Articles by David Burrell

You see, back in the early 1950s, Chrysler executives were worried declining sales which market research had told them, very bluntly, was because the company's offerings were boring and stodgy. Meanwhile, the head of design at Chrysler, Virgil Exner, had heard rumours about Chevrolet's Corvette and Ford's Thunderbird. He was determined not to be left out of this little party and decided to create a sports car which would demonstrate once and for all that Chrysler had shed its dowdy image. And so he commissioned the Chrysler Falcon. Styled in Detroit and constructed by Ghia in Turin, Exner had three cars (some say only two were built) delivered for the 1955 auto-show circuit. All were operating automobiles. Exner kept one as his personal transport. The Falcon was sleek, low and long. Slightly bigger all round than the Thunderbird and standing at a mere 1.3 meters high, it had a wrapped windscreen and huge tail fins. Its smooth flanks were devoid of chrome. Under the hood was Chrysler's new 4.5 litre Hemi V8 bolted to an automatic transmission. Two chrome exhaust swept along the side of the car, hot-rod style. Inside it was luxury all the way, with power assistance on everything. Dealers and potential customers lobbied Chrysler to produce it. Yet despite the acclaim, Chrysler executives were reticent about its viability. While the Thunderbird was a sales success, the Corvette was struggling and rumours circulated Detroit that GM was about to drop it and the engineering and accounting folk didn't like it either. "Too hard and too low volume to make for the price," they said. That was the kiss of death and the Falcon was shelved. Fast forward to mid-1959 and the Big Three are preparing their new compacts for the showrooms. Chrysler has two names for its "little" car, either Falcon or Valiant. Chevrolet has decided on Corvair. But Ford is still searching. And it's here that two legends emerge. One story is that Henry Ford II liked Falcon, so he rang Chrysler boss Tex Colbert and asked if he could use it. Tex agreed because Exner preferred Valiant. The other story is that both companies sought to trademark the name and Ford beat Chrysler to it by, some say, just 20 minutes. Of the Chrysler Falcons, one is on display at the Chrysler Museum and another is owned by concept car collector Joe Bortz. The third has long disappeared, assuming it was ever built. David Burrell is the editor of retroautos.com.au  

It is 60 years since Mercedes rolled its landmark 180 sedan into the sunshine. Back in 1953 it was a technical and styling milestone for Mercedes-Benz, and set a foundation for its luxury sedans and coupes for the future.The 180 featured Mercedes' first unibody construction, which allowed it to break free from the more conventional and heavier body-on-chassis design, thus lowering weight and increasing torsional rigidity. Mercedes also boasted the 180 had a double wishbone front suspension which was bolted to a front axle carrier instead of directly to the frame.The U-shaped axle carrier also accommodated the engine, transmission and steering. This arrangement helped reduce road and body noise and delivered production line efficiencies. Down the back of the 180 the Germans used those wicked swing axles and coil springs, which Chevrolet later employed on the Corvair.If you look at the 1953 Mercedes and you start to see a 1949 Ford or 1950 Chevrolet, except a little smaller, you'd be right. The folks from Stuttgart reinterpreted the emerging American design motifs and trends while still incorporating that famous Mercedes grille and star emblem. They came away with a unique Mercedes "look" that still draws admiring glances.The main engine of the 180 was a 1.8 litre four cylinder affair producing a meagre 38kW. No surprises then that it took the car over 30 seconds to reach 100kmh. That was slow even in the day. By comparison a 1948 FX Holden could get to 100kmh nine seconds quicker. Mercedes also offered a diesel engine in the 180, which made it a popular choice for taxis.The 180 was the basis of a long line of more powerful sedans and coupes. The 190 SL sports convertible, which debuted in New York Auto show in 1954, was built on a shortened 180 platform. By lengthening the 180 wheelbase, Mercedes was able to develop a range of luxury sedans during the 1950s and insert more powerful six cylinder motors under the bonnet.Mercedes made almost 120,000 180s and variants during its nine year production run. On a global comparison a good 180 fetches about $25,000 to $30,000 theses days. For those wanting to get into their first classic European car, the 180 is a great choice.David Burrell is the editor of retroautos.com.au

