Mine didn't rust! It was one of the only Toyotas I ever had that didn't rust. I can't remember if it was Rusty'd or not, or Waxoyl. Can't remember if I paid the extra or not.
I had the coupe. It was definitely one hell of a car. It had a 1.8L Hemi, however. No neck-snapping acceleration, but it would go pretty good and hit 85 on the highway without breaking a sweat.
Highest I ever went with that was ~112. Not like the 129 in the Hachi...
Northeast? I thought you were out near Vancouver!
Yup. All "Hemi" means is Hemispherical head, and even my Corolla 1200 had one of those!
WOW! 140?!?!?! The Speedo in my Supra goes up to 240! I haven't had it anywhere near that. I didn't realize they had that same stupid law in Canada, too (or was it just that all NA imported cars were stuck at that?)
The Supra came from Downtown Toyota...:) An imported import.
It was a plain old DUMB idea, because if you exceeded the speedo, you had NO CLUE how fast you were going. That played well...a friend of mine had a Chevy "Monza" (the one that looked like a wedge) and I 'buried' the speedo in about 6 seconds. Had NO IDEA how fast we were going, but it was at least 120. He had the V8 version.
Ah. Where in ONT? I have been to Toronto, Oshawa (immediately RIGHT BEHIND the GM assembly plant) and Kitchener.
Hachiroku $B%O%A%m%/(B wrote in news:KL7_o.21493$ snipped-for-privacy@newsfe08.iad:
Yeah, in Metric. That's about 87mph.
There wasn't any law up here. We tended to get the same speedometers as the US, just with the Metric dominant instead of the miles.
As for that photo... When I worked the tach reading back with the 5th-gear and rear-end ratios and tire circumference, I got 103mph.
That was Joan Claybrook's point.
She believed people were going fast for thrills, so if they didn't know how fast they were going, they'd slow down because the thrill would be gone.
I was thinking the former, simply because it's such a bland, grandma- looking car.
Of course, I used to have a '62 Studebaker Daytona as well, which was essentially the same thing. (Studebaker Lark hardtop body = definition of grandma car, but with a 289/4-speed)
nate
see my reply to Brent.
Yup, so lots of OTC performance parts easily and cheaply available. Sort of like building a Factory Five roadster, but with the exact opposite end result. (getting a completely boring looking car to drive/handle acceptably well.)
nate
The only thing that is interesting about a fairmont to me would be to create a muntant car. There are a few projects displayed online... start with fairmont put in various mustang running gear and suspension (after market or stock), optionally replace the front clip with mustang parts.
Wouldn't the 50's kinda give it away?
What ever happened to Studebaker? I always thought they were actually ahead of the curve. If they had hung on into the 70's they might have fended off Toyota and Nissan in the smaller car market.
ALMOST bought an Avanti in the late 70's for near nothing, but I didn't know a lot about cars them. Ditto for a 1953 "50th Anniversary" Ford flathead F-100. Boy, kicking myself hard now. The truck was $50...
Don't you wind up with that era's "Thunderbird"?
Makes about as much sense as anything else the Carter Administration did...
By the early 1950s Studebaker sales were poor and the company was in very bad financial condition. The post-WWII sellers' market had ended and GM and Ford were engaging in a sales war that the smaller independents could not compete against. The 1954 merger with Packard was disastrous for Packard, and that marque disappeared after a few years of being little more than rebadged Studebakers.
Studebaker's last year in the car business was 1966. For 1965 and 1966 production took place in their small Canadian plant and the cars used Chevrolet engines. Although plans for 1967 and beyond were being made, in the end the company decided they would make more money by *not* being in the car business and the Canadian factory was shut down.
Studebaker had diversified and become something of a mini-conglomerate. The company did not go out of business per se but the various pieces were acquired by other companies over the years. What remains of it is can be found in the Studebaker-Worthington Leasing company in Texas, which leases industrial products to manufacturers:
not really. Not sure which 'bird you're talking about either. Some of them were pretty much rebadged fairmonts.
Hachiroku $B%O%A%m%/(B wrote in news:vbw_o.89$ snipped-for-privacy@newsfe12.iad:
According to noted automotive historian Patrick Foster, who specializes in the independents, Studebaker was the victim of their own very serious errors, and of historical circumstances...
Error 1: Instead of banking the profits from the immediate post-war sellers' market, Studebaker gave generous dividends to stockholders. This was probably an attempt at impressing investors with the health of the company. But the ultimate effect - after the sellers' market inevitably ended - was to leave the company with little cash for new development at a time when new development was the key to sales.
Error 2: Stude spent huge money developing their modern OHV V8, introduced in
1951. But then they made a huge mistake in failing to consider how large engines might grow in the future. As competitors' engine sizes crept well over 300 cu. in., Stude ended up maxed-out at 289, with no money left to develop a new engine with larger displacement. They did supercharge the 289 in an attempt at matching the competition's horsepower numbers, but it was too little, too late.Circumstances 1: Studebaker was solely a low-end manufacturer (excepting the Avanti). Low- end sales prices also mean low-end profits. Unless you can sell a ton of cars to make up the difference, which Stude could not do. It didn't cost them much less than Ford or GM to bring a new model to market, but they had far fewer sales over which to amortize those costs. Ford and GM had several divisions covering different strata of the market, so they could share lots of parts to cut costs while building sales to different types of customers. And when Ford and GM used their much- larger sales volumes to engage in a price-war in the '50s, one-trick-pony Studebaker just couldn't compete.
Circumstances 2: The UAW strike of 1962. By that point, the end was probably already near anyway, but the strike definitely did a lot of damage. Studebaker needed every sale they could get to help amortize the aforementioned costs, and the strike cost them - and the strikers - fatally.
Ultimately, what killed Studebaker was bad management, exactly the same thing that killed Packard.
Looking at it from a modern POV what killed them was not having access to taxpayer money. Bad management is ok so long as a company has friends in government.
Nope, that only works for a very short amount of time. But, a loan from the government sure helped Iacocca clean out some of the bad management from Chrysler. If only it could have stayed out...
--scott
The fiancial sector has been doing it to various degrees since 1914.
Brent wrote in news:ihfvrq$11g$1 @news.eternal-september.org:
And that's a very bad thing indeed.
I'll second that. I had a 78 Fairmont wagon with the 302, an ex-fleet car. Basically a Mustang GT station wagon. Even with the slightly-less-hot engine, it surprised a lot a people who assumed it was a 6. I put the slightly-wider rims from a fox-body Tbird and some decent tires on it, and heavy-duty shocks, and it even handled pretty well. I was broke at the time, or I would have switched the sway bars and such with the Mustang pieces. And it was basically invisible to cops.
Sadly, rust got it. The rocker panel box sections, a major component on a unit-body car like that, turned into swiss cheese. It is one of the few cars out of my past that I still miss.
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