Crap. Now us Jeep drivers are going to have to strip our “Hummer Recovery Vehicle” stickers off. (Hummers were famous for being driven by suburban assholes who didn’t have a clue how to drive the things offroad, we were always having to pull their yuppie butts out of trouble with our winches and tow-straps after they got the thing hung somewhere stupid).

– Badtux the Jeepin’ Penguin

It’s no accident Hummer rhymes with bummer. Some models were underpowered and sluggish which led to transmission and engine-mount problems, and $$$ repair bills. Who would buy an over-priced ride that guzzles more gas than anything else on the road, and is hard to park to boot? Yep, not just an asshole, but a really stupid asshole. (Gov. Schwarzenfluffer owns something like 10 of them.)

I’m ancient enough to recall when Studebakers were made in South Bend, IN, and I never heard a complaint about any of their cars. (Not true for the AMC Ramblers, etc., that came later, of course.) Those Studebaker designs by Ray Loewy were easy to recognize on the street, in the days before most cars looked alike, and the last Studebaker models I remember wiere the Lark and the Avanti.

OTOH, I’ve always had trouble with GM cars, particularly the early ’80s Chevy Citation junkmobile that I had the displeasure of renting for a long trip, although friends who’ve owned Saturns seem to like them.

RS, you’re wrong – Studebaker was originally going to be part of the merger that created AMC (which was a merger of Nash and Hudson), but AMC looked at Studebaker’s finances and said “No freakin’ way”, Studebaker instead merged with Packard which was not so diligent in doing its due diligence. Studebaker’s finances allowed Curtis-Wright to buy a larger portion of the company, Curtis-Wright wanted Packard’s aircraft engine factory which also made Packard’s big new V-8 engine which Studebaker was counting on to allow them to compete with Detroit’s new big-block V-8 engines that were coming out (Studebaker had their own V-8, but it was a small block with limited ability to be expanded), and basically forced Studebaker to sell them the Packard engine factory, thereby ending any ability of Studebaker to compete in the “horsepower wars” that were then revving up. That was pretty much the death knell of Studebaker as an auto company, the board used the cash from the sale of the engine plant to swiftly diversify into other related businesses such as STP and started winding down the auto side of things starting in ’58 or so, though as mentioned elsewhere they didn’t completely cease manufacturing cars until sales dwindled to the point where it couldn’t be justified anymore because really, if you aren’t making any investments into new product and are just leveraging already-existing facilities, why not?

My mother wrecked my grandfather’s Studebaker pickup truck in 1962 or so, and I spent much of my childhood summers staring at the wreck of that pickup truck, which was sitting beside my grandfather’s barn until the late 1970’s when a collector spotted it and bought it off my grandmother. When the new Dodge Ram pickup trucks were released in the early 90’s, with their big vertical grills and their curving hoodlines, some of the older men in the community smiled and said that somewhere, the ghost of my grandfather was happy, because it looked much like the front end of the Studebaker pickup trucks that he so loved. My grandfather was forced to buy a Chevrolet pickup truck to replace that last Studebaker, because the pickup trucks were made in the South Bend plant and that plant was being shut down by that time to move the remaining Studebaker automotive production to the Canadian plant which was better sized for what few cars Studebaker was still making but did not have room for a pickup truck assembly line too. He never was happy with those Chevrolet pickup trucks, but they were what was available, and he needed a truck for the farm, so that’s what he bought from then until the end of his life.

So anyhow, that’s my personal connection to Studebakers. It’s a shame that Michael Kelly couldn’t make a go of it with his “Studebaker SUV”, but not surprising. Making cars is *hard*, which is why it takes multi-billion-dollar companies to do it.

Finally, regarding the electric throttles: All of the new cars are coming with them these days, because it is the only way to meet the latest emissions standards, it gives tighter control over the air flow so that you don’t get a sudden leaning out of the mixture when you floor the gas pedal the way you do with a mechanical throttle (which in turn results in a sudden increase in nitrous oxides emissions, since you have a surplus of nitrogen and oxygen — i.e. air — to be jammed together in the high temperature of the combustion chamber into that lung-irritating smog-creating pollutant). The other way to combat NO is to run a richer mixture to begin with, which produces the pollutant carbon monoxide due to the lack of sufficient oxygen in the mix as well as some unburnt fuel, but carbon monoxide is easily catalyzed by catalytic converters. The problem is that then you are a) wasting fuel, b) you need an air pump, and c) you’re down on power because you’re no longer completely combusting the fuel. And d) the new standards are so tight that even with this, there’s times you end up out of compliance. This approach, BTW is why the cars of the late 1970’s were so horrible on fuel economy and power and had a habit of catching fields on fire, they were pumping excess gas through their carburetors and then burning it in their catalytic converters, which got red-hot and tended to catch things on fire. Fuel injection with its tighter control of the mixture in the late 80’s largely resolved that problem, but wasn’t enough to deal with the new NO standards. So anyhow, my 2006 Jeep has a mechanical connection to the throttle plate. My friend’s 2007 Jeep has an electrically controlled throttle because it was designed to meet the new 2008 California / 2010 USA emissions standards which tightened NO further. This is a safety issue in my opinion as both a computer geek and a car geek, but one that can be dealt with. And the march of progress goes on…

Enough car geekery. I was a car geek long before I was a computer geek, I seriously considered going into mechanical engineering in college so I could design cars. But then I looked at the state of the American automotive industry in the 1980’s, and decided that was about as good a career choice as buggy whip maker would have been in the early 1900’s, because it was clear that the American automotive industry had lost its way and wasn’t going anywhere that I wanted to go. So it goes.

– Badtux the Car Geek Penguin

AMC (another early proponent of unibody design) had rust problems too. In AMC’s later years, the sheet metal was often rusty *before* it was assembled into cars, because the sheet metal storage warehouse where they stored the stamped parts had a leaky roof and a dirt floor and AMC could not afford to fix it. It also didn’t help that they were using mild steel rather than high-strength galvanized steel because their antiquated stamping plant could not handle the new stuff. All of the American auto makers had rust problems until they switched over to high-strength galvanized for their car bodies in the early 80s, which is why you find few older American cars on the road today from before that changeover — they all died of body rust years ago.