CarPort

Timing, as they say, is everything. International Harvester’s timing seemed ideal, when it introduced the new Scout utility vehicle as a ’61 model. Intended to challenge the Jeep CJ-5, it offered more modern styling and a dose of creature comforts. Power came from a “half-V8” slant four, derived from a truck engine. Scouts could be had as open vehicles, with a full top or as a half-roof pickup. Like Jeeps, they were useful for plowing snow and other country chores, especially with the larger cargo area. The Scout that heads this page is the fairly rare “Sportop“,” available as a convertible or with a fiberglass hardtop.

More than 28,000 Scouts were built in the model’s first year, nearly as many as Jeep built CJs. Demand held steady, with Scouts selling near 30,000 most years, despite competition from the Ford Bronco and Chevy Blazer and Jeep’s Scout-inspired Jeepster Commando. More powerful engines followed, a turbocharged four, a small V8 in 1967 and an AMC straight six in 1969, the year an automatic transmission became available. In 1971 came a longer-wheelbase Scout II (this is a ’73), which offered power steering and brakes and factory air. In addition to the standard Scout there was a hatchback Traveler, and a pickup called “Terra.” In 1976, a Nissan six-cylinder diesel joined the option list.

Scout sales rose to more than 40,000 in the late 1970s, and a replacement, to be called “Scout III,” got as far as the clay modeling stage. There was also a concept called SSV, for Scout Supplemental Vehicle. This was a smaller, lighter vehicle with a composite body. Often thought to be a Scout successor, it was actually a test bed for new materials. Only two were built, one of which is on display at the Auburn Cord Duesenberg Museum in Indiana.

As we know now, the future for SUVs was bright. The Bronco went on to beget the Explorer, midsize SUV market leader since its inception, out of the Bronco II. (How many Explorers can you see?) GM and Chrysler rushed to ready their own, Chrysler buying American Motors in 1987 on the strength of Jeep alone. What happened to Scout?

International Harvester had its own troubles. The popularity of well-equipped pickups from the Big Three led to the discontinuation of International’s light trucks in 1975. That left the Scout without any “supporting siblings,” and International’s dealer network was never very robust anyway. A lengthy strike starting in 1979 took its toll, also. A look at Jeep sales in the period shows that volume increased markedly after the American Motors takeover in 1970, partly, no doubt, because AMC had more dealers than previous owner Kaiser Jeep Corporation, and their dealers were more in touch with free-spending automotive consumers than budget-conscious truck customers. There was an attempt to set up an independent Scout Corporation in Texas, but this fell victim to financial difficulties of the principal players. What would have happened, though, if Chrysler had bought the Scout business in the early 1970s? Would all today’s Jeepers be Scout leaders instead?

With more than 530,000 built in 20 years, there are plenty of Scouts still around. Many of them in the northeast plow snow (and in Colorado, too). Old battered Scouts can be found as log skidders and general roustabout backwoods vehicles. Mudders like them, too. The last Scout was built on October 21,1980. It’s alive and well and living in Iowa. More about that soon.

Everybody knows that Fluid Drive was Chrysler Corporation’s answer to Hydra-Matic, and that it goes “clunk” when it shifts. Everybody’s half right. Indeed, Fluid Drive, introduced on Chrysler cars for 1939 and extended to DeSoto and Dodge in 1941, was Chrysler’s weapon in the shiftless wars, arriving a year before Hydra-Matic and proving to be much more successful than the Reo Self Shifter and Lincoln’s ill-fated Liquimatic. But Fluid Drive doesn’t clunk – it doesn’t even shift.

That’s because Fluid Drive is simply a fluid flywheel, a concept employed by the British Daimler as early as 1933. As Chrysler explained it, a “driving wheel” attached to the engine is filled with a “special oil” (the fluid) which exerts force on a “runner wheel” that connects to the driveshaft (“Gyrol” refers to the “special oil;” the fluid couplings were developed in Germany). As the driver is spun faster and faster the runner turns with it, in a smooth application of power.

Instead of the repetitious routine of clutching and shifting a conventional car, one merely drops the Chrysler into high and steps on the gas. The result is a smooth getaway. Not just more convenient, it was safer, too – and easier on the car. This “cushion of power” was said to be trouble free – and thrilling. As thrilling, apparently, as driving a destroyer or a submarine. “Adopted in 1938” pertains to the 1939 model year, and the 1945 date on this brochure suggests that no innovation since 1915 was as noteworthy.

