The gargantuan full-size 1971â6 Pontiacs (Laurentian, Catalina, Parisienne, Bonneville, Grand Ville and Grand Safari) went up on Autocade last week, and they reminded me of the golden era of Pontiac illustrations. That era didnât stretch into the 1970s that much: you saw them for the 1967s through to the 1971s, before photography took over.
I had some saved up over the years on the hard drive, and a few went into my blog gallery when that was still public (Google will have you believe it still is, with a lot of their top 50 devoted to it; so much for that search engine updating quickly).
First up is the 1967 Bonneville, with its sharp, new grille emphasizing width and sportiness. I believe this image came by way of Twitter, pre-Musk.
Hereâs the 1969 Bonneville, probably the year that was the zenith for a lot of GM divisionsâ designs.
Iâm unclear on the origins of this scan, but it was shared on OnlyKlans when I used it. Itâs the 1969 Firebird 400.
From the gallery are the 1969 GTO convertible and Firebird, showing just how right these two designs were for the era.
And here are two 1971 Canadian Pontiacs, the Laurentian and the Parisienne Brougham, which sat on the 124 in wheelbase rather than the 126 in of the US Bonneville, Grand Ville and Grand Safari that year. You can feel the white country club of the 1960s just barely hanging on before the decade gave way to more brown shades and gritty urban decay. The garish pointy noses (which Bunkie Knudsen tipped Ford off to when he went to work there) and vinyl roofs all contributed to a heaviness that the decade characterizes for me.
Above: I spy Natasha Lyonne and a Plymouth Barracuda. So the car is part of her screen identity? So it should be, it’s television. I might have to watch this.
Iâm not going to refer to it with the bit after the colon in the Netflix release because it doesnât make any sense. If youâre that stupid to require its presence, you wonât be able to follow the film anyway. (Johnson was annoyed that it was added as well. I can see why.) The second Peter Ustinov-led Poirot film in 1982 wasnât called Evil under the Sun: a Death on the Nile Mystery. Studios obviously thought we were smarter 40 years ago.
Anyway, the first quotation, on social media trolls, where Johnson believes they have to be shut down, not ignored. Between Wiredâs senior editor Angela Watercutter and Johnson:
Wired: It does feel like a shift. Ewan McGregor issued a statement pretty quick saying that this doesnât represent the fandom. And like you said at WIRED25, 99 percent of the fandom isnât trolls.
Johnson: Well, and also, that 1 percent tries to do this shell game where they say, âAnyone who doesnât like the movie is a racist.â Thatâs a bad faith argument. Itâs so clear. Weâre not talking about whether you like something or whether you donât, we’re talking about whether youâre toxic and abusive online and whether youâre an odious sexist racist.
Just something to keep in mind if you still use Facebook or Twitter, where these sorts of discussions erupt.
Second one, and why I began blogging about the interview: Johnson is working on a TV series called Poker Face for Peacock, with weekly release and stand-alone stories.
Oh, so each episode is a standalone?
It was a hugely conscious choice, and it was something that I had no idea was gonna seem so radical to all the people we were pitching it to. [Laughs] The streaming serialized narrative has just become the gravity of a thousand suns to the point where everyoneâs collective memory has been erased. That was not the mode of storytelling that kept people watching television for the vast history of TV. So it was not only a choice, it was a choice we really had to kind of fight for. It was tough finding a champion in Peacock that was willing to take a bet on it.
All my favourite series follow this format and I was deeply surprised that itâs been gone so long that it seems radical in the early 2020s.
Itâs actually why I tend not to watch much television these days, because all those shows are history.
Who wants multi-episode story arcs? I want an hour of escapism and next week I want another hour and I honestly do not care if character A picks up traits or clues about their fatherâs brotherâs roommateâs missing excalibur each week and its relevance to their superpowers. If the characters are reasonably fleshed out, then Iâll enjoy the standalone stories on their merits, thanks. Maybe give me a little bit of the underlying mystery in the first and last episodes of the season. Or maybe not, I just donât care.
These are the sorts of things I have boxed sets of: The Persuaders, Return of the Saint, The Professionals, The Saint, The New Avengers, Mission: Impossible, UFO, Department S, The Sweeney, Dempsey and Makepeace, Hustle, Alarm fĂŒr Cobra 11: die Autobahnpolizei. By the 2000s, I did think it was odd that Hustle was being compared to The Persuaders and how it parodied the formula. What parody? The shows are not that alike. Now I think the writer must have been getting at the standalone nature of its episodes (though there were some that connected through various seasons). It was that unusual by the 2000s for Hustleâs structure to be considered parodic.
