Category: Wheels

One reason, I believe, for the appeal of vehicles beyond their point-A-to-point-B utility is the sensory experience of driving them. It’s not just about rolling down the road; there are the sounds the car makes, the feel of the road rushing by (smoothly or, in the case of a certain pothole on East Sullivan Street near Ripon High School, not).

That came to mind because of two recent blogs. The first was a Jalopnik.com blog and reader poll about, of all things, car startup sounds. The other was a Top Gear blog about, of all things, car instrument panels.

My pre-driving car experiences were all sitting in the left rear seat of our various cars. Perhaps that’s where I started getting interested in the layout of the speedometer, fuel gauge, lights and wiper controls, and climate and audio controls. As for the starter, a car starter motor represents going somewhere, and as we know cars are the highest expression of vehicular freedom.

Back in the 1960s and 1970s, one of the (largely unrecognized) innovations of Chrysler Corp. was its high-speed starter, helpful in getting high-horsepower engines to start. The sound (which I first heard from my grandfather’s station wagons used for his farm implement sales) was termed the “Highland Park hummingbird,” named for Chrysler’s corporate headquarters.

Before the Highland Park Hummingbird, this Chrysler starter would get your attention, because it was attached to a 1950s Hemi V-8, which powered an air raid siren:

Before GM and Ford adopted their own gear-reduction starters (and in the days of carburetors), starting a car used to sound like this:

My favorite car I’ve ever had custody of, our 1975 Chevrolet Caprice, had the loudest starter I’ve ever heard when started in our garage:

My 1988 Chevy Beretta GT and Jannan’s 1992 Pontiac Sunbird SE had similar V-6 engines. However, her ownership experience was much more positive than mine:

From Jalopnik’s list of great startup sounds, the most out-there is Brutus, a car powered by a 48-liter V-12 engine, described thusly: “It sounds Teutonic. Not a clean, emotionless, modern executive car kind of Teutonic. Not a clean, gray business park kind of Teutonic, but a tear a hole in the world, pagan god kind of teutonic.”

Until 1969, cars were started from a switch mounted somewhere on the dashboard. (Ford ignition switches were often mounted on the left side, supposedly because Henry Ford was left-handed.) Then in 1969, GM (followed one year later by Ford, Chrysler and AMC) debuted its ignition switch on the steering column, designed to lock the steering wheel as an anti-theft measure. Nearly three decades later, at Marketplace Magazine, I got a news release from GM about the new Chevrolet Malibu, which featured the innovation of … an ignition switch on the dashboard. Now, of course, cars can be started without a key, just like in the 1950s, when the key could be removed from the ignition switch while the car was running.

One of the several reasons I’m not a fan of hybrids is the fact that turning on some of them is like flipping a light switch. I drove a Lexus LS250h, which is the upscale version of the Toyota Prius. The driving experience starts on the wrong foot when you can’t figure out whether the car is on or not.

The aforementioned left rear seat gave me a view of our cars’ instrument panels, from a 1966 Chevrolet Nova station wagon …

… to a 1969 Chevy Nomad …

… to a 1973 AMC Javelin …

… to the aforementioned Caprice …

… to the 1981 Chevy Malibu:

Most of these cars had merely a speedometer, gas gauge and odometer. The Javelin had the upgrade of a temperature gauge. My parents declined to buy the Caprice’s optional temperature and fuel economy gauge package. (Why a fuel  economy gauge is helpful for a car rated at 13 city and 18 mpg is a good question.) Tachometers started becoming standard equipment during the 1980s, which is sort of ironic given that manual transmissions have been doing a slow fade for a couple of decades.

Gauges instead of idiot lights are helpful to be able to determine how your car is operating. If the oil light goes on, does that mean the engine is about to seize, or is it low oil pressure resulting from low oil level? If your battery is dying, it would be helpful to see a voltmeter show the battery or alternator putting out fewer volts before the battery light comes on and it’s probably too late.

It’s kind of ironic that the one car I’ve owned that had the complete set of instruments — speedometer, tachometer, fuel gauge, temperature gauge, voltmeter and oil pressure gauge — was also the worst car I’ve ever owned, the aforementioned Beretta GT:

My wife’s favorite car was the aforementioned Sunbird, which had a well-designed instrument panel, including its radio; too bad the tall had great difficulty getting in and out:

Time was when additional gauges were optional. The base Sunbird offered just a speedometer and fuel and temperature gauge. One level of options added a voltmeter and oil pressure gauge, and Jannan’s added a tachometer. The automakers now generally don’t offer additional gauges, consumer choice having lost out to efforts to improve build quality through fewer variations.

