As you can imagine with a date that occurs only every four years, not much happened today in music.
Today in 1968, the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” won album of the year at the Grammys:
The number one single today in 1992:
Birthdays begin with Jimmy Dorsey …
… and end with Gretchen Christopher of the Fleetwoods:
Two deaths of note today: Songwriter Wes Farrell in 1996 …
…and Mike Smith of the Dave Clark Five in 2008:
In the summer of 2008, gas prices in my corner of Wisconsin reached $4.129 per gallon, 6 cents per gallon less than the all-time state record of $4.189 per gallon.
That was in June and July 2008, when gas prices are usually at their highest. WisconsinGasPrices.com show what gas prices have done from then to now:
On Monday, I put gas in my car at $3.629 per gallon. It is nowhere near tourist season.
Gas prices are already at $4.36 per gallon in California. (That’s for regular self-serve; ABC-TV was doing a story from a California gas station last week where prices were already over $5 per gallon, and during the live report gas went up another 10 cents per gallon.) Nationwide, unleaded costs almost $3.67 per gallon. And the summer tourism driving season is three months away.
We know from our 2008 experience what happens when gas prices jump over $4 per gallon and diesel fuel nears $5 per gallon. It’s not just that vacation plans get curbed or canceled. We discover how much fuel prices affect the cost of everything that requires transportation from producer to seller, beginning with food. We also discover how many things come from petroleum, including plastics and rubber. And since police cars use gas and fire trucks use diesel, even the cost of providing government services increases. It seems rather obvious that $5-per-gallon gas is the surest path to tanking our fragile-at-best economy.
Someone therefore should tell President Obama that public impotence is not a winning campaign strategy (see Carter, Jimmy, 1980). From the Associated Press:
“We know there’s no silver bullet that will bring down gas prices or reduce our dependence on foreign oil overnight,” Obama said Saturday in his weekly radio and Internet address. “But what we can do is get our priorities straight and make a sustained, serious effort to tackle this problem.” …
Obama said Republicans have one answer to the oil pinch: Drill.
“You know that’s not a plan, especially since we’re already drilling,” Obama said, echoing his remarks earlier in the week. “It’s a bumper sticker.”
Obama is pushing what he calls an “all-of-the-above” approach to the problem of limited energy resources, meaning an attempt to seek out alternative energy sources while reducing consumption of traditional fuels.
That’s not an all-of-the-above approach. An “all-of-the-above approach” would reduce dependence on foreign oil by developing more domestic energy, including oil, natural gas and Obama’s definition of evil, coal.
And Obama’s claims about drilling are false, according to University of Maryland Prof. Peter Morici:
The liberal theocracy in academia, the media and the Democratic Partyleadership relentlessly expounds that drilling for oil in the United States won’t much affect U.S. gas prices, because petroleum prices are set in global markets. And, more domestic oil production or U.S. access to Canadian petroleum won’t much change global supplies, or the pace of economic recovery and unemployment.
Balderdash!
Oil prices paid by U.S. refineries in the Gulf do move with global prices but not in lockstep. Despite a recent reduction in U.S. refinery capacity, increasing North American production would lower refinery acquisition costs.
U.S. refineries, like others around the world, are built to handle the special characteristics of oil produced by their primary sources of supply. And gasoline produced by individual refineries is not wholly fungible either—differing fuel characteristics are required across the United States and Europe to meet environmental standards. …
For years, prices for West Texas Intermediate and North Sea Brent moved closely, but now WTI is selling for $17 less than its North Sea counterpart.
This indicates the U.S. market is becoming somewhat separate and less wholly determined by global conditions; hence, more domestic production and increased access to Canadian oil would lower U.S. oil and prices—more drilling in the Gulf and elsewhere in North America, and the Keystone pipeline would significantly affect gas prices and employment.
More importantly, whether Americans pay $115 a barrel for oil from Saudi Arabia and Nigeria or obtained from the Gulf of Mexico and other domestic deposits makes a huge difference.