You note it says nothing about shifting. That’s because Fluid Drive, in its basic form, is just the fluid flywheel and a standard clutch. When ordered on a Dodge, that’s all you got. Drop it into third and go – smoothly but with destroyer-like acceleration. You did have to use the clutch, which Chrysler called a “Safety Clutch,” to get into gear, but afterwards all your driving was with your right foot. On Chrysler and DeSoto, though, it could be coupled to a transmission that shifted itself. This was actuated with vacuum, called Vacamatic by Chrysler and Simplimatic in DeSoto. There were two gears in each of two ranges, and the shift was actuated by lifting the throttle and waiting for the clunk. You could get Fluid Drive without Vacamatic/Simplimatic, but not vice versa.

After World War II, a new hydraulically-shifted transmission was used, designated “M5” (Vacamatic and Simplimatic were apparently M4; I don’t know what M1 to M3 were). Chrysler’s was called “Prestomatic,” DeSoto’s “Tip-Toe Shift,” but all else was the same. Interestingly, although “matic” was the industry-wide suffix for self-shifting, widely touted, Chrysler didn’t announce it on their cars. There were no Vac/Simpli/Presto/TipToe emblems. The cars simply said “Fluid Drive,” on Dodge’s rear bumper, DeSoto’s front fender and Chrysler’s stop lamp. DeSoto also put it on the glove box.

But wait, there’s more – only not right now. The story of Fluid Drive post-1948 will have to wait for another time.

Queen Isabella I is best known for bankrolling Christopher Columbus in his quest to the New World. Less remembered is her role, with husband Ferdinand (Ferdinand II of Aragon, Ferdinand V of Castile – he wore two crowns), in instigating the Spanish Inquisition. Which one, we might wonder, was on Carl Borgward’s mind when he introduced the Borgward Isabella in 1954?

Carl Friedrich Wilhelm Borgward was a manufacturer of small three-wheeled delivery vehicles he called “Goliath.” In 1929, he bought Hansa-Lloyd-Werke, another automaker, and merged it into a new Borgward Group, building Hansa cars and Lloyd and Goliath trucks. During World War II its output was military vehicles.

Postwar production didn’t resume until 1949, Borgward apparently having been interned and his factories destroyed. The first car was a slab-sided 1.5-liter sedan called the Borgward Hansa. In 1950, he introduced two small two-stroke front-wheel drive cars, the tiny 293 cc Lloyd and a 668 cc. Goliath. The Isabella, a unitary version of the Hansa with four-wheel independent suspension, debuted in June 1954. It came as a sedan, both with and without a canvas sunroof, a “Combi” station wagon, and a smart little cabriolet by coachbuilder Deutsch of Cologne. A coupe version was added in 1957. Power came from a 1493 cc. overhead valve four, developing 60 horsepower. A “TS” engine, which made 75 horsepower by increased compression, larger valves and a two-barrel carburetor, was available.

I discovered this Isabella coupe in Estes Park, Colorado, Gateway to the Rockies, while on a research trip. My main mission was study of the Stanley Steamer at the knee of Frank Hix, who instructed me in the art of firing up and raising steam. After successful liftoff, we took his Stanley 726 roadster to the Estes Park fairgrounds so that I could learn about the operators controls. Not surprisingly, the Borgward captured a few moments of my attention. It was obviously someone’s project, as it was covered with a tarp – doing more harm than good, probably, flapping in the wind – and was missing its radiator. I hope someone has restored it by now.

Carl Borgward had a brief surge of success, capitalizing on the American thirst for imported cars in the late 1950s. About a quarter of the Isabella’s production came to the United States through 1960, and Borgward was Germany’s fourth-largest auto manufacturer. The Goliath and Lloyd makes continued, some of which, particularly the Lloyd 600, were also imported to the U.S. The end of Borgward came rapidly. In 1961, the firm was declared insolvent, and the business liquidated. However, creditors were paid in full, and Borgward partisans today feel that some degree of skulduggery was involved, as the auditor in the case was supervisory board chairman of BMW. There are several Borgward clubs and sites that explore the history in more detail.

