Car Flake II Trivia Quiz

Answer: Torpedo

The Tucker Torpedo was an odd bird in the post-war world of the late 1940s. It looked like a cyclopean Oldsmobile of that vintage, but had a flat, rear-mounted six cylinder engine, all around independent suspension and a headlight that followed the same arc as the steering wheels.

Not exactly cyclopean, but the Torpedo had three, (count 'em) three headlights, and the center one was the one that followed the wheel arc. The Torpedo was also a safety conscious marque that had one of the first passenger roll cages and had safety belts as an option before anybody. Fifty one were built, and amazingly enough, after more than 50 years, 47 still survive! The "big three" tried and succeeded in suppressing production of this car, as most of Preston Tucker's supplies were cut off and bad publicity was routinely circulated about him and his car.

Originally sold for less than $3000.00, the value of the remaining models varies between $250,000 to $500,000 today! In 1988, Francis Ford Coppola directed Jeff Bridges in a George Lucas production of "Tucker: A Man and His Dream", about the creator of this visionary, but weird-looking, automobile.

Answer: The Fairlady Z

The Nissan Z began life in Japan as the Fairlady Z back in 1966, developing into the immediately popular 240-Z for the American market in 1969. The car was the vanguard for a revolution in sports car design that made all the British marques look sick, specifically the output of the British Motor Company, or BMC, the makers of the MG-B, Sprite and Midget. The car handled, moved better and was more reliable by whole three digit percentage points than the sports cars coming from Europe. It was easily the equal of the cars coming from Italy in handling, stopping and overall excitement, but had what is now the legendary Japanese attention to quality control and long-term viability, something no one but Mercedes had at the time. Now even Mercedes can't hold a candle to the Japanese companies like Toyota, Nissan and Honda...

The 240 Z eventually evolved into the 260 Z, the 280 Z, the 280 ZX, the 300 Z and ZX, (two model cycles,) and the present 350 Z, by all accounts, the best one so far.

Would you believe the Z originally cost only $3500+, American?

Answer: Ransom Eli Olds

Ransom Eli Olds was apparently a very shy and retiring man, since he was edged out of just about every company he founded! He started the Olds Motor Vehicle Company in 1897. This company was bought by a Samuel L. Smith just two years later, and Olds was relegated to vice president and general manager. He had a falling out with Smith, (wonder of wonders,) and left to form the R.E. Olds Motor Car Company, which quickly changed its name to Reo. The reason? To avoid a lawsuit with the former company _he_ had started! This was the company that produced the fabled milk truck called the "REO Speedwagon", a vehicle whose exterior design didn't change for something like 70 years!

Oldsmobile, formed after the name Olds was bought by General Motors in 1908, was responsible for such legendary cars as the 4-4-2, the Hurst Olds, the original, sleek, front wheel drive Toronado, the best selling Cutlass, (a car that was actually the most popular car in the country, once,) and the horrendously ugly 1958 model line, which had to be seen to be believed! Ransom Olds, it should be pointed out, never had anything to do with General Motors.

The venerated Oldsmobile Division of General Motors, usually the most tastefully styled division of its upper tier in the GM pecking order, with the exception of those latter-day Toronados and the '58 large car, was retired, unwisely, in 2004, while the gaudy, consistently ugly Buick Division lives on! There is no justice!

The Olds name had been on one vehicle or another for 99 years....

Answer: Playboy

The Jordan Playboy was advertised as a glamorous car, but by all accounts, it was actually pretty ordinary. However, its ad comapign caught the attention of agencies and companies all over the auto industry, with its "Somewhere, west of Laramie..." ad campaign, which left a haunting image in the minds of pre-Depression Americans. It never did sell well, though, managing less than 10,000 units a year.

The ad blurb went like this:

"Somewhere west of Laramie there's a bronco-busting, steer-roping girl who knows what I'm talking about. She can tell what a sassy pony, that's a cross between greased lightning and the place where it hits, can do with eleven hundred pounds of steel and action when he's going high, wide and handsome." Only 10,000 a year...? Get that factory going again!

