While I haven't been much of a fan of Motor Trend lately, I picked up the Sept/Oct issue of Motor Trend Classic for an article on the Corvair, and an interesting piece on the '59 Chevy's fins.
This morning I'm going through, page by page, checking out the mag, and I find an editorial by Angus Mackenzie, entitled "History Lesson", and I swear, this man somehow got inside my mind and published what I (and others) have been thinking and posting here for years. Here are some excerpts:
"...Henry Ford: 'History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want tradition...' The irony is Ford Motor Company might be in a whole lot less trouble right now if the folks who run it ignored Henry's advice and read a little history once in a while."
"After decades of thrashing about, GM is only now beginning to coalesce into an automaker with a strong, centralized engineering, design, and product-development core supporting brands with a clearly defined place and purpose in the market."
"GM is rediscovering the basics. But, ironically, this is stuff it had already figured out 50 years ago."
"For far too long, Detroit has been preoccupied with building cheap clones of Japanese and European automobiles..."
"The truth is, for the best part of two decades, a truck was about the only thing you could buy from Detroit that had a muscular V8 under the hood and didn't look like a jellybean. The 300C has proven that if you give Americans a real American car, they will buy it."
"Camaros, Challengers, Galaxies, Bonnevilles, Caprices, Torinos, Gran Sports, Catalinas, Trans Ams. They're all history. But they ain't bunk."
Bravo! This had to be said in a major publication!
(And I really like how he mentions 3 proud Pontiac names in that last paragraph.)