Carl F.W. Borgward died of a heart attack on July 28, 1963. Some of the factory machinery was sold to Mexican investors, who built a limousine version of the P100 model at Monterrey from 1968 to 1970. And the inspiration for the name “Isabella”? Not the Spanish queen, it seems, but rather Herr Borgward’s wife.

Gregg D. Merksamer is no shrinking violet. Heads turn when he enters a space; conversation stops as shock and awe spread through the room. It’s no surprise, then, that Gregg D’s recent visit to the North American International Auto Show landed him in the pages of the Detroit News. Gregg D., whose regular beat runs to morbid motorcars, is a persistent and perceptive reporter, so we are grateful for his impressions and images of the Detroit show, a bellwether of automobiles to come.

Gregg D. is bullish on the U.S. auto industry. Finding Motown “still the nexus of all things automotive,” he pronounced the show “chock full of splendid, American-branded debutantes that might actually attract some showroom traffic.” Among them were a Camaro convertible, reprising last year’s appearance of a revival F-car coupe, and the 2008 Cadillac CTS. The General drew honors, too, for the North American Car of the Year, the Saturn Aura, and Truck of the Year, the Chevrolet Silverado.

DaimlerChrysler intensified the minivan wars with “Swivel ‘n Go” seats for the new Dodge Caravan and Chrysler Town & Country, oddly counterpoising them with the van that started it all, the late Plymouth Voyager. Collapsible hard tops are all the rage, so Chrysler trotted out one for the Sebring, and showed a Nassau concept wagon dubbed a “shooting brake,” replete with a “bird in space” interior.

Wound-licking Ford brought out a concept vehicle called “Airstream,” for its aluminum exterior. With camp features like a 360-degree lava lamp, it uses a hydrogen fuel cell to charge a lithium-ion battery. More conventional is the Interceptor, a Mustang-based sedan with shaker hood scoop and a 400-hp V8 that runs on E-85. There were no new Mercs for Merks, but Lincoln showed the MK-R concept, a retro-themed sedan that Gregg says “pays homage to the 1941 Continental.” Maybe so, but I find its face frightening.

It wouldn’t be an auto show without some kind of new Jeep, and design veep Trevor Creed was only too glad to oblige, lauding the Trailhawk, a T-top terratraveler with retractable quarter windows.

Overseas entries included a concept Jaguar C-XF, intended as a preview of the next X-Type, and a four-door droptop “Ocean Drive” from Mercedes-Benz. Despite the name, it does not appear to be amphibious. Honda marked the silver anniversary of U.S. manufacture with a concept version of an Accord coupe, aimed at younger buyers. Rolls-Royce had a new Phantom drophead on show, its suicide doors restrained with speed-sensitive locks.

The Chinese are coming: it’s not a matter of whether but simply when. Chang Feng Motors showed three utility vehicles, a Liebao CS6 SUV, Liebao CS7 crossover, and a UU-CT_3 mini pickup. With Geely in abeyance and Bricklin divorcing Chery, perhaps Chang Feng, based at Hunan, will lead the Chinese charge.

A display of motoring heritage marked the centenary of Detroit’s first dealer-sponsored show. A 1912 Standard electric roadster, a 1930 Lincoln Willoughby Town Sedan, a 1927 LaSalle and 1936 Cadillac V-12 were visiting from the Harold E. LeMay collection in Washington State. Corporate retro was represented by the Holden Efijy coupe, an amalgam of Holden’s 1950s Australian FJ series with American 1930s themes reminiscent of the 2000 Buick Blackhawk.

EDAG, a German company, showed some concept hardtops, a hatchback on the Pontiac Solstice and a fastback for the Saturn Sky. Truly weird was Chang Feng’s Rhombus, a four-wheel car in a diamond pattern, designed by students at Hunan University. Did they know about the 1947 Gordon Diamond, I wonder?

And finally the United States will Get Smart. In 2008, we are told, Roger Penske’s United Auto Group will bring the new longer ForTwo to US dealerships. At NAIAS, a continuous parking gymkhana between two stretch limos demonstrated the agility of the little urban coupes.

Detroit may be back in the game, as Gregg D. says, but I think that Chang Feng – with Geely and Chery and probably SAIC, will soon be heavy competition.

Walter Chrysler and I have something in common. When he was 33 he bought a Locomobile and took it apart. I know the feeling: during the summer I turned nine I bought a Ford and did the same thing.

