AAH #769 - The EV Slowdown and Lessons From 100 Years Ago
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Term
electric cars
Electric cars run on electricity stored in batteries, so they don’t use gasoline. They need to be plugged in to recharge and are known for quiet, smooth driving.
Car
Ford Model T
The Model T was a simple, inexpensive car that many families could afford for the first time. It made cars common in everyday life.
Concept
high wheel bike
These were the first bicycles, with a big front wheel and a tiny back wheel. They were fun but could tip over easily.
Concept
safety bike
These bikes had the same size wheels on both sides and a chain that moved the back wheel, making them much safer to ride.
Concept
steam carriage
A steam carriage is a very old car that ran on steam power instead of gasoline. It had a boiler and used steam to move the wheels, similar to how old trains worked.
Concept
internal combustion powered car
Internal combustion cars burn gasoline or diesel inside the engine to make the car go. This is how most cars have worked for over a century.
Concept
steam cars
Steam cars are old-fashioned vehicles that use steam power instead of gasoline. They need water and a way to heat it so the steam can push parts inside the engine.
Car
Ford GT
The Ford GT is a very fast, special edition car made by Ford. It has a strong engine and a light body so it can go very fast.
Car
Tesla Model S
The Model S is a big electric car made by Tesla that can drive long distances without gasoline and has fast acceleration.
Car
78 Dodge Omni
The Dodge Omni is a small car from the 1970s that was made by Chrysler. It has a simple design and is often seen in classic car shows.
Concept
Henry Ford Museum
The Henry Ford Museum is a big museum in Michigan that shows old cars, trains, and other machines from the past. It helps people learn about how transportation has changed over time.
Concept
steam powered locomotives
Steam locomotives are trains that run on steam power, like old big engines that used coal or wood to make steam and push the train forward.
Brand
Saturn
Saturn was a car brand that used to be part of GM. They made cars with a different look and some special customer perks.
Term
presidential limousine
A presidential limousine is a fancy car that the president drives. It has extra safety features and special equipment to keep them safe.
Term
Quadro cycle
A Quadro cycle engine is a type of car engine that tries to get more power out of each breath of air and fuel, making the car run better and use less gas.
Brand
Richstone Weatherpeep Tires
Richstone Weatherpeep Tires are a type of tire that can handle different weather, like rain or light snow, and they’re made to last a long time.
Term
hood ornaments
Hood ornaments are little decorations on the front of a car’s hood that show the brand or add style. They were common in older cars.
Part
Buick grill
The grill is the part at the front of a car that lets air in. Buick cars have a special style for this area, which many people recognize.
Brand
Oldsmobile
Oldsmobile made cars for many years in the U.S. They were sold by General Motors and stopped making cars after 2004.
Term
Spirit of Ecstasy
The Spirit of Ecstasy is the fancy little statue you see on top of a Rolls‑Royce car. It looks like a woman with a dress and an umbrella, and it’s the car company’s logo.
Brand
Pontiac
Pontiac was a car brand made by GM that sold cars for many decades, especially sporty models.
Term
voice motor meter
A voice motor meter is a simple gauge you could see on older cars that told you if the engine was getting too hot. It used a little speaker or light to warn drivers before modern digital displays.
Brand
Subaru
Subaru makes cars that can drive well in bad weather because they have power on all four wheels. They also use a special engine shape called a boxer.
Brand
Cadillac
Cadillac makes big, fancy cars that are very comfortable and have lots of luxury features.
Brand
Volkswagen
Volkswagen makes many different cars, from small city cars to bigger family vehicles. They also own Audi.
Brand
Audi
Audi is a fancy car brand that makes sleek cars with advanced technology and all-wheel drive.
Brand
Lalique
Lalique is a famous French company that makes fancy crystal decorations. In the 1930s, they made shiny glass ornaments for car hoods.
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Gary, John, how are you?
I'm doing well.
We've got a lot of automotive history today.
We've got a lot of history.
We've got an exciting show yet.
I mean, and I've got like this fresh off the
press copy rodent track, because...
An actual printed version.
Yeah, it is.
It's got Mike Austin.
Thanks for having me.
Yeah, it's on like the digital version.
I think it's out yesterday.
And so it's on new stands and in mailboxes any day now.
And Mike did a story on our guest here,
Matt Anderson, curator of transportation at the Henry Ford Museum.
So when you all go get your copies of rodent track,
go to the last page.
And here's this piece that...
And I want to know this was just beautiful kismet,
because I did not know that I was going to be on today
when I talked to Matt.
And I'm sure you've been booking because of that coincidence.
Yeah, and then the issue came out just in time for this
opportunity.
Yeah, it just all comes together here on the auto line
after hours.
So Matt, thank you for joining us today.
Hey, thanks.
My pleasure to be here.
Matt, one of the reasons I wanted to have you on the show
is a couple of months ago you were one of the speakers
at the SAE's Propulsion Conference.
And you dug out some...
I thought really interesting insights as to the very early days
of the automobile, the horseless carriage,
and how things had evolved.
Well, one of the things that you got into was maybe there's
lessons today's industry can learn going back in history
to those very early days.
And one thing that hit me was if you go back to the very early part
of the 20th century as the horseless carriage first started to appear,
there was a lot of people who just hated them,
despised it, get a horse, you know, was the common refrain
that a motorist might have heard back then.
And it seems to me maybe there's some lessons that today's
industry can learn because of...
there's a lot of people out there who absolutely despise
electric cars.
You pick it up from there.
Am I grasping for straws here, or are there some
connections and lessons?
No, I think you're onto something there.
You're right.
There was some hesitancy and some reluctance around the automobile
right at the turn of the 20th century.
And part of that, frankly, was a class issue.
Right?
Cars were very expensive at that time, so if you had one,
you know, by definition, you were probably pretty well off.
Look, that was part of the issue.
But also, they were noisy, they were smelly,
they were just playing difficult to drive,
shifting gears, advancing spark, having to change a flat tire,
almost guaranteed anytime you went out.
So all of that played into some of the reluctance to adopt
automobiles early on.
But a lot of those problems got knocked out,
pretty early.
And I would say by 1905, 1906, the latest,
folks are really interested in wanting a car.
There's envy, but it's not envy at the money.
It's envy because I want my automobile now, too.
And then there were lower price models that started to come out, too.
Henry Ford famously with the Model T.
It wasn't the only one, but that really opened up
the automobile to the masses.
Absolutely.
And the curved dashes will build before that,
which really the first car kind of targeted at a middle-class
market will say.
And you're right.
Henry Ford just exploited that, obviously, very successfully
with the Model T.
So is it just an issue of people being able to get into a vehicle
that changed their perception of it?
Because you were saying that there were pushback, smelly,
noisy, flat tires.
None of that went away.
You still had that, right?
Yeah, to some degree, though.
It got better, certainly, by 1910 and into the mid teens.
But I think some of it, too, was just people were eager
to adopt the new technology, and horses had some disadvantages
that people came to realize pretty quickly, too.
