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Spinning My Tires is one man's view of the world of cars. Random thoughts, ideas and comments pop up here, all of them related to owning, driving and restoring cars. I've been doing this car thing as long as I can remember, and have enjoyed a great many car-related experiences, some of which I hope to share with you here. And I always have an opinion one way or another. Enjoy. E-mails are welcomed--if you have thoughts of your own to share, please send them. Additional Spinning My Tires editorials can be found on the Archives page. 5/2/03 What's a "Classic?" The word “classic” has to be one of the most abused terms when it comes to discussing old cars. It’s like those pesky homonyms there, their and they’re; nobody seems to know how to use the word, and just throws it out there haphazardly. What does the word classic mean to you? To me, a classic is one of the great cars from the mid-20s to the late ‘30s. You know the cars I’m talking about: Packards, Lincolns, Cadillacs, Marmons, Duesenbergs, Rolls-Royces. These are cars that are as much artwork as transportation. Now, it just so happens that my definition pretty much matches that of the Classic Car Club of America (CCCA), which sets strict criteria for determining which cars are true Classics (note capital ‘C’). And that’s all well and good, because they are, after all, the Classic Car Club. No Fords or Chevys need apply. I don’t have a problem with that—it’s their club. For me, cars stopped being classics as soon as mass-production replaced all craftsmanship in the cars. No more hand-made sheet metal bodies, no more hand-assembled engines with exacting tolerances, no more flawless paint and artful stitching in the upholstery. Mass production pretty much eliminated the very things that make Classics so classic. There’s a pretty tangible dividing line as to when that happened, too: right after World War II. After that, we were in the jet age, the space age, the information age. Cars became appliances as much as transportation, and the companies that once built rolling artwork were either dead, gobbled up by some larger company, or building cars that were a shadow of their former selves. I think once the last of the ’48 Lincoln Continentals with V-12 engines rolled out of the factory, that was pretty much the end of things that I would consider classic. The industry subtly shifted from being driven by pride to being powered by market-share. Classics had no place in the brave new post-war world. Today, there are people who figure that anything over 15 or so years old is automatically a ‘classic’ (note lower case) simply because it survived and you can’t get it anymore. So does that make a Dodge Diplomat a classic? Probably not. People with this loose interpretation are often the grossest offenders—everything can be a classic if it lives long enough. Interestingly enough, these are usually the same guys who will try to pass off a heap of rusting scrap as a valuable piece of automotive history. You’ve seen them in all the magazines and probably on Ebay, too. They figure that our burning passion for old cars will cloud our judgment sufficiently to allow us to swallow his description of said ‘classic.’ Most of the car enthusiasts I know use the term classic frequently, but not as willy-nilly as the guy I described above. They recognize that not everything can be a classic car, and try to limit their application of the term to vehicles that truly are remarkable in some way. The ’59 Cadillacs can probably be safely called classics. The 55-57 Chevys and the ’66 Oldsmobile Toronado and the ’65 Mustang, too. They pushed an envelope or introduced new technology or resonated with the public in some way that made them rise to the surface of the automotive ocean. The ’76 Eldorado convertible I used to have was interesting, but I wouldn’t consider it a classic (though many do). There was nothing remarkable about the car, no new horizons (though the 6-foot-long hood seemed to create its own horizon out there) and the quality and power and distinction that it should have carried as both a Cadillac and the “last convertible” [sic] were absent. Nice car, not a classic in my mind. I’m willing to concede that maybe there was a renaissance of classic cars in the late ‘50s, a time when anything seemed possible and auto engineers tried wild and wonderful things: record players that fit in the dashboard, pivoting seats that would spin to let you out of the car, retractable hard tops and tailfins. In high-end cars like Cadillacs, the quality was tangible, and there were still limited-production models that did have some hand-labor in their construction. I’ll let you call these classics, too. But not the ’52 Chevys, the ’54 Pontiacs, the ’58 Fords. Nothing special there, guys. Neat old cars, not classics. So the next time you see a guy referring to his car as a classic, think about what classic might mean to you, and whether you think the word should be reserved for something special instead. And don’t get me started on the guys who call AMC Pacers antiques… See you next month. E-mail me at toolman8@sbcglobal.net This page accessed Thanks, Fidget! |