AAH #769 - The EV Slowdown and Lessons From 100 Years Ago

TOPIC: Classic Cars PANEL: Matt Anderson, Henry Ford Museum; Steve Purdy, Author; Gary Vasilash, shinymetalboxes.net; John McElroy, Autoline.tv

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
I'll don't Line After Hours is brought to you by
bridge Stone Tires Solutions for your Journey.

Speaker 2 (00:09):
Gary John, How are I'm doing well? We got a
lot of automotive history.

Speaker 3 (00:13):
We've got an exciting show. Yeah, I mean, and I've
got like this fresh off the press copy of Road
and Track, because.

Speaker 2 (00:22):
An actual printed version.

Speaker 3 (00:24):
Printed version, because you've got Mike Austin, it's on.

Speaker 4 (00:26):
Thanks for having me. Yeah, it's on.

Speaker 5 (00:28):
Like the digital version I think is out yesterday and
so it's in news on newsstands and in mailboxes any
day now.

Speaker 3 (00:35):
And Mike did a story on our guest here, Matt Anderson,
curator of Transportation at the Henry for Museum. So when
you all go get your copies of Road and Track,
go to the last page and here's this piece that.

Speaker 5 (00:49):
And I want to know, this was just beautiful, kiss
met because I did not know that I was going
to be on today when I talked to Matt, and
I'm sure you know you book and because of that coincidence.

Speaker 2 (01:02):
Yeah, and then the issue came out just in time
for this all to it just just.

Speaker 3 (01:06):
All comes together here on the Auto Line after ours.
So so Matt, thank.

Speaker 2 (01:10):
You for joining us today. Pleasure to be here, Matt.
You know, one of the reasons I wanted to have
you on the show is a couple of months ago,
you were one of the speakers at the SA's Propulsion Conference,
and you dug out some I thought really interesting insights
as to the very early days of the automobile, the
horseless carriage, and how things had evolved. Well, one of

(01:33):
the things that you got into was maybe there's lessons
today's industry can learn going back in history to those
very early days. And one thing that hit me was
if you go back to the very early part of
the twentieth century, as the horseless carriage first started to appear,

(01:54):
there was a lot of people who just hated them,
despised it. Get a horse, you know, was the common
refrain that a motorist might have heard back then. And
it seems to me maybe there's some lessons that today's
industry can learn because of there's a lot of people
out there who absolutely despise electric cars. You pick it

(02:16):
up from there. Am I grasping for straws here or
are there's some connections and lessons.

Speaker 6 (02:21):
No, I think you're onto something there, And you're right,
there was some hesitancy and some reluctance around the automobile
right of the turn of the twentieth century. And part
of that, Frankie, was a class issue.

Speaker 3 (02:30):
Right.

Speaker 6 (02:30):
Cars were very expensive at that time, so if you
had one, by definition, you were probably pretty well off,
So that was part of the issue. But also they
were noisy, they were smelly, they were just playing difficult
to drive, shifting gears, advancing spark, having to change a
flat tire almost guaranteed anytime you went out. So all
of that played into some of the reluctance to adopt
automobiles early on. But a lot of those problems got

(02:52):
knocked out pretty early, and I would say by nineteen
oh five nineteen oh six at the latest, folks are
really interested in wanting a car. There's envy, but it's
not at the money. It's envy because I want my
automobile now too.

Speaker 2 (03:03):
And then there were lower price models that started to
come out too. Henry Ford famously with the Model T.
It wasn't the only one, but that really opened up
the automobile to the masses.

Speaker 6 (03:13):
Absolutely, and the curve dash Oldsmobile before that was really
the first car kind of targeted at a middle class market,
we'll say, and you're right, Henry Ford just exploited that
obviously very successfully with the Model T.

Speaker 3 (03:24):
So it's just an issue of people being able to
get into a vehicle that changed their perception of it.
I mean, because you were saying that there were you know, pushbacks, smelly, noisy,
flat tires. I mean none of that went away. I
mean you still had that right, yeah.

Speaker 6 (03:39):
To some degree. Though it got better, certainly by nineteen
ten and into the mid teens. But you know, I
think some of it too, was just people were eager
to adopt the new technology, and horses had some disadvantages
that people came to realize pretty quickly too. You've got
to pay to board a horse, to feed a horse,
whether you're using it or not, whereas the car's only
costing you money if it's up and run. And then

(04:00):
there's the issue of the shall we say, exhaust that
horses leave behind, the emission.

Speaker 2 (04:05):
Yes, it was a different emission story.

Speaker 7 (04:07):
Absolutely.

Speaker 2 (04:08):
You know a lot of people don't realize this, but
horses and horse drawn carriages were actually very noisy, at
least in city streets if they were on cobblestones or
any kind of paved road. You know, the steel horseshoes,
the steel bands on the wheels of carts made a
hell of a racket.

Speaker 3 (04:25):
Now that's charming John now around Central Park and yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (04:29):
But that's only because you know, you hear an addition,
an occasional horse and an occasional carriage. But you know,
I was, early in my career the editor in chief
of a magazine called Automotive Industries. We could trace our
roots back to a magazine that started in eighteen ninety
five called The Horseless Age, and my then predecessor, a

(04:51):
guy named mister Ingersoll, had written an editorial in the
first issue of The Horseless Age in eighteen ninety five
and it was like, oh, these soless carriages are going
to be so much better. You know, we're not going
to have this emissions problem where it's going to be
so much quieter than it is today. It's going to
be far safer than all the accidents that we have
right now. And of course, with one hundred years plus

(05:13):
of hindsight it boy, was he wrong.

Speaker 6 (05:16):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, We've just traded one set of problems
for another set of issues around the automobile, obviously, but
people were just thinking about the issues that the horses
were causing at that time, and we're eager to kind
of break away from that. And yeah, by as we said,
by nineteen oh five nineteen ten, the middle class is
certainly entering the automotive market and it won't be long
after that for the working class gets in as well.

(05:37):
When Henry kicks off the movie Assembulne about nineteen thirteen,
nineteen fourteen.

Speaker 4 (05:41):
So this is something that's.

Speaker 5 (05:42):
Always kind of fascinated me too, And if I have
this wrong, I looked it up a long time ago.
But in terms of per capita, there weren't a lot
of horses.

Speaker 4 (05:49):
Not a lot of people had.

Speaker 5 (05:50):
Horses because of the stuff you guys mentioned. You need space,
you need to board them, they need veterinary care. So
we went from not everyone has a horse to you know,
surely for nineteen thirteen ager you're mentioning a lot of
people have cars like that was a pretty rapid transport
transformation just in the way people got around, right.

Speaker 6 (06:09):
Yeah, I think there's a misconception thanks to movies and
TV that you know, the sort of hers and carriage
or buggy was the equivalent of the family car today.
But you're right, particularly in the cities. You know, most
people didn't own horses, They relied on public transportation or
just walked wherever they were going. But the automobile all
of a sudden freed you to travel further distances, and
to some extent that had been kind of set up
or predicted by the bicycle, which was incredibly popular in

(06:32):
the eighteen nineties. Again because people could now travel where
they wanted on their own schedules and go farther than
they wanted to. So in a sense, the automobile is
almost a bigger, better version of the bicycle.

Speaker 2 (06:41):
Man, go into that, because I think not a lot
of people these days appreciate what the chain driven, pneumatic
tire bicycle did for transportation, what starting mainly in the
eighteen eighties.

Speaker 6 (06:54):
Yeah, absolutely, And there's a lot of bicycle technology that
went into the automobile. You mentioned the steel tube frames
of seeing early cars, pneumatic tires, chain drives, which were
not all that uncommon on cars on the turn of
the twentieth century, So that's a part of it. There
were even manufacturers who build bikes who then went into
the auto industry. Pope famously, Rambler, Thomas Jeffrey. I mean,
the rambler name was used on bicycles before it ever

(07:15):
appeared on automobiles, and now we think of it with
the AMC cars of the nineteen sixties.

