Car Flake III Trivia Quiz

Answer: Pinto

Yes, and it even _looked_ like the woebegone thing as well! The chunky, decidedly un-Mustang-y looking Mustang II was a sales success, but a car-flake bomb, as it had anemic straight-line performance and mushy, ill-defined handling. It also wasn't the most crashworthy car around either, back then, considering its origins!

The car ran from 1974 to 1978 and was replaced by the even _less_ Mustang-y looking 1977-78 model Mustang, whose basic body style lasted for a record-breaking 17 years! Even the 1968 Corvette or the many single permutations of the Dodge Dart and Plymouth Valiant didn't last that long!

Answer: The Wildcat

This model was specific to the 60s and early 70s and hasn't been revived since! It was supposedly the "sport" model in the full-size Buick lineup, but trying to equate the word "sport" with the name "Buick" is a difficult feat at best. It was essentially gaudier than a Le Sabre and much less formal than an Electra, and actually sold fairly well.

The Invicta was a model that lasted from 1959 to 1964. The Wildcat essentially replaced it in '65. The Special was both a Buick "senior compact" of the early 60s and a large car of the 50s.

The Star Chief was, of course, the mid-range Pontiac of the 50s and early 60s. The Le Sabre, Invicta and Electra names were introduced in the 1959 model year.

Answer: The 2000 GT

Introduced at the 1965 Tokyo Auto Show, the 2000 GT didn't see production until 1967. It was designed by Albrecht Goertz, and was a collaboration between Toyota and Yamaha. This car beat the Nissan 240Z to the market by about 5 years, but was as rare as hen's teeth in the States and was considered a much more exciting car! It bore a great resemblance to the Ferrari Boxer Berlinetta of the early 70s.

The Bond movie it was in? "You Only Live Twice".

Answer: Cord and Duesenberg automobiles

Yep. Considered the "upper triumvirate" of American brands, after Packard, The Auburn, (especially the boattail Speedster,) the fwd Cords and any Duesenberg were the rolling royalty of pre-WWII America. All three were produced under the umbrella of the Aurburn Motor Car Co.

A man named Erret Lobban Cord ran the company from 1926 until the late 30s, when the company went under. Every model the company has ever produced is considered a prized collector's item, especially the boattail Aurburn, any Cord and any Duesy.

The company's Lycoming V-12 engine was so well designed, that it was used in American La France trucks and fire engines until the mid-60s!

Answer: Batman

The "Batmobile" that Adam West drove in the ABC mid-60s TV show "Batman" was a Lincoln Futura show car ever-so-slightly customized by George Barris, "King of the Kustomizers". This baby was supposed to be atomic powered and had more gadgets than James Bond's Aston Martin. Oddly enough, except for the nuclear aspect, most police cruisers today are outfitted just about as well!

Answer: Dinah Shore's Variety Show, The Pat Boone Show and Bonanza

"See The USA In Your Chevrolet", perhaps the best known jingle for Chevrolet, was part and parcel of the "Dinah Shore Chevy Show". Pat Boone also benefited from the sponsorship of what was then, unequivocally, the most popular car on the road. "Bonanza" also had the steady ad flow for its entire NBC run on Sunday nights.

The Chevrolet division of GM alone, at one time, had a larger percentage of the market than _all_ of Ford Motor Company!

Answer: The Henry J

The Henry J was a model made for newlyweds and post war young folk on a budget by the Kaiser-Frazer Corporation, and indeed, looked just like a lemon with small tailfins. It has a very active fan base dedicated to the restoration and showing of these obscure, post-war vehicles. It was very small, even by the standards of the late 40s.

Answer: Kaiser Darrin

Surprise! It wasn't the venerable 'Vette, but the rare-as-hair-on-a-duck Kaiser Darrin, a rather long machine that had an odd, diamond-shaped grille and great expanses of plastic fenders dwarfing its two passengers. This model was, again, made by The Kaiser-Frazer Corporation, beating the Corvette to the market by only weeks!

Answer: True

For a good portion of the 1930s, Morgan's only model was a steadily evolving three-wheeled vehicle that at different points had an internally and externally mounted engine. These cars handily won races, especially races where traction was important.