The annual trade deficit on petroleum is about $300 billion. Raising U.S. oil production to its sustainable potential of 10 million barrels a day would cut import costs in half, directly create 1.5 million jobs, and applying administration economic models for stimulus spending, create another 1 million jobs indirectly.
Overall, attaining U.S. oil production potential would boost GDP about $250 billion. Not bad, because it could be accomplished by increasing federal revenues from royalties and reducing the federal deficit, instead of adding to it through additional stimulus spending and subsidies to questionable solar and wind projects.
Obama’s concern over gas prices is limited to how voter anger over gas prices will affect Obama’s reelection. Investors Business Daily points out:
Nothing quite divides the elites from regular working folks like a spike in the price of gasoline. To the latter, it’s a blow to the household budget. To the former, it’s a teachable moment.
The lesson always seems to be twofold. One theme is that there’s no fighting higher gas prices. The other is that there is plenty you can do to adjust and, in the process, help build a better world. …
But most Americans are car-dependent and will remain so for at least a few more decades.
Bicycling to work, for instance, is an idea that might make sense in a few college towns with good year-round weather. That’s a short list.
Waiting years for a rail line to be built to your neighborhood doesn’t exactly meet your short-term needs. And, contrary to much wishful thinking, hybrids still carry a steep premium.
For most of the 99%, the only solution to high gas prices is lower gas prices.
So what can be done about gas prices? Contrary to Obama, far from nothing, says Steve Maley:
1. Commit to a strategic goal of North American energy security. That includes reasonable and responsible domestic drilling. That includes taking the lead on the Keystone XL Pipeline; we could find a way to make it happen while addressing the legitimate environmental concerns of Nebraskans. It includes a commitment to maintaining the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System and opening ANWR.
2. Ditch the anti-industry, anti-capitalist rhetoric. It is not the President’s or the government’s place to decide when an industry’s profitability is “high enough”. High oil company profits fund more drilling; more drilling means more future supply and lower prices. Besides, American oil companies are not owned by a cabal of wealthy executives, but by America’s pension funds, mutual funds and private investment accounts. “They” are “us”. …
4. Realize that Uncle Sam is in the energy business and is a partner in industry’s success. Oil and gas royalties are the federal government’s #2 source of revenue, after the income tax. Offshore slowdowns hurt not only industry and jobs, but government revenue. …
6. Trust that no oil operator wants to be the “next BP”. The BP spill cost that company something on the order of $40 billion. Industry safety and environmental commitment is motivated more out of self-interest and less out of fear of the government. …
8. Declare hydraulic fracturing & well design to be the regulatory domain of the states, not the EPA. Geology and environment vary widely; Pennsylvania is not Louisiana is not North Dakota is not California. It is insanity to think that one broadly-applied set of rules can be applied to regulate industry without suffocating development.
9. Rescind the recently-enacted royalty rate increase for new onshore Federal oil and gas leases. Secretary [of the Interior Ken] Salazar’s stated rationale for increasing the government’s take by a whopping 50% – from 12.5% to 18.75% of gross production – was to equate onshore royalties with the offshore royalty rate. That makes no sense. Higher royalties mean less drilling, poorer economics of production and premature abandonment of wells. Besides, an IHS-CERA Study recently showed that the federal government’s total take of offshore cash flows makes the Gulf of Mexico the second-most punitive fiscal regime in the world, after Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela. …
Bonus #11: Get real about the promise of alternative fuels. Recently you said: “You’ve got a bunch of algae out there; If we can figure out how to make energy out of that, we’ll be doing alright.” Maybe so, but I will stick my neck out and say it ain’t gonna happen, at least not in my lifetime, not on a scale that will impact pump prices.
Not widely known is the fact that, when you put gas into your car, the federal and state governments get more money out of that tank in taxes than the oil companies get in profits. That would explain why you don’t hear anyone suggest lowering gas taxes.
The particular state contribution to the aforementioned $3.629 is the state’s minimum markup law, which requires that gas prices be set at the higher of 6 percent more than costs or 9.18 percent more than the average wholesale price. A U.S. district judge blocked enforcement of the law in February 2009, but a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals reinstituted the law in September 2010.