Speaker 2 (07:19):
I think Boujo Poujo pougeou was And you know, though
they didn't build automobiles. The Right brothers went from bicycles
to airside. So why did that happen?

Speaker 3 (07:27):
Do you have any idea, I mean, why they didn't
do automobiles.

Speaker 6 (07:31):
I mean, well, by all accounts, Orville was a bit
of a gearhead, so he was interested in automobiles. But
the Rights got into aviation because that was the big
problem with the age, and they were just Wilbur I
think was really fascinated by it. But yeah, a lot
of bicycle technology went into the first airplanes as well.
They have steel tube frames on the wing spars, there
chain drive or any of the propellers. So the bike,
I think gets overlooked sometimes for as much as it

(07:54):
contributed to the twentieth century, How.

Speaker 2 (07:56):
Did that history was? The bicycle I got to believe
was more of a European thing that then came to
the US.

Speaker 6 (08:03):
Yeah, the earliest bicycles were developed in Europe, and then
the technology kind of migrated to the United States, and
all the major advancements I would say really took place
in Europe, you know, starting with the addition of pedals
on the front with the velocipede, and then the high
wheel bikes of the eighteen seventies and then replaced by
the chain in Sprocket systems. Now you have what they
called safety bikes with wheels of the same size. But yeah,
we forget what a boom it was here in the

(08:24):
eighteen nineties. It were selling millions of bikes every year
and using some early mass production techniques as well, which
would then be adopted by the auto industry.

Speaker 2 (08:34):
You mean, moving assembly line kind of manufacturing techniques to
some extent.

Speaker 6 (08:39):
The Pope Company in Connecticut probably had the most advanced
factory for bicycles of its time, but they were producing
parts using mass production techniques with specialized machines, building them
in enormous quantities and rudimentary moving a Sembuland obviously Henry
Ford took it to a much farther extent a few
years later, but the seeds were planted, so to speak.

Speaker 3 (08:57):
So any idea why there was a diversion from like,
you have bicycles motorcycles, but then you have automobiles that
I mean, why wasn't there some consolidation there.

Speaker 6 (09:11):
Yeah, that's a good question, and you're right. Some manufacturers
go in those specific directions and that's it. And you
know there's a natural sort of bridge, I guess from
bicycles to motorcycles. Right, you're just putting an engine on it.
But automobiles kind of developed separately, right, developed in Germany
with Carl Benz and his pot and wagen and three
wheel initially, and I think a lot of that was
just to accommodate the size of the engine, Right, it's

(09:32):
got to be a bigger Chassi and the bigger platform.
But motors get smaller. Bicycles and motorcycles I should say,
become more practical. But you're right, there is a real
distinction in the early development of those two technologies.

Speaker 2 (09:43):
Don't you have some car at the museum that predates
the Benz Wagon? I mean, you might argue, really is
the first automobile.

Speaker 6 (09:53):
We have an eighteen sixty five steam carriage built by
Sylvester Roper, who in Slee later went on to build
steam motorcycles as well.

Speaker 7 (10:00):
And you're right.

Speaker 6 (10:00):
That does predate the Benz Potten vaguen a little, but
the difference, I think is that it's steam powered, for one,
whereas Benz was working around the internal combustion engine. And
also Roper never had any imaginings of building this thing
on a commercial scale or selling it to the public.
It was literally a carnival attraction. You pay money to
go watch this thing move under its own power, which
must have been pretty exciting in eighteen sixty five.

Speaker 2 (10:23):
So I mean, how did this thing work?

Speaker 3 (10:24):
I mean, what was the heat source?

Speaker 6 (10:28):
Well, that's the thing. You know, we talk about the
advantages of steam and electric cars, and you know, one
thing said for steam was a proven technology at the
turn of the twentieth century, and it worked very well.
Developed low torque, didn't need to shift gears with a
steam car. But a lot of people kind of forget
that a steam car still requires some hydrocarbon fuel because
you've got to heat up the water to make the
steam in the first place. You know, why not cut

(10:49):
out the technological middleman and just go straight to an
internal combustion powered car or an ice engine.

Speaker 2 (10:55):
But it takes what twenty to thirty minutes to build
up the steam in the steam car, so an internal
combustion engine, that fire is right up with a you know,
a hand crank or even an electric starter, so much
more convenient than the steam.

Speaker 6 (11:09):
Absolutely, and you're right it did take a while to
build up ahead of steam. Some companies, White in particular,
eventually developed flash boilers. We could heat up your water
in about ninety seconds two minutes, so kind of eliminate
a lot of that problem. But the other issue was,
you know, finding soft water is easy here in the
Midwest or in the East. It's tough finding soft water
or water period out in the desert southwest, so that
was an issue that hampered the steam car as well.

Speaker 3 (11:31):
How many cars you actually have.

Speaker 8 (11:33):
At the Henry Report Museum, We've got about three hundred,
and I always say about because we have things like
a chassis from a nineteen forty Oldsobil which had the
automatic transmission, the first hydramatic.

Speaker 6 (11:44):
We have a four gt which is cutting too, is
a display piece for the Detroit Auto Show. So you know,
it's up to you whether you want to call that
whole car or not. But about three hundred's a good figure.

Speaker 3 (11:52):
So, Mike, you've been to lots and lots of car museums.
I mean, how does their collection impress you?

Speaker 5 (11:59):
The thing that I love about it is that it
does this might son. Obviously, it covers the history of
the car and especially the mass produced.

Speaker 4 (12:08):
Like the thing I always remember is like, oh wow,
they have a crust or.

Speaker 5 (12:11):
Minivan and they have you know, they have cars you
wouldn't normally see in the museum, but are this huge
piece of history and like where the industry went. And
also you know, there's definitely something there. Everyone can go
in and be like, oh I and I remember that,
or my my parents had that.

Speaker 2 (12:28):
And yeah, you've got some really rare pieces too, very
expensive pieces. And how do you go about determining what
should be? And now, obviously the museum has been around
an awful long time, and you inherited you yourself, Matt
inherited a collection that's already there. I got to imagine,
though there's still pieces that you would like to add.

(12:50):
What are they?

Speaker 6 (12:51):
I always have a wish list of things that we
should have, and a couple of things on that list
I would love an early Saturnes series. Right this idea
of general motors trying to copy the Japanese style and
sort of way of producing automobiles and building them literally
out of the motor city in Tennessee. I would also
love a Tesla model s right, the car that made
electrics cool again, getting back to our original subjects. So

(13:12):
if anybody's out there and has one of those that they're.

Speaker 2 (13:15):
Looking to, should be easy to find.

Speaker 6 (13:17):
One, one would hope, yes. And certainly the Saturn sold
in big numbers and the Tesla's you know, people seem
to like them at the time, you know, early adopters
buying those, but got to have one in the collection.

Speaker 2 (13:26):
Is there anything rare that you would like to see
in the collection?

Speaker 6 (13:30):
You know, it's interesting the rarest cars tend to be
the ones that were the most common at the time
they were sold. Not too long ago we acquired a
Ford Mustang too, which is like nobody's idea of a
dream car or a collector.

Speaker 2 (13:43):
Amen to that, right, right, But you know, these.

Speaker 6 (13:46):
Were cars that sold very very well at the time,
kept the Mustang brand alive. And there's this whole thing
called the Malaise era. Right as manufacturers were dealing with
new emissions restrictions and technologies and consumers are interested in
fuel economy, all of a sudden, the cars just frankly
weren't very good for a few years there, and you know,
nobody's collecting or saving that kind of stuff. We needed
to have one in the museum to represent that era

(14:06):
as much as we might like to forget it. So
it was a great acquisition.

