发表于2024-11-06
Automobiles of the 60s pdf epub mobi txt 電子書 下載 2024
The symmetry was perfect. It was the Sixties, and just
as American society at large was engulfed in violent
change, so too did the domestic auto industry hurtle into
a turbulent and controversial part of its history.
The horsepower race that had begun in the Fifties accel-
erated in the Sixties. On top of that, the auto industry
expanded its offerings to include a previously unheard-of
variety of cars: big personal-luxury hardtops, miserly
compacts, potent muscle machines, and sporty pony-
cars--something for every taste and budget.
Detroit s marketing language was equally memorable:
Wide-Tracks, Scat Packs, Super Sports, and Cobra Jets.
All this, plus gasoline that seemed pricey if it topped 30
cents a gallon, combined to make for a unique generation
of cars.
Cars of the Sixties were a powerful expression of
America s waning postwar euphoria. Here was a decade
that produced the Pontiac GTO, a showroom model that
could do 0-60 mph about 6 seconds; and the Studebaker
Avanti, which crossed the Bonneville Salt Flats at 170
mph. Today, such rowdy performance strikes many as a
guilty pleasure, and a mere echo of an era that is long
gone. Indeed, by the Seventies a whole host of economic,
social, and environmental factors conspired against the
flash and dazzle offered by the cars of the Sixties. From
cockpit safety to tailpipe emissions--the federal govern-
ment mandated requirements for those and more.
Ironically, it was the car-buying habits of the public
that encouraged the heavy hand of government interfer-
ence-the same heavy hand that the public soon grew to
loathe. Consistently, and to Detroit s undoubted puzzle-
ment, consumers showed themselves unmoved by techni-
cal progress and innovation. Consumer apathy caused
Chevy s cleverly engineered Corvair to fail in its mission
as an economy compact. Buyers yawned at the 61 Pontiac
Tempest and its innovative rear transaxle and all-inde-
pendent suspension; the conventionally engineered
Tempest that arrived after 1963 handily outsold the 61.
The front-drive 66 Toronado could not match the sales
figures of the ent~irely orthodox Buick Riviera. And
Pontiac s economical 1966 overhead-cam six-cylinder
engine was almost completely ignored by a public that
overwhelmingly preferred gas-guzzling V-8s.
It s significant that most of the decade s technical inno-
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Automobiles of the 60s pdf epub mobi txt 電子書 下載 2024