Notice Wisconsin gas prices from February 2009 (far left) to September 2010, and what’s happened since then:
Brian Fojtik on the American Legislative Exchange Council:
In recent months, ALEC has become a target of a sloppily-orchestrated, but well-funded effort by conspiracy theorists and anarchists (think “Occupy”) who care more about creating another dark, sinister boogeyman to scare you rather than honestly and seriously confront the challenges before us. …
A number of legislative organizations similar to ALEC exist across the country. The National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL), like ALEC, brings together legislators and policymakers from across the country who listen to and work with members of the private sector in an effort to promote public policy and learn about what’s worked — and what hasn’t worked — in their respective states. …
ALEC is being portrayed as something different than some of those groups. And, ALEC is different. It’s different in that it adheres to its very open and publicly-stated philosophy of advancing the “Jeffersonian principles of free markets, limited government, federalism, and individual liberty, through a nonpartisan public-private partnership of America’s state legislators, members of the private sector, the federal government and the general public.” I’ll give you an example of how that plays out in practice. When the federal government imposes mandates upon the states (i.e. Medicaid) while some groups might seek higher federal funding levels or more flexibility to fulfill those mandates, because of its limited government philosophy, a group like ALEC might be more inclined to oppose the mandates outright or suggest even more freedom for states to fulfill a mission (i.e. providing healthcare for the poor) in their own ways, less-restricted (or unrestricted) by federal controls.
Many of the recent attacks on ALEC seem to focus to a great extent on ALEC’s work to promote “model legislation” to be considered in states across the country as some sort of devious plot to avoid the legislative process in the states. Nothing could be further from the truth. These absurd attacks ignore the reality that other groups promote goals and objectives in public policy all the time. It’s a lengthy and tedious process to have proposed legislation achieve “model bill” status endorsed by groups such as NCSL or ALEC. And these “model bills,” if introduced by a legislator in a particular state, have no special status or fast-track to becoming law. They are merely bills written and introduced by a legislator, that must go through the exact same legislative process as any other bill introduced in that state. They must be drafted and introduced by an elected legislator, they’re distributed for cosponsorship opportunities, they’re written about and reported on by the media, and they must go through the committee and legislative process in two houses of the state legislature (except for Nebraska which is a unicameral) and be discussed, debated, criticized, lauded, amended and voted upon — all subject to the same open records and open meetings requirements as any other piece of legislation. …
Much of the criticism you may have seen or will continue to see about ALEC seems to be centered around the fact that the private sector is involved in ALEC and the ALEC process. Frankly, this is a strength of ALEC, rather than a detriment.
Many of the more unhinged attacks on ALEC have come from within these state lines. And you can see why — according to ALEC’s Wisconsin critics, the only ideas the Legislature should be allowed to consider should emanate from Wisconsin. (Instead of socialist Europe, source of numerous brain-dead Democrat ideas. Otto von Bismarck was not a Wisconsinite.)
What kind of fascist ideas does ALEC support?
What a radical list. Indeed, it seems as if ALEC’s proposals follow Article I, section 22 of the state Constitution — “The blessings of a free government can only be maintained by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality and virtue, and by frequent recurrence to fundamental principles” — better than the Legislature does.
Good or bad ideas are not good or bad based on their source. As we’ve seen from the mess within Republican presidential caucuses, primary elections were a good Wisconsin idea. Giving government employees collective bargaining was and is a bad idea. The lack of budget and tax controls in the state Constitution was an error of omission. And nothing ALEC suggests becomes law unless legislators elected by Wisconsin voters vote for it and a governor elected by Wisconsin voters signs it into law.
The number one single today in 1970:
The number one single today in 1976 is the first record I ever purchased, for $1.03 at a Madison drugstore:
Today in 1977, a member of the audience at a Ray Charles concert tried to strangle him with a rope.