Speaker 2 (14:10):
I was thinking that you were going to say, some
rare hand crafted body, you know, spectacular long limousine or
sedan from the nineteen thirties or something like that.

Speaker 6 (14:21):
Yeah, well, that's one thing I think that sets our
collection apart from others too. There are certainly other museums
that go deeper into certain makes or models or types
of cars. I don't know that anyone can touch our
breadth because you know, on the one end, we've got
a seventy eight Dodge Omni. The other hand, we have
the thirty one Bugatti Royale. Speaking of very rare cars,
so just about everything in between those two goalposts as well.

Speaker 3 (14:40):
So it's an interesting thing. You know, you're talking, Mike,
that they have cars that are common more or less,
I mean, not scessarily exclusive, But you guys can textualize everything.
I mean, if somebody goes to the museum and they
walk through the displays, they can learn why there was
this evolution and why different vehicles look the way they do.

(15:02):
I mean, and you have house trailers and all kinds
of transportation.

Speaker 6 (15:08):
Yeah, and that's the thing we always hope visitors kind
of take away from our auto exhibits. You know, they're
about cars, but they're really about people, right, and it's
about how people have changed over the last one hundred
and twenty hundred and thirty years to meet the car's needs,
and how the cars impacted every facet of our lives,
where we work, where we play, how we eat, et cetera.
So those kind of contextualizations are really really important to

(15:30):
the way we tell stories at the entry floor.

Speaker 2 (15:33):
And the other thing I like too, is it goes
well beyond cars. And so you're you're the curator of transportation.
You know, I probably took my first tour of the
Henry Ford Museum when I was about six or seven
years old, and it made a lasting impression. Because you
have these gigantic steam powered locomotives inside the museum. Does

(15:54):
that come under your purview?

Speaker 6 (15:56):
It does?

Speaker 2 (15:56):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (15:56):
I get to work with the railroad equipment as well,
And you're right that alleganty locomotive. That's the one thing
I think every everybody sees it and remembers it when
they come to visit the museum. It's always fun to see.

Speaker 2 (16:06):
So what else besides trains includes your part as the
curator of transportation.

Speaker 6 (16:12):
Yeah, well, we've got a modest collection of airplanes that
are all civilian aircraft, all pre World War Two. But
within those parameters we've got im boarding examples of just
about every significant aircraft of that time. We do have
some railroad locomotives. We have a diesel locomotive, a few
steam locomotives.

Speaker 4 (16:28):
We have some.

Speaker 6 (16:29):
Cars as well. Henry for a while owned a railroad
that Detroit, Tulito and Kington, so we've got a locomotive
and a caboose from that line. And we've got a
couple of small watercraft as well. Nothing major but steam
launch for example, from the turn of the twentieth century.

Speaker 7 (16:43):
Things like that.

Speaker 6 (16:44):
A little bit of everything.

Speaker 3 (16:46):
But another interesting thing is is that while people might think, oh,
it's the Henry Ford Museum, therefore it's going to just
be full of Fords. I mean, isn't like you have
the first accord that came off the line.

Speaker 6 (16:59):
Yes, that's on to us from Honda Generalcy. But yeah,
the very first Accord that was built in Ohio, so
the first Japanese badged automobile built in the United States,
which is an important piece for what it represents in
shifting perceptions of cars import versus domestic.

Speaker 2 (17:12):
Yeah, no, I think that's an important point that you
made there, Gary. It's not just for it. In fact,
Fords are probably in the minority of everything that's on
display there, at least amongst the cars. You also have
a racing display too, you guys get into the history
of motor race sign.

Speaker 6 (17:28):
Yeah, we've collected from the beginning racing. Racing was an
important part of the turn of the twentyth century for
improving the technology and proving the technology right. It was
some of the best advertising at the time, as it
still is to some extent today. But we've got some
pretty significant cars there. The nineteen oh eight or nineteen
oh six Locomobile, which won the nineteen o eight Vanderbilt
Cup in nineteen oh eight is kind of seen as
a turning point in the American industry because we win

(17:50):
the Vanderbilt Cup. GM as founded, the Model T is launched,
so that's important. More recent things like the Lotus Ford,
the first rear engine car to win to Indiana nineteen
sixty five, and the one everybody loves, the sixty seven
Mark four with Gurney and Floyd at Lamal when Ford
was taking it out against Ferrari in those days.

Speaker 2 (18:06):
At one point too, you had one of Juan Manuel
fond Geo's Grand Prix cars Mercedes from the mid fifties
fifty five, fifty six or something like that, that was
on loan to you right from Mercedes Benz and then
they they said, okay, that's enough, were calling it back
to Germany.

Speaker 6 (18:24):
It was our car, believe it or not. And this
opens up indiuar discussion about you know, what we have
and why we have it, and that was one that
we dea session, which is a formal process where we
kind of review what we have and it you know,
it has to get approved all the way up to
the board of Directors. We opted to remove that car
from our collection because it were really our focused on
the American market in American innovation, so unquestionably a very

(18:46):
important car and it was a big attraction, but it
just didn't fit what we were trying to do so
sometimes we do that, you know, more often than not
we're bringing things in rather than taking them out. But
it does happen.

Speaker 2 (18:55):
Do you own or does the museum own all the
vehicles or do you have colle or others that you
switch things in and out with.

Speaker 6 (19:03):
We do have some cars on loan. We talked about
the accord. We also have a few cars from our
friends at GM move loan to some significant racing cars
and production cars, and we'll bring things in for special
events like our Motor Muster and Old Car Festival. But
most of what you see when you go to the
museum is from the collection of the Henry Ford, owned
by the organization.

Speaker 3 (19:21):
So if these guys at GM can't get you a Saturn,
come on, you're watching we go get mad a Saturn?

Speaker 2 (19:29):
What about ev One? Do you have one of those
GM's first electric car.

Speaker 6 (19:33):
We do have an ev One. I love that car
and it's not an exaggeration state it's the greatest electric
car of the twentieth century, but maybe not the greatest
electric of all time anymore.

Speaker 2 (19:42):
Are these cars all in runnable condition? Is that an
important part for the museum or no.

Speaker 6 (19:47):
It's a mix, you know, a lot of what we
have we don't run on a regular basis because to
run a car you kind of have to keep running it,
and we'd be doing nothing but driving cars all day.
Not a bad job, but we have other things to do,
so some mic does.

Speaker 4 (20:00):
There you go.

Speaker 6 (20:01):
But for the most part we drain the fluids, put
the cars up on jackstands, etc. Just for the long
term preservation. We do have some vehicles that will run
on a semi regular basis. Of course, we have a
whole fleet of model ts. We're running out of Greenville
Village every day in the summertime.

Speaker 2 (20:14):
That's a point for anybody who's never been to Greenfield Village,
which is right next to the Henry Ford Museum, not
just called the Henry Ford, right, so you can get
rides and model ts.

Speaker 6 (20:26):
Yeah, people always enjoy that, and I think they're moved
not just by the car itself and the technology, but
the experience of being in an open air touring car.
And you start to realize that was a big selling
point at the turn of the twentieth century, right getting
the fresh air, getting out there, feeling the breeze, seeing
and being seen. Frankly, riding in an automobile.

Speaker 7 (20:44):
It's we're a big deal. See.

Speaker 3 (20:45):
This is an interesting point though. So if you go
to Greenfield Village, you can also take a carriage ride
and you have these dray horses, I mean these giant
horses that are pulling people. And this gets back to
the beginning when we were talking about how how people
thought that cars are a noisy and smelly and indeed,
if you're walking through the village and you those cars

(21:06):
are noisy and smelly, but you've got to watch we
were walking because the horses deposit things that could fill a.

