Cars That Go Boom: Detroit's Big Three & Me

**Pugwash** · 11-18-2008, 09:22 PM

Originally Posted by Dave123

No kidding....that GM comparison backfired on Puggy....

No, I don't think it did.

I picked that GTO because it's a gorgeous car, and completely impractical. The fact you're lusting over a car like that shows you're still struggling with reality.

**The_Monkey** · 11-19-2008, 02:08 AM

Originally Posted by Pugwash

No, I don't think it did.

I picked that GTO because it's a gorgeous car, and completely impractical. The fact you're lusting over a car like that shows you're still struggling with reality.

Muscle Cars are actually surprisingly practical, the engines and transmissions are basically indestructible, you have to try really hard to kill them... the suspensions are on the stiff side so you can load a surprising amount of crap into them, most of them can actually seat four adults, they've got mountains of torque so, should the urge strike you, you could use it to pull a trailer or boat... and since the cars are devoid of all the heavy modern safety equipment they're fairly light given their size so the fuel economy isn't nearly as bad as you'd expect.

Besides all that, they sold. The end of the Muscle Car era was the beginning of the Malaise era, which started the downward death spiral of the US automotive industry.

One of the largest mistakes the US automakers have made in my lifetime was basically abandoning cars in the late '90s and focusing, almost exclusively, on the SUVs and Trucks people were buying up as fast as they could churn them out until just this year... they got greedy and then got caught looking... when gas hit $4 a gallon it was like someone flipped a switch and the US automakers, GM in particular, got caught with massive surpluses of monster SUVs that nobody was buying... they'd retooled a bunch of their car plants to SUVs because cars weren't selling and SUVs were , then everything switched over the course of a couple months... and they got caught.