Och

iTrader: (3)

Today all cars are more firmly sprung, although arguably it doesn't make their ride any less comfortable. With sophisticated active suspension you can have a car with luxury level of ride and track level of handling combined.

But back in the 80ies and 90ies, these American Lincolns and Cadillacs were such garbage. I was 14 when i came to the US in 1993, and I did not even drive back then and did not know much about cars, but even being a passenger in many of them I could make the distinction. I remember when my cousin got himself a brand new 1994 Q45, it just felt like a spaceship compared to all the American cars I've ridden before, there was not even a comparison, a whole different level. And the original LS400 was even better than the Q45. When I was getting my first car, I specifically did not want anything American because most of them were just sad sights.

Of course, 30 years later its great to see a pristine Lincoln as a collectors car, but there was a day when these were the laughing stock.

SW17LS

To be fair, they really weren't a laughing stock in America. They sold a LOT of these and a lot of people really liked them. American sensibilities about cars were way different than they were in Europe, they still are but they are far closer today than they were back then.

There was a time when a lot of Americans truly would rather have one of these than a Mercedes

I do find it funny that Clarkson is showing a late 80s Town Car as an example of American cars from the 70s lol

Och

iTrader: (3)

Well, being an immigrant kid I was spared of any of the patriotic boomer bias, so I made the distinctions purely on merit. Of course I knew that Mercedes was German, but I had no idea for instance that Lexus or Infiniti were Japanese. The only American car back then that appealed to me was the Ford Taurus, and rightfully so - it was actually modern and the best selling car in the US for a number of years. Reliability of course was a whole different problem, and a few years later many of them ended up with failed transmissions and a slew of other problems.

He might as well be showing 2000s Town Car, it was still 70ies tech.

SW17LS

Had nothing to do with patriotism, this was just the sort of car that a lot of Americans really liked. Hard to argue with 200k annual sales. What luxury car sells anywhere near that well today?

Och

iTrader: (3)

Perhaps, but there was also little choice back then. Once the Japanese and the European expanded in the US market, Americans rushed to abandon these primitive clunkers.

SW17LS

The Japanese and Germans had to adapt their products to better reflect what Americans wanted before that really started to happen though.

rogerh00

I think there were a lot of WW2 veterans still around that influenced sales like my father who was a pilot during the war. He refused to ever own a German or Japanese car and his influence was strong. I remember a time when I told him I wanted to buy a VW bug as my first car. He told me fine but to never park it our driveway but to park it at the end of the street and walk home. My Brother in law who worked at a car dealership often would take a Towncar from the lot to take our family out. I don't remember any of issues being talked about here except that it was a big and fancy car but also out of our families budget.

Och

iTrader: (3)

Oh absolutely, but so is vice versa.

SW17LS

That’s absolutely true.

My dad drove American cars for a long time because he did a lot of business with labor unions, and couldn’t be seen driving a foreign car. He had several Japanese sports cars before that time, he had a 240Z and a 260Z and an RX7. Then he started driving American stuff because he had to. He had a Chrysler Cordoba and a Cutlass Calais and a Chrysler Fifth Avenue before the Lincoln and the Caddy.

When he got the LS I had an Explorer and when he would go play golf with those labor guys or go out to dinner etc he always drove the Explorer.

Fizzboy7

Interesting slice of history. Can't stand the reporter.

SW17LS

I think he's a hoot

bitkahuna

iTrader: (20)

obviously you're a big fan of old large cushy american vehicles. about this era of town car, one time in the late 80s i think, i needed to rent a car to take a bunch of computer equipment from near Philly to the Waldorf Astoria hotel in NYC. i wasn't able to rent a van (and didn't particularly want to) so i asked for the biggest sedan the rental place had and they rented me a town car like the one in the pic. 4 things were memorable:

1) the trunk space was PATHETIC. it has all kinds of corners and obstructions and a deep but very small 'well' in the middle. it was useless for putting anything very large in (you know, like suitcases!), so i had to put most of my gear on the back seat.

edit: just watched video and see the trunk, lol forgot about the MASSIVE spare using a load of it.



2) the interior space was PATHETIC. with GIANT seats, a giant dash, there was VERY few places inside to put anything - it was incredibly bad.

edit: from video i see, no door pockets, no center console storage!

3) the car leaned so bad in ANY turn at ANY speed, it would likely induce nausea even in popeye or other seasoned sailor (or pilot). WORST... HANDLING... EVER.

