Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

Read These Too:

InstaPundit
USS Clueless
James Lileks
Little Green Footballs
As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
Secular Islam
Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue
Ravishing Light
Rosenblog
Cartago Delenda Est

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Friday, April 8, 2005
11:09 - Retro Rockets	(top)
These are heady and strange days, when Chrysler is foreign-owned, Ford makes a budget supercar, Mercedes is a synonym for shoddy build quality, and BMW is known for visual tastelessness. And people wear hats on their feet and hamburgers eat people. In more and more driveways I'm seeing new Ford Mustangs, and they've got that vibe about them that says the car is a runaway hit. I think we can safely conclude from this, and from the similarly explosive Chrysler 300C, that the American car-buying public has been aching for something quite specific that has been denied them for a long time: cheap, good-looking, distinctive rear-drive V-8 cars. What makes a car a hit has little to do with its objective quality. History is full of great cars that were dogs in the market. Sort of like with the iPod, cars are as much about the myriad intangibles of fashion as they are about functionality; a name becomes a buzzword, and through some ill-understood chaotic function of society, overnight it becomes The Thing You Must Have. That's been the case with all the big automotive hits of the past few years, all of which have been part of the "retro" fad, whether that means anything about whether what the public wants is "retro" or not. But it seems the smart money is on assuming it is. We've moved on lately from modern reprises of Art Deco and Moderne styling (as in the VW New Beetle and Chrysler PT Cruiser); now we're exploring the possibilities of resurrecting the big beefy post-war designs, finding joy in quirky surprise engineered-cult hits like the Cooper Mini and the Scion xB, and even�in the case of the Mustang�doing what I didn't think anyone had the guts to do: taking the raw, sharp-edged, slack-jawed, knuckle-dragging style of the 60s, running it through some modern metal presses and a DeLorean-tinted prism and filing off the sharp corners, and making it into one of the tightest, smartest designs I've seen in a long time. Of course, "retro" can't be considered the whole story. The Thunderbird revision has been a lackluster seller at best; but perhaps history is merely repeating itself here. The original Thunderbird, an answer to the Corvette, quickly became known as rather prissy and overpriced by comparison, which led to its series of bizarre thrashing reinventions over the years while the Corvette always remained true to its original conception. It wasn't until the Mustang that Ford really found its true player for that niche, and soon it had the Camaro and other musclecars to compete with, leaving the Corvette out on its own. So it is once again: the new Mustang is everything the new Thunderbird should have been. Inexpensive, exuberant, powerful, and looks good in low-profile tires. The styling is pleasing without being quirky. It's a winner all around, from what I can see. Ford may finally be back in the game. Which means that now that Ford and Chrysler have their big, cheap, V-8-powered entries burning up the market, where does that leave GM? They've got the new Corvette, which is what it is, but it's not an answer to the youth market's needs. The Camaro is dead, V-8 or no. So is the Firebird. They ostensibly had the ingredients necessary to be hits today, but something was lacking�and that something has got to be the intangibles of "style" that have allowed Ford to succeed where GM's entries have faded grimly from sight. What can GM do here? The obvious candidate would seem to be the GTO, but the resurrected version of that that's now on the market suffers from the same visual blandness problem that seems to be endemic to GM: it looks like a fleet car. Pontiac needs to completely redesign the GTO the way Chrysler did the 300C, killing the 300M's 90s-legacy look and going out on a bold new limb. A GTO that follows a similar path and harks back to the hobnailed, broad-shouldered aspect of mid-60s GTOs could look strong, threatening, confident, unashamed�everything the current one doesn't. If that's what has made the Mustang and the 300C successful, GM needs to get on board. The 90s have been a great decade for automotive quality�it's been hard to buy a bad car�but the timid, anonymous styling of the era is not something we need to cling to. Ads whooping about "The First G6" do nothing to suggest that Pontiac knows what the hell it's doing on that front. I can barely picture cars in 2050 designed in "retro" fashion to ape the hunched, hunted, furtive look of all those 70s hatchback versions of formerly beloved nameplates... but I have an even harder time imagining anyone trying to find any distinctive style of the 90s to mimic.