Speaker 6 (21:15):
City absolutely, and you know, we only have about four
or six horses working in the village at any one time,
and they do leave a bit of a mess. But
the one thing we can't get across is like this
is just a small portion of what you would have
seen one hundred and twenty years ago in this city.
So it's tough to imagine today.

Speaker 4 (21:31):
Man.

Speaker 2 (21:31):
You know, we were talking about all these cars and
things that you have on display. You guys have got
some incredible records too, photography documents and the like. Is
that available to researchers or others you know, or you
tell the story?

Speaker 6 (21:48):
Yeah, no, absolutely, We've got a great collection of automotive history.
The two core pieces we have Ford Motor Companies corporate
records going up to about nineteen fifty three or so,
so right from the beginning nineteen oh three. We have
the articles of incorporation that Henry Companies signed to get
the automaker off the ground.

Speaker 2 (22:05):
There.

Speaker 6 (22:05):
But we also have the collections of Henry Austin Clark,
who is a well known automotive collector for many, many decades,
and he collected a little bit of everything. A lot
of published sort of consumer material, marketing materials, brochures, tlests.
Those are a phenomenal resource, but a lot beyond automobiles
as well, a great collection of trade catalogs, industry catalogs, etc.
And yes, all of that is available for research by

(22:27):
the public. You can make an appointment through our benson
Ford Research Center and we can help you. If you're
not in the immediate southeast Michigan area, we can often
help you remotely as well.

Speaker 2 (22:35):
Get you what you need is a lot of that
digitized or not? I mean, can you search this online?

Speaker 6 (22:39):
We are working on it. We've got more than two
hundred thousand items digitized right now, which is great, but
we have about twenty six million collections. Little ways to go.

Speaker 2 (22:48):
Yet you got some job security in that or somebody does.

Speaker 3 (22:51):
All right, So John, remember the train. I remember that
you have presidential limousines. Do you still have those?

Speaker 6 (22:57):
Yeah, we still have those out on display. We have
five different presidential vehicles, and yet to your point, for
them are Lincoln automobiles that were built for various presidents,
going back to FDR right up to last. One was
built for Nixon and used through the first George Bush,
believe or not, and the best.

Speaker 2 (23:11):
You also have the car that Kennedy was assassinated at.

Speaker 6 (23:15):
Yes, yes, and that's that's always astonishing when people see
that and you assume it would have been destroyed or
locked away in a government warehouse somewhere, but no, In fact,
after Kennedy was shot, they just practically they needed an automobile,
and they figured it was FASTERI to rebuild what they
had than to start from scratch. So that car was
completely stripped down, rebuilt, given a permanent roof, bullet resistant

(23:36):
windows and armor and all of that in about six
or seven months in a very quick fix, and then
continue to be used right up through nineteen seventy seven.

Speaker 2 (23:44):
And I'm kidding even though that was the car that
Kennedy had been shot at.

Speaker 6 (23:48):
Absolutely, and I've always read that Johnson in particular kind
of avoided that car whenever he could, I think, for
obvious reasons. Yeah, right, Yeah, pretty astonishing.

Speaker 2 (23:56):
In fact, maybe I'm confusing. Museums. Correct me if I'm
wrong here. Doesn't they Ford also have the chair that
Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in, replete with bloodstains.

Speaker 6 (24:06):
You are correct, we do have that chair, and it's
kind of coincidental that that and the Kennedy limousine are
both there. But Henry was a big admirer of Abraham
Lincoln so purchased a lot of Lincoln memorabilia in the
chair belonged to the Ford family, no relation the Ford
theater family in Washington, and they sold it at auction
and he had the resources to buy it. So we've
had it ever since.

Speaker 2 (24:26):
Go into a little bit and you know, we're getting
down to the end of the segment here. How did
the Henry Ford Museum start?

Speaker 6 (24:32):
Yeah, we're getting close to our one hundredth anniversary here.
Was founded in nineteen twenty nine and Henry envisioned it
as a kind of living, breathing tribute to Thomas Edison,
who was his great hero and friend. And his idea
is that we shouldn't just be capturing history about the military,
or history about great leaders or politicians. It should be
history of everyday life. So he collected a lot of

(24:53):
common things and things that ironically are not so common
anymore because they weren't saved, they weren't thought of his importance.

Speaker 2 (24:59):
But that's what I I had always heard is that
Henry realized that the world has industrialized, was changing very,
very rapidly. He also recognized that he was one of
the culprits for that happening. And here was a guy
who loved you know, Bucolic rural scenes and the like,
and wanted to capture that before it disappeared, and he
knew it was going to disappear.

Speaker 6 (25:21):
Yeah, it's the sort of great irony of Henry Ford
in his work. You're right, he, more than anyone, is
probably responsible for that transformation in the United States, but
he wanted to preserve some of life as he knew
it growing up in the eighteen sixties eighteen seventies. So
there's a lot of focus on that in our collections,
but we've always collected things from the modern day as
well and continued to collect modern innovations right to the present.

Speaker 3 (25:41):
Okay, so let's go full circle on this. You mentioned
that Henry and Thomas Edison were great friends. So why
internal combustion rather than electric motors?

Speaker 6 (25:52):
Way back when, Henry was always a believer in internal combustion.
His first car, the Quadricycle of eighteen ninety six, had
an internal combustion engine, and he just thought it gas
was the best compromise field. It got you the most
power for the weight that it was. I mean, batteries
and electric motors tended to be very heavy and very expensive.
Also got your great range. I mean, the best electric
car of the nineteen teens might get you seventy eighty
miles on a charge under ideal conditions.

Speaker 7 (26:15):
It's not bad, not too bad.

Speaker 2 (26:17):
Yeah. But also you're that's had about twenty five miles
an hour, right.

Speaker 6 (26:20):
Yeah, Yeah, and a Model T gets twenty miles to
the gallant ten gallan tate two hundred miles of range,
so that's a big improvement.

Speaker 2 (26:26):
So yeah, that's so.

Speaker 3 (26:30):
Thomas and Henry didn't like mix it up over what
was the way to go, but they didn't.

Speaker 6 (26:36):
I think Edison was a little disappointed that his batteries
and electric cars in particular didn't didn't last a little longer.
But Ford did experiment with some electric cars, never went
into production, perhaps never had any serious intention of producing
the but he and Edison did collaborate on a couple
of one offs.

Speaker 3 (26:50):
So you mentioned also the early tires failing on flat
tires on these early vehicles, and Harvey's fire Stone is
a friend of these guys too.

Speaker 4 (27:02):
Absolutely, Yeah.

Speaker 6 (27:03):
Firestone had a contract to supply tires to Ford even
before the Model T and obviously all he did very
well for the Model T success as its entry, and
the three of them had a great time going on
those camping trips in the nineteen teens in the early twenties.

Speaker 2 (27:15):
Well, in fact, there's still a family connection there. So
Chairman of Ford Motor Company, Bill Ford's mother is a Firestone.
Absolutely yees, so it's still there.

Speaker 7 (27:27):
I realize that.

Speaker 2 (27:28):
Yeah, Look, we're gonna have to wrap this segment up.
But Matt Anderson, thanks so much for coming on. Very interesting.
If any of you and the audience have not been
to the Henry Ford, if you ever get a chance,
go take it. It's an amazing museum, and.

Speaker 3 (27:44):
I'd say make a chance, don't.

Speaker 2 (27:45):
Yeah, make a chance. And in fact, I mean you
could probably spend a week there and still not really
fully absorb everything that's in the museum. There's so much
to say.

Speaker 6 (27:55):
Terrific, Thank you very much, been a pleasure, real good.

Speaker 2 (27:58):
We're going to take a quick break here. We're going
to be coming back and talking about more automotive history,
making the life full of memories, one road trick at
a time.

