With that in mind, I’m going to throw something out there that I’m sure will bring out some of that passion, so get ready to blow up the comments section. Here it is: The Triumph TR6 is the perfect English car and the Cadillac Eldorado is the perfect American car. By that I mean they are the perfect cars for the environment for which they were intended. «insert picture of me ducking as various heavy and sharp objects are lobbed my way» [Editor’s Note: The image Huibert provided was too graphic for our current editorial standards. – JT] You may think I’ve lost my mind but hear me out first. All cars are a product of their environment. The environment dictates how a car will be used and by whom and the result is a car that, hopefully, perfectly suits that environment and customer usage. While my statement only addresses English and American cars, the same thing can surely be said for any country or region of the world. You could say the 5 series is the perfect car for Germany or the Citroen SM is the perfect car for France, etc. But for now, let’s just talk about England and America mainly because I live in America and I’ve just spent three weeks in England. Also, I spent two years in England doing ride and handling development at Jaguar Cars so I’m pretty familiar with the place and what it’s like to drive there. Let’s unpack this a bit. When I lived in England back in the late 90’s, I knew I would be there for at least two years and while I would have access to some cool cars from my work, I can’t live without a toy so I quickly set about finding a cool car toy and settled on a 1971 Triumph TR6. It was red with a black interior, 150 HP fuel-injected engine with 4-speed gearbox and electric overdrive. In a word, it was the TR6 to have. It was, and still is (in my humble opinion), the quintessential British sports car. Where I lived, I was close to an area called the “Cotswolds” which is known for its beautiful villages and houses made from a local stone appropriately called Cotswold Stone. It gives the houses a look as if they organically grew out of the soil.
The roads between these villages are narrow and windy and they dip and dive over the land. Many of the roads are lined with hedges or stone walls so you can’t always see what’s around the corner. This means you need a car that will move with the road and be quick to respond. Because the roads are so windy, it also means you don’t need a lot of power or top speed. 500+ horsepower is wasted on these roads since you rarely have a chance to open it up anyway and a wide car like many of today’s Ferraris or Porsches would scare the heck out of me when a tractor invariably comes the other way. Much better to have a narrow car for these roads. Mind you, there are no true narrow cars anymore since safety requirements mean more metal and space surrounding the occupants is a must but the narrower the better for these roads.
I spent a lot of time driving that TR6 and it was immediately clear that this car was absolutely perfect for that environment. It was nimble, 150 Hp made it reasonably quick, and the manual rack and pinion steering gave it excellent feel and precision. Its narrowness meant I was never worried about passing another car or tractor and the springs were reasonably soft so the car moved with the dips and dives in the road. My boss at Jaguar used to say the car had to “breathe,” It had to be able to move and flow with the road. I’ve driven BMWs, Audis, and Mercs on those same roads and they’re all so stiff they get yanked down into the road undulations and thrown back up on the other side. Your head gets thrown side to side constantly until you’re sick of it. Vehicle Dynamics engineers have a very technical sounding name for this: “head toss.” While these cars are superb on the Autobahn, I find them supremely uncomfortable on these English roads.
Lastly, we need to remember that many people in England, and many other countries in Europe for that matter, just didn’t travel very far. I grew up in Holland and knew of many people who had never left the village they were born in. For others, a 10-mile trip was very long and happened rarely. Most people just didn’t spend much time in their cars. In the meantime, while the English were building the TR6 and other cars like it, over here in the US, we had a very different driving environment. Our roads were long, straight and wide. With the invention of the car, the average American quickly took to the road to explore this vast country we had. We drove for hours and hundreds of miles at a time, so we wanted a car that was comfortable and could eat up the miles with ease.
Our roads were wide so our cars didn’t need to be narrow. Roads were mostly straight so going around corners was not a priority, and since we were spending hour after hour in our cars, they had to be comfortable above anything else. Given these conditions, you can see why American cars of the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s turned out the way they did. Based on this, it is my opinion that the Cadillac Eldorado from the ’60s and ’70s epitomizes these priorities and represents the perfect American car. It was very good at doing all the things Americans wanted from a car. No, it was not fun to drive and you wouldn’t want to take it down a canyon road quickly but that wasn’t so important. It was comfortable and you could drive it for hours without getting tired.
