RIP, Robert C. Stempel

Longtime GM executive Bob Stempel, who rose to the rank of GM CEO in the Nineties, died Monday at his home in Florida at the age of 77. Most of the obituaries note that Stempel was ousted as GM’s chairman following a stormy two-year tenure that ended in 1992. The boardroom coup that ended in […]

Class of ’86 – Oldsmobile Toronado

Image courtesy oldcarbrochures.com Looking back over the vehicles we’ve so far selected for the Class of 1986, we can pretty quickly come to a couple conclusions about the vehicles in showrooms that year. One, it was a year that saw great downsizing, thanks in part to the previous decade’s fuel crises and to the early […]

SIA Flashback – The Long and Short of It

My love for the shorty-type cars is not unprecedented, as we see from Ray Scroggins’s article on shortened and lengthened cars from SIA #66, December 1981. Less a rigorous examination of the causes for shortening and lengthening cars, Scroggins’s article is more a stab at a compendium, showcasing some of the various types of cars […]