Speaker 3 (28:10):
That's what really matters rich down whether peep.

Speaker 2 (28:13):
Tires with the seventy thousand mile women at warranty. All right,
we're back and we're making a guest change here. We're
going to get a mic on our new guest right now.
But we've got Steve Perty here from Shunpiker Productions, right
who has written a book and Seohn, I don't know

(28:36):
if I'm holding it up right or not. You got
it on the screen here. So it's called Mass Cops
in Motion, yes, a subtitle. A hefty tome, I'll have
you know. It's about five pounds and it is jam
packed with all kinds of pictures of hood ornaments, grills, tailfins.

(28:56):
You tell the story, Steve. He wrote the book.

Speaker 9 (28:58):
It's subtitle is Images and Stories of Automotive Aesthetics, and
it's forty years of my photography of hood ornaments and
other details of automotive design. I started doing those, I
don't know, forty years ago or so when I inherited
kind of a high end thirty five millimeter camera with
a two hundred millimeter lens, and I discovered the Concorde

(29:21):
de Legance at Meadowbrook about the same time, and.

Speaker 7 (29:24):
I went to the show.

Speaker 9 (29:25):
And when you're looking at cars through a long lens
like that, it just kind of draws you into the
details like the hood ornaments and things like ever reflections.
And because you're getting a close up, and because of
that the compression factor of that lens, it's the background
is blurred. He's got a narrow depth of field, and

(29:47):
so they ended up being kind of artsy. Well, in
the early days, you know, I'd go there with pockets
full of film and maybe one in fifty shots were keepers.
But after doing that for a number of years, then
you know, I just kind of learned how to really
get beautiful images. So and about the same time, part
of the Concorde de Legance was the Automotive Fine Art exhibit.

(30:11):
The Automotive Fine Art Society had their annual show there,
So I got to know all of those guys and
was influenced by people like Tom Hale and then you
know the major automotive artists. So so that artistic influence
and looking through that long lens, you know, I went.
I went to the concur every year and whatever other
car shows I could find, and you know I was
I was shooting blossoms and faces of animals and other things,

(30:34):
but that long lens, but I was always drawn to
those hood ornaments.

Speaker 2 (30:38):
So how many pictures are in the book.

Speaker 9 (30:41):
Three hundred and twenty images, about three hundred and sixteen pages,
and I've added about fifty thousand words of text, just
enough text to kind of put them all in context.
Sometimes they're about the company, that the company and what
it meant about the car itself. Sometimes it's it's how
I captured the image and why I captured it, what
drew me to that. So the the it's not a

(31:04):
scholarly work and it's not an encyclopedic work. It's just
those images that caught my eye.

Speaker 2 (31:10):
Over All, those years, and so you shot every one
of these amages my gas. So I mean, you've got
three hundred plus in here. You probably have a lot
more in your life more.

Speaker 9 (31:20):
The hardest part about doing that book was culling those thousands,
tens of thousands.

Speaker 2 (31:25):
Of So what was your criteria? First going well, yes,
this one goes in that one. I'd love it, but
I'm not going to put it in.

Speaker 9 (31:32):
Well, I would go, I'm not very organized with my
computer storage systems. So I would go to a car
show that I had shot, and I just kind of
skimmed through the images and I'd see some of them
jump out at me and some of them wouldn't. So
all those that jumped out at me, I'd kind of
separate those, and then I'd go through those again, and
then I'd go again and again, and I knew about

(31:53):
how many I wanted for the book, So the hardest
part was really deciding, because you know, there are so
many that caught. And also, when I started the book,
it was going to be about hood ornaments. But when
I started calling these pictures from all the car shows
that I'd shot, a lot of other things jumped out
at me, like this big Buick grill that became in
the book, a two page spread for those kind of things.

(32:15):
Cadillac tail fence Cadillac tale fifty nine Eldorado, right, yes,
fifty nine. There's a couple of images like that. In fact,
one of the images in the book, and one of
the very few that I shot indoors without a flash,
but indoors, was when the Cadillac when GM had their
Cadillac collection stored in a warehouse between when it was

(32:35):
downtown and when they moved it out to the to
the Heritage Center, and I stuck my way into the warehouse,
got some good images.

Speaker 7 (32:43):
But it's just the tail fit of the Cadillac.

Speaker 9 (32:45):
But behind it kind of blurred was the Christmas tree
for they that they had in the little little museum
that they had there. So that became my Christmas card
for a couple of years. You may have got one
of them.

Speaker 3 (32:56):
So, Steve, you've taken these images in largely of details
of vehicles. I mean, what vehicles have features that you'll
not forget?

Speaker 9 (33:09):
Well, I'll tell you. Generally speaking, the nineteen fifties cars
are the most striking because they're the most unusual and
the most high design. The thirties cars a lot of
times looked alike, but you zoom in on the details
and you find a lot of differences. The hood ornaments
particularly are different from one to the other. But it's

(33:29):
probably the fifties cars that are the most dramatic and
the most striking, and probably the most photogenic.

Speaker 2 (33:35):
You sent us some photos ahead of time. I don't
know if, Sean, if you've been showing them or should
we pick out some and talk about them or what?

Speaker 9 (33:44):
Okay, well, but I don't know which, why I don't
remember which?

Speaker 3 (33:48):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, so so you can yeah, so that one.

Speaker 9 (33:52):
Take a look at that one. Now, that's another example
of what changed when I started the book. When I
was thinking about hold on it, I came across an image.

Speaker 2 (34:02):
Like that where and the images is it's got to
be a grill of a car, right you can?

Speaker 7 (34:07):
Can you tell any more about it? Maybe you can
hold it up? So hold it up.

Speaker 2 (34:10):
But I have from the photo I cannot tell what
this is.

Speaker 3 (34:13):
Well.

Speaker 9 (34:13):
That the bar across the middle is the bar that
locates the headlights on a thirties Dusberg, early thirties Dusenberg.
The patterns you see there are a result of the
grille slats, some being tilted one way, some being tilted
the other way. And for a photographer, the worst thing
to shoot cars at a car show is a bright
sunny day. But in this case, what happens is the

(34:35):
sun hits that bar and it makes those wonderful scalops
go in both directions. So that's when I decided that
I would include some abstracts, the ones that you'd look
at and have to kind of guess what they were,
but they were just they but they struck my eye.

Speaker 7 (34:50):
Basically, Oh there's a good one.

Speaker 2 (34:52):
I don't know if I can turn to this this
page quickly or not, but you even have like an
Oldsmobile ornim yes, and the photos all rusted out, and
here's a forward one. There you go, that's all rusted out.
So I mean you're not just trying to go for
beauty shots.

Speaker 9 (35:10):
Oh No, these are car shows and junk yards and
backyards wherever it's. Wherever one of these jumped out at me,
I shot him. In fact, let me tell you about
one of my favorite spots in Middle Tennessee. Right at
the base of the Cumberland Plateau. There's an old guy
that his livelihood was collecting nineteen fifties cars and using

(35:31):
it as a salvage yard. Put his kids through school
that way. When I first ran into him, he's about
eighty years old. He hadn't really been selling parts much.
He was just playing with them all. But he had
about thirty of them out in front of his place,
and they're surrounded by a fence, and gosh, they're just
all rusty and beautiful old fifties cars, nothing but fifties cars.

(35:52):
So I asked him if I could shoot him, and
so he let me shoot him. But then twenty years
later I went back again. Now he's ninety something. Couldn't
come out to talk to him, but his son let
me in there, and a lot of those ended up
in the book because they're they're they're strikingly textured with
rust and old paint. The young man paint in some

(36:12):
of those cars with house paint when he was a kid.
But but but part of the charm of these details
is for one thing, the rusty ones, they really have
a character. And the other is and I was telling
you about a sunny day being what a what a
what a photographer doesn't like, what a what a photographer
does like is a rainy day because those shiny hood

(36:35):
ornaments and the shiny cars and the paint and the
details sparkle in in that little bit of rain and
it adds a depth to that picture that's just strikingly beautiful.

