The rear end of a 1958 Cadillac in The Brockbank Omnibus.

Ford Future

For the first time in more than eighteen years, I have a new address. The commute should be familiar, I still leave from and come home to the same driveway.

The beds have been moved, the kitchen is open, and we've been technically living in the larger side of the duplex for four days. There are still exposed outlets, unfinished Ikea furniture, and piles of stuff laying on the floor. It will take a long time to fully settle in.

But last night, I had the first opportunity in over a month to go to the basement and shuffle some furniture around. I emptied a tote, placed the first bookshelf, and made an important token effort in getting the office moved.

It's going to take most of March, I think, to get to a point where I can work on posting new content to CarsAndRacingStuff.com. I have to clear the main work space of display cases and shelves and boxes and other furniture, but first I need to clear a space to put all of that. Then I have to get my desk, work table, and all of the associated equipment upstairs from one side of the basement and back down on the other side, and plug everything in.

It's been a fight every step of the way. Shorted on construction materials deliveries. Broken furniture delivered. Two deliveries needed to get the dishwasher installed. Having to trade in a reliable but uninsurable little car and receiving an obnoxious bucket of electronic issues in return. Half our Amazon purchases being not as described in some way: size, materials, or just plain falling apart when assembled.

Has there ever been an era of post-Industrial Revolution history where the American people have paid more and gotten less?

There's the Malaise Era of automotive history, brought about by a combination of oil supply issues and environmental concerns. We were quickly forced into cutting horsepower and adopting emissions controls, and American automakers weren't very good at building for efficiency. Fuel economy took center stage in automobile advertising. Luxury features became the main way of differentiating high end automobile from common commuter car, and Detroit came out with some wild styles. “Rich Corinthian leather” had its day.

It took us more than two decades to figure out how to engineer digital fuel injection properly and start to surpass the performance of the muscle car era. We took what we were forced to learn about handling and efficiency and began to apply it to updated versions of the small block engine of the 60s and came up with some truly wonderful muscle cars in the 2000s and 2010s.

But yanking the emergency brake on automotive performance came from a combination of Cold War fighting via trade as well as pollution in America's industrial heartland getting so bad the Cuyahoga River caught on fucking fire in 1969.

It wasn't fun. I had a 1985 Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera with a computer controlled carburetor that had to be traded in because I couldn't find or rebuild the missing air pump hose. The computer wasn't effective at controlling the carburetor and the air pump was necessary to assist the catalytic converter in burning the excess fuel the engine couldn't. The emissions test notice came, and I had to move on.

This feels similar. All across the board, people are paying more and getting less, and while companies complain that the increasing prices are due to increased labor cost, raises aren't keeping up with inflation. All that money has to be going somewhere, and the same companies that cry poverty when it comes time to discuss raises in their employees' annual performance reviews are crowing about their record profits in their shareholder meetings.

It's 2024, don't they know the working class can get recordings of those now?

It's an attitude that's been widely adopted in automotive manufacturing. Ford is one of the worst at this. Or maybe they're just the most vocal. Having forced their UAW workers to give concessions in the recession to keep the company afloat, they're swimming in cash and the company won those concessions back in their recent strikes. Jim Farley's response was to say that the company just might not be able to make vehicles in the United States anymore. Henry Ford used to believe that America should be the world's manufacturer and that his workers should be able to afford the cars they build.

In 2024 every company is obsessed with squeezing every penny out of every transaction with no regard to the future of the company or their brand. Amazon is flooded with counterfeits, most of the rest is junk plastered with AI-generated fake brand names, they appear to be breaking credit card network agreements by re-charging to different payment methods the transactions they lose in disputes, they're adding ads to their “ad-free” plans, but their stock price steadily climbed all through 2023.

Automobile sales isn't exempt from the less-for-more attitude, either. Recently I bought a $31,000 Ford Maverick XLT with a faulty $80 component. Maybe I should have stuck with Hyundai/Kia since they've been so good to us throughout the years, but I wanted a small truck and aside from the price difference the Hyundai Santa Cruz is far too “Special Forces” and I was looking for a more “Union Electrician” look. I had my heart set on a white XL, the basic work truck look for The Crittenden Automotive Library, but we came across an XLT in the putty beige Terrain color and my wife liked the heated seats. I love them, too, I just could never bring myself to pay for them for my own use. I've always been the kind to offer to suffer a little so we could afford them on her car.

Anyway, back to the truck and its electronics. It's a known failure, with lots of similar messages on Maverick forums. But the dealership says that even though I showed a photo of the computer error, and they can replicate the problem in the parking lot, they can't replicate it often enough to submit an intermittent part failure to Ford. This is because Ford might test it, and if it works for them they'll decline the warranty on the $80 part. So for the cost of an $80 part (labor wouldn't have been required since they had the dashboard apart for a scratched instrument cluster that happened before delivery), I'm definitely never buying from that dealership again and can't recommend anyone buy a brand new Ford if that's how the dealerships have come to handle their manufacturer's policies.

It feels like the concept of charging a little more for producing quality products, or providing any kind of customer service, is a relic of the pre-pandemic times. They definitely adopted the “charge more” part of that business strategy but realized they can double dip in the profits if they cut back on all possible costs as well. And why should the executives care? If they burn down one business, they'll immediately get a job at another based on their ability to profit from the arson while the working class is left jobless for long enough to feel some pain.