The number one single today in 1981:
Birthdays today start with Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones:
Joe South:
Donnie Iris of the Jaggerz:
Ronnie Rosman of Tommy James and the Shondells:
Cindy Wilson of the B-52s:
Ian Stanley played keyboards for Tears for Fears:
Phil Gould of Level 42:
Four deaths of note today: Frankie Lymon in 1968 …
… one-hit-wonder Bobby Bloom in 1974 …
… David Byron of Uriah Heep in 1985 …
… and drummer George Allen “Buddy” Miles in 2008:
You can safely bet that when the stupid gubernatorial recall election occurs, and should Kathleen Falk win the Democratic nomination, I will not be voting for her.
Mike Nichols gives more examples of Falk’s work besides the ones I previously listed:
As a public intervenor in the mid-1980s, according to newspaper stories at the time, she opposed the widening of I-94 to three lanes each way between Highways 18 and 16 in Waukesha County. Described by the Milwaukee Journal as “a leading critic,” she reportedly maintained at the time that an air quality permit was necessary for the project to proceed – a stance even the Department of Natural Resources disagreed with.
The paper also reported that she was part of a group that said the widening of the highway would encourage urban sprawl.
When I asked her the other day if it was accurate to call her an opponent in the controversy, she said, “Frankly, I don’t remember it.” After I read her parts of a newspaper story about her involvement, she suggested that her role as an intervenor who worked for a citizens advisory committee was not always one of opposition so much as making sure proper environmental assessments were conducted.
Falk is spreading manure with that assertion.
Nichols repeats a point of mine that requires repetition:
At the same time, she did not dispute opposing two other high-profile projects people might remember.
Falk was one of the loudest critics of a plan to replace a four-lane stretch of Highways 12 and 18 in Dane County — described as one of the most congested and dangerous sections of roadway in the state — with a new six-lane South Beltline that crossed the Upper Mud Lake Marsh.
She very publicly expressed concern about the impact of the Beltline on the 1000-acre marsh in the 1980s, and called a compromise that allowed destruction of 22 acres of marshland and creation of 25 acres of new wetlands a “joke.”
Asked about that controversy the other day, she said she thought more should have been done to protect the wetlands and also said there were better alternatives to improving the old highway than what was selected.
So the blood of the people who died on the South Beltline before it was finally upgraded in the late 1980s is also on the hands of, as David Blaska calls her, The Kathleen. Run on that, Ms. Falk.
Back in the 1980s, one of the other things that was written was that she — first, as an attorney for Environmental Decade and later as an aggressive public intervenor — fought the construction of the Fox River Mall off Highway 41 a couple miles from downtown Appleton.
Most Americans nowadays, even those of us who treasure Wisconsin’s lakes and fields, see highways and malls as inextricably and inevitably linked to the way we drive and shop – the result of choices we make about how and where to live our lives. But back then, there were folks who thought stopping the mall was the way to preserve Appleton’s downtown, and Falk was quoted in 1991 as saying, “We joined with the downtown business people, who had their own set of concerns, many of which duplicated ours.”
It’s fair to say the mall has been “a challenge” to downtown Appleton, she told me the other day. But she declined to tell me whether she thought, in retrospect, it should have been built or not.
So Falk opposed what is now the largest shopping mall outside the Milwaukee area and one of the biggest tourist and retail draws to the Fox Cities. That should get her a lot of Northeast Wisconsin votes.
Nichols concludes with another point that Falk won’t be running on either:
I guess it’s kind of a moot point in a way since she lost all three battles.
Next time you’re shopping in the mall or driving down I-94 or the Beltline, the thing is, imagine if she hadn’t.
Falk can argue that she wanted to reverse our way of life — better transportation and retail opportunities — or she can run on her policy failures before Dane County voters wrongly voted for her twice for county executive. (Not to mention her two statewide election failures.)
The fact that Falk now has primary opponents — state Sen. Kathleen Vinehout (D–Alma) and possibly Secretary of State Douglas La Follette and Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett — demonstrates that Democrats haven’t decided to fall on their candidacy swords to pave the way for her path to the final recall election. That doesn’t show that there’s a dime’s worth of difference among them, but apparently running a Dane County liberal is turning off other Democrats.