Speaker 3 (36:45):
I think so, Mike, at one point you were in
this world sort of deeply when you were with Hemming's.
I mean, what is that culture of people who are
interested in things like this?

Speaker 5 (36:56):
Uh, I don't I don't know exactly. I'd say it
goes deep. I mean there's a lot of you know,
the details, especially when you get into pre work cars.
I mean it's there's an obsessive museum like you know,
archaeology almost too they made, you know, or if you
get into more bespoke cars that might have changed their
hood ornaments, right, it's that they made this one, you know,

(37:19):
from this year to this year. But then you know
you read it on the internet and there's different, uh,
you know, conflicting stories of like well this one might
have been in this state of this year, and it
it just goes all the way down.

Speaker 4 (37:31):
You know.

Speaker 5 (37:32):
If if model trains aren't enough for you, I'd say
get into automotive ornaments.

Speaker 9 (37:38):
I offer the disclaimer in the front of the book
that that you know, I've captured all these photographs of
what car they were on, and I cautioned people not
to not to take that for gospel, because often there
are two different stories about when a what ornament was
used and when it wasn't used, and what one was
used on which cars, and all that kind of stuff.
So previous books that I've done, you know, I really

(38:00):
enjoyed the writing, but I didn't enjoy the research that much.

Speaker 7 (38:02):
It was tedious.

Speaker 9 (38:03):
But this book, the research was as much fun as
the writing. Why Well, because every time I thought I
knew a story it seemed and I went into fact
check it, somewhere I found out there was another story
and maybe another story, and it led me deeper and deeper,
and some of them ended up being really huge stories.

Speaker 2 (38:22):
So tell us your favorite one.

Speaker 9 (38:24):
Well, I'm glad you ask. You know our friend Maureen McDonald. Yes,
she and I are working on sort of working on
a historical novel about Eleanor of Alasko Thornton, who was
the model that posed for the Rolls Royce Wood ornament.
The spirit that's oh no, it's a big story. That's
I talk about a lot of that in the book. Well,

(38:46):
she thought that doing a historical novel about this young
lady who was right in the middle of the first
fifteen years of automobiling in Britain with King Edward the
seventh and mister Rolls and mister Royce and her paramour,
Lord Montague, who started the first automotive magazine back in

(39:06):
the day, would make a wonderful story for a historical novel. Well,
Eleanor Thornton died in nineteen fifteen when she and her paramour,
Lord Montague were crossing the Mediterranean. He was going to
India to be the Crowns representative transportation representative. She was
going to go to Cairo, turn around and come back

(39:28):
and run the magazine while he was gone. Well, as
they were passing Crete, their pleasure boat was sunk by
a German u boat. She perished and he survived, and
in the end. Twenty years later, Lord Montague wrote in
his memoirs a scene of them clinging tightly to each
other as the boat was sinking, and a big wave

(39:51):
came along and ripped her out of his arms, and
she perished and he survived for three days on an
upturned lifeboat. So David Attenborough and Martin Scorsese bought the
rights to a similar story, and they were going to
produce a documentary some in or twenty twelve, I think,
but it was going to be centered on the founding
of Rolls Royce. Well, this would be the same story,

(40:13):
but it would be centered on Eleanor of Alasko Thorpe.
I think your story is more interesting.

Speaker 5 (40:18):
I was going to say, what did the lady Montague
think when, well, Lord Montague came home with a car
that had his paramore's image on them.

Speaker 9 (40:26):
Well, she might have been in the passenger seat, because
Lord Montague's wife. You know, back in those days at
the turn of the century, for a wealthy, powerful man
to have a woman on the side basically to hand
handle some needs and the wife is at home taking
care of all the other needs. They got to know
each other and she respected They respected each other because

(40:48):
Lord Montague's wife knew how valuable she was to him
in running the magazine. She did road test reports with him.
She did she was the manager of the office. She
was the main clerk for the thousand mile rally in
nineteen hundred, which kind of established automobile in Britain as
a thing. So it's really a wonderful story.

Speaker 2 (41:11):
So hood Ornaments led you to this stright, that's amazing.

Speaker 9 (41:14):
So that's the most fun one. But there's plenty of others,
like the packerd of I mean, the Pierce Arrow, the Archer.
You've seen the Archer well like Cupid.

Speaker 7 (41:26):
Yes, right, that.

Speaker 9 (41:28):
One was designed by a woman named her name is
escaping me at the moment.

Speaker 7 (41:33):
She was the first full time auto designer in Detroit.

Speaker 9 (41:38):
Essentially she worked for the Turnstat Division, who designed a
lot of these for the manufacturers, for all different manufacturers. Well,
she used the janitor for her model and sent him
to an archery school to make sure he had the
right pose so she could sculpt him shirtless. And oh gosh,
I wish I could remember her name rather No, no,

(42:01):
that wasn't it.

Speaker 7 (42:02):
No company.

Speaker 9 (42:04):
Wow, there's story signs of those stories in this book
that I found. The Midge, the MG Midge and old MG's.
You'll see what looks like a mosquito about that high
and an aftermarket person in nineteen twenty first produced those
for MG's because the Midge was sort of a sounded

(42:28):
like midget and that was the name of the car
back then, DMG Midget basically, so they used this mosquito
like thing, and the company said, we don't want to
pesky mosquito on our cars, so we're not going to
authorize that. But then the MG owners loved it so
much that the company had to eventually produce it and
sell it.

Speaker 2 (42:48):
So I want to get back to the spirit of ecstasy, okay.

Speaker 3 (42:51):
So I mean to this day that is legendary. I mean,
Rose Royce continues to have, you know, photographers and models
and it's a living story of all of these hood
ornaments that you've taken pictures of. I mean, that's got
to be the most famous. Why do you think that's
the case.

Speaker 9 (43:10):
Well, they went away primarily for both stylistic reasons and
for practical ones. In the nineteen fifties the late nineteen fifties,
the hood ornaments just kind of became badges sort of,
and part of it was safety issues because people would
get them paled on them if you get hit by
a car, and others were just plain stylistic. There's so

(43:30):
much filigree on the car. I think the hood ornament
itself became superfluous basically, and probably the last ones that
you could call that ended up on the fenders. There
were one on each fender and that was in the
early sixties on some full size Pontacs and mostomobiles and
things like that. So they just went away for both

(43:51):
stylistic and practical reasons. I think they Rolls Royce hood ornament,
which very classy and still exists now on your Rolls Rice.
When you turn off the car, a little trap door
opens and she folds down in under the hood.

Speaker 7 (44:04):
The trap door closes on top of her. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (44:06):
Because they became so desirable, people would deal them.

Speaker 7 (44:09):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (44:10):
And in the sixties, of course the hippies would steal
the Mercedes emblems off the hood of the car because
it looked like a peace symbol if you turn it
upside down.

Speaker 7 (44:17):
So what was.

Speaker 2 (44:19):
The last hood ornament?

Speaker 7 (44:21):
Well, the.

Speaker 9 (44:23):
Like we say, the Spirit of Ecstasy is still made,
so I still made. So but the gosh, I want
to say, Jaguar didn't. They have the leaper the well
on some of the cars and my boxes are still
my box being made. They still use the hood art
but but the last ones that were on the car
was probably the Jaguar because they used the leaper even
on the ones they made here in Detroit. The Jaguar

(44:48):
S Type was that what they called it X type? No,
the one that was built alongside the Lincoln LS in
Wickson S Type Yeah, yes.