When you see a Mercedes 230SL coupe it is still hard to believe that they made their debut way back at the 1963 Geneva Motor Show. When Mercedes Chief Engineer Professor Dr. Nallinger rolled the deep blue covering cloth off the car, the assembled media quickly realised that Mercedes had well and truly left the 1950s behind. For in front of them was a grand touring machine of stunning beauty.Mercedes had been able to combine power, quality, safety, style and wrap it into one elegant and understated package. If you bought one of these babies back in 1963, you had it all. And if you have one now, you still have it all. The brief given to planners in 1959 was to replaced two cars in the Mercedes range, the famed gull winged and uncompromising 300 SL, which many believed to be irreplaceable (and they were right) and the popular, charming but listless boulevard cruiser, the 190 SL sports convertible.So, the 230SL was to follow a middle course and designed to be a comfortable high-performance, reliable, two-seater grand touring car with exemplary driving safety. Head of Mercedes styling Fredrick Geiger and designers Paul Bracq and Bela Barenyi got the shape of the 230 fixed by February 1960 and the car was in prototype stage soon after.This was the first Mercedes to have passive safety engineered into the car and boasted radial tyres as standard. The vehicle body incorporates a rigid passenger cell and crumple zones at the front and rear. It was Bracq and Bareni who devised the car's distinctive, patented, slightly concave hardtop which inspired the "Pagoda" nickname, being reminiscent of Eastern temples. The concave form of the roof also improved passive safety, ensuring greater rigidity at a lesser weight.In production between 1963 and 1971, the 230SL started with a 2.3 litre six cylinder engine and progressed through 2.5 and 2.8 litre motors. The Pagoda now has a status which very few vehicles are ever are able to achieve. Those in the advertising industry turn to it regularly whenever they want to use a symbol that immediately convey timeless, classic design and high levels of boulevard chic. They made 49,000 of Pagodas and most are left hand drive. Good ones in Australia go for $80,000 and upwards. Keep checking Carsguide!David Burrell is the editor of retroautos.com.au 

My pick is the Chevrolet Corvair. Chevrolet released the Corvair in late 1959. With its engine made out of aluminium, cooled by air and mounted in the rear, this was a different American car by any measure. Its driving force was Mr Ed Cole, soon to be president of all of General Motors, but in 1959, he was the general manager of Chevrolet. The Corvair was GM's answer to the rising tide of imported small cars. Ford and Chrysler went with conventional driveline layout for their compacts, Falcon and Valiant, but Cole, the engineer, wanted to go radical. He reasoned that an air cooled engine eliminated all of the complexity, costs and weight of cooling systems. A rear mounted engine also meant no drivelines, saving even more weight and costs. And, of course, there were those swing rear axles, with no stabiliser bars. It seemed all too good to be true. And for a while it was. GM sold over 300,000 Corvairs in 1961 alone. But soon the stories of accidents started to spread. And you know the whole sad story for there on, which can be summed up in three words. Oversteer. Crashes. Injuries. In November 1965 an unassuming Washington lawyer. Ralph Nader, who'd been working for a Senate subcommittee, published his book "Unsafe at Any Speed". Only the first chapter was about the Corvair and the accidents and injuries it was claimed it have caused, but that was enough for it all to unravel for Ed Cole and GM. By early 1966 the lawsuits had really started to roll into GM , and politicians had started to take notice. During 1967 the political pressure was so great that the US congress started to pass laws regulating automobile design and safety standards. And so the great consumer protection regulatory reforms began in the US, covering many industries and products. That regulatory tsunami swept around the world. Quite simply, the Corvair changed consumer laws on a global scale. The burden of proof on accidental injuries caused by faulty products now fell on those who made and marketed those products. Meanwhile, Nader had become a global celebrity, his name synonymous with consumer protection. In the year 2000, a 66 year old Nader decided to run for President of the USA against then Vice President Al Gore and Republican nominee George W Bush. Nader received nearly 95,000 votes in Florida, which George W Bush won by less than 2000 votes. It was Florida which kept Al Gore out of the White House. Perhaps, had not Nader been on the ballot it is possible that many of those 95,000 votes would have gone to Gore. And if it had not been for the Corvair, Nader might have been just one of many unknown names on the ballot. You might say, the Covair legacy elected George W Bush. David Burrell is the editor of retroautos.com.au

