Changing Architecture of the Motor Car - the History 

"Catalytic converter" and "gov't regulations." Curses! Ya, ya, I know, gotta save the earth but I covet the pre '71 cars of which we car nuts drive sparingly so please you enviros, don't knock it.

Bet it was great seeing your uncle being part of a General Motors design team

Thank you.

I had to ask what do you mean by "ordered" world? No judgment I'm just interested

BASH!

+Travis Olson There are so manny definitions i don't know what you mean.They didn't hit the car.You mean swinged ?

@motanelustelistu The Beetle was moving up and down front to back while on that cable and they lowered it so fast that it looked to hit the ground pretty hard.

Jordan Bauman Bing back the mother in law seat ? I thought that was what the trunk was for mother in law LOl 😂😂😂 LOl 😆

It was called the Rumble seat because M-I-L said; You put me in there, Theys gonna be a effin RUMBLE!!! ; ) I never said I was good at jokes, but I try. ; )

Thanks for sharing your memories.

1955 Chevy Bel Air. It and it's 1957 iteration are iconic. (The next one is the 1957 Nomad station wagon.)

Not even remotely, they were good alone, but compared to other companies of the same merit and year, they were at the bottom in both elegance + size, and handling + performing ability. Packard went 130 miles per hour from 1938 to 1940, while people were crying over the passenger car hitting 60, which was achieved in 1902 with a Winston sedan.

Just like the Ford Crown Victoria of the 1980s -2000s .

@Another view Early cars were purposely made for front drag in attempt to compressed air in the cylinders but after such thing was debunked the car company just shrugged and pretended to invent something. Since the 70eds the car industry has been in power struggle with hippies and invirmental laws. Truth is electric cars will not replace gas in this century because it's not affordable and impractical. The only replacement for gas is to speed up the process of fossil fuel.

Sounds like Peter Graves of Mission: Impossible fame.

I guess you don;t have grandchildren Jim. But if you have, ask them, you will learn that they don;t give a damn about your mechanic nostalgia, they live in a different world .

+Frank Dunbar Yeah, I own 27 of them. My neighbor has 19 Tuckers and the guy a block over from my home has 35. Those things are everywhere!

@@lbullis66 not even close.

@@lbullis66 Yeah, we used hundreds of them in demolition derbys in the 70s! Haha!

Duesenberg J type phaeton. One of the best darn American cars ever made. Mechanically, it was decades ahead of its time in many, many ways.

With its solid axles?

well, it's a GM produced film. they couldn't very well say "our executives at the time convinced the government to prosecute a potential competitor for fraud and destroy their business so we don't have to make a better product."

@@chieftp Notice, also, no mention of the Chrysler Airflow which was scuttled in a different way by the greater powers that be (were], but for similar reasons. Many concepts used in the Airflow are still in use today.

Not so well. Actually to try and mitigate the heat issues the whole engine ended up being heavier than an all iron engine. Which also required heavier suspension etc. The whole Vega was a bust. A great idea to build a small car but they took it out of the Chevrolet engineers hands and it became Ed Cole's pet project that he rammed through the board. A disaster. That set back GM's interest in small cars and left them without viable challengers when the gas shortages of the 70s made Japanese cars popular.

King Rose Archives The Vega had a high-tectate silica aluminum block that could be die cast, but a steel head. Overheat it even a little bit, and the head warped due to differential thermal expansion. It had a long stoke and idled rough (the thing rocked in the engine bay like a cradle). It was taller and heavier than the Pinto engine, or even the old Iron Duke (which later replaced it). My parent's '73 lasted about 68,000 miles (which was typical) until my stoner brother overheated it. The fenders rusted through (no fender liners, removed to save costs). We were unaware of the "hidden warranty" to replace the fenders. DeLorean's book pretty well tells he story. It was de-contented to keep cost down after the '72 strike. Sad, too. They were all shipped nose down in special rail cars. Typical of GM's attempts to use esoteric technology to save costs (as opposed to confronting the union labor costs). The high-tectate technology did not go away. BMW uses it today, with some success. The only problem they had was in the 1990's when high sulfur gas in America caused some 5-series to have extreme cylinder wall wear and lose compression before 70K. BMW repaired these under hidden warranty (replaced the blocks!). Today, the sulfur isn't an issue in our gas, and the technology works pretty well.

Not so much that the block was made out of aluminum, as it was the funky design of the block, and an ignorant public where some got lucky with the result of abusing cast iron block engines.

It was a fatal failure and everyone died😣 the end.

