Extraordinarily Ordinary

(NYIAS)

The next thing to talk about was in the booth for Chevrolet to accompany the release of their new Impala. It was a sky-blue, convertible 1966 Impala Super Sport in seemingly perfect mint condition that was actually much more interesting than the new one. I'd like to say right off the bat that many of the interesting facts herein are courtesy of my friend over at Ate Up with Motor. A huge nod of thanks to him and his vast automotive knowledge.

It's fortunate that I have such a good excuse to talk about the Impala, considering that I so recently examined Levittown, because the Impala was sort of like the 1960s automobile equivalent to a Levittown house. There was nothing at all exceptional or innovative about it, in fact, its appeal was that it was utterly ordinary. Adding to this is Chevy's choice of a model from 1966 to display at the show. The Super Sport options package was first offered on the Impala in 1961. In 1964, it became the top-of-the-line model, but in 1966 it was surpassed in prestige by the Caprice, which had become its own series. All the standard cars in Chevy's line-up, including Impala and Caprice, shared most of the same basic innards. The differences were in power, styling, and options. There was nothing particularly new about the '66; it was mostly a cosmetic upgrade of the '65. The moral of the story, by 1966 the Super Sport was even less exceptional for a Chevy than previous Impalas had been.

It was most popular with exactly the same demographic who a decade earlier would have gravitated toward Levittown and communities like it. It was a preferred car for mostly middle-income buyers who wanted a relatively good quality car, easy to service and maintain, but nothing too flashy or outrageous. It's the same demographic that today buys the Toyota Camry and Honda Accord. But while the Camry enjoyed 3% of the market as the best selling car in the United States in 2008, Impala in the 1960s commanded 15% of the market. Out of ten of your car-owning friends, at least one if not two of them would have had an Impala.

It's a fairly mammoth car, over 312 inches long (792cm) and almost 80 inches wide (203cm). Perhaps one of the more interesting things about the engineering of the Impalas from '65 onward was their flexible frame. At the points where the frame curved inward for the wheels at front and rear, the frame was designed to flex to absorb impacts from the road. The body was then mounted onto the frame with no metal-to-metal connections. Instead, rubber pads separated the frame from the body in up to fourteen places, depending on the model. The body was welded together and gusseted extremely rigidly and cross-braced, especially at the front end. The idea was that the body would feel extremely firm while all the vibrations and shuddering from the engine and road were handled by the flexible frame.

My friend from Ate Up... shared with me one of the critical reactions to Impala at the time which I thought was rather funny. Evidently, the resonant frequency of its coil spring suspension was such that the car would start hopping at certain speeds when driving over the seams of a concrete highway. I'm amused by this in part because I can't remember the last time I was on a highway paved with concrete. Having driven around many parts of the country, I remember the familiar rhythm of those seams in the road slabs. But they use asphalt almost exclusively in the New York area. Asphalt is cheaper and much faster to install on highways that, around here, serve enormous amounts of traffic almost continuously. Potholes in asphalt can also be more quickly and easily spot-repaired rather than having to replace entire sections of road at a time as with concrete slabs.

In its design, the Impala is anything but a remarkable car. Evidently that was sort of the whole point; above all, it was a safe choice. To put the design of the car under discussion here in some perspective, 1966 was the same year that Ferrari unleashed on Turin this masterpiece by Pininfarina. Nonetheless, in retrospect, there are some nice things about the old Impalas that could have inspired their new one with fantastic results. I think Chevy would have been wise to take a similar approach as they did to the Camaro--and as Dodge did to the Challenger--and look back to the older models for inspiration. For a few things, the broad, muscular grille, forward angled front end, or the side detailing that streaks straight from the front all the way to the back end (most pronounced on the 1964), could have been extrapolated quite wonderfully on a car for 2012.

Instead, Chevy seems to have recreated the past glory of the Impala in spirit rather than style. Their new offering is about as bland today as the '66 may have seemed when it appeared on the market. I might be tempted to wonder whether it's more difficult for the huge corporate manufacturers to reconcile good design with other concerns like marketing and economics if it weren't for the fact that I've seen comparably large manufacturers overcome these conflicts quite adeptly.

The 427 Turbo Jet was newly available on Impala in '66, and was the biggest engine option. 

All text and embedded images ©2012, Ryan Witte.

Amped Up

(NYIAS)

Another thing to be excited about was at the booth for Chevrolet, and no, I don't mean that Bumblebee made an appearance to introduce the Camaro.

Although that was very exciting.

It was really their introduction of an ostensibly viable electric car, which they claim is officially going into production for 2011, the Volt. Here it is as a concept vehicle:

This is a seriously hot car. Why they felt the need to bash it with an ugly stick before putting it into production, I have no idea. Here's what they had at the auto show:

Don't get me wrong, it's not that bad. But it just doesn't have the boldness or confidence of the concept version.

Here's the thing: car design generally wallows in this luke-warm stylistic middle ground. In the one direction, you have the design of, say, Japanese motorcycles, which have consistently had some of the most mind-boggling design of any kind of object. The distinction I'm making with the Japanese offerings is from the Harley-Davidson sort of American cruising bikes, which, though gorgeous, are a completely different animal. But the motifs of motorcycle design not only have to connote high technology, power, and speed, but their design has something even on the sports cars, in that it also speaks much more of adrenaline-soaked rebelliousness. So all the elements of their design are pushed to the most radical extreme. Cars, however, are typically more expensive, more of an investment, more of a risk, and are purchased for quite a few reasons other than weekend jaunts out on the highway. Their design, therefore, has to be safer and appeal to a much lower common denominator.

In the other direction, there's an art form like architecture. Architecture has to be ridiculously safe because, unlike cars which would seem to have a stylistic shelf-life of around five years, buildings need to stand and remain more or less relevant for as long as thirty years, in most cases much longer. But buildings, first of all, are just iconic inherently, due to their sheer size. Secondly, because they do typically have such a long lifespan, there's a responsibility for them to be beautiful, even if boringly so. This is why the ugliest architecture arises from situations where there's neither the need for personal or institutional identity (like suburban tract housing that has to appeal universally to the broadest section of potential buyers, or the offices of companies for which corporate branding is largely unimportant), nor the likelihood of required longevity (mid-size companies enjoying steady growth that expect to move to a more profitable or respectable location or physically outgrow their current building before it becomes obsolete).

Mass-produced, moderately-priced automobiles seem to be able to fully enjoy none of the phenomena that facilitate design innovation in other products. It's unfortunately much more restricted.

In any case, I'm still very happy the Volt is becoming a reality, whatever it looks like. I mean, for how many years have vehicles in Science Fiction movies been making that electric humming noise? Thirty? It's true GM had come out with the first electric car, the EV1, years ago and it got dumped, but luckily I think the timing is a great deal better now for this to finally take off.

It was Chevy's booth rep on the Volt turntable, in fact, who I asked what difference it makes that your car is electric if your home's power supplier burns fossil fuels, and she didn't seem to have a very good answer for me. If you drive only forty miles at a time, though, you'll never need a single drop of gasoline. The Volt does have a combustion motor, but it's not a hybrid engine. Instead, the gas powered motor is a back up, running a generator to recharge the battery if you exceed the forty-mile limit. It seems to me that it would be strangely inefficient to burn gas to run a generator to recharge the battery to power the electric motor to move the car, rather than just having a hybrid engine, but I suppose the difference is that for the first leg of a journey, you're not burning any gas, at all. And the fact remains that before recharging stations become commonplace, fears of being stranded with a dead battery will be a major hindrance to the success of electric cars.

©2009, Ryan Witte