Will Today's Wagons Ever Be Classics?

You look at this pic and have to wonder if the 'wagons' of today will ever exude the same feelings:

 

No.
Wagons of our American past represent the history of America, the history of the American family and the history of Detroit. There will never be another era so loved and missed. That's what I love about this Forum. It's about the wagons....but it's more than that....it's about the times that these wagons were built and who they were built for and why they were built and how they were built. I cannot even come CLOSE to explaining how I miss those times, those people and those cars. The people here on this forum are close knit because they share all of these feelings and memories. Even the younger people here that love wagons have feelings for those times gone by. When I drive a beautiful old survivor wagon down the road I'm making a statement. The statement is that I am proud to be a member of those times that share this car's history.

 

That! is the statement every CEO should get. Brilliant and clear! Well said.

Our economies are built on the nuclear family, and they build hatch-backed CUVs. Try doing that picture in one of those.

Since those years, the North American and European birthrates are down. Youth crime is exponential and families don't play together anymore.

If you go back to the covered wagon, families travelled and camped and played together. The Stationwagon kept it going, and became a multipurpose hauler. Add a room for the new baby, build the kitchen bigger, a garage for the other car. Now, we've got bigger homes and no kids. Transportation binds families together. Whether its on camel backs or covered wagons or station wagons.

:rant:

 

On a lighter note

My wife loses her glasses and keys all the time. But what if you lost your car in this parking lot?



At first I thought it was a Ford Factory Production storage yard, but you can see some older luxury Phaetons in there too.

 

Wagons Better than Bear Spray

At least he didn't claw the paint! But he knows his wagons!

 

I'd have to say NO also, good blunt and to the point comments made alwready. Everything is made disposable today, all the computor crap in cars now you would have to be a computor geek 20 years from now just to keep it running and you would have no time to maintain the body or interiour.

The good old wagon, we still want a 1970 or older one. Seems everytime one comes up for sale the timing is never rite

We have a bout new 99 Saffari van but when it comes to road trip time the "ol wagon" has always been the choice....mainly because of trustworthy quality,,,,,Hey Big Three, did you hear that? Remember what that was??

 

Guys like us must be a PITA for the new car companies. We keep proving them wrong-headed, and our old wagons outlast their newbies for decades later.

A car with computer wizardry would be a tough thing to maintain past the warranty period, if only for the chips and circuitboard upgrades. Obsolescence is the key to their higher volumes, but it doesn't serve the buying customer past the payments, unlike ours.

You buy a hammer for $25 one year, and 10 years later its $19.99. You buy a brand new 1957 Chevy Belair for under $1,800, and a new 1967 Impala costs $4,400. Where are the economies of scale? They made far fewer 1957 Belairs than 1967 Impalas. And the hammer is still in your toolbox, when you pass it onto your children.

Not right. They should build them upgradeable, instead of redefining them every 2 years. You could take a 1957 283 CID and drop into a 1999 Chevy or even later (2001 or 2002?), and with some major rewiring, you could do the reverse. Try that with the rice-rockets or their North American badge sisters.

They call themselves General Motors, Ford Motor Corp and Chrysler Motor Corp., but their focus is on the body and bling, not the heart. And plastic bodies and molded fibrous plastic frames in the top half of the cars too. One accident and its off the road or unsound. Krazy Glue Frame repair.

Same weight, more plastic, more non-self-repairable components, and no major benefit to the consumer. After 100 years of production, this industry is less efficient and cost-effective and nearly bankrupt, with all the robotics on the assembly line. How can that be? :banghead3:

 

How can that be? Well...now you border on politics. I don't discuss politics...I'm afraid of killing someone. But the big picture, as I see it, is we have to damn many do-gooders that want to CHANGE everything. We have to gear down instead of up so we are an equal world. Our fore fathers worked hard to get this country where it was and now there are people that want to hammer it until it crumbles. Do NOT get me near one of those people. I will hold on to the good old USA and take the great memories to my grave.

 

No not politics. I'm an Industrial Engineer. I designed and built factories in Canada and Mexico, and even helped redesign Elgin Clock's Chicago operations. I know what being competitive means and building better quality by finding better ways to build a competitive product. The car companies have failed, despite all the advanced technologies they have.

Elgin was one of my biggest clock case customers. Timex was my biggest. Oak and Ash clock cases. I bought the wood from the US (Carolinas), shipped it to my plant in Alberta, and shipped the finished cases to them, paying highend wages (Alberta is Oil country, nobody works cheap) and with less administration and overhead than either of them could, and I still made a gross margin of 45%! Elgin bought me out, and hired me to update their plant. Timex couldn't believe that we could get a custom 3" high LCD made in Canada, with non-Asian parts, for less than they could. We only had 47 employees.

There's no hard-cost reason the Auto companies can't be more efficient. Admin is too big. The Mopar and GM execs aren't engineers, they're bean-counters. Bean-counters don't run companies to succeed, they run them until they aren't cashcows.

 

Everything you say is true...but you have to wonder how we (or they) GOT to that point. I owned and operated a marketing/advertising company for 30 years and handled national and international industrial corporations and saw the trends happening. That's one reason I retired at an early age. But...I think I'm done on this subject...it is WAY to deep and complex for this venue. I could write a book about it but I don't have enough time left to finish it! Suffice it to say that you, in your post, alluded to the new type of people that are running these companies today. Enough said.

 

SF, at the risk of being bashed a bit, all the major Software companies (not the googles and yahoos), are holding their own in this crisis. All of them are run by software geeks. They don't branch out into financing, into mergers with other competitors. If their name is attached, they own it.

IBM was over 400,000 employees large in 1997 when they were mugging Microsoft in the big Anti-trust suit. Microsoft was 33,000 employees and raking in mountains of cash, then and since. They're still only 54,000 worldwide, and IBM went to just over 300,000 and its stable and profitable. Sun is in debt, looking for a merger or a buyout. Yahoo lost its edge and its choking. Both are run by merger and acquisition wizards, not geeks. Huge mindset difference. If you run the shop, making products for consumers, then success is secured. If you run it to appease bean-counters and stockbrokers, you choke.

 

Good to know we have complementary backgrounds. You're the other half to the success of a great enterprise. As you said, Nuff said.

 

And who would bash you for those comments?

 

The Linux clan. Redhat, and other Linux OS coders. Most of the anti-trust fight had nothing to do with the issues. Until that legal disaster, the entire software industry had no major lobbying or campaign donation funds to either party. The industry total in 1994, before Windows 95, was $500,000. After the settlement, Microsoft was coughing up $5 million between each Party. IBM was about $7 million, Sun was about $3 million.

Now that it's in Europe, Google tries to make it surface as an attack on their 80% market and Yahoo does likewise. It'll come back to bite them.

 

I wonder how many rice-rockets could be stacked like this:


According to the poster:
"The pic was shot here in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil back in 1971. This is a public deposit for irregular vehicles right in downtown Rio. The terrain is still there, next to Petrobras headquarters, but no car is there any more, of course."