St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, 217 Houston St., Ripon, is presenting a Lenten discussion series on Wednesday evenings from Feb. 29 to March 28.
The evenings will begin with Mass at 6 p.m. and a simple supper at 6:30 p.m. Discussion will take place from 7 to 8 p.m. Child care will be provided.
The series will discuss the N.T. Wright book Simply Jesus: A New Vision of Who He Was, What He Did, and Why He Matters. The book, inspired by C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity, asks how the church and Christians should communicate Jesus Christ’s mission and accomplishments to a world that does not know Christ. It suggests that the debates over Christ’s identity have obscured what the New Testament actually teaches.
The former Bishop of Durham in the Church of England, Wright is Chair of New Testament and Early Christianity at the University of St. Andrews School of Divinity. He taught New Testament studies at Cambridge, McGill and Oxford universities. Wright also is the author of After You Believe, Surprised by Hope, Simply Christian, The Challenge of Jesus, and the Christian Origins and the Question of God series, and coauthored The Meaning of Jesus.
St. Peter’s is an Episcopal church in Ripon, Wis., with a chapel in Wautoma, Wis. St. Peter’s is part of the Episcopal Diocese of Fond du Lac, which has more than 6,600 baptized members in northeast Wisconsin, the Episcopal Church of the United States of America, and the worldwide Anglican Communion. The St. Peter’s building, constructed in 1860, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Regularly scheduled services are held Sundays at 9:30 a.m. (English) and at noon (Spanish), and Wednesdays at 6 p.m. at St. Peter’s; and Saturdays at 5:30 p.m. at St. Mary’s Chapel in Wautoma. The mission of St. Peter’s is to restore all people to unity with God and each other in Christ.
The number one single today in 1961:
The number one British single today in 1964 was sung by a 21-year-old former hairdresser and cloak room attendant:
That day, the Rolling Stones made their second appearance on BBC-TV’s “Top of the Pops”:
The number one album today in 1971, “Pearl,” hit number one five months after Janis Joplin’s death:
The 1980 Grammy Album of the Year was Billy Joel’s “52nd Street”:
Birthdays begin with one-hit-wonder Guy Mitchell:
Eddie Gray was one of Tommy James’ Shondells:
Robert Balderrama of ? and the Mysterians:
Neal Schon of Santana and Journey:
Today in 1955, Billboard magazine reported that sales of 45-rpm singles …
… had exceeded sales of 78-rpm singles for the first time.
The number one single today in 1966:
The number one album today in 1966 was the Beatles’ “Rubber Soul”:
Today in 1970, BBC-TV’s “Top of the Pops” showed the Brotherhood of Man …
… White Plains …
… and number one Edison Lighthouse …
… with the same singer, Tony Burrows. The BBC was described as “aghast” and banned Burrows … for a couple weeks, until Burrows returned as lead singer of the Pipkins:
Burrows returned to Top of the Pops four years later with yet another group:
The number one album today in 1983 turned out to be the number one album of all time:
The number one British single today in 1984:
Today in 2009, a never-before-publicly-heard 10-minute version of the Beatles’ “Revolution” hit the Internet:
Birthdays begin with Antoine “Fats” Domino:
Johnny Cash:
Bob “The Bear” Hite of Canned Heat:
Jonathan Cain played keyboards for Journey:
Michael Bolton, worthwhile here for one and only one song:
Two deaths of note today in 1977: Sherman Games of Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers …
… and songwriter Ben Raleigh in 1997, after his cooking set his bathrobe on fire:
The number one country and western single today in 1956 was the singer’s number one number one:
The number one British album today in 1984 was the Thompson Twins’ “Into the Gap”:
The number one single today in 1984 was adapted by WGN-TV for its Chicago Cubs games — a good choice given that the Cubs that season decided to play like an actual baseball team:
The number one British single today in 1989:
Today in 1995, Frank Sinatra sang before a live audience for the final time, at a private party at his Frank Sinatra Desert Classic golf tournament:
Birthdays begin with George Harrison …
… and end with Stewart Wood of the Bay City Rollers:
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.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 