The 1964 Pontiac Banshee was a concept or "dream car" I wish GM actually put into production. Many concept cars look silly or cartoonish but the Banshee was a sex bomb. Spy on me, baby.
Legend has it that it was the brainchild of then Pontiac division president and GM bad boy John DeLorean. Yes. That DeLorean. That's probably only partially true. What's more than likely closer to reality was that he collaborated with his team to create it and in an attempt to get it past GM upper management on the "fourteenth floor", he roused that is was to compete with the Ford Mustang. I think to give DeLorean sole credit for the Banshee not unlike like giving him singular credit for creating the GTO. A big engine in a small car? What a novel and unique idea, JD! In my opinion, the most important thing he did with the GTO was using his nerve and political moxy to sneak it past the stodgy suits upstairs. Unfortunately, he had no such luck with the Banshee.
So, why'd he even try? Well, you can't say the man wasn't doing his job trying to expand Pontiac's footprint within GM but even the most proactive people, regardless of their personal agenda, have to answer to someone; like it or not. Despite a number of successful product launches during his time at Pontiac, JD kept swinging for the fences until he tried to push something out that crossed head on into the lane of one of GM's sacred cows.
That cow being the Chevrolet Corvette and GM brass felt the Banshee would pinch its modest sales. At around 22,000 cars sold a year, because of its image, Corvette may have been a sacred cow but it was certainly no cash cow. What's more, the Banshee was much smaller and lighter than the then current Corvette and even with a six-cylinder engine, on paper, it would have been quite a performer. With a V-8 it could probably destroy a Corvette in a drag race too. With the Banshee a two seater and a stronger performer it never stood a chance.
While it's readily apparent now that GM used several design cues from the Banshee on future designs, in 1964, the Banshee concept, as concept or dreams cars should, broke new ground and the fourteenth floor took notice.
They liked the Banshee so much that shortly after DeLorean's abortive attempt to get it approved for Pontiac, they called GM head of design Bill Mitchell and ordered him to work up a Chevrolet design based on it. That Chevrolet design exercise saw the light of day as the 1968 Corvette.
Buying an older car can be risky; especially buying an old sports car in the middle of winter in northern Ohio. Hopefully, with enough foresight, you can mitigate any potential problems. Well, any problems that you should or could be made aware of.
My wife and I weren't in the market for anything "new" per se, I'm seemingly always looking, but due to "cookies", when this little beauty popped up on my Facebook wall a couple of weeks ago I fell madly in love with it. No surprise, 2005-2008 Mustang GT's are the rare "modern" car that's on "my list". Much to my surprise and delight, my wife went nuts for it as well.
At fourteen this pony is no foal but she has just under 43,000 miles on her, I found it to be priced "correctly" and rides and drives like new. That's great but you have to take emotion out of any purchase like this and that's easier said than done on something as emotional as this. If I was to pull the trigger on the purchase, I had some stipulations. I wanted some cash knocked off the price, a thirty-day warranty, and gap insurance. Perhaps I was doing my best to kill the deal, after all, we don't need a sixth car, but doing my best, again, to mitigate risk, I didn't feel as though my asks were unreasonable.
They knocked $700 off the asking price without me blinking. Seeing that my sales person said the dealership doesn't haggle on price, she claimed to be amazed her almighty sales manager did that. Hmm, okay. I wasn't born yesterday and this certainly isn't my first car purchase rodeo but still, the gesture was nice. Besides, old cars like this on dealer lots are albatrosses. Banks don't like to loan money for them and finding cash buyers is hard regardless of the time of year but especially in winter. The warranty was a sticking point, though.
At first, my sales person said that although all of their used cars that don't have any balance from a factory warranty are sold "as is", they all come with a thirty-day warranty. Then she waffled and said that wouldn't apply on a car as old as this. Well, shoot. I told her that would be a deal breaker; I didn't feel comfortable buying a car this old without any protection. My brilliant, evil plan was to take the thing to a mechanic after I bought it and for just $53, they'd do a top to bottom diagnostic on it for me. They find anything wrong with the car the dealership would cover it.
She called me back the next day and said they'd make an exception and gave me thirty days. Now we were really getting somewhere. Good thing we really like the car.