Speaker 2 (44:57):
What I don't remember that was built him?

Speaker 9 (45:00):
Yes, yes, it was built on the same platform, on
the same powertrain as the Lincoln LS and Wickham and
the Thunderberg.

Speaker 2 (45:07):
Yeah, wick I don't remember that at all.

Speaker 9 (45:10):
It was a nice looking car, I think. I don't
know if its quality was up to par, but I
had an LS and the interior quality on that was
pretty dismal, so maybe maybe it.

Speaker 7 (45:19):
Wasn't enough quality.

Speaker 9 (45:21):
But that was before that was when Ford still owned
Jaguar basically, so so that went away. But yeah, hood
ornaments are a wonderful thing, you know, but it just
led to so much other stuff.

Speaker 7 (45:33):
When I did the book.

Speaker 2 (45:34):
What do you think of today's cars? That?

Speaker 9 (45:36):
I mean, well, a lot of people say to me.
You know, I've been reviewing cars for twenty twenty five years,
and when i drive down the road on a long
highway drive, I'm looking in the rear miror can kind
of challenge myself to see how far back I can
identify that car.

Speaker 7 (45:51):
Or one company the other.

Speaker 9 (45:52):
So people say to me, you know, cars all look
the same these days. Well, if you went to the
auto show and you strolled around slowly, you'd find some
pretty interesting stuff. And it doesn't all look alike.

Speaker 7 (46:04):
But so much of it is.

Speaker 9 (46:07):
Evolutionary and not dramatic that you know that it seems
that way now. Hyundai and Kia.

Speaker 7 (46:15):
Look at how they're leading design right now.

Speaker 9 (46:17):
You know, you look at one of the new new
Hyundai and because the palisade or the tail you ride,
I mean, that's pretty strike. They're very dict that doesn't
look like other cars in this class. So I you know,
I the golden age of automotive design was probably American
automotive design was probably the nineteen fifties, just because it

(46:38):
was so varied. But in the classic area of the
thirties was wonderful. But today there's still quite a lot
of variety out there if you look closely, I.

Speaker 3 (46:47):
Think, Steve, if we go back to the hood ornament
and the other details, it seems to me that at
one point they were added to draw people to the
vehicle as something particularly special, and a lot of that
is gone by the wayside as they look for ways

(47:08):
to reduce costs and make them more well maybe not
more affordable, but at least less expensive.

Speaker 9 (47:15):
Yeah, I don't know if the cost was the biggest
issue in the early days when they still called them
mascots instead of hood artiments, because they were essentially like
an athletic team's mascot, meant to reflect something about the
brand essentially, and so Pontiac of course had its Indian
head and that lasted in different forms, different styles right

(47:39):
up into the nineteen fifties. Plymouth had the sailing ship,
same theme, lasted all the way into the fifties. Packard,
on the other hand, had probably six or seven or
eight different, totally different images for their hood ornaments, so
those also were meant to say something about the elegance
or the speed or the class of the cock or

(48:00):
something like that. But even Chevrolet and you know, lesser
brands had some pretty fancy hood ornaments in their name.

Speaker 2 (48:07):
Now, these all evolved from radiator cap yes, is that
not right? And then the first radiator caps actually had
temperature gauges so that when you're in the driver's seat
you could see if your engine was going to.

Speaker 9 (48:19):
Overheat or That was called a boice motimeter. I have
a whole chapter on voice motometers. What happened was Boyce
invented that thing, and it got pretty popular because people
wanted to see the temperature of their water and so forth.
But it wasn't long before Packard and other companies started
embellishing those motimeters with their little crest or their little design.
Packard even put a whole hood ornament behind the motimeter

(48:42):
in the latter days. But then in the twenties, temperature
gauges moved inside the car, so they didn't need the
motimeter anymore. But by then it was really I mean,
it was accepted that that they had to have some
kind of of a hood ornament. So that's when they
became hood ornaments rather than mascot essentially what the collectors
would tell you.

Speaker 5 (49:03):
So some of them were head ornaments, some of them
are just badges. But I think we've now we're in
this era when these sort of things are getting even.

Speaker 4 (49:12):
More simplified and flatten.

Speaker 5 (49:13):
I think of Volkswagen or Audi, Alphameo Cadillac even as
simplified the crest.

Speaker 4 (49:19):
What you're feeling on that as as a trend.

Speaker 2 (49:21):
Well.

Speaker 9 (49:23):
There it's essentially their their logo or their look, the
Audi has the four circles and Mercedes has their their
star and so so these badges still have their kind
of logo look basically, but their badges, they're nothing more
than badges essentially, and some of them have some interest
to them, some of them don't. I like the you

(49:44):
know as a as a as a guy who likes
the aesthetics of it all. Basically, I like the different
different designs that I see. You know, some Europeans have
a little more artistic feel to them, and uh and
and then Kea with their new ai A bad I
just love that because it was so simple and so classy.
But yeah, the the esthetics of it are much simpler.

(50:08):
They're much less artsy than they used to be.

Speaker 2 (50:10):
What do you think about Is there an opportunity here,
because you know, to just say it's got a badge, well,
you know, there seems to be an opportunity to connote
more of what the spirit of the brand is all
about and add some artistic flavor to it.

Speaker 4 (50:24):
Yeah, I think the simplification is a mistake.

Speaker 5 (50:26):
And mean you look at you know, iconic badges not
necessarily quota orments, but you know, Ferrari Portia Lamborghini, they're
still doing the same one, and you know they'll speak
it here and there, but you know they're not taking
elements out or rendering it, you know, from an actual shape.

Speaker 4 (50:42):
They're not turning the horse into like some pixelated representation.

Speaker 3 (50:46):
So I mean, do you think that automakers are doing
that from a design perspective in order to make it
seem as though they're more advanced? And consequently, I mean,
so you know you're mentioning, you know, in folkswag and
what with its flat design for its logos and a
lot of that was influenced by the design on the

(51:07):
iPhone in terms of what the app designs look like.
And is it do you think they're trying to associate
themselves more closely with technology?

Speaker 5 (51:20):
Yeah, I think some of it is you, Yeah, you
want to be seen as current and modern, and it's
changed for change's sake. So it's you know, it's a
very easy thing to say, well we need to do
something different. Well we haven't updated the logo in twenty years,
let's do that. And some of that is some of
that is a justified want to feel current. You know,
if you put the old like flowers and ducts. If

(51:41):
you resurrected the nineteen eighties Cadillac badge with the laurels
on the side, that's going.

Speaker 4 (51:47):
To look dated, kind of old, and not in a
good retro way.

Speaker 5 (51:51):
But I think I think they have gone a little
too far to just say we're going to strip it
of all of its decoration, when by definition it is
a decoration.

Speaker 4 (51:59):
So I should have a little bit of flat.

Speaker 3 (52:01):
You know, it's interesting think about think about you know
we're talking about Ford earlier. I mean, think about the
Ford badge, I mean his script. I mean it's not changed.

Speaker 2 (52:09):
It's timeless. Yeah, really, it's evolved over time, but not much,
but not much. You still recognize it.

Speaker 7 (52:16):
For the early one.

Speaker 9 (52:17):
I like the idea of increasing the stylizing. The stylized
designed Cadillac in their celestique. Was it one of one
of the recent concept cars, not the production version, but
the concept car had a wonderful little strip down the side,
and inside that strip was a depiction of the Cadillac

(52:37):
Goddess that was the hood ornament for thirty or forty years.
Just she's done in plastic, she's done in an outline,
but it's a reference to the no.

