I am making my annual trip to the Greater Milwaukee Auto Show this weekend.

The state’s biggest auto show, on through next weekend, shows off the work of the world’s automakers, present and past. It usually demonstrates how much more capable cars are now than they used to be, if you’re OK with your being unable to identify carmakers anymore.

Wisconsin has a relatively limited automotive manufacturing history. (But a lot of fire truck manufacturers.) General Motors closed its Janesville assembly plant, the birthplace of my 1975 Chevrolet Caprice, in 2008. American Motors Corp. had plants in Milwaukee and Kenosha, which were assumed by Chrysler Corp. in its 1987 purchase of AMC. Johnson Controls is one of the biggest suppliers of things like car interiors, seats and doors, and the state has other auto suppliers.

AMC was the result of Nash (from whence came the Milwaukee and Kenosha plants) purchasing Hudson. Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is the son of George Romney, former governor of Michigan, and before that, president of AMC.

That makes this Automotive News article interesting, starting with the younger Romney’s defense of his 2008 New York Times column suggesting that having GM and Chrysler declare bankruptcy was preferable to their federal bailouts:

Mitt Romney wrote: “Cars got in my bones early. And not just any cars, American cars. When the President of American Motors died suddenly in 1954, my dad … was asked to take his place. I was 7 and got my love of cars and chrome and fins and roaring motors from him.”

Father and son may have shared a love of autos, but George Romney was the prototypical anti-“chrome and fins and roaring motors” guy. He popularized the phrase “gas-guzzling dinosaurs” while competing with the excessively finned Big 3 behemoths of the 1950s. He claimed to have coined the term “compact car” to describe AMC’s Rambler.

Romney said he considered the Rambler “the car of the future” and said in a 1993 interview that he believed “it would revolutionize thinking about cars in America and others would have to copy it.” He even dropped AMC’s Nash and Hudson lines in 1957 to concentrate on the tiny car. When Romney left AMC in 1962 to run for governor, the Rambler grew larger.

“My successors didn’t stick with the Rambler concept,” he said. “They spent $200 million in tooling to try to make the car more like the Big 3’s cars. Later, they began to tool up sports cars, the Javelin and the AMX, to copy the Corvette and the Mustang and its imitators at the Big 3. They literally threw away the biggest opportunity in the auto industry since GM overtook Ford.”

Romney, who died in 1995, said: “The Big 3 were all pushing style, size and power.” He said the Rambler “was like Ford’s original approach, a practical car.”

This seems like a bit of revisionist history on the elder Romney’s part. The Big 3 were pushing style, size and power because that’s what was selling in the marketplace. (Hudson had one of the most successful early NASCAR racers, back in the days when NASCAR cars were close to what you could buy at your local dealer. Hudson was acquired by Nash after the failure of Hudson’s compact Jet.) Romney green-lighted the development of AMC’s first V-8 engine. At 30 cents a gallon for gas, only the thrifty were concerned with gas mileage.

In those days well before computer design, if you bought a small car, everything was small — interior space, trunk space and performance. AMC sold its Metropolitan, built by Britain’s Austin Motor Co., to only 94,986 North American buyers over 10 years. And AMC never had enough money, because it never had enough sales, to change its cars as often as GM, Ford and Chrysler restyled theirs, nearly every year from the mid-’50s into the 1970s. Romney may have been 15 years ahead of his time in pushing compact cars, but he ran AMC until 1962, not in the mid-1970s.

The opposite to the George Romney philosophy, I guess, is the high-performance engine. But as Jalopnik points out, not all high-performance engines were created equal:

Porsche 924 4-cylinder …

Porsche’s four-cylinders are rarely engines to complain about. This one is. Essentially a dressed-up Audi engine back when that wasn’t anything special in the first place, the two-liter four was criticized as much for its vibrations as its soft power output. …

Subaru/Motori Moderni Formula One engine …

Formula One is the most ridiculously harsh competition series in motorsports, but every now and then some well-funded Don Quixote finds a way to get in and be openly humiliated. The 3.5 liter flat-12 was significantly down on power, a bitch to package in the car, and suffered repeatedly from klutzy reliability problems. It never got past the prequalifying stage used at the time. (Many more fun details here.) …

Until I read this, I never knew Subaru had tried Formula 1. This was in the days when relatively few Americans had heard of Subaru, so Subaru presumably would have gotten little American benefit unless it had overwhelmed F1, and possibly not even then. It’s kind of strange to read of 600 horsepower as “significantly down on power,” but there it is. Too bad they couldn’t have figured out how to package a flat-12 — or, for that matter, a flat-8 — into a Subaru.