As many of you know, I have Life on Mars but only because by then that was the closest thing to the formula, even if Sam Tyler is trying to figure out whatâs happened to him in the background each week. I also have recordings of The Paradise Club, and prefer season 2 to season 1 because of its standalone episodes. I have fond memories of the US shows such as Knight Rider, Automan and CHiPs but never went as far as getting the DVDs.
Johnson is roughly the same age as meâheâs a year youngerâso heâll have grown up with the same influences. His statement that this was how people watched TV for the majority of its history is bang on. Just on that alone, I might find out what Poker Face is about. Maybe we Xers will start getting things weâd like to watch after decades of reality TV and a decade of realty TV, neither of which interests me.
To the best of my recollection, this is the only photograph of HM Queen Elizabeth II and HRH the Duke of Edinburgh that I shot and own. You’ll have to look closely. In fact, you might not even see them at this resolution.
I gave the print to someone at Warehouse Stationery who was a big fan of the Queen, but I came across this scan yesterday. I still have the negative, of course.
This was from the royal visit in 2002, her last to Aotearoa. As Labour was in, and they werenât big royalists, there wasnât a huge welcome, and the Queen and Prince Philip were ferried around the back roads from Lyall Bay through Rongotai and Kilbirnie. Here they are in the viceregal Daimler Limousine on Coutts Street: I stopped my car to take the photograph from Mamari Street.
Congratulations to those who spotted Graham Payn’s line as Keats in The Italian Job used in the title.
Notes
Rosa ClarĂĄ image, added as I was archiving files from the third quarter of 2021.
The Claudia Schiffer Rolling Stone cover came to mind recentlyâI believe it was commended in 1991 by the Society of Publication Designers, which I was a member of.
Lucire 46 cover for our 25th anniversary: hotographed by Lindsay Adler, styled by Cannon, make-up by Joanne Gair, and hair by Linh Nguyen. Gown by the Danes; earrings by Erickson Beamon at Showroom Seven; and modelled by Rachel Hilbert.
I was hoping weâd crack 30 million page views by the end of November, but itâs taken an extra week or so to get to this milestone at Autocade.
The statsâ counter shows 2,375,730; added to the last recorded total of 27,647,011 before the server upgrade and a new MediaWiki installation, and weâre comfortably in the 30,000,000 territory. In fact, I believe we would have got here yesterday when the counter was 2,354,000, but I didnât have time to check the old total.
I had looked at the daily increases and there were some days when the page views jumped by 20,000. The smallest was 7,000. Typically Iâd see 10,000, maybe a little more.
Overall the pace has been far slower this year than last, possibly due to Bing acting like itâs on life support, and dragging all its proxies (Duck Duck Go, Ecosia, Yahoo, Qwant) with it.
Fewer models have gone up, too, admittedly, with the total now at 4,631; in early August we had hit 4,600. But it has been a bit busy here lately and do people really want to see another SUV?
As the numbers get back up to what they were before the reset, these rankings will become less meaningful, but for now thereâs still some academic interest to see them jostling for position.
So hereâs how we stand in terms of our traffic development.
March 2008: launch
April 2011: 1,000,000 (three years for first million)
March 2012: 2,000,000 (11 months for second million)
May 2013: 3,000,000 (14 months for third million)
January 2014: 4,000,000 (eight months for fourth million)
September 2014: 5,000,000 (eight months for fifth million)
May 2015: 6,000,000 (eight months for sixth million)
October 2015: 7,000,000 (five months for seventh million)
March 2016: 8,000,000 (five months for eighth million)
August 2016: 9,000,000 (five months for ninth million)
February 2017: 10,000,000 (six months for 10th million)
June 2017: 11,000,000 (four months for 11th million)
January 2018: 12,000,000 (seven months for 12th million)
May 2018: 13,000,000 (four months for 13th million)
September 2018: 14,000,000 (four months for 14th million)
February 2019: 15,000,000 (five months for 15th million)
June 2019: 16,000,000 (four months for 16th million)
October 2019: 17,000,000 (four months for 17th million)
December 2019: 18,000,000 (just under three months for 18th million)
April 2020: 19,000,000 (just over three months for 19th million)
July 2020: 20,000,000 (just over three-and-a-half months for 20th million)
October 2020: 21,000,000 (three months for 21st million)
January 2021: 22,000,000 (three months for 22nd million)
April 2021: 23,000,000 (three months for 23rd million)
June 2021: 24,000,000 (two months for 24th million)
August 2021: 25,000,000 (two months for 25th million)
October 2021: 26,000,000 (two months for 26th million)
January 2022: 27,000,000 (three months for 27th million)
April 2022: 28,000,000 (three months for 28th million)
August 2022: 29,000,000 (four months for 29th million)
December 2022: 30,000,000 (three months, 10 days for 30th million)
The latest model entered: the current Nissan Fairlady Z. For once I had something cool to show for one of these million-milestone posts.