It says something about our collective conscience that we allow this to keep happening and keep blaming the wrong people for it. And if this continues, once private equity has extracted every possible dollar from the American public and moves on to the next available resources like the aliens in Independence Day, will the Ford Motor Company even exist as it does today? Or will it eventually become a Saudi- or Chinese-owned company building ever cheaper tin cans in low-labor-cost countries that vaguely resemble Ford's past glory to sell to ever poorer Americans that are no longer able to generate their own wealth in manufacturing?

Will it be like Volvo, who retain most of their identity from their pre-Geely days? Could it be like Chrysler under Stellantis, a shrinking but somewhat stable mixed bag with Ram spun off and Chrysler/Dodge down to the Hornet & Durango & Pacifica after the Challenger/Charger/300 finally ends production? Or could it end up worst of all like MG, a brand bought to be applied to cheap Chinese hatchbacks that have nothing to do with the MG legacy?

What does a CEO like Jim Farley even think of his role and future legacy in this era, both in terms of where the Ford Motor Company will be twenty years from now, and his role as one influential CEO among many setting the tone for a larger trend that will leave the entire nation less prosperous? Does he spare a thought for the fates of thousands of American families whose breadwinners he'd like to replace with lower paid workers in other countries? Or will his chest swell with pride when he thinks of the quarterly profits he delivered to his friends at the World Economic Forum?

629.2

The Dewey Decimal System's designation for automobiles falls within the 629.2 range. This section is about The Crittenden-Walczak Collection.

The first book sale finds of the new year have been brought home, as well as a jackpot trip to a Half Price Books clearance section.

My favorite one was The Brockbank Omnibus, a collection of cartoonist Russell Brockbank's work as art editor of Punch magazine. It was published in 1958 and details decades of his mostly motoring-themed cartoons.

Someone had apparently dropped off their entire collection of books of classic magazine and newspaper cartoons, and I was browsing through those hoping maybe to find something just like this...even though I didn't know at the time that it existed.

Brockbank's art style often involved drawing real vehicles in great detail. To automobile enthusiasts, these cartoons were welcome Easter eggs among the usual generic cars found in cartoons. In some instances, the use of recognizable cars (such as the 1958 Cadillac in this month's featured image) communicates that the subject is a luxury car in a way that's otherwise very hard to do in black-and-white line drawing.

If there are other versions, I'm not entirely sure, but the edition I picked up was published in the United States in 1958 and I can't find a copyright renewal. As you can tell from the image above, it's a little dark & fuzzy at the left margin so this one will have to wait for a proper bookedge scanner before getting scanned for CarsAndRacingStuff.com.

And that will have to wait until I have an office to put it in.

History Beyond the Bumpers

The Crittenden Automotive Library includes information from all aspects of automotive transportation and competition. This section highlights interesting topics related to automobiles other than vehicles themselves.

The key to my new truck on one of John Walczak's old keychains. Detroit Lions marketing photo unveiling their alternate helmet in 2023.

My favorite automotive-themed hockey team, the Detroit Red Wings, are finally having a good season. That's not why I've followed them for more than the past two decades, it's a happy coincidence.

But as good as the Red Wings are, the Detroit Lions had an even better season. And following the local Red Wings broadcasts meant getting a LOT of talk about the Lions. I hadn't been watching football since the Chicago Bears blew that Super Bowl in 2007. But Detroit's sports fans sold me on tuning in. Dan Cambell's grit philosphy, combined with an offense that actually scored points, made me come back for more.

Being from Detroit, and playing alongside the Red Wings and the Pistons, having a strong automobile industry connection was unavoidable.

The last time I'd paid any attention to the Lions was in the Barry Sanders era. I'd vaguely remembered that one of the Ford family owned the team but they played in the Pontiac Silverdome, which was named for the city and not the car. What I hadn't known, until the team brought it back recently, was that there was definitely a Ford-inspired Detroit Lions logo.

The their 1950 models Ford introduced a red, white, and blue three-lion crest that seems to have been inspired by King Richard the Lionheart. It carried on in various versions through the late 1970s, but it's that first logo in those early years that are the most important. The crest adorned some of Ford's greatest cars in America's golden years, and carries a lot of positive memories for those who are old enough to remember.

In 1961 William Clay Ford Sr. took over ownership of the Detroit Lions football team. In that year the team introduced two logos. The one on the helmet resembled the familiar blue leaping lion that would remain relatively unchanged (except for the addition of a white outline) until 2003 when the blue was lightened and the outline was sharpened. The lightening and sharpening was taken a step further in 2009.

But the Detroit Lions introduced a second logo the year WCF took over the franchise. They would use the other for more corporate functions like their letterhead, and that one resembled two racing stripes and one of the Ford Motor Company's lions.

William Clay Ford Sr. died in 2014, and the Lions wore a WCF patch on their chest for three seasons. They would finally move the memorial initials to a permanent place on the sleeve, something familiar to a guy who watched a lot of Bears games in his life.

In 2023 the Lions finally put that logo that looks like one of the Ford Motor lions on the field on a Honolulu blue helmet paired with gray jerseys as an alternate uniform.

It looks like year the Red Wings will possibly have a new alternate logo for at least one game. The NHL announced that the Columbus Blue Jackets will host the Red Wings at the Stadium Series game in March of 2025, and while the Winter Classic designs look vintage the Stadium Series jerseys are supposed to be bold and futuristic. I'm hoping for a Cragar SS wheel with a Firestone Wide Oval and black outlining the wing, but that really is just me.

Telemetry

CarsAndRacingStuff.com site statistics.

Not a full bounce back to December's numbers, but no more red. That's all I can say about the stats at this point.