You got to pay to board a horse, to feed a horse,
whether you're using it or not, whereas the car's only
costing you money if it's up and running.
And then there's the issue of the, shall we say, exhaust
that horses leave behind the doors.
The emissions.
Yes, it was a different emissions story, too.
Absolutely.
Yeah, a lot of people don't realize this, but horses and horse-drawn
carriages were actually very noisy, at least in city streets.
If they were on cobblestones or any kind of paved road,
the steel horse shoes, the steel bands on the wheels of carts,
made a hell of a racket.
Now, that's charming, John.
And now, around central park.
Yeah, but that's only because you hear an occasional horse
and an occasional carriage.
But I was early in my career, the editor-in-chief of a magazine
called Automotive Industries.
We could trace our roots back to a magazine that started in 1895
called The Horseless Age.
And my then predecessor, a guy named Mr. Ingersoll,
had written an editorial in the first issue of The Horseless Age
in 1895.
And it was like, all these horseless carriages are going to be
so much better.
You know, we're not going to have this emissions problem.
It's going to be so much quieter than it is today.
It's going to be far safer than all the accidents that we have
right now.
And of course, with 100 years plus of hindsight,
it boy, was he wrong?
Yeah, absolutely.
We've just traded one set of problems for another set of issues
around the automobile, obviously.
But people were just thinking about the issues
at The Horseless for causing at that time.
And we're eager to kind of break away from that.
And yeah, by, as we said, by 1905, 1910,
the middle class is certainly entering the automotive market.
And it won't be long after that for the working class gets in as well
when Henry kicks off the moving assembly line about 1913, 1914.
So this is something that's always kind of fascinating to me too.
And if I have this wrong, I looked it up a long time ago.
But in terms of per capita, there weren't a lot of horses.
Not a lot of people had horses because of the stuff you guys mentioned.
You need space.
You need to board them.
They need veterinary care.
So we went from not everyone has a horse to, you know,
shortly after 1913, he's mentioning a lot of people have cars.
That was a pretty rapid transformation just in the way people got around, right?
Yeah.
I think there's a misconception thanks to movies and TV that, you know,
the sort of Harrison Carage or Buggy was the equivalent of the family car today.
But you're right, particularly in the cities, you know,
most people didn't own horses.
They relied on public transportation or just walked wherever they were going.
But the automobile all of a sudden freed you to travel for their distances.
And to some extent, that had been kind of set up or predicted by the bicycle,
which was incredibly popular in the 1890s.
Again, because people could now travel where they wanted on their own schedules
and go farther than they wanted to.
So in a sense, the automobile is almost a bigger, better version of the bicycle.
Now go into that.
Because I think not a lot of people these days appreciate what the chain-driven,
pneumatic tire bicycle did for transportation,
what's starting mainly in the 1880s.
Yeah, absolutely.
And there's a lot of bicycle technology that went into the automobile.
You mentioned the steel tube frames, which you see in early cars,
pneumatic tires, chain drives, which were not all that uncommon on cars
on the turn of the 20th century.
So that's a part of it.
There were even manufacturers who built bikes who then went into the auto industry,
Pope famously, Rambler, Thomas Jeffrey.
I mean, the Rambler name was used on bicycles before it ever appeared on automobiles.
And now we think of it with the AMC cars in the 1960s.
I think Pujo.
Pujo, Pujo was, and, you know, though they didn't build automobiles,
the Wright brothers went from bicycles to airplanes.
So why did that happen? Do you have any idea?
I mean, why they didn't do automobiles.
Well, by all accounts, Orville was a bit of a gear head.
So he was interested in automobiles, but the Wright's got into aviation
because that was the big problem of the age.
And they were just, Wilbur, I think, was really fascinated by it.
But yeah, a lot of bicycle technology went into the first airplanes as well.
They have steel tube frames on the wingspars, their chain drive,
or any of the propellers.
So the bike, I think, gets overlooked sometimes
as much as it contributed to the 20th century.
How did that history?
Was the bicycle I got to believe was more of a European thing
that then came to the US?
Yeah, the earliest bicycles were developed in Europe,
and then the technology kind of migrated to the United States.
And all the major advancements, I would say,
really took place in Europe, you know, starting with the addition of pedals
on the front with the velocities.
And then the high wheel bikes of the 1870s,
and then replaced by the chain and sprocket systems.
Now you have what they called safety bikes with wheels of the same size.
But yeah, we forget what a boom it was here in the 1890s.
It was selling millions of bikes every year,
and using some early mass production techniques as well,
which would then be adopted by the auto industry.
You mean moving assembly line kind of manufacturing techniques?
To some extent, the Pope company in Connecticut probably
had the most advanced factory for bicycles of its time,
but they were producing parts using mass production techniques
with specialized machines, building them in enormous quantities,
rudimentary moving assembly line.
Obviously Henry Ford took it to a much farther extent a few years later,
but the seeds were planted, so to speak.
So any idea why there is a diversion from like you have bicycles,
motorcycles, but then you have automobiles.
I mean, why wasn't there some consolidation there?
Yeah, that's a good question.
And you're right, some manufacturers go in those specific directions,
and that's it.
And you know, there's a natural sort of bridge,
I guess, from bicycles to motorcycles,
right, you're just putting an engine on it,
but automobiles kind of developed separately, right?
Developed in Germany with car bends in this pot and wagon
and three wheel initially.
And I think a lot of that was just to accommodate the size of the engine, right?
It's got to be a bigger chassis and a bigger platform,
but as motors get smaller bicycles and motorcycles,
I should say become more practical, but you're right.
There is a real distinction in the early development of those two technologies.
Don't you have some car at the museum that predates the bends wagon?
I mean, you might argue really is the first automobile?
We have an 1865 steam carriage built by Sylvester Roper,
who later went on to build steam motorcycles as well.
And you're right, that does predate the bends pot and wagon a little,
but the difference, I think, is that it's steam powered for one,
whereas bends were working around the internal combustion engine.
And also, Roper never had any imaginings of building this thing on a commercial scale
or selling it to the public.
It was literally a carnival attraction.
You pay money to go watch this thing, move under its own power,
which most have been pretty exciting in 1865.
So, I mean, how did this thing work?
I mean, what was the heat source?
Well, that's the thing, you know,
we talk about the advantages of steam and electric cars,
and one thing said for steam was, you know,
was a proven technology at the turn of the 20th century,
and it worked very well, developed low torque.
You didn't need to shift gears with a steam car,
but a lot of people kind of forget that a steam car still requires
some hydrocarbon fuel, because you've got to heat up the water
to make the steam in the first place.
You know, why not cut out the technological middleman
and just go straight to an internal combustion powered car?
Or a nice engine.
But it takes what?
20 to 30 minutes to build up the steam in these steam cars.
So, an internal combustion engine that fires right up
with a hand crank or even an electric starter,
so much more convenient than steam.
Absolutely. And you're right.
It did take a while to build up ahead of steam.
Some companies, white in particular,
eventually developed flash boilers.
