Fourth Saturday’s Loneliest Liberal: Cars

The ones my dad had me grow up with

By James Knudsen

I’m sure everyone has a tale to tell of how they were embarrassed by their parents. It was rarely deliberate. Parents are usually too harried with the tasks associated with being parents to have the time necessary to formulate a plan to make their children want to crawl in a hole and disappear from the sight of every teen/pre-teen peer they know or wish they knew. More often it is the case of an adult being who they are. Recent events have caused me to consider my dad and the way he went about being who he is.
    One of the more obvious traits that were visible to anyone on the streets of Tulare, California was my father’s mode of transportation. He was well known for many years for his penchant for using a bicycle whenever possible. But even his choice of two-wheeled transport was not the usual. Aside from the Schwinn my mother bought him, Dad liked something less ordinary. So he bought a Motobecane. He was the only person who could pronounce it correctly. Later he became the owner of a Moulton bike that had once been the transportation of fellow Moristotle & Co. columnist Tom Lowe.
    But it was automobiles that made him stand out in a town like Tulare. His Volkswagen Type 1 was probably one of the first in town. Alas, it was too German. So, one small-displacement European car was replaced with another of even smaller displacement, his 1957 Panhard Dyna Z12. This car still stands out; aerodynamic in an era when few automotive designers gave drag coefficients a second or even third thought, fuel efficient when no one cared about fuel consumption and, in its first years of production, made largely from aluminum when the lightweight alloy was being used only in aircraft and pricey bespoke vehicles.
    The Panhard would be supplanted, not replaced (it’s still in the garage) by a brace of Citroen DS’s. I have no doubt that an entire graduate thesis devoted to this remarkable automobile is gathering dust on a shelf somewhere. Writers continue to praise its advanced design and marvel at its ability to handle the insults poorly maintained pavement hurls at it. And when those met untimely ends, Dad bought the last Renault R16 from the local farm equipment dealer who was glad to no longer be selling Renaults.

    The VW, the Panhard, the DS, and the R16 – four cars that most automotive editors would concede were signifcant for one or more reasons. But remember, I was growing up in Tulare. Today, the big, downsized-from-huge SUV is the vehicle of choice as it is in many small towns. Decades ago, before the SUV, the customized van, the lumbering station wagon, and the big American luxo-barge were the cars to be seen in. I rarely was. And it was ok.

    I never knew anything but a sensibly sized, front-wheel-drive car made in France. I couldn’t understand why anyone would drive anything else. And when the rest of the world finally grasped that such a design was what people should be driving, it was old news to me. And more often than not the new interpretation wasn’t as good. Has anything been as good as the DS?
    In the years since, I’ve come to appreciate certain aspects of more plebian designs. My 1985 Chrysler 5th Avenue was unmatched in its ability to coddle me in comfort hundreds of miles at a time. The mind-numbing reliability of my Toyota is a trait that was unheard of in my youth. And I even went through the de riguer teenage rebellion of wanting and driving an uncorked V-8 at high speed on country roads. But I recognize the logic and purity of design in the cars I grew up with, and I appreciate those traits even more now.
    The Citroens, the slew of Renaults, and the Volkswagen are long gone. All that remains is the Panhard. But not for long. That is a story for next time....

Copyright © 2014 by James Knudsen