Speaker 2 (52:46):
I love that idea. And you know, with today's technology,
there's a lot that you could do with badging to
make it much more artistic, you know, standing out. I'm thinking,
I just saw a company just this week. I'm trying
to I see so many different things that has developed
the technology to mold led lights right into plastic badging

(53:06):
so that you can have not just a badge sitting
there that's some sort of coded plastic but is illuminated, right.
And you don't want to go too far, you know,
you don't want the Tokyo by Night School of Design
or it's you know, doing all these different things. But
there's got to be a way to really take badging

(53:27):
to another level here.

Speaker 4 (53:29):
You know.

Speaker 9 (53:29):
They had a press conference some years ago with George Jarro,
the young young mister George Arrow, and I asked him
at the end, I said, what designs do you like
and not like? Or what do you like about design?
What you don't like about modern design? And he said, well,
I really like the way that the different markets, the

(53:49):
European market, the Japanese market, the American market have their
own language, thrown design language. And he gave a couple
examples of that, and I think that's true. Think of
the think of the Japanese, the little Japanese fun cars,
the K cars, well yeah yeah, the cave style car.
A lot of them looked like an anime puppy for
goodness sakes, are so cute. But and that's a purely

(54:11):
Asian design. You you see those here if they import
a few of them.

Speaker 2 (54:15):
Yeah, no, I'm not the K cars, they're very boxing
and angular and all that. I think you're thinking of.

Speaker 7 (54:19):
Maybe if the figure, yeah.

Speaker 2 (54:22):
Figure or the S cargo. Yeah, those were fun design. Yeah,
of course that was back when Nissan was making money
hand over.

Speaker 4 (54:29):
For and they made it a whole series.

Speaker 5 (54:31):
Those are the Zamba cars. I think there were there
might have been four, but there are three different desk
cargo and the POW and the figure out. We're all like,
we're gonna make fun things.

Speaker 7 (54:38):
Yes, but I thought those were wonderful.

Speaker 5 (54:41):
I mean they stopped get Yeah, I haven't looked, I
haven't I'm I haven't refreshed my memory on that, but yeah,
they stopped coming up with the ideas or there was
probably a financial crisis or yeah.

Speaker 2 (54:53):
No, they were largely Japanese market only. They so they
never were sold in the United States. The Cigarel they
brought a bunch over I think, didn't they Those were
they probably gray market.

Speaker 7 (55:03):
Cars maybe I just saw one Wauntion not too long.

Speaker 2 (55:06):
Yeah. No, They're really good looking cars and uh and
they got great publicity for Nissan the world over, but
I think they were very niche. They never really sold
in big numbers. I don't think they exported them much
around the world as as Nissan. Like I said, I'm
sure there was a lot of gray market stuff that
was going on. I think we actually had a Pow
in the studio that Chris Poker drove here. Yeah, Chris,

(55:28):
Chris definitely a big, big fan of the Powe.

Speaker 9 (55:31):
Yeah yeah, so uh so Yeah, modern design, I think
it needs a little more personality, a little more panache.

Speaker 3 (55:39):
So so in your book, is it all American or
are their European.

Speaker 9 (55:44):
Car I start out talking about motimeters. Then we go
to a special chapter on l Leak you know the
leak glass, Yes, very fast Leak. I'll read La Lak
made a renee Laleak. I think his name was made
thirty some different crystal months for cars back in the thirties,
and to find an original of those today is just

(56:04):
something because of course they were made out of crystal
and you hit a big bump and they crack and break.
They're still reproduced today, but all these thirty some versions,
I've got a book on that that I used for
the research, but I've only seen a few, so I've
got a chapter on them. But then I go into
the Brits and then to the Continental Europeans, then to
General Motors, then to Ford Chrysler, and then a big

(56:27):
chapter on American independence. And then I finish up the
book with a little short chapter on trucks because I
had my designer said, I had a few pages yet
to spend, so I got to have the bac who Well,
the bulldog's in there. And also, you know, my favorite
one is on the DIVCO.

Speaker 7 (56:43):
Have you ever noticed that?

Speaker 4 (56:44):
You know?

Speaker 9 (56:44):
Divco is the little humpy milk truck, the Detroit Industrial
Vehicle Company. They made that little humpy milk truck to
stand up delivery truck and it had the nicest little
art deco hood orn on it.

Speaker 7 (56:56):
So that's kind of the way.

Speaker 9 (56:57):
Well, the last image in the book, I wanted to
end it with a little whimsy, so I included an
image I got in Jackson, Michigan. At the car show,
somebody had a rag of the old pickup and he
had welded a little crowbar under the front of his hood.
So it was also the hood pull and the hood ornament.
So that's the way I ended the book.

Speaker 2 (57:15):
Okay, we're getting down to the NTR. If people are
watching the show and they go, dang, I'd like to
get that, or maybe it'd make a great Christmas present.
Where can you get the bull?

Speaker 9 (57:23):
Well, I found it about seventy percent of the people
buy that book or buying it for gifts. It's only
available on my website, not on Amazon or any.

Speaker 7 (57:30):
Of those sites.

Speaker 9 (57:31):
Okay, so as your website Shunpiker Productions dot com s
h U N p I k e R Shunpiker. So
it's is well, a shunpiker is one who shuns the turnpike,
takes the back road instead of the highway. In the
spirits of Charles Carrault, Jack Kurowak, and William at least
heat moving.

Speaker 2 (57:48):
Turnpike is more of an East Coast kind of time,
we would just call them highway.

Speaker 7 (57:52):
Sorry, highway. Yeah, but so's the back road kind of guy.

Speaker 9 (57:55):
Yeah, I talk about that in the introduction to the
book that that not all of my discoveries are on
the back roads. But I think that's kind of a
basic way to live your your vehicular life, your travel life.
When you see a sign that says road ends or
dead end, you go down there and see what's down there,
because there's bound to be something pretty interesting down there.

Speaker 2 (58:15):
So Shunpiker dot com.

Speaker 9 (58:17):
Shunpiker Productions Productions dot dot com. Yeah, only available there.
It's one hundred dollars and I'll ship it anywhere in
the country and it'll always get a and that's part
of a hundred dollar price. Yes, one hundred dollars. Price
includes a personal inscription and shipped anywhere.

Speaker 7 (58:32):
In the cotton US.

Speaker 2 (58:34):
Cool beautiful book. Yeah, beautiful shots in there too.

Speaker 7 (58:38):
A lot of work. It was a lot of work.

Speaker 9 (58:40):
It took me forty years to take the pictures and
it took me just a year to actually gather it
up and get it to the designer. And I hired
a company in Grand Rapids that does just art books
that's essentially an art book. That's what I wanted to be.
Company in Grand Rapids did the production, so it was
printed in China and did. He handled all that logistical stuff,
and I'm glad I hired that because they did a

(59:00):
beautiful job.

Speaker 3 (59:01):
It's a gorgeous book.

Speaker 2 (59:03):
Thanks congratulations with that, we're going to wrap it up. Okay,
Steve Purdy, thanks so much for coming on.

Speaker 7 (59:08):
We're having me. I appreciate it.

Speaker 2 (59:09):
Yeah, my Gosten, great to have you here.

Speaker 7 (59:11):
Appreciate it.

Speaker 2 (59:12):
Where's that road and Track issue? Let's get that up
here again. We've actually got a physical copy, which I
love because I don't know. The digital stuff is convenient,
but the printed version is so much better.

Speaker 7 (59:24):
And I agree.

Speaker 9 (59:26):
I don't get mini magazines these days, but I appreciate
having one to hold on to.

Speaker 2 (59:31):
And Darry, we won't be here next time.

Speaker 7 (59:33):
We'll be eating.

Speaker 2 (59:34):
Next week is Thanksgiving. We're going to take that week off,
but we hope all of you like this show. Two
weeks from now, we'll be right back here again.

Speaker 1 (59:44):
O'll online. After Hours is brought to you by Bridge
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