We could heat up your water in about 90 seconds, two minutes.
So, kind of eliminated a lot of that problem.
But the other issue was, you know, finding soft water is easy here
in the Midwest or in the East.
It's tough finding soft water or water period out in the desert,
Southwest.
So, that was an issue that hampered steam cars, well.
How many cars you actually have at the Henry Ford Museum?
We've got about 300.
And I always say about because we have things like a chassis
from a 1940-old's will be, which had the automatic transmission,
the first hydromatic.
We have a Ford GT, which is cutting, too,
is a display piece for the Detroit Auto Show.
So, you know, it's up to you whether you want to call that whole car or not.
But about 300 is a good figure.
So, right now, a car Subaru and Beaverton signed for the 2025 Subaru
share the love of it.
So much love.
We think about Subaru loves to care.
Subaru loves pets.
Subaru loves pets as one of our love-promise pillars
because we love pets and it's our way of giving back to the community.
Subaru loves learning.
Yeah, everybody should get the same opportunity.
And it feels really good to have supplied up.
We did all these events throughout the year.
And now, here we are at the 2025 Subaru share the love event at car Subaru and Beaverton.
It is a great time.
It's the culmination of everything that we've done to give back to the community.
And now, not only can you get a great new Subaru,
but you'll know that you're doing good for the community during this time.
$350 donation goes to some great national charities
and a couple local ones here.
Providence Child Center and the Sunshine Division.
And now, we're adding in the two-mounted fusion passes just in time for the ski season.
It's just a great time to get a car.
And you can't understate the love because that's really what it's all about.
It's a great way to end the year at car Subaru and Beaverton with you all the way.
Every mile, every day.
Like, you've been to lots and lots of car museums.
I mean, how does their collection impress you?
The thing that I love about it is it does...
This might sound obvious.
It covers the history of the car,
and especially the mass produced stuff.
Like, the thing I always remember was like,
oh, wow, they have a Chrysler Minivan.
And they have...
Cars you wouldn't normally see in a museum,
but are this huge piece of history
and where the industry went.
And also, you know, there's definitely something
that everyone can go in and be like,
oh, I remember that.
Or my parents had that.
And yeah, you've got some really rare pieces, too, very expensive pieces.
And how do you go about determining what should be?
And now, obviously, the museum has been around an awful long time.
And you inherited...
You, yourself, Matt, inherited a collection that's already there.
I gotta imagine, though, there's still pieces that you would like to add.
What are they?
I always have a wish list of things that we should have.
And a couple of things on that list that would love an early Saturn estuary,
is this idea of General Motors trying to copy the Japanese style
and sort of way of producing automobiles,
building them literally out of the motor city in Tennessee,
would also love a Tesla Model S, right?
The car that made electric school again,
getting back to our original subject.
So if anybody's out there and now has one of those
that they're looking to find...
Oh, should be easy to find.
One would hope.
Yes, certainly the Saturn sold in big numbers.
And the Tesla is, you know, people seem to like them at the time.
And early adopters buying those.
But gotta have one in the collection.
Is there anything rare that you would like to see in the collection?
You know, it's interesting, the rarest cars
tend to be the ones that were the most common at the time they were sold.
Not too long ago we acquired a Ford Mustang 2,
which is like nobody's idea of a dream car or a collector...
Amen to that.
Right.
But, you know, these were cars that sold very, very well at the time,
kept the Mustang brand alive.
And there's this whole thing called the Malaysia era, right?
As manufacturers, we're dealing with new emissions restrictions
and technologies.
And consumers are interested in fuel economy all of a sudden.
And the cars just frankly weren't very good for a few years there.
And, you know, nobody's collecting or saving that kind of stuff.
We needed to have one in the museum to represent that era
as much as we might like to forget it.
So it was a great acquisition.
I was thinking that you were going to say some rare handcrafted body,
you know, a spectacular lawn limousine or sedan from the 1930s or something like that.
Yeah, well, that's one thing I think that sets our collection apart from others too.
There are certainly other museums that go deeper into certain makes or models or types of cars.
I don't know that anyone can touch our breadth because, you know, on the one hand,
we've got a 78 Dodge Omni.
The other hand, we have the 31 Bugatti Royale, speaking of very rare cars.
So just about everything in between those two gold posts as well.
So it's an interesting thing.
You know, you're talking like that they have cars that are common more or less,
I mean, not necessarily exclusive, but you guys contextualize everything.
I mean, if somebody goes to the museum and they walk through the displays,
they can learn why there was this evolution, why different vehicles look the way they do.
I mean, you guys think you have house trailers and all kinds of transportation.
Yeah, and that's the thing we always hope visitors kind of take away from our auto exhibits.
You know, they're about cars, but they're really about people, right?
And it's about how people have changed over the last hundred and twenty hundred and thirty years
to meet the cars needs and how the cars impacted every facet of our lives,
where we work, where we play, how we eat, et cetera.
So those kind of contextualizations are really, really important to the way we tell stories at the Henry's floor.
And the other thing I like too is it goes well beyond cars.
And so you're the curator of transportation.
You know, I probably took my first tour of the Henry Ford Museum when I was about six or seven years old.
And it made a lasting impression because you have these gigantic steam powered locomotives inside the museum.
Does that come under your purview?
It does. Yeah, I get to work with the railroad equipment as well.
And you're right. That Allegheny locomotive. That's the one thing I think everybody...
It's gigantic. Everybody sees it and remembers it when they come to visit the museum. It's always fun to see.
So what else besides trains includes your part as the curator of transportation?
Yeah, well, we've got a modest collection of airplanes.
They're all civilian aircraft, all pre-World War II, but within those parameters we've got important examples
of just about every significant aircraft of that time.
We do have some railroad locomotives. We have a diesel locomotive, a few steam locomotives.
We have some cars as well at Henry for a while owned a railroad that are totally different octaves.
And so we've got a locomotive and a caboose from that line.
And we've got a couple of small watercraft as well.
Nothing major, but steam launch, for example, from the turn of the 20th century.
Things like that. A little bit of everything.
But another interesting thing is that while people might think, oh, it's the Henry Ford Museum.
Therefore, it's going to just be full of Ford's.
I mean, isn't it like you have the first accord that came off the line?
Yes, that's on loan to us from Honda, in general, but yeah, the very first accord that was built in Ohio.
So the first Japanese-badged automobile built in the United States, which is an important piece for what it represents
in shifting perceptions of cars, import versus domestic.
Yeah, no, I think that's an important point that you made there, Gary. It's not just for it.
In fact, Ford's probably in the minority of everything that's on display there, at least amongst the cars.
You also have a racing display, too. You guys get into the history of motor racing.
Yeah, we've collected from the beginning racing cars. Racing was an important part of the turn of the 20th century for improving the technology and improving the technology.
It was some of the best advertising at the time as it still is to some extent today.
We've got some pretty significant cars there, the 1908 or 1906 locomobile, which won the 1908 Vanderbilt Cup in 1908.