I know what you’re going to say at this point. You’re going to say that the Cadillac Eldorado is soooo 1970s and we’ve moved far beyond that type of car. But have we really? The top selling vehicles in America are the Ford F-Series pickups, the Chevy Silverado, and the Ram Pickup. I say these are the Cadillac Eldorados of our time. The three pickups sell for their utility but they have become boulevard cruisers too. They ride well, are roomy, their steering and handling is mediocre at best but they will soak up mile after mile of highway. Similarly, the Toyota Camry is always near the top best selling car and it’s easy to see why. While it isn’t the size of the Cadillacs of old or the pickups, it is roomy, comfortable and will drive for hours without beating you up. It doesn’t steer or handle particularly well but it does everything us Americans want in a car, just like the Eldorado did. Now I want to hear from you all. Do you think I’m nuts? Tell me what you think is the perfect car for the environment you live in and why. Ready, set, go! Almost certainly. Pickup trucks are, for many people, a statement that says “I am a rugged, American, manly-man.” They’re an accessory, much like the latest iPhone. Let us remember the Eldorado in its glory years, of which for me means 1967. https://www.gtautolounge.com/vehicle-details/1967-cadillac-eldorado-coupe-64947c02e3b841d88bb6c8e273256e71 429 cubic inches (a new even 7 liters) of displacement. 480 Ft-Lbs of torque and 340 BHP (250.24 KW). According to ProfessCars estimation this Cadillac is capable of accelerating from 0 to 60 mph in 8.1 sec, from 0 to 100 km/h in 8.6 sec, from 0 to 160 km/h (100 mph) in 22.7 sec, from 0 to 200 km/h (124 mph) in 75.2 sec and the top speed is 134 mph. This Eldorado more fits the American spirit in that it has wretched excess in spades but also has “muscle” and the beauty expected of American cars before the government stuck its wooden shoes and wooden head into the design and engineering process. This is a better counterpart to the TR-6 you propose as you offer it in its finest form to wit: fuel-injected and without the bump-o-rama bumpers. Assuming you agree to this change, I will promise not to mention the TR-7, which -it could be argued – suffered from the same interventions and suffered the same flaccid fate. See the USA in your Chevrolet, dammit! 🙂 I propose the following choices… well, you asked… Perfect American car: Chevy Suburban. It’s essentially a station wagon, but sits taller on a truck chassis. Lots of room, comfy on the highway, more than what most of its buyers really needs, but not so much more so that it becomes cumbersome. You can take the kids to school or to Yellowstone in it and it’s equally at home doing both. Perfect English car: Ford Fiesta. Still small and economical, reliable, good-handling, works well on those narrow country roads (which I love, btw), but can seat four and work well as a household’s only car. I would imagine most British households only have one car, so it needs to be well-rounded. The modern four door pickup is as close to automotive perfection as any single vehicle is likely to get. I’m not going to compare them to a smaller sedan. I’m going to compare them to a Suburban. A Suburban has more seats, more usable space which also happens to be easier to load, roughly the same capability – it can’t tow a fifth wheel but that’s a very small percentage of the market – is actually significantly better in snow since it doesn’t need to be weighed down as much. It’s equally comfortable and roughly the same size. Unless you’re towing a fifth wheel or doing some commercial work you don’t actually want a pickup. I say this as someone who lives somewhere that pickups are the vast majority of vehicles on the road, they’re actually shockingly poorly adapted to the environments they operate in and bring with them a ton of compromises with few to no actual advantages for most buyers. I’m not saying they’re not used to their full capability, most people own cars that aren’t used to their full capability. I’m saying that the design actually runs counter to what buyers actually need their cars to do. There’s a lot of stuff that I do with a truck bed that I couldn’t do with a Suburban unless I brought a trailer along. Maybe I carry large and/or dirty stuff more often than the average owner, but furniture, bulk mulch and dirt, yard waste, bikes, ATVs, etc often find their way into my truck bed, and I wouldn’t want any of those in a Suburban. GM also seems to have consciously aimed the Suburban upmarket from where it used to be, which is awesome if you’re road tripping in one, less awesome if you’re trying to drive through a muddy field on 22″ wheels with low hanging running