The Playboy was produced for most of the 1920s, but succumbed to the ravages of the Great Depression, even though Will Durant wanted to make the car part of a "second GM" he wanted to found. Unfortunately, Durant went under after the stock market crash, and so did Jordan's chances of being revived and part of a big company's lineup.

Answer: Bugatti

Volkswagen, which is getting danged empirical in its old age, (they also own Bentley and Lamborghini,) has just introduced the incredible Bugatti Veyron 16.4, a car that has, (now listen to this!) a V-16 engine, not one, not two, but _four_ turbochargers, 1000 bhp, 1000 lbs./ft. of torque, seven forward speeds, a top speed of 240 mph and a zero-to-sixty time of 2.3 seconds! The price tag? A cool $1,000,000+!

The thing actually lowers itself to the ground when its ready for hard acceleration and also has four wheel drive! Though the Bugatti name has been revived before over the past fifty years, (notably during the 70s, as a California-esque custom job that had very George Barris-like lines, and a not-bad model called the E-110,) this is only the second version made in Europe. (Yes, the other one, in case you haven't guessed, was a U.S. version!)

I understand a certain Bruce Wayne is on the waiting list for this one.

Answer: Fiat

Yep. "Little" Fiat, the car company that tried to bring sports cars and a whiff of Italian motoring to the worldwide masses, but whose quality control was from hunger, owns not only Ferrari, but just about every marque in Italy! They own: Alfa Romeo, Ferrari, Maserati, Fiat, and may still own Seat(in Spain,) which it helped found. The only company they don't own is Lamborghini, which, as I stated before, is owned by VW/Audi.

Actually, I've always wondered, since 1975, whether Fiat hasn't exerted some major influence over VW, which dumped its trademark rear-engined, air-cooled layout for Fiat's FWD setup, after years of dominating US import sales (Fiat sells better than VW in Europe). Odd that the seriously out-of-reach Ferrari and Maserati brands are sold in the USA, but not the more popularly priced Fiat line, eh wot?

In 2014, Fiat announced that the luxury Ferrari brand would be split off from the parent company.

Answer: Air and water cooled, opposed 4s and 6s

Yep! A type of engine that usually powered rear-engined cars in the 40s, 50s and 60s, has been propelling Subarus for most of the brand's American existence. Subaru is somewhat of an oddball nameplate, putting many car flakes in mind of the French brand, Citročn, though Subarus are much more utilitarian. If you listen closely, you can hear the somewhat muted, old VW Bug clatter when they go by.

Despite their oddness, they are very reliable and highly praised cars.

Answer: 1965

After two years of a disc/drum combination and all drum in earlier models, the Corvette was made totally unique among American cars by being given disc brakes all around, making it the car with the most reliable, fade free stopping power on the domestic market. Sting Rays _still_ rode like oxcarts, but they could stop on a dime!

To this day, it's still one of the only American cars that comes with all discs standard! The Dodge Viper is this car's only real domestic competition.

Answer: Chevy II, Pontiac Tempest, Oldsmobile F-85 and Buick Special

These cars, the Chevy being the only exception, were all built from the same frame and mold, with subtle styling differences to differentiate them. However, the one mechanical iconoclast in the bunch was the Pontiac Tempest, which originally had its transmission mounted on the rear axle, making it the first post-war American car with a transaxle.

This was done, theoretically, for even weight distribution, but I'll bet it cut down on the intermingling traffic among the GM brands in the repair bays!

Answer: Chrysler

Remember the K-car? That came out before the Chevy Citation or the Ford Escort. The Oldsmobile Toronado preceded everybody in the post-war (WWII) era. Cord, for whatever reason, preceded everybody, and there were others. This method of propulsion originated in and was popular in France for years before Detroit decided to go all-FWD, following Chrylser's lead.

Chrysler, recently, with the re-introduction of RWD in its Chrysler 300C and Dodge Magnum and Charger models, has obviously seen the error of its ways!