I knew I’d have a car sooner or later. I’d been consumed by them from my earliest memory, had learned to read from hubcaps and radiator ornaments. My moment came during the summer of 1953. A family friend had given me a copy of Ford at Fifty, the company’s commemorative book for the golden jubilee. It was a bit of puff publicity, a paean of praise, but it had lots of fascinating photos and some vignettes of folks with Fords. One concerned a farming family with an all-Ford fleet. One of the photos showed a youngster working on an old Ford truck. “I wish I had an old Ford to work on,” I mused.

It happened that my older cousin Ben had an extra one. He had recently traded up from his first car, a 1936 Ford convertible sedan, to a similar 1937 model. In the process he had acquired a parts car, but had taken all the parts he needed. He offered me the spare Ford for seven dollars. I didn’t hesitate. My dad towed it to our house, my uncle steering, with our Jeep. I was ecstatic, and spent the rest of the day daydreaming behind the wheel.

Thus started my Walter Chrysler period, learning by doing, taking my Ford apart. I read extensively, finding out how Fords were made, how they worked and how to fix them. Unlike Walter Chrysler, though, I didn’t put my car back together. Quite a few of the engine parts were missing, and not knowing the local junkyards I was at a loss to find them.

Ford built 4,378 convertible sedans in 1937, along with 3,723 phaetons without side windows. Whenever I see one I get nostalgic. I don’t feel any regret in failing to restore it – eventually I sold off many of its parts. The lessons it taught me, however, were invaluable. When I was given a complete but inoperative car, a ’47 Ford sedan, five years later, I was able to get it running within a week.

De sooner, de better. Chances are, if you live in the United States, your mail is delivered in one of these Long Life Vehicles. Ours is; if you live in a city yours may be brought to your door by an ambulatory carrier. Since 1986, the United States Postal Service has purchased nearly 100,000 LLVs from Grumman Olson Corporation.

Although the US Post Office, forerunner to today’s USPS, has been moving mail with motor vehicles since early in the Twentieth Century, carrier route delivery vehicles are a fairly recent phenomenon. Trucks were initially used to move mail between post offices and to transport carriers and mailbags to their routes. Intercity post was transported by trains. A standardized fleet of Model A Fords was placed in service in 1931; because of Depression austerity and priorities of World War II, many of these Model As remained in service until the 1950s. In the late 1940s, the USPO began to augment them with Chevys, Dodges and Internationals with special bodies by Gerstenslager Company of Wooster, Ohio.

When I was growing up, our mail was delivered by Marty in his own green Ford Ranch Wagon. He seemed to race from mailbox to mailbox, but perhaps this was because he was driving from the middle and steering with his left hand, and did the whole route in first gear. How he managed the clutch and accelerator I don’t know.

The first carrier route vehicles, which came in 1956, overcame this problem. They were right-hand drive Jeep Dispatchers, with bright red, white and blue paint jobs supplanting the olive drab of the old Model As and Gerstenslager trucks. The Dispatcher was a two-wheel drive version of the Jeep CJ-3; in 1965, a new style DJ-5 replaced it. The DJ-5 postal Jeeps used Chevrolet four-cylinder engines, the unit developed for the Chevy II, and Powerglide transmissions. After American Motors bought Kaiser’s Jeep business in 1970 the Rambler six was adopted, and a new extended grille was added to accommodate it.

The LLV had its roots in an experiment with electric mail trucks during the late 1970s. Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corporation had purchased the J.B. Olson Company, maker of truck bodies, in the 1960s. Grumman Olson, who made a popular Kurbmaster line of van bodies, decided to compete for the USPS contract with a vehicle called Kurbwatt, an all-aluminum unibody design. Some 41 Kurbwatts were placed in service, but the decline in oil prices caused interest in the project to wane. Grumman Olson then refitted the Kurbwatt with a front-drive Volkswagen Rabbit diesel power unit and sold it as the Kubvan. However, diesel demand was also fading by 1983, when the Kubvan was introduced. About 500 were built in 1983 and 1984.

The experience with the Kurbwatt and Kubvan, however, put Grumman Olson in an excellent position when the USPS put its LLV project out to bid. The LLVs have a Grumman Olson aluminum body mounted on a chassis derived from Chevy’s S10 pickup, using the “Iron Duke” engine driving the rear wheels through a Hydra-Matic transmission. More recently, the USPS has taken delivery of 21,000 Flexible Fuel Vehicles built by Utilimaster of Wakarusa, Indiana. The FFVs, somewhat larger than the LLVs, are built on right-hand drive, two-wheel drive Ford Explorer chassis, and can burn either gasoline or ethanol.