boards. The 2500 model is gone. You can still buy a base model, but when was the last time you saw one dirty at a job site? Finally, I guess I don’t see a lot of drawbacks from the pickup body style. Traction and stability control have cut way back on the weight distribution penalty in snow; I live in a snow belt and my truck handles nasty roads just fine. My CCLB truck is longer than a Suburban, but as I’ve said many times here, the size becomes pretty manageable with practice. I think you’re being overly harsh on the body style, and while I really like (and considered buying) a Suburban, there really are a lot of people that couldn’t substitute one. People might tell themselves they’ll haul a couch every week or fill it with gravel but they don’t. They never do. Probably 80% of households here have a truck in front and 75% have never done anything that only a truck can do. I’m not saying it’s a fashion accessory, it’s just something people think they’re going to use all the time and wind up never actually using. It’s the treadmill of transportation. They guy with the clean pickup bed in the office parking lot might tow a boat every weekend. Or might have just helped his friend move. Or worked all Saturday in his yard. And so on. My truck certainly isn’t used every day or even every weekend. But it’s used often enough that renting or borrowing a truck every time would be a serious imposition. And as I stated in my first post, the truck has very few downsides that make it difficult to own vs. any other large vehicle. I suspect most non-professional truck owners make a similar calculation when they decide what to buy. Almost certainly. Pickup trucks are, for many people, a statement that says “I am a rugged, American, manly-man.” They’re an accessory, much like the latest iPhone. While the minivan is not as “manly” as a truck or big ass SUV, it’s a better choice for 90% of families. Although, you addressed what the modern US car would be with the trucks or Camry. You didn’t address what the modern English car would be. I’d have to say the Miata. Its a modern TR6, with all that entails; and like most English things the idea at its heart and soul may be quintessentially English (in this case, a two-seater convertible) but another country took a crack at it and did it so much better that the English version doesn’t get produced anymore I’d say that the perfect American Car is the the 1971-1985 Oldsmobile 88. It is big, comfortable, upper middle class, reliable (and remember the era, but they’re pretty good even today), fixable, and practical. It does everything that the Caddy does, but in a less ostentatious manner. I can’t comment on the perfect English car, but I’ll wager there’s an equivalent to the Olds 88… British roadsters are great on a summer day but we don’t have the weather for year-round use. As to the Eldorado, I owned a ’75, the Coupe version. I absolutely loved driving that car. Some people prefer canyon carvers, I like couches mounted to wobbly springs mounted to watercraft. I don’t know if I’d call it the “perfect” American car, but it was definitely representative. America has always had a bit of a reputation for excess and that ’75 Eldo was excessive excess. A 500 cubic inch V8 that simply absorbed gasoline. No transmission tunnel so the floor in front of the seats looked like a good place to tango. It felt like taking an acreage out for a spin. The Bedford Van is the right car for England. You can shag in it, move your drum kit, park it anywhere and no one will notice or bother to steal it, even use it as a getaway in a bank robbery. It’s the F150 of the UK. 80 bucks a day, eh? I might have to consider that. I’m sorry, what? Driving down the highway, top down, comfortably doing 80mph and barely feeling like you’re moving with the tunes cranked to 11 isn’t fun? I think fun is subjective. The Caddy sounds like an absolute blast of a road tripping machine. Its a shame that, as you said, the modern equivalent is a truck or truck based vehicle. I’m waiting for one of those last Lincoln Continentals to hit the used market. Cadillac doesn’t really have a car like that in its lineup. Anything long, lower than a truck, and comfy is the dream. A comfortable, street legal way at the bottom of those types of speeds is as good I can get. When its warm, we take my wife’s 1-series convertible out on the autobahns. Cruising at 100+mph with the top down is amazing. They don’t sell for their utility. They sell for the image of their utility. Stolen valor of the working class by middle managers and dudebros means Ford et al can make a $100k F250 and the money printer goes brrrrr. Spot on. The marketing folks at GMFordDodge are selling the illusion of manliness and machismo.