Answer: Borgward

Borgward was a minor German auto manufacturer that got its start in 1924 with an underpowered little machine that had to be a good 20 years out of date to begin with: A trike that had all of 2 bhp! Five years later, in 1929, Carl Borgward himself, the maker of that little scooter, was managing director of another bygone German company, Hansa. There he pushed for "middle class" automobiles, as the large, Duesenberg-ish cars that manufacturers were fond of making in those days just weren't selling.

The upshot of all this is, by 1937, the Hansa company changed its name to Borgward, due to the Henry Ford-like thinking of Borgward himself, and a new German brand was born. The Isabella, arguably Borgward's most popular model, started production in 1954 and was the company's premier export to the US until 1961, when the company went bankrupt. Auf wiedersehen, Carl...!

Answer: 1959

In 1959, after years of more or less restrained styling that made Pontiacs look like old-fashioned ladies on wheels, the stylists at GM went all out, making the Pontiac Bonneville/Star Chief/Catalina, along with the Oldsmobile line, two of the glitziest, chromiest lines of cars coming out of Detroit. This was the first year the split grille appeared on a Pontiac model. This car was a whopping 220 inches long, almost 20 feet, and 80 inches wide, more than _six_ feet! You could probably have put a wading pool in the trunk! And it's actually surprising that you didn't hear complaints about glare from all the chrome applied to it that year.

Oddly enough, the next year, the big wide-track was actually much more tasteful looking, but, alas, this was the one year since 1959 that Pontiac didn't have the split grille. This was remedied the next year as the divided frontal intake was adopted as a trademark styling cue, apparently forever, or at least until the Bonneville was revived in the late 80s, after a big car hiatus for Pontiac, sans the old split. However, just about every _smaller_ Pontiac model has sported the split grille, with the exception of the last generation of the Firebird and the last two of the Sunbird.

Also oddly: Oldsmobile adopted the split grille theme itself, from about 1977 on, and, in fact, came to co-own it with Pontiac, until its demise as a division at GM in 2004.

Answer: It had three cylinders and no valves.

Svenska Aeroplane Aktiebolaget (SAAB) started production of its little egg-shaped car in 1949. The original car only had a two-stroke engine, but this was upgraded in the mid-fifties to a three cylinder engine which managed to operate without the help of nornal valves. This was changed to a V-4 eventually. The egg-shaped models 92->96 were produced until 1980, when Saab turned its full attention to making the 99/900 and all its derivatives and descendants. The 93 was apparently the first one exported to the United States, though you'd see an occasional 92 here and there. A model called the 9000 was produced, in conjunction with Lancia, an Italian marque, in the 80s and 90s, and was substantially longer than the 900 derived models.

Saab was originally an airplane manufacturer, and its cars were very popular with counterculture types in the 50s, 60s and 70s. They are now yuppie-mobiles, and Saab itself was acquired as a jewel in the General Motors diadem in 1991. The latest models introduced that wear the Saab badge, in fact, are actually a Chevy SUV and a Subaru WRX underneath the Saab details. Chez Infamie!

Answer: Pegaso

The car, similar to its opposite number in Italy, Lamborghini, which was an outgrowth of a tractor company, was started by a truck company, but in Spain! The other difference is, this truck company was government owned and operated. The Pegaso has been made, in one form or another, as a luxury GT, since the late forties.

It was created out of the ashes of the great Hispano-Suiza automotive line, another famous Spanish marque. It is odd that Spain, a country no one connects with technology or industry, has produced two of the rarest and most lusted after concours machines out there. Ai caramba!

Answer: Austin, Morris, Riley, Wollesley and Vanden Plas

BMC, or the British Motor Corporation, came about in 1952 with the merger of the Austin and Morris automotive companies. From there, they acquired the names of the marques Wollesley and Riley, badge-engineered them as upscale versions of Austins and Morrises and bought the Vanden Plas line of limousines into the fold to complete the job of becoming a "British GM".