Many postal Model A Fords remained in service for 25 years. Today’s Long Life Vehicles celebrated two decades of service last year, and will remain on their routes for several more. As Poo-Bah sings in The Mikado, Long Life, Long Life to You!

The French had a word for it: “automobile,” combining Greek and Latin roots, though it was initially used as an adjective, as in voiture automobile (self-propelled conveyance). First used around 1890, the term did not catch on in the United States until 1899, when it replaced “motocycle;” in Britain “motor car” was preferred and still is, to some extent, today. The French needed a word because they had a motor industry, starting in 1883 with Count Albert DeDion, who teamed with Georges Bouton and M. Trepardoux to build steam cars. By the turn of the Twentieth Century there was a vibrant industry, including steam proponent Serpollet (1887, later Gardner-Serpollet), and internal combustion pioneers Panhard et Levassor (1889), Peugeot (also 1889 and still going), Delahaye (1894) and johnny-come-lately Renault (1898).

Moreover, the French have an enduring claim on the invention of the automobile, at least as we define it. Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot, a retired Army officer, was given a contract in 1769 to build a steam-powered tractor for towing artillery. His first voiture en petite was demonstrated the following year and carried four people at a walking pace, but could only run for 15 minutes before running out of steam.

That same year he began building another, tested in 1771. This was a tricycle some 24 feet in length, with a huge kettle of a boiler cantilevered over the single front wheel. Twin vertical cylinders operated directly on the wheel, their connecting rods alternately operating ratchets on the axle. A two-handed tiller operated a simple steering gear, and a long rod controlled the speed by modulating steam leaving the boiler. Slung below the chassis was a wicker fuel tank, containing chunks of wood. Though crude by today’s standards, including a total lack of brakes, it was forward-thinking in use of front-wheel drive and rack-and-pinion steering.

The fardier à vapeur (steam dray) operated on the streets of Paris, though the legends have gained in the telling. Conventional wisdom says it belched and snorted through the streets, terrorizing the good citizens, before knocking down a wall, whereupon the machine was seized and its inventor thrown into jail. Montagu and Bird dismiss the latter claims as “flights of purest fancy,” while admitting that the tradition concerning the wall is “strong” and might have resulted in some “trifling damage.”

What is perhaps most remarkable is that this mother of the motor car survives, on display at Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris. Much of it has been reconstructed, but the boiler and firebox are clearly original, nicely patinated and fragile in places. Its silhouette adopted as the emblem of the Society of Automotive Historians, you’d think that carfolk would be ten deep in paying homage, but on the day some friends and I visited in 2001 we had the fardier all to ourselves, save for the occasional browsing schoolboy.

I’ve owned 40-some cars in my lifetime, but only one Cadillac. In the summer of 1967, in a misguided fit of youthful enthusiasm, I bought a boat. Since my Austin-Healey Sprite was an inappropriate tow car, I looked around for something heftier. After considering a 1955 Cadillac, a 1960 Lincoln and the car I should have bought, a low-mileage 1957 Buick, I settled for a 1959 Cadillac Sedan de Ville.

Henry Martyn Leland (seen here with “Osceola,” his 1905 coupe) was the father of Cadillac and the “Master of Precision.” He developed exacting standards for machine work at Brown & Sharpe, then went to Detroit to build engines for the new motor trade. Leland’s Cadillacs were so precisely built that in 1908 three Model K cars were disassembled, their parts scrambled, then three cars built from the mixture, all of which started and ran. This earned Cadillac the Royal Automobile Club’s Dewar Trophy and the title “Standard of the World.”

By 1914, Cadillac was a large car, still with four cylinders but with electric starting and lighting. By 1923, closed cars were the norm and V8s ruled. As the Depression raged, Cadillac threw caution to the winds and introduced not just V-12s but also V-16s. In 1938, a young designer named Harley Earl penned the Sixty Special, a design icon to this day. Cadillac grew heftier in 1941, and after the war started the tailfin craze, and while the Fleetwood limos were anachronistic the fastback Sedanettes were positively beguiling.

