Of course not. Everyone borrows from everyone. The Cisitalia’s design was inspired by a Buick.   But if you decide you want to discount the influence of Europe, you’re not going to have much left, if anything.

And highly influenced by European designs.

Fad’s probably still a good term, but some fads keep coming back.

Calgary resident, and that’s about right. Right now, it’s torn between  whether it wants to be Dallas, or Austin.

Because car movies don’t always have to be about action and car chases, There’s Genevieve, a very British comedy from 1953 about the London to Brighton run.

A v-4 powered FWD Volkswagen beater?  You basically described the Ford Cardinal, which was originally going to hit the market in 1962 but Ford lost its nerve and ended up making it in Germany.  if your hypothetical AMC compact came out in 1960, it might have changed Ford’s mind about building an American version.  

And let’s not forgot that time before the federal government in the US was meddling was...1966?

And I’ll bet if you ask most of these people when cars were last “good”, almost invariably it will be about the time they were just entering adulthood, and everything was new and shiny.   It’s not about the cars, it’s about lost youth, and even the best car company is going to have a tough time bringing that back.

It’s a testament to the GM stylists during the Mitchell era that they could make a box on wheels look this good.

Basically, it was that the Soviets hadn’t quite figured out the landing part.

The mass of the Earth is about 6 times ten to the twenty first power tons, or 6 followed by twenty one zeros. Even a trillion tons in a negligible portion of that mass.  About a billionth of it.

Those old Ferraris also show that there’s more to being a supercar than just the numbers.

It just means the standards by which a car is judged to be “super” get raised. A Ferrari built in the ‘50s will be left in the dust by just about anything built today.

If some people have too much money, then makers of Bugattis and other outrageously expensive trinkets should be applauded for their heroic efforts to separate those people from their excess wealth.

According to Google, 9 Gs is the upper limit, which works out to 88.2 metres per second squared, which would give a 0 to 60 time of about 0.3 seconds.

I think you could make an argument that 1976 was the year of peak land yacht, just like 1959 was the year of peak tailfin, after that, designers came to their senses and started dialing things back.

I enjoyed it.  It’s basically a Star Trek episode, or more accurately, the sort of tale that was the prototype for the original series.

You’re right, this isn’t about logic, and that’s okay.

Fear not, “the worst thing on the internet” is a meaningless concept, like the biggest number.  There is always something worse.

If your family had clout back then, you could still have your enlistment defered, or you could get posted some place less hazardous, so even with a draft, if you were poor, or were the wrong colour, you were still more likely to end up with a target on your back. It also took the Korean War and six years of the…