These days, with General Motors being kicked around by Ford Motor Company and the Japanese brands like Toyota and Honda, it is hard to remember 
a time when GM’s share of the total U.S. automotive market stood at a whopping 60 percent. Now, some 40 years have passed since those halcyon days for the biggest automobile maker on the globe–the go-go Sixties, rock music, the decade of youth, and the Vietnam War. To quote some unknown author, who is possibly quite tired of being so quoted except for the fact he’s dead, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” Read more . . .
The 1959 Cadillac was the epitome of American automotive elegance taken to the illogical extreme. 
If you believe in the principle “less is more” and “form should follow function” then the ’59 Cadillac may strike you as some evil alien life-form, as appealing as fungus, as pleasant to the eye as a sharp spike. But if, on the other hand, you believe the objective of a car is to please its driver, to send her or him off into the distance affixed with a smile, then the Cadillac that arrived in showrooms for the 1959 model year was a very big success indeed. Read more . . .
Imagine a car company that produced not only the most highly regarded luxury cars of its era, but also the most successful racing cars.
Imagine a company that combined the best attributes of Rolls-Royce and Ferrari. And imagine such a company not being controlled by corporate boards of directors, but only by a single visionary man. If you can imagine all this, then you can imagine what Bugatti was like in 1930. Read more . . .
If the marque were named Bamford Martin, would it have the same panache? 
How about if it were called plainly Ford Martin? Would the automotive cognoscenti find it similarly appealing? Truth be told, either name would be as apropos as the fabled Aston Martin moniker, just as the DB initials signify Aston Martin’s significant debt to David Brown, the man who gave a more distinctive stamp on the marque than even its founders. Read more . . .
They say BMW is “The Ultimate Driving Machine,” but before the now-legendary German brand took that given name for itself there was another, 
far more humble car, that called itself simply “The Machine.” It was built, not by Bavarian Motor Works but by American Motors, and despite its ordinary underpinnings, if The Machine had ever squared off against a contemporary BMW, it would have blown it back into the Black Forest. Which is not to say The Machine was the final “ultimate driving machine,” but in its own idiosyncratic way the American Motors Rebel Machine, a model you probably don’t recall, but a model whose single year was a great one, somehow, someway deserves to be considered among the Greatest Cars of All Time. Read more . . .