One innovation, if that’s what you want to call it, that reared its garish head in the 1980s was the option of all-digital gauges. I think one reason for the comparative lesser popularity of the fourth-generation Corvette is that between 1984 and 1989 drivers had to stare at this …

… which not only looks like an ’80s video game, but apparently dies, requiring increasingly expensive replacement. A similar instrument panel was available on the late ’80s Beretta, which I declined to purchase:

Since, other than the windshield, the instrument panel is what the driver looks at the most, badly designed instrument panels would drive me nuts. (For a few years in my youth, I drew instrument panels based on drawings in the owner’s manuals of cars of family and friends of my parents. Yes, I was a strange kid.) There were a few cars in the ’50s and ’60s where the interior designer got the brilliant idea of removing the zeroes from the speedometer, leaving the impression that the car could go no faster than 12 mph.

Top Gear’s most out-there instrument panel design comes from a Lancia Orca, a concept car in the height of the digital dashboard craze:

I think I could put 100,000 miles on this car and still not know how to do certain things with the car.

With increasing interest in ergonomics in the 1980s, car instrument panels started becoming less, shall we say, creative. In the late ’60s, a couple of GM cars featured speedometers with a drum-like display — the needle was stationary and the numbers rolled vertically by as the car sped up.

Some Lincolns had a thermometer-like speedometer — instead of a needle, a bar would go to the right as the car accelerated. Pontiac and Oldsmobile started putting controls on steering wheels in the ’80s and ’90s, which lasted until airbags started getting installed.

(A former employer of mine once owned an Olds Toronado with pushbuttons on the steering wheel. This proved to be a design flaw when he left the car windows open before a sudden rainstorm, and a few miles later the radio decided to increase volume to maximum level.)

One sign of how serious the car is (or so the carmaker wants you to believe) as a performance vehicle is the location of the speedometer vs. the tachometer. The Porsche 911 traditionally has had a five-gauge layout with the tachometer in the middle:

BMW’s Mini Cooper has the tachometer in front of the driver,  and the speedometer and other gauges between driver and passenger:

The coolest interior option presently available on an American car might be the Ford Mustang’s MyColor option, where you can set your own favorite instrument panel lighting color, based on red, green and blue as with a TV. Two people with a lot of time on their hands created two guides for creating your own instrument panel colors. (My wife liked the red of her two Sunbirds. I recall the bright green of the aforementioned Javelin.)

No employee of a car manufacturer has ever asked me, but if they did, I would tell them that as far as gauges are concerned, more is better. If I ever got the money to do a car project where I could design my own instrument panel, it might have more gauges than an aircraft — speedometer, tachometer, fuel level and pressure, engine temperature, oil temperature and pressure, volts, engine vacuum, and who knows what else. A month ago, I spent an afternoon in my brother-in-law’s tractor–trailer, and while he was filling the trailer with corn I was trying to figure out what the gauges indicated. And numbers are preferable to letters; “C” and “H” don’t mean much on a temperature gauge.

Beyond that, I’m surprised the aforementioned MyColor option hasn’t been copied by other car manufacturers, because it is a great idea. (My Subaru Outback has white for the instruments and red for the air and audio controls.) I once drove a BMW that had three main air controls, for fan speed, temperature and outlets (the panel, floor and defroster outlets, plus combinations thereof), with buttons for air conditioning and rear defrost. I prefer that to trying to decipher an electronic display — how do I get the air to blow out of the air outlets? — and attempting to figure out whether I’d prefer the air at 68 degrees or 70. I’m fine with the headlight switch on the turn signal stalk and the wipers on an opposite stalk, but I prefer transmission shifters off the steering column — either on the floor or, as with newer Honda Odysseys and 1960s Dodge vans, on the instrument panel. And I’d like to be able to easily figure out, without consulting the owner’s manual, how to change the radio station.

This instrument panel from a Koenigsegg CCX certainly provides a lot of information, but not at one glance …

… similar to the Koenigsegg Agera:

The most exotic instrument panel I saw as a youth doesn’t count as very exotic today, but you can imagine why I thought it was:

Chevrolet is celebrating its 100th anniversary (which was Thursday) this year. (In fact, a Chevrolet centennial ad was on TV as I started typing this, announcing the Chevy Open House at a Chevy dealer near you through Monday.)