Back in the day, that's the 1950s and 1960s to anyone born since 1980, the American car makers spent a significant amount of money researching names that would appeal to the subliminal desires of consumers.And so the cars came out of the factories with names like La Sabre, Riviera, New Yorker, Newport, Imperial, Bel Air, Delray, Le Mans, Bonneville, Ventura, Electra ,Jetstar, Skylark, Catalina, Biscayne, Impala, Wildcat, Tempest, Mustang, Cougar, Sprint, Dart, Firedome, Thunderbird, Falcon, Marauder, 'Cuda, Challenger, Corvette, Cobra, Firebird , Fury, Monaco, Javelin, Rebel, Pheonix, Grand Prix and Toronado.Whatever your yearnings and needs, Detroit had the car for you! In Australia things were a little more conservative. We had Special, Premier, Royal, Regal, Kingswood, Belmont, Statesman, Brougham and Freeway. Ford pushed the envelope a little with Futura. Chrysler gave us Charger and Hustler, while Holden created the iconic Torana and Monaro names.These days so many cars are defined by a jumble of letters and numbers. I mean, does anyone really understand it all anymore, honestly? Well, Holden have reached back into the good old days in an effort to create a point of difference. Enter one of most evocative names ever to be affixed to the fenders of any car: The Malibu.While GMH (don't call them that, I've been told!) fills its showrooms with the new  Holden Malibu (don't called it a Chevy , I've been told!), the Chevrolet diehards will remind us that it is 50 years since the storied nameplate first appeared in the "bowtie" line up. In those five decades, General Motors (GM) has sold 8 million Malibus.Chevy introduced the Malibu in the northern autumn of 1963 as the top-of-the-line model for the new mid-sized Chevelle. Similar sized cars were fielded by GM's other divisions, including Pontiac who christened theirs "Tempest", and offered a performance option they cheekily called the GTO.Initially , the Malibu could be optioned with an  SS package, which meant a four speed transmission, bucket seats, some sporty wheel trims and a dual exhaust for the 4.7 litre (283 cubic inch) V8. As sales of the GTO took off, Chevrolet got to work on the SS, inserting a 5.2 litre (the fabled 327) V8 into the front end. The muscle car era was officially green flagged!From there on the Malibu became the base car for all manner of muscle bound machines, culminating in the outrageous SS of 1970 with a 454 cubic inch V8 upfront boasting upwards of 450 BHP and good for a 12 second pass down the  mile in stock form.Those days are long gone. Only the name remains now.David Burrell is the editor of retroautos.com.au 