Gap insurance? Well, that was a longer putt. Gap insurance protects you in the event your car is totaled and there's a "gap" between the car's book value and what your insurance company will write you a check for. For instance, you pay, $10,000 cash for a car and a tree falls on it within a week of the purchase - if your insurance company will only pay out $6,500, that's a $3,500 punch in the face. With gap insurance, you don't have to worry about a gap.
The banks the dealership works with don't offer gap insurance but I found that if I financed the car through my insurance agency, gap insurance is included. What's more, because the car is so old, the banks the dealerships work with would only give me a loan at between 8-12%; the lower rate dependent on credit rating. State Farm got me a 36-month loan at 7.1%. Yes, that's high for a used car loan but reasonable considering the age of the car. Besides, we're only financing about $11,000 so the interest payments are fairly digestible.
So, we have a 2005 Ford Mustang GT that's in practically showroom condition that I paid relatively little for that has a warranty, albeit brief, covering repairs and gap insurance. I've got my fingers and toes crossed but this looks like the beginning of a beautiful relationship.
At sunset on Friday, September 30, 1955, 24-year-old James Dean was killed in automobile accident while heading to Salinas, California, for, ironically, a weekend of racing. He was getting 'wheel-time" in his recently purchased, 1955 Porsche 550 Spyder on highway 46 in Cholame, California roughly four-hours northeast of Los Angeles, when Donald Turnupseed, a 23-year old Cal-Poly student, driving a 1950 Ford Tudor, made a left turn at the intersection of highways 41 and 46 directly into Dean's path. Witness' claim Dean maneuvered right in an attempt to drive around Turnupseed, but collided all but head on into his substantially larger and heavier Ford. Dean was crushed by the impact, he suffered massive internal injuries and his neck was broken. He was pronounced dead on arrival at Paso Robles War Memorial Hospital, nearly thirty-miles away.
Turnupseed, a Navy veteran, said the setting sun at the time lent a "mirror effect" to the road and the color of Dean's car made seeing him harder still. He may not have even seen the stop sign some say he drove through. Even if he did, given the poor visibility, it is possible he could have stopped, proceeded through the intersection and not have seen Dean. He was not charged in any wrong doing and kept a low profile afterwards making a living as an electrical contractor. He died of lung cancer at the age of 63 in 1995.
Dean's fatal car crash occurred just under a month before the theatrical release of, arguably, the most famous of his three films, "Rebel Without a Cause". Seeing how large his legend became, it's hard to fathom he only made three movies; seems there were many more.
Reviews of "Rebel" were mixed, however, and it has not aged well. Dean's performance, without question remarkable and the best thing in it, was more like that of a marked-down Marlon Brando than the birth of an important talent. Watch the film today and you can't help but notice James Dean's "Jim Stark" seems out of place in it, not unlike seeing a Porsche 550 Spyder driven on an ordinary two-lane road. Despite the critics, the film was enormously influential; a milestone in the creation of new ideas towards young people. Brando is given much credit for initially blazing that path, Dean further stoking those flames Elvis Presly took to incendiary heights.
Much like James Dean, his Porsche 550 Spyder was more than handsome and photogenic, it was supremely capable.
Racing was the impetus for Porsche's creation of their lightweight, 110-horsepower, 550 Spyder. To be sanctioned by the 1.1- and 1.5-liter roadster class governing body, they mandated that Porsche have a "factory car" they could sell to the public. To qualify, they modified their 356 model removing its roof amongst a number of mechanical upgrades. They dubbed the roadster, "550 Spyder".
As it pertains to automobiles, the term "spyder" purportedly stems from open, horse drawn carriages and their large, wooden wheels that resembled long legged spiders. There's considerable conjecture as to why the "i" in spider was replaced with a "y".
Dean's car was one of only 90 550 Spyders made and one of only 43 "customer" cars, it was rarer still. Customer cars were cars Porsche sold to the public that were "street legal". With its "mid-ship" (mounted in front of the rear axle), air-cooled, 1.5-liter flat-four, dual overhead cam engine, locking differential, hand-built, tube-frame chassis under a wafer-thin aluminum skin, the Porsche 550 Spyder was the stuff of exotic car dreams. To some degree it still is.