4) it was slow. the v8 roared to life when hitting the gas, but not a lot happened. like a large ship it slowly gathered speed, and the brakes were dangerously poor.

this was by far the worst 'luxury' car i've ever driven.

some people may have wanted them because they spoke to 'american luxury' and excess and a dying era.

maybe you should have been in a different seat.

you're massively over-simplifying modern luxury suspensions. first of all, most luxury cars have adjustable suspensions which may control damper rates, air ride rates, roll bar rates, etc.
second, because modern cars are so much more sophisticated in the design process, the inevitable trade-offs of 'firmness', control, response to small bumps, large bumps, cornering, etc., are all vastly improved over simple springs and shocks of the past. i know you have a nostalgic fondness for the old boats, but really, they suck in comparison to anything from the past couple of decades.

true.

also true, and all for the good!

mmarshall

Yes and no. Many of them I liked, but I wasn't a big fan of some others. I thought the AMC Ambassadors, except for the rustproof ceramic-covered exhaust system, were not well engineered. Some of the large full-sized Chrysler products (Chrysler Imperial excepted), despite good handling with the torsion/leaf suspensions and unit-bodies, had too much road noise and powertrain noise. And the late-60s/early-70s full-sized Chrysler products suffered from drastically poor quality control.

That was partially (but not completely) due to downsizing. The 70s-vintage Lincoln Continentals were truly massive in every stretch of the imagination (including the trunk)....and they were among the last the enormous 70s full-size cars to downsize, several years behind GM and Chrysler.

I'll gladly trade the POS Temporary/Donut/Run-Flat/Compressed-Air-Bottle crap we have today for a real spare like that, especially considering that a real spare today would be smaller and take up less trunk-space than the one shown in that picture. Not only that, but notice how spares, in those days, were housed in those nice cloth/velour-lined cases, preventing the tires from scuffing up items in the trunk and, unlike trucks/SUVs, which had the spare mounted underneath the vehicle (when it wasn't hanging in the hatch-lid), also protected the spare from damage from road-debris.



You might be an inch or two taller than me (at least without my baseball cap LOL)...but I can virtually guarantee you aren't as big as I am in most of my frame. Personally, I had no space problems at all in cars of that era.....even compact cars, although it is true that so much space in those cars was taken up by the hood and trunk-length that interior room, with the RWD engineering of the time, was not quite what it could have been.


Well, consider that, back in those days, you generally did not NEED to lug as much around with you. Cellphones, Laptops, I-Pads, Tablets, Portable GPS Receivers, and all the other electronic toys we are addicted to today did not even exist back then. People also did not use their vehicles as rolling salons to shave (electric razors), dry their hair, read the newspaper, read the newspaper, follow daily stock prices, eat breakfast, drink Lattes, play video-games, or the million and one other things that they do today instead of keeping their eyes on the road.



See my last post.....most of the time, they were not needed. Different era....different priority. And, by then, most of the smoking in vehicles, with the need for ash trays and cigarette-lighters, was also on the way out. I myself had (fortunately, thanks to God) quit smoking when I was 22 years old

Yes, the big Fords of that era (and GM, to a lesser extent) did have some very soft suspensions and handling characteristics (I remember my neighbor's 1976 Thunderbird at the time, which I drove on a few occasions). Again, the people who bought these cars were not interested in handling.


That was not a luxury-car vs. non-luxury-car issue....or, for that matter, even American vs. Non-American. That was simply the primitive level of emission-controls at that time, which clearly sacrificed power and drivability to pass the EPA tests. Adding catalysts in 1975 helped a little, but real progress was not made until the automakers dumped carbs once and for all in the mid/late 1980s (which, as I have said in previous posts, they should have done in the 70s, as much of the technology was there at the time. Like so much else in the auto-industry, it was primarily a money-saving issue....carbs were considered cheaper.


Friend, trust me on this one. You don't know what lousy brakes are until you have driven 60s/70s-vintage Dodge/Plymouth compacts, with the 13-inch wheels and non-power drum brakes-without the later power front-discs option). I am well-qualified to talk about these cars.....I not only learned to drive in them, but put many thousands of miles on them, across mountain ranges, all over the Eastern U.S. The only other brakes I've seem that were just as lousy (if not worse) were on full-size GM trucks/SUVs of the early 2000s, before they completely redid the braking systems on the 2007 models....which I test-drove.

Your opinion noted......and respected. I have seen what I consider lots worse.

Thank you, but when It comes to GA aircraft, I've been in all the different kinds of seats. I also had a Ground Instructor's rating, meaning I could teach Aircraft/Flying Ground School in the classroom, although I didn't actually have much time in those days to actually teach classes.

Again, Thank-You, but I'm well-familiar with them both. My opinion stands. Older vehicles produced a lot of comfort without a lot of handling.....but, the way those vehicles were meant to be driven, handling and corner-carving as not an issue. Besides, even if they had sport-sedan suspensions, those old luxury cars were simply too big, and wheelbases/overhangs too long, to be agile around corners. It's just one of the things you sacrificed for that kind of comfort level. Personally, although I am capable of safely driving sports cars (and manual transmissions) in an aggressive manner, I prefer not to do most of the time. My idea of driving is to be relaxed and enjoy the ride.......while paying attention, of course.