It's kind of seen as a turning point in the American industry because we win the Vanderbilt Cup.
GM has founded the Model T's launch, so that's important.
It's more recent things like the Lotus Ford, the first rear-engine car to win the India 1965,
and the one everybody loves, the 67 Mark IV, with Gernie and Floyd at Le Mans, when Ford was taking it out against Ferrari in those days.
In 2002, you had one of Juan Manuel Fongio's Grand Prix cars, Mercedes, from the mid-50s, 55-56, or something like that.
That was on loan to you, right, from Mercedes-Benz, and then they said, okay, that's enough.
We're calling it back to Germany.
It was our car, believe it or not, and this has opened up an issue of discussion about what we have and why we have it.
And that was one that we de-assessioned, which is a formal process, where we kind of review what we have, and you know, you have to get approved all the way up to the board of directors.
We opted to remove that car from our collection because it really are focused on the American market and American innovation.
So it unquestionably a very important car, and it was a big attraction, but it just didn't fit what we were trying to do.
So sometimes we do that, more often than not, we're bringing things in rather than taking them out, but it does happen.
Do you own, or does the museum own all the vehicles, or do you have collectors or others that you switch things in and out with?
We do have some cars on loan, we talked about the Accord.
We also have a few cars from our friends at GM who have loaned to some significant racing cars and production cars.
And we'll bring things in for special events like our motor muster and old car festival, but most of what you see when you go into the museum is from the collection of the Henry Ford owned by the organization.
So these guys at GM can't get you a Saturn.
Come on.
You're watching.
Here we go.
Get Matt a Saturn.
What about EV1?
Do you have one of those?
GM's first electric car.
We do have an EV1.
I love that car, and it's not an exaggeration.
It says the greatest electric car of the 20th century, but maybe not the greatest electric poll time anymore.
Are these cars all in runable condition?
Is that an important part for the museum or no?
It's a mix.
You know, a lot of what we have, we don't run on a regular basis because to run a car, you kind of have to keep running it.
And we'd be doing nothing, but driving cars all day.
Not a bad job, but we have other things to do.
So some like to us.
There you go.
For the most part, we drain the fluids, put the cars up on jack stands, et cetera, just for the long term preservation.
We do have some vehicles that will run on a semi-regular basis.
Of course, we have a whole fleet of Model T's.
We're running out in Greenfield Village every day in the summertime.
That's a point for anybody who's never been to Greenfield Village, which is right next to the Henry Ford Museum.
Not just called the Henry Ford, right?
So you can get rides and Model T's.
Yeah, people always enjoy that.
And I think they're moved not just by the car itself and the technology, but the experience of being an open-air touring car.
And you start to realize that was a big selling point at the turn of the 20th century, right?
Getting the fresh air, getting out there, feeling the breeze, seeing and being seen, frankly, riding in an audible field.
That's what a big deal.
See, this is an interesting point, though.
So if you go to Greenfield Village, you can also take a carriage ride.
And you have these dray horses.
I mean, these giant horses that are pulling people.
And this gets back to the beginning when we were talking about how people thought that cars were noisy and smelly.
And indeed, if you're walking through the village and you, those cars are noisy and smelly.
But you've got to watch where you're walking because the horses deposit things that could fill a city.
Absolutely.
And we only have about four or six horses working in the village at any one time.
And they do leave a bit of a mess.
But the one thing we can't get across is like, this is just a small portion of what you would have seen 120 years ago in this city.
So it's tough to imagine today.
Man, you know, we were talking about all these cars and things that you have on display.
You guys have got some incredible records to photography, documents, and the like.
Is that available to researchers or others, you know, or you tell the story?
Yeah, no, absolutely.
We've got a great collection of automotive history, the two core pieces.
We have Ford Motor Company's corporate records going up to about 1953 or so.
So right from the beginning, 1903, we have the literal articles of incorporation that Henry and company signed to get the automaker off the ground there.
But we also have the collections of Henry Austin Clark, who is a well known automotive collector for many, many decades.
And he collected a little bit of everything.
A lot of published sort of consumer material, marketing materials, brochures, panelists.
Those are phenomenal resource, but a lot beyond automobiles as well.
A great collection of trade catalogs, industry catalogs, et cetera.
And yes, all of that is available for research by the public.
You can make an appointment through our Benson Ford Research Center.
And we can help you if you're not in the immediate southeast Michigan area.
We can often help you remotely as well, get you what you need.
Is a lot of that digitized or not?
I mean, can you search this online?
We are working on it.
We've got more than 200,000 items digitized right now, which is great.
But we have about 26 million items in the collections.
We got some job security in that or somebody does.
All right, so John, remember the train.
I remember that you have presidential limousines.
Do you still have those?
Yeah, we still have those out on display.
We have five different presidential vehicles.
And yet, your point for them are Lincoln automobiles that were built for various presidents.
Going back to FDR right up to last one was built for Nixon and used to the first George Bush, believe it or not.
And the best.
You also have the car that Kennedy was assassinated in.
Yes, yes.
And that's always astonishing when people see that and you assume it would have been destroyed or locked away in a government warehouse somewhere.
But no, in fact, after Kennedy was shot, they just practically they needed an automobile.
And they figured it was faster to rebuild what they had than to start from scratch.
So that car was completely stripped down, rebuilt, given a permanent roof and bullet resistant windows and armor all of that in all about six or seven months in a very quick fix.
And then continue to be used right up to 1977.
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And all kidding.
Even though that was the car that Kennedy had been shot at.
Absolutely.
And I've always read that Johnson in particular kind of avoided that car whenever you could.
I think probably his reasons were thought.
Yeah, right.
Pretty astonishing.
In fact, maybe I'm confusing museums.
Correct me if I'm wrong here.
Doesn't the Henry Ford also have the chair that Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in?
Replete with blood stains.
その人からの小学校を与えるようにするのが、
日本での小学校の公開を説明して、
その人の小学校にも未来にもも、
小学校の歓迎が非常に多く、
小学校の小学校が、
小学校の先にも、
小学校の小学校にも、
小学校の先にも、
小学校の先にも、
小学校の先にも、
そのため、ヘニアル・トリー・バースティーによるな
英国の以来は、世界のドリネーusteの
塾が 三岸に2歳を作ることができる
その等にとっては、
この日本にも this is his great-young and friend
彼方は 日本に アクションに映って
やっぱり、フェイトすることができない
このヘニアル・トリー・ヘニアル・トリメ・トリメ・トリテンの
名前の人類も 尽くして、
英国の私は アクションにいながら
その交換をすることができない
これは アクションにいる
このヘニアル・トリメの人類が
思い出したことはありませんが、
Henry realized that the world as an industrialized was changing very, very rapidly.
He also recognized that he was one of the culprits for that happening.
And here was a guy who loved the bucolic rural scenes and the like
and wanted to capture that before it disappeared.
And he knew it was going to disappear.
Yeah, it's the sort of great irony of Henry Ford and his work, you're right.
He more than anyone, probably responsible for that transformation in the United States.