Automobile Magazine has a great retrospective of Chevy over its 100 years:

In the year Chevrolet was born, there were 270 auto companies operating in the United States. Although Chevrolet was started by one of the best-known and most prolific names in the fledgling industry, its survival was not ensured. But Chevrolet not only endured, it prospered. It went on to become one of the few American auto brands to reach the century mark, and it was the number-one-selling brand in the United States in the majority of those years.

(Not surprisingly, Car and Driver, Motor Trend and Road and Track also have  Chevy centennial features, as do the Detroit Free Press and Detroit News.)

Chevrolet’s success in the past century probably hinges on two things: value and choices. Chevy took off in the marketplace when Alfred E. Sloan, who eventually became chairman of GM, hit on the strategy of using Chevy to take on the Ford Model T’s higher-end customers — “a higher-quality low price car,” as Automobile puts it. The Free Press calls Chevrolet “the brand that became a giant by giving Americans more car for their money.”

Here’s an example: In 1955, Chevy came out with its new full-size car …

… which looked similar to that year’s Cadillac, for much less money:

The cars had similar, though separately designed, engines. Six years after Cadillac’s overhead-valve V-8, the ’55 full-size and Corvette offered an optional V-8, Chevy’s first in almost 40 years. The same basic design is available today in Corvettes, Camaros, pickups and the Suburban and Tahoe. The Chevy small-block V-8, which powered by my count four of our Chevys, is considered perhaps the best mass-production engine ever produced.

Twenty years later, those who wanted a full-size Chevrolet had three choices — the base Bel Air, the middle-range Impala and the high-end Caprice — in two-door coupe, four-door sedan (with or without B-pillar in the case of the Caprice), station wagon and Caprice convertible. The cars were available with the buyer’s choice of three V-8 engines, four radios, and manual- or automatic-control air conditioning, or neither. Buyers could choose from cloth or vinyl bench or split-bench seats in several colors. Buyers could choose, or not, cruise control, tilt steering wheel, power windows, power door locks, two kinds of wheel covers, two sizes of tires, and so on. The option list used to take up one to two pages in a car catalog.

The first several cars of my parents were Chevrolets. My grandparents owned nothing but Chevys as far as I know. My in-laws owned Chevys until Chevy stopped building the kind of Chevy they wanted to own. (More on that later.)

The Chevy thing with my parents and maternal grandparents is a bit ironic given that my aunt and uncle (on my mother’s side) were Ford owners, at least until my aunt bought a couple of Suburbans to replace the Ford Club Wagons they used to own. My uncle would call our preferred brand of car “Shove It or Leave It,” and his smartass nephew would reply with either “Fix Or Repair Daily” or “Found On Road Dead.” (So of course I replaced my last Chevy with a Ford, but more on that later too.)

My father’s first car was a 1951 Chevy with a six-cylinder engine and the Powerglide two-speed automatic, whose engine-power-sucking attributes gave it the name “Powerslide.”

Chronologically speaking model-year-wise, the first Chevy I remember is my grandparents’ 1959 El Camino, in this Aspen Green (although theirs did not have the chrome wheels or whitewalls). My grandparents bought it for my grandmother’s next-door second-hand store. After they closed the store, my grandfather drove it to work at the Department of Natural Resources nursery just outside Boscobel.

My parents supplanted my father’s collection of used and fancy, but not always reliable, cars with a Chevrolet Nova (known as a “Chevy II”) after they got married. By the time I arrived, the first Chevy II was replaced with a dark red wagon, the first car of theirs I remember. I apparently lived in Chevy neighborhoods while in Madison. The next door house (where our babysitters came from) owned a Corvair. Up the street, the father of friends of ours drove a 1969 Impala coupe. And when we moved to the house my parents built, two houses down was the first Corvette I ever saw. In the days when many people replaced cars around 40,000 miles (which was 28,000 miles past warranty and around the time when things started to go wrong), my parents then decided they needed something larger, and replaced a compact Chevy wagon with a mid-size Chevy wagon, a 1969 Nomad. The Nomad was LeMans Blue, not this green, and it had a roof rack. It didn’t have many options besides that — AM radio and a power tailgate window. It could move quite smartly, given that my father selected one from an Oregon Chevy dealer with the most powerful available V-8, 255 horsepower and 365 lb-ft of torque, attached to a two-speed automatic. (I sat behind my father, so I can tell you how fast it could go.)