550 Spyders went on to 95 victories and 75 class wins over a total of 370 races helping to establish Porsche's legacy of producing high-performance automobiles; it won the first race it was ever driven in. Having a movie star die in one in an accident that was not only not his fault, forensic reconstruction of the accident concluded Dean was not speeding at the time of the crash, but also had nothing to do, per se, with the car itself, was, no doubt, a marketing coup for Porsche. Albeit a tragic if not maudlin one.
Fanning the furor after Dean died, his friend, photographer Sanford Roth, was doing a photo expose for Collier's Magazine on his racing exploits at the time of the crash. This photograph, supposedly taken just moments before the crash, was shot by Roth as he was riding in the passenger seat of the Ford Country Squire Dean purchased as a towing vehicle when he bought the 550. Bill Collins, Dean's dialogue coach from the film "Giant", that Dean had just completed and was released in 1956, was driving. Dean's passenger in the above photograph is Rolf Wuthereich, a Porsche mechanic whom he befriend, who assisted Porsche customers interested in racing their cars.
Miraculously, Wuthereich, although seriously injured when ejected from the car after impact with Turnupseed's Ford, survived. He had few if any recollections of the crash.
Dean had traded in his Porsche 356 "Super Speedster" on his 550 taking delivery of it just 10-days before the accident that killed him. He had "Little Bastard" painted in washable paint on the the 550's hood (bonnet) to poke fun at Warner Brothers studio executive Jack Warner who referred to Dean as, "that little bastard" when he refused to vacate his temporary trailer after filming for "East of Eden" wrapped. Racers would have their race-registration numbers painted in washable paint since their numbers usually changed race-to-race.
James Dean, while a gifted actor and an intelligent, albeit by many accounts a damaged, tortured soul, had premonitions of his early death. He told a pastor in his hometown of Fairmount, Indiana that, "the only success, the only greatness is immortality".
When Alec Guinness first saw his friend James Dean's brand new Porsche 550 Spyder, he said, "if you get in that car they will find your body in it in a week". Dean laughed and said, "Oh shucks. Don't be so mean!" Of his premonition of Dean's death in the Porsche, Guinness said afterward it was one of the oddest and spookiest experiences of his life.
Shortly before the crash and while he was filming his last film, 'Giant", Dean shot a public service announcement about safe driving.
My wife and I had been shopping for a 75 inch TV for our basement Man Cave for a long time but every time I established a price point that one would have to be at for me to be comfortable with I found some lame excuse not to do it when I found one at that price. Too indulgent, too much money, we should downsize, blah, blah, blah.
Part of the problem was the original TV that we bought for the Man Cave found its way up to our den because of "input lag"; it's a video game thing where a TV, usually older, doesn't have enough of whatever to process the latest video game systems. There's no input lag on the 50 inch Roku we had in our den so I swapped them. So, with a 60 inch TV in the den and a 50 in the Man Cave, my wife and I haven't watched anything down there in quite a while because if we did, we'd be getting less of a visual experience. Hey, we have our standards.
Dumpster diving anyone? My office has been undergoing a massive downsizing of late in square footage and a lot of "stuff" had been made available that we were allowed to rummage through and take home if we wanted. Chairs, desks, cabinets, monitors, shelving, carpeting, wall art and what not. And while I procured a chair or two, my biggest coup was scoring the 4 x 8, "Screen Innovations" video screen that was in this conference room we're losing. Ask and ye shall receive. Seriously, I think they were just going to throw it out.
Which is amazing considering how freakin' expensive these things are. Several years ago when we were setting up our Man Cave we toyed with the idea of a projector and screen and found the cost of a screen to be almost twice the price of a projector. I priced the "Screen Innovations" screens in my office and was stunned to find they run about $2,500. Holy smokes. Anyway, I figured I'd figure out the projector thing once I got the beast home; that being easier said than done.
For starters, it wouldn't fit in the elevators in my office so I had to walk it down eight flights of stairs. While not heavy per se, it certainly was not feather light and its size made going downstairs, by myself of course, quite challenging.
More than once I sort of tripped and almost either dropped it down the stairs or kicked a hole in it. Once outside, it wanted to take off like a kite as I was putting it in the back of one our office vans. To make matters even worse, once home, it barely fit the turn to go down into our basement. Luckily, it slid right down after I removed the stair banisters. Now, onto the projector.