But he wanted to preserve some of life as he knew it growing up in the 1860s,
1870s. So there's a lot of focus on that in our collections.
But we've always collected things from the modern day as well.
And continue to collect modern innovations right to the present.
Okay, so let's go full circle on this.
You mentioned that Henry and Thomas Edison were great friends.
So why internal combustion rather than electric motors way back when?
Henry was always a believer in internal combustion.
His first car, the Quadro cycle of 1896 had an internal combustion engine.
And he just thought it gas was the best compromised fuel.
It got you the most power for the weight that it was.
I mean batteries and electric motors tended to be very heavy and very expensive.
Also got your great range.
I mean, the best electric car of the 19 teams might get you 70, 80 miles on a charge under ideal conditions.
It's not bad.
Not too bad.
Yeah, but also you're that's had about 25 miles an hour.
Right.
Yeah, yeah.
And the Model T gets 20 miles to the gallon 10 gallon take 200 miles of range.
So it's a big improvement.
So yeah, that sort of is so so so.
So Thomas and Henry didn't like mix it up over what was the way to go.
But they didn't I think Edison was a little disappointed that his batteries and electric cars in particular didn't didn't last a little longer.
But for did experiment with some electric cars never went into production.
Perhaps never any serious intention of producing the but he and Edison did collaborate on a couple of more.
So you mentioned also the early.
Tires failing on flat tires on these early vehicles.
And Harvey firestone was a friend of these guys too.
Absolutely.
Yeah, firestone had a contract to supply tires to Ford even before the Model T and obviously all.
He did very well for the Model T success as it's entering the three of them.
Had a great time going on those camping trips in the 19 teams in the early 20s.
Well, in fact, there's still a family connection there.
So chairman of Ford Motor Company Bill Ford's mother is a firestone.
Absolutely.
So it's still there.
Yeah.
Look, we're going to have to wrap this segment up.
But Matt Anderson, thanks so much for coming on.
Very interesting.
If any of you in the audience have not been to the Henry Ford, if you ever get a chance, go take it.
It's an amazing museum.
And I'd say make a chance.
Yeah, make a chance.
In fact, I mean, you could probably spend a week there and still not really fully absorb everything that's in the museum.
There's so much to say.
Terrific.
Thank you very much.
Been a pleasure.
We're going to take a quick break here.
We're going to be coming back and talking about more automotive history.
Making the life full of memories.
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All right, we're back.
And we're making a guest change here.
We're going to get a mic on our new guest right now.
But we've got Steve Purdy here from Shunpiker Productions, right?
Who has written a book.
And Sean, I don't know if I'm holding it up right or not.
You got it on the screen here.
So it's called Mass Cops in Motion.
Yes, a subtitle.
A hefty tomb.
You know, it's about five pounds.
And it is jam-packed with all kinds of pictures of hood ornaments, grills, tail fins, or you tell the story.
Steve, you wrote the book.
Its subtitle is images and stories of automotive aesthetics.
And it's 40 years of my photography of hood ornaments and other details of automotive design.
I started doing those 40 years ago or so.
When I inherited kind of a high-end 35 millimeter camera with a 200 millimeter lens.
And I discovered the Concord Delegance at Battle Brook about the same time.
And I went to the show.
And when you're looking at tires through a long lens like that,
it just kind of draws you into the details like the hood ornaments and things like every reflections.
And because you're getting a close-up.
And because of that, the compression factor in that lens,
the background is blurred as you've got a narrow depth of field.
And so they ended up being kind of artsy.
Well, in the early days, you know, I'd go there with pockets full of film.
And maybe one in 50 shots were keepers.
But after doing that for a number of years,
then I just kind of learned how to really get beautiful images.
And about the same time, part of the Concord Delegance was the Automotive Fine Art exhibit.
The Automotive Fine Art Society had their annual show there.
So I got to know all of those guys.
And was influenced by people like Tom Hale and then major automotive artists.
So that artistic influence and looking through that long lens,
you know, I went to the Concord every year and whatever other car shows I could find.
I was shooting blossoms and faces of animals and other things, but that long lens.
But I was always drawn to those hood ornaments.
So how many pictures are in the book?
320 images, about 316 pages.
And I've added about 50,000 words of text, just enough text to kind of put them all in context.
Sometimes they're about the company, the company and what it meant about the car itself.
Sometimes it's how I captured the image and why I captured it.
What drew me to that?
So it's not a scholarly work and it's not an encyclopedic work.
It's just those images that caught my eye over all those years.
And so you shot every one of these images.
So I mean, you've got 300 plus in here.
You probably have a lot more in your house.
I have a lot more.
The hardest part about doing that book was calling those thousands, tens of thousands.
So what was your criteria for it going?
Well, yes, this one goes in that one.
I'd love it, but I'm not going to put it in.
Well, I would go.
I'm not very organized with my computer storage systems.
So I would go to a car show that I had shot and I just kind of skimmed through the images.
And I'd see some of them jump out.
So those that jumped out at me, I'd kind of separate those.
And then I'd go through those again.
And then I'd go again and again.
And I knew about how many I wanted for the book.
So the hardest part was really decided because, you know, there are so many that caught my eye.
And also when I started the book, it was going to be about hood ornaments.
But when I started calling these pictures from all the car shows that I'd shot.
A lot of other things jumped out at me.
Like these big, Buick grill that became in the book a two-page spread for those kind of things.
Cadillac tail fence.
Cadillac tail fence.
59-Helderado, right?
Yes, 59.
There's a couple of images like that.
In fact, one of the images in the book, one of the very few that I shot indoors without a flash.
But indoors was when the Cadillac, when GM had their Cadillac collection,
stored in a warehouse between when it was downtown and when they moved it out to the heritage center.
And I stuck my way into the warehouse.
Got some good images.
But it's just the tail fence of the Cadillac.
But behind it, kind of blurred, was the Christmas tree for the that they had in the little museum that they had there.
So that became my Christmas card for a couple of years.
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So Steve, you've taken these images in largely of details of vehicles.
What vehicles have features that you'll not forget?
Well, I'll tell you, generally speaking, the 1950s cars are the most striking because they're the most unusual and the most high design.
The 30s cars, a lot of times, look alike.
But you zoom in on the details and you find a lot of differences.
The hood ornaments particularly are different from one to the other.
But it's probably the 50s cars that are the most dramatic and the most striking and probably the most photogenic.
You sent us some photos ahead of time.
I don't know if Sean, if you've been showing them or should we pick out some and talk about them or what?
I've shown most of them.
I don't know which one.
I don't remember which one.
Yeah, yeah.
So you can take a look at that one.
That's another example of what changed when I started the book.
When I was thinking about hood ornaments, I came across an image like that.
And the image is, it's got to be a grill of a car.
Can you tell any more about it?
I can hold it up, but I have, from the photo, I cannot tell what this is.
Well, that the bar across the middle is the bar that locates the headlights on a 30s do some bird, early 30s do some bird.