Now that the quartet has been launched, it’s evident that Tesla’s naming strategy is all wrong. This is what they should be called.
On a related note:
Since I haven’t seen the March 15 video now circulating on OnlyKlans, I mean, Twitter, I can’t use the DIA reporting form. But those who have, should.
If it were a New Zealand website doing the distribution, a warning would have been issued at the least; and I bet it would have been blocked by now. The person running the site would probably have been charged. Basically what our government is signalling is that a foreign fascist sympathizer has greater freedoms than the rest of us. And what the opposition parties are signalling is that that’s OK, too, because here’s a real thing that they can sink their teeth into, but they prefer to gaslight over other stuff.
Shared by a family member. Hear out Dr Graham Conway, principal engineer in the Automotive Division at Southwest Research Institute, and why zero-emission vehicles are not truly zero-emission. Itâs a point Iâve made way, way back (in the 2000s) when I cited a study which showed the Ford Fiesta Econetic, a diesel car, was the best vehicle for the environment over its lifetime.
This TEDx talk is from 2020, and Conway believes hybrids are a better bet for the environment than full EVs. Have a watch as he explains why.
TED has flagged Conway’s talk with the following statement: ‘This talk only reflects the speaker’s personal views and interpretation. Several claims in this talk lack scientific support.’ I’d be irresponsible if I didn’t quote this. It’s also worth having a read of this from 2021 and this from 2020. Here’s one more link from Green Car Reports in 2020, titled ‘Lifetime carbon emissions of electric cars are much lower than previously suggested’. All of these suggest that newer production processes and decarbonization may be helping EVs rank better when their lifetime (including production) emissions are counted.
Weâve hit 4,600 models on Autocade, with the Toyota Will VS taking us to this point, but the stats show we are sitting on 1,180,548 views. We have to get to 1,352,989 on the new count before I can announce weâve reached 29 million page views.
Weâre looking at the lowest traffic on Autocade since 2019, and Iâm sure the collapse of the Bing index, taking down the indices of all associated search engines (Duck Duck Go, Qwant, etc.), is to blame. I used to see an increase of 100,000 every week, roughly, but not these days. (PS.: I was still observing this level when we first switched the site over, and the slower growth has probably coincided with when WorldWideWebSize.com recorded Bing’s plummet in late Mayâearly June.)
Autocade is the one site where we never changed the set-up, other than hosting provider and Mediawiki version. The other sites had various things done to them, with Cloudflare and HTTPS. So given the âinvisibleâ changesâchanges we had done before in years gone byâwe know âitâs not us, itâs themâ.
Iâve listed the three Will models (or WiLL to use the original styling) as Toyotas after I confirmed this with another motorhead, the very knowledgeable Atsuhiro Takeda. They were also always listed as Toyotas by Auto Katalog many years ago, and I believe also by Toutes les voitures du monde. Atsu confirmed that that was how he believed they should be indexed. Iâve had those Will publicity images for a long time and itâs nice theyâve finally gone online in Autocade.
The only oddity in the Autocade stats is the rise in hits for our page on the Kia Morning (TA), coming from nowhere and into sixth place among model pages. Whomever the Morning fans are, I thank you!
I see the Le Snak range has now left us, after its US owner PepsiCo cited a lack of demand. I call bullshit, since during 2021 it was becoming increasingly difficult to find them on the shelves. Throttling distribution is not the same as a lack of demand, something you see time and time again with corporate claptrap.
Itâs like the myth that New Zealanders all prefer automatic transmissions. No, not supplying manuals will inevitably force people to change. Has the industry done a survey as I have? Last time I conducted one, in the 2010s, we were still running 50â50, with a lot of people saying, âI prefer a manual, but I had no choice but to buy an automatic.â
Ford is a useful example of US companies citing reduced demand but doing things behind the scenes to ensure it. The line that no one was buying big cars saw to the end of the road for the Australian Falcon and the closure of its Broadmeadows plant. Did any of you see any advertising for the Falcon leading up to that? Or see many Falcons on dealer lots? It seems to me that a corporate decision had been made, and steps taken to guarantee an outcome. Throttle the distribution (âWeâre out of stockâ) and of course demand falls.