On my previous blog (and probably on this blog in a few weeks) I mentioned the Christmas albums my parents got from a tire dealer. Chevy also distributed an album shortly after my parents got the Nomad:

That was quite an album for its day, featuring performers you would have heard of in 1970 — Glen Campbell, Dionne Warwick and Burt Bacharach.

Perhaps sitting in the second seat of station wagons is where I got my affinity for station wagons, given that the second one I’ve owned is sitting in front of my house right now. (Though it is not a Chevy, because Chevy doesn’t build the kind of wagon I wanted. You may notice a theme developing here.)

When my parents owned a blue 1969 Nomad, my grandparents owned a black 1968 Nomad. (The latter lacked the front headrests and steering-column-mounted ignition switch of the former.) So one day apparently I suggested to my grandparents that they should buy a new wagon in our Nomad’s color. So imagine my surprise when the next time I saw them, they pulled up to our house driving …

(Theirs had the dog-dish hubcaps, but not the roof rack.)

About that time (ironically, in the town where my grandparents lived) my father bought our first second car, a burgundy 1965 Bel Air sedan, powered by a 283 V-8 and Powerglide. The Bel Air was built in the days before seat belts were required to be installed in the back seat. My parents’ solution was to have my mother sit in back and my brother and I share the lap belt on the passenger side of the front seat. My father never hit anything (though someone backed into the left rear side once) while we were in the car, which was good, because the lap belt would not have prevented our faces from being rearranged once our unrestrained upper halves made contact with the dashboard.

My parents and grandparents then went in different vehicular directions. The newer blue Nomad was replaced by the first of two Novas … … while my parents moved up to the full-size level, a 1975 Caprice: This was a car. (Dark red, not black, and without the color-keyed hubcaps and with a full vinyl roof.) It was 18 feet 1 inch long, weighed 4,300 pounds, and required careful parking. (Note the huge front bumper guards; the way to get it into the garage was to drive slowly until the front bumper hit the concrete steps into the house.) On the other hand, it ate up the miles in Chevrolet-level luxury. And it was built down Interstate 90 at the GM Janesville plant, which employed one of my neighbors. This is undoubtedly where I developed my affinity for land yachts.

Our Caprice had the base-level V-8 (the same as this car), which gave it enough power for me to get two speeding tickets driving it. (Perhaps it was the fact the car was so large that its radar signature could be seen by AWACS planes flying in the Middle East.) I believe the 350 V-8 is an engine that is impossible to kill, based on my experience with the Caprice. It survived its two drivers’ thinking the other had been checking the oil (two quarts too low, not that you could tell), various brown, red and green fluid leaks, and a bird’s nest that a bird had planted overnight in the Caprice’s air cleaner. It was our first car with air conditioning, an AM/FM (but not stereo) radio and cruise control. It was the quietest car I’d ever been in, quieter than my other grandparents’ Cadillac Coupe de Ville, surprisingly. (The de Ville had those fiberoptic lamp monitors on the fenders, however.)

Old Car Memories‘ description of a Caprice convertible applies to our coupe too:

To most observers with today’s frame of mind the Caprice Classic convertible seems almost outlandish in proportions compared to today’s much smaller cars. The hood is so very long and even the shorter trunk (in comparison to the hood) looks big. The car has elegant curves and bumps unlike today’s aerodynamic sheet metal. One look at the 1975 Caprice convertible is like looking at a two-door 1957 Chevy, you know this type of styling will never be seen again on a new car. …

One can talk about the elegance of the exterior of this full-size Chevy but this car’s purpose was its large wide open space in the interior for both the front and rear seat passengers. First thing an observer will notice before entering the interior is the massive side doors on this car. These heavy doors feel stronger than a steel girder acting as a main support for a skyscraper. It’s a feeling of peace of mind for it makes you realize this car is built as strong and sturdy as a Sherman tank. … Once the side door is opened the interior space seems as big as a large hotel lobby. With seating for 6 large adults (3 up front and 3 in the back), and this is not shoulder touching shoulder type space as is the case with the modern (so called full-size) 6 passenger cars – like 3-in-a-row tight airline coach seating. There was plenty of free space between each of the 6 occupants – it was just like 3-in-a-row first class airline seating giving all occupants full elbow room. For anyone who came of age during the 1970s and 1980s when full-size cars the size of the 1975 Caprice were driven by teens, it was a common site to see 4 or even 5 teens seated in the rear seat row. Try this in a current full-size car and that car will be more crowded than the clown filled VW Beetle at the circus. And trunk space with even a full-size spare tire is nothing short of enormous. It’s a trunk when the convertible top is up, can fit a surfboard and loads of luggage and still be able to completely close the trunk lid. There are a few big trunks available today however none are as wide and long as the Caprice’s trunk space.