It wasn’t until 1950 that Cadillac surpassed Packard for good as top-selling American luxury car, but from that time Caddy never looked back, though by 1952 the cars were a bit overbearing. Finer lines in 1954 improved the looks, and by 1957 the Cadillacs were low and lithe, the top-of-the-line Eldorado Brougham selling for a cool $13,500.

My ’59 was a camp caricature of a car, one of the reasons I bought it. The fins had grown to grotesque proportions by 1959 and the engine was now a 390 cubic inch behemoth. Mine was the four-window “flat top” style, rather than the more attractive six-window design, and had add-on air and gold lamé upholstery. It headstrong on snowy roads and several pairs of skis would fit in the trunk. The previous owner said it would run on Gulftane, Gulf’s cheap low-octane brand (it didn’t), and with 130,000 miles on the clock it needed lots of TLC, which included regularly checking the oil.

One Sunday evening I returned home from a weekend of skiing. The transmission had been shifting erratically and I nursed it the last 50 miles. I pulled into the driveway, shifted to reverse to turn it around and my Caddy didn’t move. My Hydra-Matic had “Park” and five “Neutrals.” The next day I took off as many saleable parts as I could and called the local scrapyard. I had owned the car for three months and it had cost me, including the purchase price, $300. For $100 a month, I reckoned, I could have a new car. I bought a showroom-fresh Volvo 122S.

Alfred P. Sloan’s doctrine of “a car for every purse and purpose” was firmly entrenched by the early 1930s. General Motors had a clear cascade of makes, from Cadillac at the top of the market to Chevrolet at the bottom. Walter Chrysler recognized the phenomenon, which led him to introduce price-leader Plymouth to balance his namesake Chrysler. Henry Ford, whose name was synonymous with economy, left his own car at the bottom, forsaking the marquee position to Lincoln. Chevrolet, Ford and Plymouth, then, came to be known as the “Low-Priced Three,” the place where a family of modest means would begin their car shopping.

The landscape was well established. In 1932, a Pontiac Six cost 22 percent more than a Chevy (based on the proverbial lowest-priced four-door sedans), a DeSoto 43 percent more than a Plymouth PB (Dodge cost more than DeSoto in 1932, remember). Ford’s bigger brother, Lincoln, didn’t really figure into this theory, as at $3,200 it was mega-times the cost of a $540 Model B Ford (this car was owned by my parents before my time – the children playing are my older cousins Becky and Ben).

In 1940, things hadn’t changed much. The “Pontiac premium” over Chevy had risen to 25 percent, Dodge, now the lower-middle Mopar, cost 15 percent more than Plymouth, and Ford had a middle sibling, Mercury, that cost 32 percent more. In 1950 the Pontiac–Chevy margin was down to 18 percent, Mercury–Ford difference had risen to 38 percent and Dodge kept its 15 percent lead over Plymouth.

The Sixties changed all that. The new compact cars from the Big Three, Corvair,
Falcon and Valiant, entered their companies’ price ladders at the bottom, commanding 12 to 15 percent less than “full size” cars. There were no Pontiac or Dodge compacts, and Mercury’s Comet arrived late in the year, priced just four percent more than a Falcon. Among the big cars, the Pontiac cost 16 percent over Chevy and Mercury was 19 percent more than Ford. But something ominous happened at Dodge. The new Dodge Dart Seneca cost less than one percent more than a full-sized Plymouth. When Dodge got a Valiant-clone, the Lancer, in 1961, its price premium was a scant one percent.

The tide had turned. Twenty years later, Pontiac’s margin over Chevy (model for model, Phoenix vs. Citation – there was no analog to the Chevette) was four percent. When the Pontiac T1000 came in 1981, its Chevette premium was but two percent. Mercury’s Zephyr cost only three percent more than a Ford Fairmont (though Bobcat’s margin over Pinto was a hefty 16 percent), while the Dodge Aspen and Plymouth Volare were actually priced the same. In fact, so were the Dodge Omni and the Plymouth Horizon.