Later, they would merge with the makers of Triumph and assorted truck lines, Leyland Motors, to become British Leyland, in 1968. Alas, both companies died by the late seventies, as British Leyland was reduced to being called "Jaguar Rover Triumph" after yet another merger, due to the Japanese takeover of the foreign car market. Now, Triumph is dead, Rover is dead, and Jaguar is part of Ford.

And the Mini, perhaps the best innovation built by the venerable old company, is being made by the makers of the dreaded Messerschmitt warplane...BMW! Winston Churchill must be revolving in his grave like a dervish!

Answer: Ford

Though an obscure make called the Playboy, (not associated with the Jordan Motor Company in the 20s,) actually did it first in the late forties, Ford was the first of the Detroit big three to produce a "hardtop convertible" in 1957, and for three years.

The Fairlane 500 "Skyliner" coupe/convertible had a production run of 48,000+ units, though I think I've only seen about four in person in my entire life.

Answer: Belgium

Jacques Ickx was born in Brussels in 1945. The "James Dean of Formula One" drove for Ferrari, Brabham and Lotus and retired in 1979.

Answer: Cadillac

He formed Cunningham Inc in 1950 so that he could enter a US car in the Le Mans 24 hour race (the regulations permitted prototypes from a car manufacturer, but not from private entries). He entered two cars in the 1950 race; ne was a standard Cadillac two-door coup0e, and the second was a proptype with a Cadillac engine, which he named the C-1.

The late Briggs Cunningham created a scandal in the 1940s and 50s by sticking big, honking Cadillac engines in his race cars. Mr. Cunningham has always been noted as a "millionaire", and indeed, that's what he was: His father was the president of a bank, and his father-in-law was one of the co-founders of Standard Oil! He used this money to race and build cars, his own models, bearing the trademark blue-stripe-on-white-body motif that made him famous. Though details of what went into his cars, (aside from the engines,) were sketchy, his cars were probably styled by Ghia, since they all seemed to possess Ghia's trademark yawning, circular grille, and most of them were quite attractive!

Answer: Chevrolet Corvair, Ford Falcon and Plymouth Valiant

Odd that all three companies came out with the same concept at exactly the same time, isn't it? Either there was a concerted agreement to scale down car size by all three, or there was a _lot_ of corporate espionage going on! Chevy probably had the most innovative model in the Corvair, since this model had a rear engine, making it, to this day, a unique model, though Pontiac had a mid-engined model in the nineties.

The Corvair, alas, was killed off by bad publicity provided by a well-known lawyer who refused to acknowledge that the Corvair he singled out for criticism had had its suspension problem fixed in 1963.

The Ford Falcon lasted another 10 years and died, only to be revived four years later as a loss-leading Torino model. The Valiant survived for the next sixteen years!

Answer: Oldsmobile 442, Buick Gran Sport, Ford Torino GT, Mercury Comet Cyclone GT, Chevelle SS396, Plymouth GTX/Road Runner and Dodge R/T-Super Bee

Almost the minute the GTO was introduced (in 1964, to immediately compete with Ford's Mustang,) the other GM divisions started development of their own pavement scorching mid-sized cars: The Chevy SS396 based on the Chevelle Malibu, the Olds 442, based on the Cutlass and the Buick Gran Sport, based on the lowly Skylark. Ford followed the next year with the Torino GT and Comet Cyclone GT, both of which developed fastbacks eventually. Chrysler was dead last with their Plymouth GTX and Road Runner, based on the Belvedere/Satellite and the Dodge R/T - Super Bee - Charger models based on the Coronet.

All of these cars, with the exception of the Ford/Mercury pair, which were hampered by gosh-awful steering (5 turns lock-to-lock, zero road feel, and mushy handling,) developed enviable reputations as very fast and muscular machines, with perhaps the GTO, 442, Roadrunner, Charger and SS396 coming out smelling the best. The Roadrunner and Charger had options that mutated them into the "Superbird" and "Daytona" respectively, two cars with _enormous_ spoilers and lethal reputations in NASCAR and drag racing. The fad died out at about the same time as the 1970s oil crisis went into high gear and automotive emissions became a government mandated priority.