I have a lot of fond memories of that car. I might have had a lot of fond memories of my first car made by anyone. But I sat in the back seat of that car on family vacations to Michigan, Florida, Salt Lake City and Las Vegas, not once breathing my brother’s air (or vice versa). The trunk swallowed up groceries, luggage, fresh Boy Scout pizzas for immediate delivery, my grandmother’s garden supplies, and enough other things to make you think it was a four-seat El Camino with a trunk lid. And then I got it with my driver’s license, my ticket to vehicular freedom and high-school and college social mobility. I got a thrill out of just starting the car (though the starter was deafening to anyone standing just outside the car), seeing the Gen and Oil lights with the ignition switch at On change to the Temp and Oil lights when the starter fired, then hearing the car start and seeing the busybody FASTEN SEAT BELTS light go off. The V-8 throb and the radio coming on was Chevy’s way of saying it’s time to go somewhere, Presty.

When I got my driver’s license, I drove the Caprice until I purchased my first car. I should have kept it instead of purchasing my first car. (That’s what the literary types call “foreshadowing.”)

While I was driving this Caprice, my wife was driving her family’s 1976 Impala, the last of the Chevy land yachts. Neither of these cars had today’s safety features such as air bags or antilock brakes. Both cars were involved in accidents with, respectively, a one-ton van that had to be towed away and a Renault that was totaled. The total damage to our Chevys was, respectively, a bent rear bumper and a dent.

Up until now, you’ll notice all of our Chevy experiences were positive ones. And then they started becoming not so positive. When the number of drivers in the house grew to three, my parents bought a 1981 Malibu, a demonstrator, black with wire wheel covers and a red interior.

It was a demonstration of how poorly the United Auto Workers could “assemble,” to use the term loosely, a car. We took it on what I called the Industrial Blight Tour — Chicago/Gary, Detroit, Toronto, Buffalo and Cleveland. By the time we returned, I had compiled, independent of the damage from a hit-and-run rear-end collision in Toronto, a page-long list of things wrong with the car — the Check Engine light going on and off for no apparent reason, thumping noises from the air conditioning (a concern in a humid summer), and, most comically, a broken front seat, which slid back every time Dad hit the gas and slid forward every time he hit the brake. We took it on another vacation a year and a half later, and it ran fine … every other day.

The Malibu was the second wave of GM’s downsizing its cars. The first one, the 1977 Impala and Caprice (along with the full-size  Pontiacs, Oldsmobiles, Buicks and Cadillacs), lasted, with a restyling in 1991, until GM (wrongly) killed its rear-drive large cars in 1996. (More on that later.)

The midsize downsizing was less than successful. The rear doors, for instance, did not have roll-down windows; GM removed the window mechanisms to gain rear-seat elbow room. (Which didn’t help the tall rear-seat passengers, I can personally attest.) The demo had the base V-6, which gave it leisurely acceleration without appreciably improved gas mileage. (One reason is that some genius at GM decided one way to get better gas mileage was to install incredibly tall rear-end ratios, which is similar to starting from a stop in your highest gear; you’ll eventually get to speed, several minutes from when you start.) I’m guessing  in the six years the car cursed our garage, I’m guessing it ran right a total of one of those six years.

Around this time, my next-door neighbor had a 1981 Citation, Chevy’s first front-drive car, the result of round three of downsizing. GM’s front-drive compacts (which replaced the aforementioned Nova) were called X-body cars — the X standing for “execrable” quality. When his daughter from his first marriage came to live with them, they drove us to high school. I put my hand on the B-pillar to get into the back seat, just in time for his daughter to shut her door on three of my fingers. It didn’t hurt my hand (which says something about the quality of the door, doesn’t it?), but my hand was stuck until I got her attention to open the door.