The Big Three were not the only manufacturers to offer entry-level cars. Independents had them, too, though no single maker offered them consistently. In 1932, Hudson’s Terraplane (christened by aviatrix Amelia Earhart) sold for ten dollars more than a Ford or Plymouth, forty dollars less than a Chevy. The low priced insurgent in 1940 and 1950 was the Studebaker Champion, and in 1960 the Rambler American cost less than any of the Big Three compacts. Studebaker attempted inroads with the super-plain Scotsman in 1957-58 and the newly-shortened Lark made some headway in 1959. AMC came up with another price-leader, the ex-Gremlin $4,515 Spirit in 1980.

Fast-forward to 2001. Pontiac Sunfire had a Sloan-like margin of eight percent over the Chevy Cavalier. Mercury had nothing competing with Ford’s Focus, its cheapest car, the Sable, costing five percent more than a Taurus. Dodge and Plymouth were competing with Neons that differed only in their badge decals; their price stickers were still exactly the same. With hindsight, we can opine that Plymouth was doomed a full forty years earlier by Chrysler’s rejection of Sloanism. And the Low-Priced Three? There were three 2001 cars sold in the US priced under $11,000. They were made by Kia, Hyundai and Toyota.

As I was finishing my Christmas shopping a fortnight ago, I came back to the parking lot and was greeted by these two silver cars. The one on the right is my everyday Infiniti I30, on the left a Jaguar XJ6, successor to the Series 3 Jag XJ6 I admitted lusting after in a previous CarPort. While I considered my old Infiniti J30 as a Japanese Jag, somewhat equivalent to the S-Type, I had never equated the I30 to an XJ6. Seeing the two cars together made me wonder if they’re not closer than conventional wisdom admits. Could I have indulged my craving and satisfied my transportation needs with a single car?

The two cars are of different generations. The XJ, designated XJ40 in Jaguarspeak, was introduced in 1986 to replace the already long-in-the-tooth Series 3. The I30, an overlapping successor to the J30, was derived from the fourth generation Nissan Maxima and launched in 1996. Mine’s a ’98; the XJ6 seen here is a 1995 model (I had to check the VIN to be sure), made in this form until 1997, after which it was available only with a V8. It carries the XJ40 24-valve evolution of the legendary Jag XK dohc six. The Infiniti has Nissan’s new-for-1995 VQ30DE engine, a 24-valve V6 called one of the “ten best” by Wards AutoWorld since its inception. While giving up a full liter of displacement and 55 bhp to its Jaguar rival, the VQ accelerates the I30 from zero to sixty in the same 8.1 seconds, due to its smaller overall size and 930-pound lighter weight. While the VQ is judged among the smoothest of V6 engines, there’s nothing like a straight six, an inherently balanced design, for vibrationless running (although under Ford stewardship Jaguar no longer has an inline engine). The Jag is rear-wheel drive, more agile in dry conditions, but I prefer the I30’s front-wheel propulsion when winter comes to New England.

The Jag is longer and wider, and presumably roomier inside, but for trunk space the Infiniti beats it by three cubic feet. No doubt British handling is more spirited than a Japanese car tuned for American tastes, but the low-end grunt of the VQ engine allows tall gearing that will achieve 28 mpg in highway driving (I’ve done it), vice the Jag’s rated 23. I give the Jag an edge for aesthetics; the Infiniti’s styling, while pleasant, is rather bland.

When I bought my I30, a year ago this month, I didn’t even consider an XJ6. I don’t regret the decision. A comparable XJ would have cost at least $1,000 more and I’d have had a narrower field of choice. That thousand dollars, less than a 20 percent differential now, takes on a different tone when considered as depreciation. The XJ6, at $54,400, cost nearly twice the price of an I30 when new.

My nearest Infiniti dealer is no closer (50 miles) than the Jaguar store, but it matters not. Mechanical parts are available from the local Nissan dealer, as well as the aftermarket – but in 12,000 miles of driving all I’ve needed, other than oil changes, is a pair of brake rotors and a knock sensor. J.D. Power rates the Infiniti’s long-term dependability as “5 out of 5,” while the XJ is only “average.” Consumer Reports gave the I30 red circles, while all Jaguars were dealt black spots.

Strictly speaking, the Infiniti comparable to an XJ Jag is the V8-engined Q45, not the I30, but even the new “entry level” X Type Jag is larger and heavier than the I30. So on balance I think I got a Jag wannabe that’s more reliable and more economical, at a lower price. I still want a Jag, but I’ll wait to find the right Series 3 XJ6 at the right price, strictly as a plaything. Lust, after all, loses its luster if you indulge it every day.