OT: 911 (was Re: A Great Find & A Defense of E-Bay)

From: John Wilson <wilson_at_dbit.dbit.com>
Date: Mon Jun 19 13:50:28 2000

On Mon, Jun 19, 2000 at 10:00:51AM -0700, Chris Kennedy wrote:
>I suppose some
>Mercedes come close to the same phenomina, but I can't think of
>a single care from a US, Italian, French, British or Japanese
>manufacturer that's been that timeless. Well, okay, the 2CV, but
>I did say *car*... :-)

I suppose the Fiat 500/Seat 600 doesn't qualify as a real car either...

But the VW bug and bus both went a long time between major changes (the bus
had a major body change in 1968 but most other things were small incremental
tweaks), from their start right after WW2 until their mutual death in 1979.
Around the time VW hit upon the notion of "our cars are luxury cars because
we *say* they're luxury cars" and walked away from their market share (in
the US at least). I love the fact that what's putting them back on the map
is a soulless cartoon lookalike of their old junkers.

Also, this may not have covered so many years, but the Chrysler Omni/Horizon
econoboxes (known in junkyards as "Horomnis") had practically the same body
throughout their entire 1978-1990 history. They changed the door handle
mounts in 1979 and of course the car subscribed to the drivetrain-of-the-month
club like most American cars, but generally you can mix and match doors,
fenders, glass, bumpers, the hood and hatch, and a lot of the suspension and
interior, from absolutely any year. For the last 5 years or so of production,
Chrysler essentially froze the design, and also cut the price in half (and
made some of the options standard to avoid having to futz with them) so that
it rode out the rest of its product life with basically no engineering work.
Even the Ford Fiesta got more parental attention!

It's kind of funny that it was so static. You can tell a '69 and '70 Camaro
apart from 100 yards away even if they're half-buried in snow, but with '78 and
'90 Horizons, really the most obvious difference is just the amount of rust.

John Wilson
D Bit
Received on Mon Jun 19 2000 - 13:50:28 BST