The appalling Malibu ownership experience did not end my parents’ Chevrolet ownership. My mother owned a 1985 Camaro, the first car she got to own and drive herself with no other driver. My father bought a S-10 4-wheel-drive pickup when they were building their house in Waupaca.

And for a few years, my father owned a 1962 Impala convertible, the only Anniversary Gold (commemorating Chevy’s 50th anniversary) non-SS convertible we had seen before or since. Somewhere there are photos of me driving the convertible with my grandmother as the passenger, as well as with my then-girlfriend (now wife) as the passenger. Driving a convertible is a cool experience, with the unrestricted outdoors going by you as you motor down the  road.

Meanwhile, I concluded after 130,000 miles, and given that gas prices were at the ridiculous level of $1.40 or so a gallon, I should get something more economical. So I gave up the Caprice and bought a 1988 Beretta GT. I conclude that it was built by the same UAW “workers” who (mis)assembled the aforementioned Malibu.

During my two years of ownership, it would occasionally peg the temperature gauge at H, making one think the engine was melting down in front of me. Several mechanics could neither prove nor disprove that it was overheating. It also had electrical gremlins that left my then-girlfriend (now wife) impressed at my colorful vocabulary when I had to stop somewhere in Iowa to get a new fuse, only to have the new fuse pop immediately upon installation. (If I remember correctly, the fuse controlled a minor function, the turn signals, and something else.)

When I had to replace the front brakes at 68,000 miles because they were rusting from the inside, that concluded my interest in owning the car. When you are simultaneously making car payments and paying repair bills, you have made a poor vehicular choice.

The last family Chevrolet I got to drive very much was my in-laws’ 1991 Caprice, the last of their several large Chevys, and a car very analogous to our old Caprice (down to the dark red color). Certainly the ’91 Caprice’s looks were an acquired taste, but it was a solid car that accelerated pretty well, handled better than you’d think, got decent gas mileage, and was comfortable, with, again, gargantuan trunk space.

Chevy has made some decisions during my vehicle ownership lifetime that have been incompatible with my ownership needs of the time. I replaced the Beretta with a 1991 Ford Escort GT. Chevy didn’t make anything like an Escort in those days — a three-door hatchback where actual adults could sit in the back seat. (Jannan owned two Pontiac Sunbirds, Pontiac’s version of the Chevy Cavalier, whose two-door back seats were meant only for the vertically challenged.) The Escort was replaced by the first of our two Subaru Outbacks. Chevy did not then and does not now make a mid-sized all-wheel-drive station wagon. The second Sunbird was replaced by a Honda Odyssey. Chevy has never made a minivan designed one-fourth as well as the Odyssey is designed. (Chevy’s first attempt at a minivan, the Lumina APV, has been called the “Dustbuster” due to its visual similarity to a hand-held vacuum cleaner.)

The irony is that Chevy does sell traditional rear-wheel-drive sedans. Just not in the U.S. If you live in the Middle East, you can buy a midsized Lumina, which in Australia is called the Holden Commodore (even with a wagon). You can buy a Caprice in the Middle East or Australia, but Chevy hasn’t sold a Caprice in the U.S. since 1996. (The Caprice is starting to be sold here as a police car, however, partly in response to Ford’s dumb decision to discontinue its rear-drive cars, including the Crown Victoria Police Interceptor.)

Today, other than the Corvette and Camaro (neither of which we’ll be buying any time soon), Chevrolet really sells no car I feel compelled to even look at. The current trend is what are called “crossover vehicles,” which, as compromises, probably don’t do anything particularly well. My interest in Chevy’s small cars is less than zero, and when it comes to the Volt, my one experience in a hybrid car (Lexus’ answer to the Toyota Prius) makes me most disinterested.

The Chevy we probably should own, but are not likely to anytime soon, is the Suburban, the longest running nameplate in the world’s auto industry, having been built since 1935. It seats up to nine, which is more than minivans can seat. (One problem of being a family of five is the limits on the number of people beyond your family that you can take in your vehicle.) It has V-8 power, which compared to some engines of today is like owning your own nuclear power plant. It can be purchased with four-wheel drive for our always interesting winters. The Suburban is listed at 15 city and 21 highway mpg, which is close to our minivan (and better than the Caprice and Impala we drove, even though it’s the same size), and it can run on E85. Unfortunately, it cannot be ordered with a diesel engine,  since Chevy hasn’t seen fit to develop its diesels beyond its heaviest-duty pickups.