+Stig Nasty My brother worked in the parts department of a Chevrolet dealership at the time that the Vega was introduced. They had something euphemistically referred to as a VEGA TUNE UP KIT. This consisted of a new short block engine and two new front fenders. This "kit" was usually required before the one year new car warranty was up, because the engines died and the front fenders rusted out very quickly. True story! :)

Air pollution

Yes, they should have made a video about the cars of 2023 in 1967.😃

razorgg, at least 1977, based on the B-Body 2-Dr Olds coupe the woman is assembling. Though could have been last half of ‘76.

Sounds like Peter Graves.

From the radiator I would say a Packard.

They weren’t

@@nandernugget you own one?

@@chrisxaf1237 nope. But these cars weren't as finely designed and sound as cars today. It's easy to assume that they didn't last as long as recent cars.

@@nandernugget They were very basic without the modern electronic crap. Also they did not use cheap plastic parts like today and the build quality is higher than today

Reliable is a relative term. They were built to last a lifetime. But they also required more maintenance and attention. But, people also didn’t need a car to travel more than 200-300 miles because there were trains that made more sense for long trips. Cars were more of a luxury (want versus need) until the 50’s. Modern cars are very dependable but aren’t made to last more than 10yrs (check engine light). The computer has killed the longevity of the car.

Actually, the Yugo was Yugoslavia's Vega.

+amartinjoe actually, it was Eli Whitney who invented standardization, and the assembly line for military guns in the 1700`s..

Actually, that's not what it said. @ 1:56 "Contrary to popular belief, neither Olds nor Ford were first with mass production. Duryea produced 13 identical automobiles in Springfield, Massachusetts in 1896." It didn't say anything about an assembly line. People (like you) just assume that assembly line = mass production. Ford takes credit for having the first *moving* assembly line in 1913. Oldsmobile produced 425 of the curved dash Oldsmobile on an assembly line in 1901, but the workers pushed the cars from station to station by hand. (Electric car manufacturers such as Columbia Electric and steam powered car manufacturers such as Locomobile had higher volumes a few years earlier). Oldsmobile definitely had the first gas-powered car produced on an assembly line. Of course, assembly line production techniques were already well-known from other industries, such as gun manufacture. Personally, I think 13 is a bit too low to be considered "mass" production, and they certainly weren't identical in the same sense that we would use that term. It wasn't until Cadillac bought Johansson gauge blocks in 1908 that the auto industry could produce parts identical enough to be truly interchangeable. @ 4:46 By the way, women were driving cars long before the electric starter was invented by Cadillac. They were driving electric cars, of course. The electric starter brought an end to the popularity of the electric car.

dlwatib - - additionally, When Daimler and friends built the first motorcycle with training wheels, with a whopping 1/2 HP engine, a WOMAN took it off to the countryside for a pic-nic lunch without permission or assistance.

amartinjoe Neither did Henry Ford Ransom E. Olds used the assembly line to build his cars Ford just kept lowering the price of his cars and in 1913 he doubled his workers pay

Ford invented the MOVING assembly line.

Nonsense

Olds had the first assembly line in 1901, but Ford perfected it by incorporating moving conveyer belts, in 1913, an idea that one of his employees got from seeing conveyor belts used in slaughterhouse dis-assemblings of animal carcases.

The curved-dash Oldsmobile was the first mass-produced car, selling 5,000 units in 1904.

+R Long Wrong.The first "mass" produced cars was the German opel or mercedes as said in the video.

+R Long Actually,none "invented" the asembly line.The asembly line was invented by a manufacturer of canned food if i remember well

Many early versions, in this case the penny farthing, rather than a fuckup, was a step in the progression of the bicycle, until someone made a better version. According to your criteria, just about everything shown in this video was a fuckup when compared to today's cars, which last hundreds of thousands of almost maintenance free miles without wearing or rusting out, except in extreme conditions.

Wahrscheinlich namenlos HaHa man USA come from England descend which mean founder of Great British

Wahrscheinlich namenlos Ok what is your point ?

Americans have a mouse and a training wheel in there heads instead of having a brain!!

+md80 captain But you forget, the Europeans and Asians were selling cars here at the same those regulations were imposed. The government owns much of the blame for what has happened to the US auto industry, but so do the unions and the companies themselves.

twana baiz....of course it is, it's the only history that matters, so why wouldn't it be?

Can't consider microcontrollers as unneeded when it's unlikely that reduced fuel and the reduction of emissions would have happened nearly simultaneously without the use of microcontrollers. The odds of surviving an accident are higher in a 2014 vehicle then they where when the 1974 vehicle where new. Anyway I'm at a loss how microcontrollers in a car could distractive, unless you are texting while driving.