Best Buy didn't have a large assortment of projectors, they did have a dizzying array of 50-82 inch televisions, but I bought an Epson 2150 for just to see what the experience would be like. As I swiped my credit card for an $800 purchase, in the back of my mind, I believed I could find something online that would be a fraction of the cost. Yeah, right. Anyway, while the projector was awesome, the cost was steep and I still needed a ceiling mount which would run another $150. Still cheaper and better all in than buying a 75 inch TV but still, $950 to upgrade a room we barely use anymore seemed lavish. Furthermore, seeing how fantastic the 2150 was, I didn't want to waste time buying less expensive projectors on line; not that I found any good deals on projectors that had good reviews anyway. I fought off pangs of guilt and tried to save money still by asking my I.T. guy if I could have the ceiling mount that the projector from the conference room we were losing had.
Well, he not only gave me the ceiling mount but he also gave me two Epson 8300 series projectors that were collecting dust in a back storeroom. Turns out our market president bristled at the cost of replacing the bulbs for the 8300's and insisted "I.T." buy LED projectors that would last longer. To top off the deal, he gave me an extra bulb which would fit either. Hard to imagine that, just like the screen, that all this stuff was going to land in a dumpster but apparently it was. Incredible.
After I gleefully returned the projector I bought I got to work reconfiguring the Man Cave for our 101-inch screen. The room had to be turned around since because of that bulkhead on the right, the screen would sit too low on the wall where the TV used to be. The projector can be at somewhat of an angle but in our case the angle would be too severe. I had some rewiring to do which took most of a Sunday afternoon and I have a lot of patching and painting to do but the end result was nothing short of mind blowing.
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Take that 75 or even 82 inch big screen TV. Now, I could be wrong but I think they're making a 90 inch TV these days but that's like more than $5,000. Wow. Not that the cost of our Man Cave, had we actually paid for it, would have been cheap. $2,500 for the screen, $1,500 for the projector plus paying for installation would have pushed this project north of $5,000? Crazy. It's nice to be back down in the Man Cave, I think my wife likes it more than I do, and I have to tell you, with home theaters like ours it's no wonder people don't go out to the movies any more.
When I was younger, I never understood how and why some people get a sense of calm out of being organized. It dawned on me recently that my innate lack of organization was making me anxious so that calm that people get from order? I totally get that now and any sense of order that I create helps to center me.
With a rash of lumber on hand after a basement storeroom remodel, I finally got around to adding shelving under my massive workbench. It had become a catch-all for everything in the garage and it was overwhelming to keep clean and tidy.
Of course, I couldn't just add shelving but shelving that was a combination of drawers and shelving. These two shelves are moveable - quite handy.
Only thing is, I used shelving guides for light duty kitchen cabinets. When I load these up with my heavier tools, they come off the undersized guides and the drawers/shelves collapse. I need to upgrade to heavy duty units so I don't have to go through the hassle of pulling everything off the shelves every time I need to put them back on. They're expensive so the project can wait but it eventually needs to get done. In the meantime, they're perfectly fine if they stay in the same place.
The additional shelving gives me more space on my workbench so there's less the chance of maddening clutter. Perhaps I'll be so inspired by my new sense of garage order that I'll find the time to finally complete the frieze. But I doubt it.
Having lived through the seemingly endless news cycle that was the DeLorean soap opera I find it hard to look at a DMC-12 and not see it at worst as a rolling joke or best as a movie prop. I rely on my twenty-one-year-old son for affirmation of my initial reaction to them; despite the movie fame, he knows nothing of the scandals that swallowed up the company, and he says they're cool as all get out. Nice to know my teenage impression of these cars has stood the test of time.
I remember seeing one of these for the first time and, like many people, being very impressed with it. Fresh, futuristic yet contemporary; it had to be great, right? Road test reviews at the time were generally favorable but not overflowing with praise with critics dinging the rustproof, stainless steel, two passenger, rear-engine, gull-winged wedged beauties for having a lack of power and for a rear end that could swing out dangerously if drivers weren't careful; with the engine out back, they did have 62 % rear weight bias. They also cited their high sticker prices as a liability - 1981 DMC-12's like our subject here had asking prices of $25,000, that's about $65,000 today; that was a lot of money for a totally new car with no cache not to mention one that's inherently impractical.