The other Chevy we should have is a car I saw at the 2010 Green Lake car show. I don’t know who owns it, I didn’t see it there last year, and of course I don’t have enough money to buy it. But when the weather gets nicer …

Today is my birthday. (In case you couldn’t figure that out from one hour ago.) And as with my previous 45 birthdays, there is no Corvette in my driveway. Life is unfair.

There are, however, Corvettes in other driveways. (Probably few in journalists’ driveways, although I was surprised to see the kinds of cars parked in the media parking at Road America when I was last there.) And there will be more Corvettes in more driveways given that GM is reportedly designing the next Corvette, the seventh generation of America’s sports car. GM is spending $131 million on improvements to the Corvette plant in Bowling Green, Ky., which also is the home of the National Corvette Museum.

First, a photographic tour of generations one through six:

The current Corvette is one of the most accomplished cars on the planet. For between $49,045 (base coupe) and $110,300 (the ZR1), you can buy a car that will go from standing stop to 60 mph in no slower than 4.3 seconds, will race one-quarter mile in no slower than 12.6 seconds, will reach top speed of at least 190 mph, and will get up to 26 mpg on the highway. You can take your significant other and a weekend’s worth of luggage wherever you can reach in a day’s drive.

For those who want numbers:  The base Corvette costs $114.06 per horsepower, and the ZR1 costs $172.88 per horsepower. A Porsche Boxster costs $188.63 per horsepower, and a Ferrari California costs $423.84 per horsepower. The most expensive Corvette is more of a performance bargain than the least expensive Porsche.

But don’t take my word, watch the videos:

Corvettes have always been front-engine rear-drive two-seat coupes or convertibles. They have been powered by V-8s (all, except for the four-cam LT-5 built at Mercury Marine’s Stillwater, Okla., plant of the overhead-valve variety) in all but their first two model years, and they have had at least an available manual transmission (and with some engines it was the only available transmission) in all but three model years. Hidden headlights were featured in generations two through five, a triumph of styling over function.

As noted in my previous Corvette writings, the automobile media swoons (I was going to use another metaphor, but given what’s happened in the past week or so, give me some credit for taste) every time GM appears to be about to roll out a new Corvette.

The first heavy breathing about a new Vette that I remember was in 1973, when Motor Trend, the first car magazine I ever read, announced GM was going to introduce not one, but two new Corvettes, both powered by the then-exotic rotary engines. One was going  to be a two-rotor Corvette …

… and the other was going to be a ground-shaking four-rotor Corvette:

Neither of those predictions was correct, nor was the prediction nine months later:

For one thing, GM (and everyone else except Mazda) abandoned rotary engines due to their poor fuel economy and emissions and other problems. The silver gull-wing-doored Vette had its four-rotor replaced by a 400 V-8 and, voila, became the Aerovette. And pretty much since then (and even before then), some Vette enthusiasts have pined for a mid-engine Vette, and auto publications have predicted that the “next” Corvette will be mid-engined.

(Motor Trend has a reputation for not being particularly critical about the cars it reviews. Motor Trend also has a reputation of making Corvette predictions into cover stories, as these covers demonstrate:

Many Corvette drawings over the years were drawn by designer Harry Bradley. Dean’s Garage helpfully put many of them in one spot. All of these were, to quote the December 1976 cover blurb, Vettes you’ll never see. But the issues sold well at the newsstands, I’m sure.)

Mid-engine cars (that is, cars whose engines are between the axles, whether in front of the rear axle or behind the front axle) are claimed to have better handling since the engine is closer to the drive axle (assuming it’s a rear-drive car) and there is less weight on the steering axle. (Anyone who has driven, say, a C3 with a big-block iron-block V-8 but without power steering can sympathize.) The Ford GT, built in 2005 and 2006, was mid-engined as was the Ford GT-40, the ’60s LeMans racer from which it was derived.

This strikes me as one of those be-careful-what-you-ask-for propositions. Yes, mid-engine cars are more exotic. GM’s experience with exotic technology over the years has been, shall we say, not entirely positive. (Four words: “Cadillac V8-6-4.” I also refer to my experience of briefly being locked inside a C6 at the Greater Milwaukee Auto Show, given that the C6 has no interior or exterior door handles.) GM also has worked mightily to make today’s Corvette a potential everyday-driver, including actual (though not much) storage space. Can golf clubs or a couple of overnight bags fit into the front trunk of, say, a Porsche 911? And imagine the reaction the first time you drive your mid-engine Vette to an oil change store, or the bill for an oil change at your favorite Chevy dealership.