Volkswagen G60 …

The scroll-type G-lader supercharger was an interesting concept, but in reality it combined the worst of both traditional mechanically-driven supercharging and turbocharging: parasitic drag, a peaky power band, soft low-speed response. This motor helped doom the otherwise-capable Corrado and likely made life all that much harder for VW’s American marketing people. …

I drove a Corrado once, not with the supercharged four, but with VW’s VR6. A lot of power, horrible torque steer, and I almost needed the Jaws of Life to get out.

BMW M70 V-12 …

Some high-performance engines are complex, some are heavy, and some have roots in soft luxury-car applications. Few if any others combine these traits to the dizzying heights that BMW achieved with its first production V-12 auto engine. The M70 was huge, heavy, and featured one complete ECU system for each cylinder bank among other gratuitous complexities. The BMW 8-series never shed its lardy image. …

I drove a 12-cylinder BMW as part of the Susan Komen Drive for the Cure at Bergstrom’s Enterprise Motorcars. After driving it, I found I preferred the previous year’s BMW 540i six-speed — fast, but smooth, but fast.

Ford 4.2 V8 …

Ford’s Windsor V8 is one of the really great engines of all time. It’s done everything from cruise Woodward to win at Le Mans. However, if you try hard enough (say, when you choke down displacement to 255 cubic inches and force the works to breathe through a miserly head design and a two-barrel carburetor) you can indeed create an effective boat anchor from one. Available in the Mustang in 1980 and 1981 exclusively with, yes, a three-speed automatic. …

Cosworth Vega 4-cylinder …

The Cosworth-tuned two-liter inline-four was an engine ahead of its time — too far ahead of its time. To read the specs it sounds like something designed last month: all aluminum, sixteen valves, electronic fuel injection, and a really nice stainless-steel exhaust header. All of this produced 110 horsepower. Serious numbers and drivability would have to wait until EFI systems evolved with computer tech in the Eighties.

The fact that this engine went into a Vega did it no favors, either. …

The Cosworth Vega engine was similar to the 1.8-liter four in my 1991 Ford Escort GT — 16 valves, double overhead cam, and much better EFI. As with four-valve-per-cylinder engines, they’re not great from a dead start, but wind them up, and they will go, with gas mileage in the low 30s. Unlike the Vega, the Escort did not rust when you stared at it for a few seconds.

PRV/DeLorean 2.8 V6 …

John DeLorean’s eponymous gullwing GT car deserved better. The Peugeot-Renault-Volvo ZMJ-159 V6 coughed out an anemic 130 horsepower, far less than what was intended for that dazzling Giugiaro shape. No one disputes that the car had other issues, but the pedestrian power level was a massive handicap that did no end of damage to the car’s desirability. …

Chevrolet 305 H.O. V8 …

Little modified internally from station-wagon service, the 305 is a harsh lesson in that most important of engine characteristics: breathing. Camaros, Firebirds, and Monte Carlos all received the underachiever small-block in a variety of intake configurations, none of which came close to doing what a five-liter V8 should do.

The aforementioned 305 was from the early days of smog-control-choked engines of the early computer control era, when the Check Engine light went off regularly for no discernible reason. (Which is different from today because … uh, let me think a moment …) Detroit was only starting to figure out that instead of killing acceleration by installing tall rear ends behind their three-speed automatics, adding a fourth overdrive gear improved mileage at cruising speeds without the car’s needing 60 seconds to get to cruising speeds. By the time I got to drive my father-in-law’s two fuel-injected 305s, they were adequate, although a 350 had improved horsepower and torque for little gas-mileage penalty.

The cars in Milwaukee will have as many as eight forward gears (although you can’t tell from the transmission shifter). Computer controls are much better, and such improvements as direct injection and more use of aluminum in engine blocks and cylinder heads give drivers if not the best of all worlds, then the better of most worlds.

Conservatives believe Mitt Romney is insufficiently conservative. One issue he hasn’t been heard on to my knowledge is the Environmental Protection Agency’s stupid 54.5-mpg standard, which, if it’s not overturned, will result in the construction of vehicles that will not be able to carry anyone besides the driver or any cargo at all, which will be OK because they’ll be too expensive for anyone to buy. That makes you wonder if the Greater Milwaukee Auto Show, which also has a collection of collector cars, will someday become the Greater Milwaukee Old Auto Show.

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