CarPort

On March 6, 1956, Renault launched La Dauphine, The Princess, in Paris. It was to make Regie Nationale des Usines Renault a world-class manufacturer and give the company a major toehold in the United States. Before World War II, Société Renault Frères had been a full-line manufacturer, making cars up to Chrysler-class with eight cylinder….
Read full article

About three years ago at Hershey I came across a sight that stopped me in my tracks. What to my wondering eyes appeared was the strangest 1942 Dodge I’d ever seen. A placard on the vehicle suggested it was a prototype for a Dodge-based Town & Country, and proffered a hefty asking price. We all….
Read full article

Michael Della Gala liked the item we did back in June 2006 about ambulance conversions by Guy Barnette and Co. of Memphis, Tennessee. In his home town of Utica, New York, the Masonic Home Hospital ordered a Chevrolet ambulance in 1951. A Chevy sedan delivery was duly shipped from Detroit to Memphis, where Barnette proceeded….
Read full article

Shortly after I posted last week’s CarPort about two-door station wagons, I became aware that the International Station Wagon Club was holding its national meet at the historic Publick House in Sturbridge, Massachusetts, not far from where I live. Coincidence or not, it seemed like an opportunity not to be missed, so I didn’t miss….
Read full article

Station wagons are as old as the hills. Billy Durant’s Star was the first to introduce one, and Ford the first to mass produce them, starting with the Model A. But until after World War II, with a very few exceptions like Bantam, all station wagons had four doors. Credit Willys with two significant innovations….
Read full article

It is not inapt to think of automotive concours as beauty pageants. Concours d’Elegance, after all, translates from the French as “elegance contest.” And since beauty is in the eye of the beholder one can expect all sorts of beauty, provocative and subtle, beguiling and bewitching. Such was the experience at the thirteenth annual Greenwich….
Read full article

She did on Sunday last, when hundreds of British cars descended on Waterford’s Harkness Park for the Connecticut MG Club’s 21st annual British Cars by the Sea meet. Not surprisingly, MGs ruled, mostly MGBs, in chrome and rubber trim. A good range of MGs attended, however, from TC to TD to TF, and MGAs in….
Read full article

Our town does its parading on Memorial Day – actually the Sunday before Memorial Day. The Fourth of July is generally celebrated with family picnics or parades in other towns. Some 30 years ago, America’s automakers did a disservice to the nation by discontinuing the production of convertibles, ever useful for parading lovelies and luminaries.….
Read full article

The summer I turned seven my parents bought their first house. It was old and run down, and among other things needed a new driveway. My father hired Foss Webb, owner of Webb’s Trucking, to deliver some gravel. Mr. Webb had two Ford dump trucks, of the type at the top of this page. Knowing….
Read full article

Over at the Hemmings Blog, one of the more inspired forms of journalism to emanate from southern Vermont, they’ve been obsessing of late about the fate of abandoned AMC dealerships. You may think this is the ultimate fetish on a famous forgotten marque, but it’s an important part of an underappreciated sub-culture, automotive archeology, the….
Read full article