The same warning about exotic tech could apply to other items on the Vette wish list such as all-wheel drive, features seen in the supercar class. (GM North America president Mark Reuss was quoted as saying he wants the next Corvette to be “a truly global competitor.”) I enjoy technology as much as anyone, but I’ve also owned enough cars to know that the more things the car can do, the more things on the car can break. Owners of C4 Corvettes, cars equipped with digital instrument panels, have discovered the digital dashes don’t work so well (as in, in some cases, not at all) as the cars reach their third decade.

The Corvette rumor mill started running in overdrive when the movie “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” was released with the Corvette Stingray concept, which includes, of all things, the one-year split rear window:

Back in December, Rick “Corvette” Conti repeated Motor Trend’s report about the next-generation Corvette’s styling:

I’m not sure I like this. Corvettes have always had flowing lines (particularly the C3), and “flowing” is not how I’d describe this design, although from the A-pillar forward it does remind one of a C3, which is good. The reason the romantic split-window design was a one-year-only design was that, regardless of how owners thought it looked, drivers found it obstructed rear vision.

Then in March, Conti passed on Car & Driver magazine’s rendition of the C7 Vette, which is certainly preferable:

In addition to the Corvette’s being America’s most enduring sports car, the Corvette is also America’s most modified sports car, in concept and reality. One thing you may have noticed by now is that few enthusiasts ever seem satisfied with the looks of the car, and to borrow the old Ford phrase, they seem to have a better idea. (The Aerovette could never have been built, for instance, because of the federal 5-mph-bumper requirement, the reason the C3 lost its chrome bumpers. We won’t get into how consumers would have felt about gull-wing doors.)

Then there’s the issue of the engine. Reports for more than a year have claimed that the next Corvette will have a turbocharged V-6 and not a V-8 due to fuel economy concerns. (Which seems silly; even though the current Corvette is rated at 26 highway mpg, people do not buy Corvettes for their gas-sipping qualities.) The V-6 rumors have fallen back in favor of a more interesting rumor: a choice of a smaller version of the current V-8 (whose 405 horsepower propels the base model from 0 to 60 mph in 4.2 seconds), or a much smaller multiple-cam V-8, perhaps half the size of the current engine but with some kind of forced induction for maximum horsepower at higher rpm.

Either engine choice sounds intriguing, with two caveats. Conti’s Motor Trend report indicated GM was trying to get its cylinder-deactivation software to work on the engine, which should be anathema even if it works better than the aforementioned V8-6-4. All of the engines I’m aware of with cylinder-deactivation are hooked up to automatics. I have read about sequential gearboxes and automated manuals and other supposedly superior alternatives to sticks, but if there is a Park gear and not a clutch pedal, it seems to me to not belong in a sports car, at least not as the only transmission choice.

There is one more issue about creating a Corvette to compete with high-end Ferraris, Porsches, etc. Recall that the list price of the 2011 ZR1 is $110,300. The Porsche Carrera Turbo S coupe, with a 530-horsepower flat-6, lists for $160,700. The Lamborghini Gallardo, with a 550-horsepower V-12 engine, starts at $212,000. The Ferrari 458 Italia, with a 570-horsepower V-8, lists for $225,325. The base model Corvette is a performance bargain; so is the ZR1 when compared with its supercar brethren. But the Corvette lacks the international cachet of the Porsche, Ferrari, etc., and is unlikely to get more merely by adding more supercar stuff. One also wonders how many people would be willing to pay, say, $200,000 for a Corvette.

The old Army tagline was: “Be all that you can be.” At some point you were probably given the advice to be yourself. The current Corvette is not a “truly global competitor” not because of its performance (there is not a single car in this blog entry with a better power-to-weight ratio than the ZR1), but because of its poor quality interior more than anything else. So improve the interior. But if GM thinks someone in the market for a 458 Italia will switch instead to whatever the better-than-ZR1 is, I’m not sure that’s going to be happen. And GM will be making a mistake if in its attempt to be world-class it ends up losing potential customers because the Corvette has a world-class price tag out of the reach of potential customers.