With the City of Detroit sliding into almost $20 billion of bankruptcy there's every likelihood its valuable collection of cars will be sold off to pay for employee superannuation and other debts.The city museum has a diverse car collection of 62 automobiles including the 1963 Ford Mustang II prototype, both of the 1963 Ford Cougar II concept cars, one of the remaining Chrysler Turbine cars (and a spare, unused turbine engine and transmission) and one of nine Stout Scarabs ever built.But wait, there's more. Hidden in the museum's warehouse is a Packard Pan American show car, Henry Leland's personal 1905 Cadillac, John Dodge's (he founded Dodge with his brother Horace) personal 1919 coupe and the Detroit Electrics owned by Clara Ford (wife of old Henry Ford) and Helen Newberry Joy (wife of Packard chief Henry Joy).Mind you, there are cars with less storied provenance in the collection such as a 1984 Dodge Caravan donated by Sandra Studebaker (yes, she's related to the Studebaker car clan), a 1934 Chrysler Airflow, a 1987 stretch Cadillac limo, a Chevrolet Corvair and a 1970s AMC Pacer.Most of the collection had been kept in air filled plastic bubbles and away from public viewing for years. The 1919 Dodge coupe owned by John Dodge has his gold initials JFD on the rear door and just 4,126 miles on speedo. The 1905 Cadillac Osceola was donated by the family of Henry M. Leland, who started Cadillac after he left Henry Ford's ill-fated second attempt to start a car company. It was his car for many years.When he sold Cadillac to GM, Leland started the Lincoln car company, and later sold it to Ford. The 1963 Ford Cougar II is an early Shelby Cobra re-bodied by Ford. One is a closed coupe, and looks like a Chevy Stingray, which would have been its main rival. The other, a convertible, is fully operational and was used by Gene Bordinat, Ford's chief stylist, as his personal car. Both, like the Mustang II, are priceless.The Packard Pan American is a one-off show car from 1951 and represents a last throw of the financial dice for the once great maker of luxury cars. The Stout Scarab lays claim to being the first Minivan. William Stout, who designed Henry Ford's Trimotor airplane, started building the first of nine Scarabs in 1933.It had a rear mounted Ford V8 to create a low, flat floor. It featured a unitised body structure when almost everything else was on a solid frame. Stout envisioned his traveling machine to be an office on wheels. The car was styled by John Tjaarda Snr whose ideas influenced the shape of the first VW and a range of Ford cars in the 1930s.The collection is valued at $12 million, but my guess is that if the cars were sold individually they'd fetch much more. The Mustang II prototype is worth upwards of $3 million just by itself.David Burrell is the editor of retroautos.com.au 

Back to September 1953 the newspaper front pages screamed the headline "NEW HOLDEN!" It was, of course, for FJ model. Back then the FJ was big news, and the even bigger news was the new luxury model called the "Special". Here was a car that was a real step up from its spartan predecessor, the 48-215, known to one and all as the FX. For the first time Holden acknowledged the increasing aspirations of Australian car buyers. The Special was special, with its sparkling full width chrome grille similar to that on the `53 Chevrolet, contemporary two tone paint and discreet chrome fins on the rear mudguards. The interior was also given a make-over. Leather replaced vinyl on the seats and arm rests graced the front doors .Rear passengers had straps to grab on to when the FJ went around anything that looked remotely like a corner. While these features might not seem much by today's standards, they were very attractive to mid 1950s buyers Previously secret photos show that Holden had been planning the FJ since January 1950. They developed many styling ideas for the grille and rear fins. Another idea was to extend the width of the rear window and wrap around the rear pillars. That Holden held off introducing the FJ for three years says more about the high demand for the FX than anything else. The company was selling every FX it could make. As long as there were wait lists, a new model was not needed. So why is it that the FJ has become such a beloved car? For my money it was all about freedom. For many families who bought an FJ it was probably their first car. An FJ in the driveway meant the freedom to roam anywhere, to go on holidays, to commute to work and to simply "go for a drive", anytime. And when an FJ was bought second hand in the 1960s by the growing boomer generation, it was a cheap and strong freedom machine to escape your parents! What more could you ask of a car? Most FJs ended their existence on the scrap heap. Some became cheap race cars, especially on speedway. In the late sixties I remember being at Morisset Speedway and nearly every car in main event (50 of them!) was an FJ Holden. Those that have survived are now pampered. Good sedans go for around $20,000, while pristine Utes fetch beyond $30,000. David Burrell is the editor of retroautos.com.au