The patterns you see there are a result of the grill slats, some being tilted one way, some being tilted the other way.
And for a photographer, the worst thing to shoot cars at a car show is a bright sunny day.
And in this case, what happens is the sun hits that bar and it makes those wonderful scalps going both directions.
So that's when I decided that I would include some abstracts.
The ones that you'd look at and have to kind of guess what they were, but they were just, they, but they struck, struck my eye, basically.
Oh, there's a good one.
I don't know if I can turn to this, this page quickly or not, but you even have like an oldsmobile ornament.
And the photo is all rusted out.
Here's a Ford one.
There you go.
That's all rusted out.
So, I mean, you're not just trying to go for beauty shots.
Oh, no.
These are car shows and junk yards and backyards, wherever it's wherever one of these jumped out at me, I shot them.
In fact, let me tell you about one of my favorite spots in middle Tennessee right at the base of the Cumberland plateau.
There's an old guy that his livelihood was collecting 1950s cars and using it as a salvage yard, but his kids through school that way.
When I first ran into him, he was about 80 years old.
He hadn't really been selling parts much.
He was just playing with them all, but he had about 30 of them out in front of his place and they're surrounded by offense.
And gosh, they're just all rusty and beautiful old 50s cars, nothing but 50s cars.
So I asked him if I could shoot him and so he let me shoot him, but then 20 years later, I went back again.
Now he's 90 something couldn't come out to talk to me, but his son let me in there.
And a lot of those ended up in the book because they're they're strikingly textured with rust and old paint.
The young man painted some of those cars with house paint when he was a kid, but, but, but part of the charm of these details is for one thing the rusty ones.
They really have a character.
And the other is, and I was telling you about a sunny day being what a what a photographer doesn't like.
What a what a photographer does like is a rainy day because those shiny hood ornaments and the shiny cars and the paint and the details sparkle in that little bit of rain.
And it adds a depth to that picture that's just strikingly beautiful, I think.
So Mike, at one point you were in this world, sort of deeply when you were with Hemings.
What is that culture of people who are interested in things like this?
I don't know exactly. It goes deep.
I mean, there's a lot of, you know, the details, especially when you get into pre-work cars.
There's a obsessive museum like, you know, archaeology almost too.
They made, you know, or if you get into more bespoke cars that might have changed the hood ornaments, right?
It's that they made this one, you know, from this year to this year. But then, you know, you read it on the internet and there's different, you know, conflicting stories of like, well, this one might have been this day to this year.
It just goes all the way down.
You know, if, if, if model trains aren't enough for you, I'd say given the automotive ornaments.
I offer the disclaimer in the front of the book that, that, you know, I've captioned all these photographs of what car they were on.
And, and I caution people not to, not to take that for gospel, because often there are two different stories about when a hood ornament was used and when it wasn't used and what one was used on which cars and all that kind of stuff.
Previous books that I've done, you know, I, I really enjoyed the writing, but I didn't enjoy the research that much it was tedious, but this book, the, the research was as much fun as the writing.
Why? Well, because every time I thought I knew a story seemed and I went into fact check it somewhere, I found out there was another story and maybe another story and it led me deeper and deeper.
And some of them ended up being really huge stories.
So, tell us your favorite one. Well, I'm glad you ask. You know our friend, Maureen McDonald, yes.
She and I are working on, sort of working on a historical novel about Eleanor Velasco Thornton, who was the model that posed for the Rolls Royce hood ornament.
The spirit ecstasy. Oh, that's a big story. That's, I talk about a lot of that in the book.
Well, she thought that doing a historical novel about this young lady who was right in the middle of the first 15 years of automobiling in Britain with King Edward, the seventh and Mr. Rolls and Mr. Royce and her paramour Lord Montague, who started the first automotive magazine back in the day, would make a wonderful story for a historical novel.
Well, Eleanor Thornton died in 1915 when she and her paramour Lord Montague were crossing the Mediterranean.
He was going to India to be the crowns representative, transportation representative.
She was going to go to Cairo, turn around and come back and run the magazine while he was gone. Well, as they were passing Crete, their pleasure boat was sunk by a German U-boat.
She perished and he survived. And in the end, 20 years later, Lord Montague wrote in his memoirs, a scene of them clinging tightly to each other as the boat was sinking.
And a big wave came along and ripped her out of his arms and she perished and he survived for three days.
So David Attenborough and Martin Scorsese bought the rights to a similar story and they were going to produce a documentary in 2012, I think.
But it was going to be centered on the founding of Rolls Royce. Well, this would be the same story, but it would be centered on Eleanor Velasco Thornton.
I think your story is more interesting.
What did the lady Montague think when Lord Montague came home with a car that had his paramour image on that?
Well, she might have been in the passenger seat because Lord Montague's wife, you'll back in those days, it's turn of the century for a wealthy, powerful man to have a woman on the side, basically, to handle some needs and the wife is at home taking care of all the other needs.
They got to know each other and she respected, they respected each other because Lord Montague's wife knew how valuable she was to him in running the magazine.
She did road tests, reports with him, she did, she was the manager of the office.
She was the main clerk for the thousand mile rally in 1900, which kind of established automobiling and Britain as a thing.
So it's really a wonderful story.
So, hood ornaments led you to this story.
That's amazing.
So, that's the most fun one.
But there's plenty of others like the Packard, I mean, the Pierce Errol, the Archer.
You've seen the Archer.
Well, like Cupid, right?
That one was designed by a woman named, oh, her name's escaping me at the moment.
She was the first full-time auto designer in Detroit.
Essentially, she worked for the Turnstatt division who designed a lot of these for the manufacturers, for all different manufacturers.
Well, she used the janitor for her model and sent him to an archery school to make sure he had the right pose so she could sculpt him shirtless.
And I was like, oh gosh, I wish I could remember her name.
What?
Brother?
No, no, that wasn't it.
No.
Well, the name's on important.
There's stories, kinds of those stories in this book that I found.
The, the, the, the midge, the MG midge, an old MGs, you'll see what looks like a mosquito about that high.
And aftermarket person in 1920, first produced those for MGs because the midge was sort of a sound of like midget.
And that was the name of the car back to the MG midget basically.
So they used this, this mosquito white thing.
And the company said we don't want to pesky mosquito on our cars.
Well, we're not going to authorize that.
But then the MG owners loved it so much that the company had to eventually produce it.
And, and sell it.
So how do I want to get back to the spirit of ecstasy?
Okay.
So I mean, to this day, that is legendary.
Yes, she is.
And Rolls Royce continues to have, you know, photographers and models.
And it's, it's a, it's a, it's a living story of all of these hood ornaments that you've taken pictures of.
I mean, that's got to be the most famous.
Why do you think that's the case?
Well, they went away primarily for both stylistic reasons and for practical ones.
In the 1950s, the late 1950s, the hood ornaments just kind of became badges sort of.
And part of it was safety issues because people would get them pailed on them if you get hit by a car.
And others were just plain stylistic.
There's so much filigree on the car.