Not that all cars need to be practical but still, for a car like this to be the initial product launch by a brand new company, even back then, was highly unusual. Those that did buy these were either people who like the latest new thing or loved the design. In total, only about 9,000 DMC-12's were sold; less than a third of the total John DeLorean bragged he'd sell in the first model year.
After a remarkable career at General Motors, John DeLorean's name was synonymous with high performance or at least perceived high performance; practical four-door sedans back then were hardly the stuff of aspirational car dreams. Through that lens the DMC-12 sort of makes sense; again, sort of. Makes you wonder what would have become of the company had DeLorean launched with a sedan instead and came with this after wards. I see a DeLorean sedan looking like a stainless steel, 1980's Aston Martin Lagonda; weird and cool (kind of) but with more upside than a two passenger "sports car". And, most importantly, you'd still stand out in a crowd.
Somewhat ironically, although made for less than two full model years, DeLorean DMC-12's have appreciated greatly in value. Our restored subject here has an asking price of $70,000; that's 1981 Porsche 911 money for something that, again, perhaps its just me, is something that's a movie prop or a rolling joke. Maybe it's both?
Purportedly, John DeLorean sent the director and writer of "Back to the Future" a thank you letter shortly after the film's initial release. Licensing fees from toy rights for the DMC-12 also went a long way towards paying off DeLorean's enormous legal bills.
Man, Chrysler had it going on in the early 1970s. What with the all-new for 1970 Plymouth Barracuda and its slightly longer wheelbase brethren Dodge Challenger sucking out eyeballs (in a good way), they followed those now impossibly valuable muscle car icons up with something no one asked for; a restyled Dodge Charger for 1971. And, wouldn't you know it, they hit it out of the park again. Our subject here is a 1974 Dodge Charger SE.
Restyling the Dodge Charger for 1971 was no small feat considering what an accomplishment the 1968-1970 Charger was; despite what some say about how much of a GM derivative it was. And how spectacular those cars were was remarkable considering what a horror the 1966 and 1967 Charger was.
These cars, though, considered by Car an Driver magazine to be the best styled new cars of 1971, were even more remarkable considering that they were two-door versions of the also new for 1971, and frumpy not, four-door Dodge Coronet. The first two Chargers were stand-alone designs that didn't share sheet metal with any four-door variant. That was an expensive way to do business especially if sales don't warrant it.
I found this green beast on my Facebook wall recently with an asking price of just $4500; you'd think it would be worth more, y'know? So, what's up? Well, for starters, it apparently doesn't run but I've seen non running Barracudas and Challengers of this vintage in similar condition going for more than twice this car's asking price so there's got to be more to this.
Best I can surmise is that being a "1974", it suffers from "last year of the model run" syndrome. That and the fact that most anything made after 1971 is less valuable these days than anything made before then. That "what year was it made" thing one of the more disconcerting facts about collector's cars; it doesn't make sense of course but it is what it is. Factor in also that this car is green, inside and out and has only a 318 V-8. This is better than a "Slant Six" but still, a 360 would be jack the value up higher - even if it wasn't running. A 1974 Charger with a 440 would be really, really cool. Rare as a sunny and warm winter day in Cleveland but cool.
Understand also that back in the day GM had the personal luxury car market locked up with their, depending on your point of view, fabulous or ridiculous Chevrolet Monte Carlo. The Pontiac Grand Prix and Oldsmobile Cutlass also took sizable bites out of what was a large but far from inexhaustible market. Funny that this vintage of the Ford Thunderbird, a model that ushered in the personal luxury car niche in 1958, really couldn't compete here because it was just too damn big and ungainly; it competed more with its stablemate Continental Marks and GM's Cadillac Eldorado.
Finally, as fabulous as these cars were when they first came out, and the same applies to GM and their 1973 "colonnades", their glow didn't last and they haven't appreciated the same way their predecessor models did; the market appreciates what it does regardless of personal taste. Perhaps if the producers of "The Dukes of Hazard" had chosen to cast one of these vintage Chargers as the General Lee things would be different but as it stands, and sadly, it seems our green '74 Charger here is just another old car. In the Facebook ad for this car, which I'll post if I can find it, the current owner hopes this goes to someone who will restore it back to what it was. I hope so too. I like this car, despite being green, a lot.
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