In 2010, one of the James Bond Aston Martins from “Goldfinger” sold at auction for a jaw dropping 4.7 million dollars. Meanwhile, the Lotus Esprit submarine car driven by Sir Roger Moore in the Bond film “The Spy Who Loved Me” is scheduled to go under the hammer. It is the only working example of the six Lotus Esprits used in filming. The Esprit was shipped off to Long Island, New York when filming ended, where it was stored for 10-years in a container. After the lease on the storage unit ran out the contents were sold in a blind auction. When the couple who won the bid discovered what they had bought, they had the Lotus authenticated and now have it for sale. What's it worth? Who knows, but rest assured, someone will pay big money for it. The replica Ferrari stolen by Matthew Broderick in “Ferris Bueller's Day Off” will also go to auction soon. Expect serious money to be thrown around.  Remember the 1970s TV detective show “The Rockford Files” starring James Garner? The fictional private eye, Jim Rockford, always drove a gold Pontiac Firebird Esprit. And yep, you guessed right. There are collectors who seek out the 18 Firebirds used during the six years of the series. Garner kept one car when the series closed. In the mid-eighties he gave it to a charity auction .It was won by the proverbial little old lady. It's been through a few hands since then and now resides in Iowa. In “Back to the Future”, Michael J. Fox sped through time in a sleek DeLorean. In Dec 2011, one of the seven DeLoreans used in the trilogy fetched $540,000 at auction. The iconic Batmobile from the 1960s television show sold for $4.62 million at action earlier this year. Holy cow, Batman!! Famed car customiser George Barris built the Batmobile in 15 days with a budget of $15,000, basing it on the 1955 Lincoln Futura concept car he'd bought from Ford for $1 a few years earlier. The black Falcon coupe from the Mad Max films almost went to the blast furnace. After the second Mad Max movie it was left in an Adelaide wrecker’s yard until rescued and restored. You can now see it in the Dezer Museum, Miami, Florida. And then there are the Pontiacs used in Burt Reynolds classic “Smokey and The Bandit”. They are out there somewhere. So start looking and start saving! www.retroautos.com.au  

James Bond ‘Goldfinger’ Aston Martin was epic, and the $4.62 million that Steve Champagne (yep, a real name) gave American customiser George Barris for the real Batmobile was serious money, then you'd be wrong.Ford as part of an ongoing product placement arrangement with Warner Bros who financed the movie. Ford also offered two big Galaxie 500s for the baddies to drive in the chase scenes but they were rejected and the producers bought two new Dodge Chargers. And so the main players in this iconic car chase were gathered for the fray.David Burrell is the editor of retroautos.com.au

Aston Martin has a rich and prestigious heritage and that the company is now 100 years old is one of the more remarkable feats of automotive longevity. Despite near death financial experiences on numerous occasions and more owners and investors than you and I have had hot dinners, Aston Martin is still there. Other UK marques, such as Austin, Morris, Riley, Hillman, Singer, Humber, Sunbeam, Alvis, Jensen, Armstrong Siddley, Standard and Triumph have all disappeared, but Aston Martin lives on. Founded in 1913 by Robert Bamford and Lionel Martin as ‘Bamford & Martin Ltd’, the company has developed into a global brand synonymous with speed, luxury and elegance. The name ‘Aston Martin’ came about when Lionel Martin successfully raced at the Aston Hill Climb in Buckinghamshire, England. Financial problems plagued the company over the next decade (nothing new there) with the business forced to close in 1925. It was rescued by a group of investors in 1926. The business was soon producing a range of sports cars and had an increasing reputation for engineering and design. Now remember, we are talking about a small niche player here, not some huge manufacturing conglomerate. A mere 140 cars were sold in 1937, the highest in the pre World War 2 era. In 1947 a new owner took over, Sir David Brown, and it was during his watch that the most iconic Aston of all time was produced. I speak, of course, of the car frequently acclaimed as the most beautiful car in the world, the Aston Martin DB5-the one James Bond drove in Goldfinger. Released in 1963, which means it's celebrating its 50 anniversary, the DB5 has come to personify everything that Aston Martin is today. Mind you, I think the most striking Aston Martin of all is the 1976 four door Lagonda. Designed by William Towns, it is an aggressively styled automobile. Long of hood and short of tail, with a cutting edge computerized digital instrument panel, the Lagonda created a huge wave of publicity for the company. Nothing worked properly, of course. All those complex electronics just refused to operate as intended. Some folk unkindly suggested that an essential part of the car's tool kit was a multi-meter, O scope and jumper leads. With an initial production rate of just one a week only 645 cars were built before the end of production in 1989. There are one or two still roaming this sunburnt country and about 80 in the UK. David Burrell is the editor of Retroautos.com.au