If only cars had changed in no other way than adding computer things. I appreciate ABS, ASR, FDR (aka ESP), navigation systems, and ability to connect cell phone associated devices. I don't appreciate so many other things like the change in the looks. Or fwd, unibody, separated footspace so that the driver can no longer get in from the passenger side. Downsizing where you have to buy an SUV to get size and rwd. SUV don't have the hood in the back in the optic. Audi once introduced the Quattro. It had AWD. But later Audi went on to sell "Allrad" cars that have only 4wd based on fwd. The engine is oriented for fwd with its axle from left to right. Lately in a mall I encountered a presentation of the new Landrover of the day. I looked under the hood on the engine was oriented for fwd. But the young female presenter told me it has "permanenter Allrad" which would mean AWD. It certainly didn't have. The orientation limits the amplitude of steering. Some great inventions were never incorporated by the industry: - sleeve valve engines, rotary engines, especially the DKM version. They only built the KKM version - all the inventions that are found in the DS - the automatic roof for the convertible brought out by Ford in 1958. They envisioned it would be in all cars in the future - In Europe: automatic transmission remained the exception rather than the rule. The gear shifter was moved to the steering column for a while then moved back again, even for fwd cars.

Ah, and I forgot to mention: The bumpers shown in 17:17 - 17:26 were removed. Modern cars no longer have external bumpers that protect the car. It was called here "Stoßfänger, in Wagenfarbe lackiert". I don't know the terminology but would be "Bumpers, painted in body color". They are not real bumpers if they are painted.

+Rainer67059 Sure they are, the actual bumpers are behind a flexible plastic cover and they do work... just ask the Wake County Sheriff who backed into my Jeep recently.

+Rainer67059 Rotary engines were and are produced.It was mostly on the 1970's Japanese cars and are stil today. Also,there are automatic convertibles today. Why would you have the automatic transmission as the rule ? It's silly,stupid and uneconomical.Besides,it takes away the pleasure of driving. Also,mainly in car makers from European COUNTRIES (Europe isn't a country) the vans and mpv's have center dash mounted shifter so manny have 3 seats front row.

+J kK Such a skeptic.

+J kK That's funny, just last weekend the rear of a police car hit the front bumper of my Jeep (REALLY!), didn't do a bit of damage to the Jeep and only left a big black mark on his bumper.

Modern bumpers are designed to absorb impact energy by crumpling. They're usually made of plastics because plastics are a lot cheaper than metals, but provide basically the same protection. And both would be rendered useless in an accident.

Tuppoo94 Not quite. For minor impacts (such as the incident with the sheriff, they have something like shock absorbers to take the impact with little or no damage to the vehicle. For harder impacts then yes, things start crumbling or collapsing to protect the people in the car.

+Jeff DeWitt One other benefit of the broad, flexible plastic bumper, is the increased survivability for the pedestrian, if struck. This, with the curved, collapsible hood and sloped, safety glass windshield, will likely decelerate him to a painful but less injurious landing in the hood pocket he will create.

Most are white or black too...with grey interiors. So boring. I miss the large choice of colors outside and colors and patterns inside. Two tones were also awesome.

Sorry about that but it came that way. Can't really change it.

LOL GM should stick to making cars instead of making video productions....they're not very good at it :-)

or making cars either now that you mention it.

good video apart from the over-done music...I guess that was cool music in those days...but YT video makers still make the same mistakes - by drowning out the narrator...and these days it is with some second rate electro-rock noise....

For a short period while GM was still shifting gears from war production. But when they did, they were unbeatable. No other company in the history of the world was as profitable as what GM became in the '50s. Its competitors fell by the wayside. GM throttled back enough to keep Chrysler and Ford alive so that the US Government wouldn't break them up as they'd done to Standard Oil. We definitely lost something when Studebaker and the others went under.

That's a little inside out. Energy absorbing front ends slow deceleration which saves lives. According to your logic the car will be better off, but the sudden stop of the vehicle results in the occupants' brains crashing into the skull resulting in irreversible trauma.

What?! Can’t hear your tree hugger bitching over the sound of my hearty, sweet, V8 ‘merican muscle!

obviously you're over compensating for a shortcoming

cars are very useful, you can't walk long distances. you need to find a balance and not only drive or only walk, both are (in opposite ways) bad for you or your possibilities

@@Blackadder75 they can be useful, but the negatives of motor vehicles far outweigh the positives