Get your tape measures out, and youâll find the Falcon was smaller than the Mondeo (which at that point was still selling) on key measures other than overall length and, presumably, boot volume. The two-litre Ecoboost Falcon with its rear-wheel drive was promoted with all the energy of a damp squid, but it had all the ingredients for success as a decent-handling sedan. But Broadmeadows was an inefficient plant, from what I understand (from hearsay), and bringing it up to speed would have cost more than a bunch of Pinto lawsuits. ‘But there’s no demand for what it builds anyway!’ they cry. Then they can justify the closure.
Go back to the 1990s and the same thing happened with Fordâs Contour and Mystique twins in the US. People were buying BMW 3-series in droves, cars the same size as the Contour. But Ford claimed there was no demand, leading to its US cancellation after the 2000 model year. Reality: I say the Dearborn fiefdom didnât like the fact the Contour was part of a world-car project (which gave us the original Mondeo) led by Fordâs Köln fiefdom. Not-invented-here killed the Contour, and a relative lack of promotion also guaranteed its fate. (Ford would wind up contesting the segment again later in the 2000s with the Fusion and Milan, but put far more effort into promoting them since they were US-led programmes. I actually saw advertising for them in US magazines! I saw a Milan in Manhattan with Mercury encouraging us to try it out!)
If you take the line that anything a big US firm utters is an utter lie, it keeps you in good stead. Use that approach with Facebook, for instance, and youâll find things make sense more often than not. And of course we all knew what Elon Musk meant when he said he wanted to buy Twitter.
Sadly, I was late to the demise of Drivetribeâthough as some on Reddit point out, the brand still exists on other channels. But as for hosting the content themselves, that ended in January, and we content creators had till then to get our stuff off.
I had been checking in there less and less over 2021, which is a real shame. It had been a favourite site of mineâcars, and like-minded fanaticsâbut I guess it takes a lot more than a community to make a community.
Maybe it was the people I followed, but I never really got the right mix of news and entertainment. Others might beg to differ. I had little desire to follow the foundersâClarkson, Hammond, May, and Wilman (sorry chaps, Iâve watched you all in one shape or another since the 1990s, and given Wilman’s nude appearances on Top Gear, they are not necessarily shapes I want in my head)âso it was down to other content creators and contributors.
Twitter gives me some joy because of various car accounts thereâAndrew at the Car Factoids and Andy with what must be a world-leading private brochure collectionâand contributing seems a breeze. Drivetribe was somewhat hampered with a less-than-easy-to-use interface and somewhere along the line, in its first year if I recall correctly, the typography changed for the worse (at least to my eyes).
And like so many social networks, it was about keeping the content there in the hope it would generate money for the core business. It did indeed have a separate programme for creators, where they expected to share in the loot, but ironically after I was approved to join, I lost interest in contributing. Maybe it was because I had my own sites that I could work on. Autocade eats up spare time with each model taking a good 15 minutes on average to illustrate, research and write.
Anything I wrote for Drivetribe exclusively, and there were a few pieces, is practically toast. There may be a few links on the Wayback Machine, but the rest is online history. Itâs hardly their fault: the closure was covered in automotive media extensively, although I never received any emails about it. Itâs a lesson once again to ensure that you keep copies of your own content; in my case, I might still have them in WordPerfect format on a DVD-ROM somewhere. Relevant ones appeared in Lucire and Lucire Men.
Speaking of hosting your own stuff, I wonder if this is what the future holds.
I’m sensing the end of the current paradigm of social media on the horizon, probably with a slight return to the old ânet where people like me were expected to work mostly through our own domains. I could be wrong, but I really feel like a couple of years will bring big changes.
—John Henry, The Revelator (@JohnHenry_US) April 18, 2022
This comes at a time when another Tweeter I follow has lost his Instagram account for no reason he can fathom, and I shared with him that I wouldnât mind hosting my own photos on this very site. Instagram is a once-every-few-months network for me now, at least when it comes to posting on my personal account. (Iâll look at it more for Lucire.) If John is right, we could be looking at a separation again: those who can host their own will, and those who canât, rely on the mass services. There could be less interaction between groups of people, but then the social networks only have themselves to blame for fostering toxicity. We are only human: we found others to interact with and learn from in the early 2000s before Facebook and Twitter, and we can again. We might even find it more productive as we claw our time back from those services.
And if itâs about traffic, each post I make here gets multiples more views than most things Iâve posted to Instagram. Seven hundred is pretty normal. Is there any point, then? The negatives seem to outweigh the positives, and this becomes truer every day. Youâd be a mug to want to buy one of these services in 2022.