I think the hood ornament itself became superfluous basically.
And, and, and probably the last ones that you could call that.
It ended up on the fenders.
There were one on each fender.
And that was in the early 60s on some, some full-size Pontiacs and most mobiles and things like that.
So they did just went away for both stylistic and practical reasons, I think.
The hood, the Rolls Royce hood ornament, which very classy and still exists.
Now on your Rolls Royce, when you turn off the car, a little trap door opens and she folds down in under the hood.
The trap door closes on top of her.
Yeah, because they became so desirable.
People would deal them.
Yeah.
And in the 60s, of course, the hippies would steal the Mercedes emblems off the hood of the car because it looked like a piece symbol.
If you turn it upside down.
What was the last hood ornament?
Well, the, the, like we say, the spirit of ecstasy still made.
Still made.
So, but the gosh, I want to say Jaguar.
Didn't they have the leaper?
Well, it definitely still has the flying bee on some of the cars.
Yes.
And my back is there's still my box being made.
But the last ones that were on a car was probably the Jaguar because they used the leaper even on the ones they made here in Detroit.
The Jaguar S type.
Was that what they called it?
X type.
No, the one that was built alongside the Lincoln LS in Wixum.
S type.
Yeah, yes.
I don't remember that.
Oh, don't you always built in Detroit?
Yes, yes.
It was built on the same platform or the same powertrain as the Lincoln LS in Wixum.
And the Ford Thunderbird.
Yeah.
Wixum plant.
I don't remember that.
I don't know.
It was a nice looking car.
I think I don't know if its quality was up to par.
But I had an LS.
And the interior quality on that was pretty dismal.
So maybe, maybe it wasn't enough quality.
But that was before.
That was when Ford still owned Jaguar, basically.
Right.
So, uh, so that went away.
But yeah, hood ornament is a wonderful thing, you know.
But, but it just led to so much other stuff when I did the book.
What do you think of today's cars that I mean?
Well, a lot of people say to me, you know, I've been reviewing cars for 20, 25 years.
And when I drive down the road on a long highway drive, I'm looking into the rear, rear, rear.
Kind of challenge in myself to see how far back I can identify that car or one coming there.
So people say to me, you know, cars all look the same these days.
Well, if you went to the auto show and you've strolled around slowly, you'd find some pretty interesting stuff.
And it doesn't all look alike.
But so much of it is evolutionary and not dramatic that, you know, that it seems that way.
Now, Hyundai and Kia, look at how they're leading design right now.
You know, you look at one of the new, new Hyundai and the palisade or the, the, uh, tell you ride.
I mean, that's pretty straight.
They're very distinct.
That doesn't look like other cars in this class.
The golden age of automotive design was probably American automotive design was probably the 1950s, just because it was so varied.
But in the classic area, the 30s was wonderful.
But today, there's still quite a lot of variety out there.
If you look closely, I think Steve, if we go back to the hood ornament and the other other details, it seems to me that.
At one point, they were added to draw people to the vehicle as, as something particularly special.
Yes.
And a lot of that is gone by the wayside as they look for ways to reduce costs and make them more, well, maybe not more affordable, but at least less expensive.
Yeah, I don't know if the cost was the biggest issue.
In the early days, when they still called them mascots instead of hood armors, because they were like essentially like a athletic teams mascot meant to reflect something about the brand essentially.
And so Pontiac, of course, had its Indian head and that lasted in different forms, different styles right up into the 1950s, Plymouth had the sailing ship.
Same theme lasted all the way into the 50s, Packard on the other hand had probably six or seven or eight different totally different images for their hood ornaments.
So those also were meant to say something about the elegance or the speed or the class of the car, something like that.
But even Chevrolet and you know, lesser brands had some pretty fancy hood ornaments in their name.
Now these all evolved from radiator caps.
Yes.
Is that not right there?
That's true.
And then the first radiator caps actually had temperature gauges.
Yes.
So that when you're in the driver's seat, you can see if your engine was going to overheat or that was called a voice motor meter.
I have a whole chapter on voice motor meters.
What happened was voice invented that thing and it got pretty popular because people wanted to see the temperature of their water and so forth.
But it wasn't long before Packard and other companies started embellishing those motor meters with their little crest or their little design Packard even put a whole hood ornament behind the motor meter in the latter days.
But then in the 20s, temperature gauges moved inside the car.
So they didn't need the motor meter anymore, but by then it was really, I mean it was accepted that they had to have some kind of a hood ornament.
And that's when they became hood ornaments rather than mascots.
Essentially what the collectors would tell you.
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So some of the more hood ornaments, some of them were just badges.
But I think we've now we're in this era when these sort of things are getting even more simplified and flattened.
There's Volkswagen or Audi, Alfa Romeo, Cadillac even has simplified the crest.
What you're feeling on that as a trend?
Well, essentially they're logo or they're look, the Audi has the four circles and Mercedes has their star.
And so these badges still have their kind of logo look, basically, but they're badges.
They're nothing more than badges, essentially.
And some of them have some interest to them, some of them don't.
I like the, you know, as a guy who likes the aesthetics of it all, basically.
I like the different different designs that I see.
Some Europeans have a little more artistic feel to them.
And then Kia with their new PIA badge.
I just love that because it was so simple and so classy.
But yeah, the aesthetics of it are much simpler.
They're much less artsy than they used to be.
What do you think about this?
Is there an opportunity here?
Because, you know, to just say, it's got a badge.
Well, you know, there seems to be an opportunity to connote more of what the spirit of the brand is all about.
And add some artistic flavor to it.
Yeah, I think the simplification's a mistake.
And you look at, you know, iconic badges, not necessarily hood ornaments,
but, you know, Ferrari, Porsche, Lamborghini, they're still doing the same one.
And, you know, they'll tweak it here and there.
But, you know, they're not taking elements out or rendering it, you know, from an actual shape.
They're not turning the horse into like some pixelated representation.
So, I mean, do you think that auto makers are doing that from a design perspective in order to make it seem as though they're more advanced and consequently.
I mean, so, you know, you're mentioning, you know, when Volkswagen went with its flat design for its logos.
And a lot of that was influenced by the design on the iPhone in terms of what the app designs look like.
And is it, do you think they're trying to associate themselves more closely with technology?
Yeah, I think some of it is you, yeah, you want to be seen as current and modern.
And it's changed for changes sake. So, it's, you know, it's a very easy thing to say, well, we need to do something different.
Well, we haven't updated the logo in 20 years. Let's do that.
And some of that is, some of that is a justified want to feel current.
You know, if you put the old like flowers and ducks, you know, if you resurrect it in the 1980s, Cadillac badge with the laurels on the side, that's going to look dated.
Kind of old and not in a good retro way.
But I think, I think they have gone a little too far to just say we're going to strip it of all its decoration.
When by definition, it is a decoration. So, I should have a little bit of flash.
You know, it's interesting to think about, think about, you know, we were talking about Ford earlier.
I mean, think about the Ford badge. I mean, his script, I mean, it's not changed. It's timeless.
