, we must reluctantly give props where props are due. Seen against the backdrop of history, his campaign against the Corvair catalyzed modern American consumer protection. Nader’s first book, Unsafe at Any Speed, shined a light on some dangerous negligence that the auto industry had engaged in for decades, without meaningful oversight, maximizing profits at the expense of consumer welfare. His exposé led directly to the enactment of foundational automobile impact, safety, and passenger-protection regulations, along with the creation of the National Traffic and Motor Safety Act. His triumphs led…

Many are the blessings of the automobile: independence, mobility, freedom. But the greatest of these is freedom! While going too fast. Speeding is art. At 120 mph, you’re in Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night. At 60 mph, you’re in Ohio. Speeding is poetry. “Triumphing over Death, and Chance, and thee, O Time,” as John Milton, lead-foot-avant-la-lettre, put it in his poem “On Time.” Speeding is literature. “... a fast car, a coast to reach, and a woman at the end of the road,” per Jack Kerouac. Speeding is the source of America’s greatest contribution to global culture— the car chase. Without the car chase, the world would lack for touchstones of beauty, form, grace, and perception. The Keystone Kops. Bullitt. The Aston Martin DB5 in Goldfinger driven by the…

My number-one worry was spinning it into a tree. Second to that, fueled by a quarter-century’s collective bench-racer wisdom on the Viper, was the fear that the car would be a shoddily whacked-together animal—no brains, all muscle. And sure, the brake pedal of this 1993 Viper is so much higher than its accelerator that heel-toeing the thing would require some sort of quadruple ankle joint. The dashboard could only have been conceived with the help of the Fisher-Price design team. And your long-of-torso, five-foot, eleven-inch correspondent found the windshield’s top frame exactly at eye level, precluding use of the Dodge’s bikini top. Exactly none of that matters. The RT/10, displayed as a concept in 1989 and fast-tracked into production for 1992, is fundamentally a first-generation Mazda Miata designed by a…

In May 1984, entrepreneur Malcolm Bricklin [see “B”] was in a bind. His venture, the importation of Pininfarina Spiders and Bertone X1/9s, was failing, and, facing bankruptcy, he had 120 days to find a more profitable car to sell here. So Bricklin scoured the world, traveling first to England, where he tried to land Jaguar, then to Serbia, a republic of what was then communist Yugoslavia. It was there, in the parking lot of Belgrade’s Hotel InterContinental, that he and former Fiat executive Tony Ciminera first examined a Fiat-based hatchback called the Yugo. “I’m looking at [the car] and I said, ‘Ugh! This is really primitive!’” recalls Ciminera. But Bricklin was desperate. So the next day, he and Ciminera toured the Yugo factory, whose owner, the aptly named Crvena Zastava…

C/D: Many who were on staff back in 1989 claim they weren’t aware of the plan to photograph you in the seat of the Buick Reatta roadster for the cover. In fact, most of the staff was pretty embarrassed by the whole thing. OtA: Look, there were certain, shall we say, arrangements. A-range-ments, okay? But, look, you don’t see any of the other cover subjects having the career I’ve had. You didn’t call up that poufy-haired shirtless guy who posed on the cover with the Suzuki X90, did you? How about that fur-wearing hussy you had pushing her rump against that Zimmer? Yeah, that’s what I thought. Also, an X90? What the hell, man? ▪ Is there any particular reason why you looked so sedated during the shoot? □ Next…