Morgan has been a legendary name as long as there have been sports cars. One model, the 4/4, has been in continuous production for _seventy years_! Their latest model is the new Aero 8, introduced in 2000, that sells for $80,000+, that has the company's second V-8 shoehorned into it. Morgan was also the only other car company, besides Marcos, to use wooden elements in their chassis.

Answer: 1975

The 1975 "E21" 3 series model was the successor to the venerable 2002, which was itself descended from the 1600 two-door. This was the first of the three-digit nomenclatured offerings from BMW, and was soon followed by the 5 series, and the 7 series, which replaced the Bavarian. Car and Driver and Road and Track magazines had no small part in popularizing the "driver's car" status of BMW, bringing it from obscurity to the enviable place in the automotive world it has today. Today's BMWs are light years away from the Isettas and BMW 1800s of the sixties and fifties in quality and engineering.

Answer: 5

One Lincoln, two European Ford small coupes, one European Ford two-seater, and one American Mercury pony car have all had the name "Capri". For some reason, Ford can't settle on a model type to affix the name to permanently. The Lincoln was a giant, entry level model during the '55-'60 model run, the second was a chintzy little coupe made in Britain that resembled a scaled-down '60 Ford Starliner coupe, the next was a very popular little VW Bug-fighter in the 70s, (a collaboration of both the German and British arms of Ford,) fourth was a clone of the 77-78 Mustang and the last was a tiny European two-seater ragtop.

The name has run the entire spectrum of car types, from full-size, to compact, to subcompact to sports car. All that's left is an intermediate!

Answer: True

Yes, the Corvette introduced fuel injection in 1958, putting it head and shoulders above just about anything else on the road, sports car performance-wise, in that year. Only a Ferrari had any chance of catching a 'Vette on the straightaway, though the sporty Chevy would probably still be left behind in the twisties. The fueler 'Vette registered 290 bhp on the dynamometer and had options ranging from power windows to a heavy duty suspension.

Where's Route 66...?

Answer: Utopian Turtletop

Famous today as one of automobile-dom's great failures, Ford had a lot riding on the Edsel, the first new line of full-sized cars introduced by the Big Three since Mercury was introduced, also by Ford, in the 30s. It was aimed at the niche market slotted inbetween Ford and Mercury...a slot not exactly aching to be filled. It was correspondingly somewhere between Pontiac and Oldsmobile in the GM lineup and where Dodge and Chrysler were in the old MoPar line-up, just south of De Soto.

The car was actually the most tastefully styled full-sized model made by Ford in 1957-58, the year that Mercury had pretty much secured itself a page in the annals of awful automobile styling with the Monterey, Park Lane and Turnpike Cruiser monstrosities of 1957. Even Ford itself wasn't especially attractive in 1958. Lincolns of the same period looked entirely too Hollywood, resembling Jayne Mansfields on wheels! The exterior fit and finish of the Edsel models actually appeared almost exemplary in 1957-58, with a smooth, lustrous paint finish and panels lining up beautifully. Interiors, however, were typically junky, as were the interiors in most cars in those days.

Alas, the public just couldn't get past that "Oldsmobile sucking a lemon" look the car had, and the marque was eventually moved up to Canada after 1959, a particularly gaudy styling year, where it had a run that lasted perhaps two years longer than it did down here. By this time, it was essentially nothing more than a chromed-up Ford, in 1960 and 1961.

Answer: True

Yep! Take a Chevy Corsica, take the old bow-tie off the front and back ends, fix the old Pontiac arrowhead there instead, and replace "Corsica" with "Tempest" on the sides, and _voila!_, an old, obscure marque is revived! This was only up in Canada, of course, mind you.

Answer: 124 4 Door Sedan

Production of this model, a mainstay of Russian automobile production for decades, began in the early 70s. You can see an example of it in the James Bond films "The Living Daylights" and "Goldeneye". Not one line was changed in the translation, though the car was beefed up for Russian conditions.

This was all done with the cooperation of Fiat itself, oddly enough, in the Russian town of Togliatti, named after an Italian communist(!). Volvo and BMW are also popular marques in the former Soviet Union.