Yeah, really. It's evolved over time. But not much.
But not much. You still recognize it for the early one.
I just, I like the idea of increasing the stylizing, the stylized design Cadillac in their celestial wasn't one of the recent concept cars.
Not the production version, but the concept car had a wonderful little strip down the side.
And inside that strip was a depiction of the Cadillac goddess that was the hood ornament for 30 or 40 years.
Just, she's done in plastic. She's done in an outline. But it's a reference to the.
No, I love that idea. You know, with today's technology, there's a lot that you could do with badging to make it much more artistic and, you know, standing out.
I just saw a company just this week. I'm trying to recognize. I see so many different things that is develop the technology to mold LED lights right into plastic badging.
So that you can have not just a badge sitting there that some sort of coded plastic, but is illuminated right.
And you don't want to go too far, you know, you don't want the Tokyo by night school of design or it's, you know, doing all these different things.
But there's got to be a way to really take badging to another level here.
You know, they had a press conference some years ago with George, George, the young, young Mr. George, and I asked him at the end, I said, what, what designs do you like and not like?
And he or what do you like about design? What do you don't like about modern design? And he said, well, I really like the way that the different markets, European market, the Japanese market, the American market, have their own language, throw in design language.
And he gave a couple examples of that. And I think that's true. Think of the, think of the Japanese, the little Japanese fun cars.
The K cars. Well, yes, yeah, at the K style car, a lot of them look like an anime puppy for goodness sakes are so cute.
And that's a purely Asian design. You would, you see those here if they import a few of them.
Yeah, no, I'm not the K cars. They're very boxy and angular and all that. I think you're thinking of maybe the figure of the figure.
Yeah, figure over the S cargo. Yeah, those were fun design. Yeah. Of course, that was back when Nissan was making money handover for the good.
And they made it a whole series. Those are the Zama cars. I think there might have been four, but they're three different.
They started to go in the pow and the figure. We're all like, we're going to make fun things. Yes, but I thought those were wonderful.
I mean, they stopped having fun. Yeah, I haven't, I haven't, I haven't refreshed my memory on that, but they stopped coming up with ideas or there was probably a financial crisis or.
Yeah, no, they were largely Japanese market only. Yeah, so they, they, they never were sold in the United States. Well, the figure they brought a bunch over, I think.
I think they were probably gray market cars. Oh, maybe. I just saw one at auction not too long ago. Yeah, no, they're really good looking cars.
And they got great publicity for Nissan. The world over. But I think they were very niche. They never really sold in big numbers. I don't think they exported them much around the world.
As Nissan, like I said, I'm sure there was a lot of gray market stuff that was going on. I think we actually had a pow in the studio that Chris Pockert drove here.
Yeah, Chris, Chris, definitely a big, big fan of the pow. Yeah, yeah. So, so yeah, I modern design. I think it needs a little more personality, a little more panache.
So in your book, is it all American or are there European cars? I start out talking about motor meters. Then we go to a special chapter on Lalique.
Lalique Glass, Lalique. I'll read Lalique made a Renee Lalique, I think his name was, made 30 some different crystal hood ornaments for cars back in the 30s.
And to find an original of those today is just something because, of course, they were made out of crystal and you hit a big bump and crack and break. They're still reproduced today. But all these 30 some versions. I've got a book on that that I used for the research.
But I've only seen a few. So I got a chapter on them. But then I go into the Brits and then to the continental Europeans, then to general motors, then to Ford Chrysler, and then a big chapter on American Independence.
And then I finish up the book with a little short chapter on trucks because I had my designer said I had a few pages yet to spend. So I got to have the Mac Golddog.
Well, the Bulldogs in there. And also, you know, my favorite one is on the Divco. Have you ever noticed the Divco is the little Humpey Milk Truck, the Detroit Industrial Vehicle Company.
They made that little Humpey Milk Truck to stand up delivery truck. And it had the nicest little art deco hood ornament on it. So that's kind of the way. Well, the last image in the book, I wanted to end it with a little whimsy.
So I included an image. I got in Jackson Michigan at the car show. Somebody had a rag of the old pickup. And he had welded a little crowbar under the front of his hood. So it was also the hood pull and the hood ornament.
So that's why I ended the book. Okay, we're getting down to the end here. If people are watching the show and they go, dang, I'd like to get that or maybe it'd make a great Christmas present. Where can you get the book?
Well, I found it about 70% of the people buy that book or buy it for gifts. It's only available on my website, not on Amazon or any of those sites. Okay, so it's your website.
ShunPikerProductions.com SHUNPiker is one who shuns the turnpike takes the back road instead of the highway in the spirits of Charles Geralt, Jack Kerouek, and will you at least eat moon.
Mike is more of an East Coast kind of term. We would just call them highway. So it's a bad road kind of guy. I talked about that in the introduction to the book that that not all of my discoveries are on the back roads, but I think that's kind of a basic way to live your or vehicular life, your travel light.
When you see a sign that says road ends or dead end, you'd go down there and see what's down there because it's bound to be something pretty interesting down there. So shunpiker.com SHUNPikerProductions.com. Yeah, only available there. It's a $100 and I'll ship it anywhere in the country and it'll always get a $100 price.
Yes, $100 price includes a personal inscription and shipped anywhere in the continental U.S.
It's a beautiful book. Beautiful shops and there too. Right, a lot of work. It was a lot of work. It took me 40 years to take the pictures and it took me just a year to actually gather it up and get it to the designer.
And I hired a company and Grand Rapids that does just art books. It's essentially an art book. That's what I wanted it to be.
Company and Grand Rapids did the production. So it was printed in China and did he handle all that logistical stuff. And I'm glad I hired them because they did a beautiful job.
Let's see, gorgeous book. Yeah, thanks. Congratulations.
With that, we're going to wrap it up. Okay, Steve Purdy. Thanks so much for coming on.
Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Yeah, Mike Austin. Great to have you here. Appreciate the invite.
Where's that road and track issue? Let's get that up here again. We've actually got a physical copy, which I love because I don't know.
The digital stuff is convenient, but the printed version is so much better. I agree. I don't get many magazines these days, but I appreciate having one to hold on to.
And Gary, we won't be here next week. We won't. We'll be eating next week is Thanksgiving. We're going to take that week off.
But we hope all of you like this show two weeks from now. We'll be right back here again.
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About this episode
Exploring the parallels between the early automotive industry and today's electric vehicle landscape, this episode features Matt Anderson from the Henry Ford Museum. He shares insights on the initial resistance to automobiles, drawing comparisons to the current skepticism surrounding EVs. The discussion delves into historical automotive innovations, the evolution of consumer preferences, and the role of iconic vehicles like the Model T. Listeners will appreciate the rich historical context and the lessons that can be learned from the past as the industry navigates its future.
Original notes
TOPIC: Classic Cars PANEL: Matt Anderson, Henry Ford Museum; Steve Purdy, Author; Gary Vasilash, shinymetalboxes.net; John McElroy, Autoline.tv
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