Automotive History Proves One Decision Can Echo For Decades

What’s Coming Up In Car History

So, starting off with automotive history. This week in automotive history, uh, the week ahead, some of the things that are coming up in the upcoming days that you might be interested in. We found them very interesting, and you might want to follow up on them as the dates roll around.

Al Moss And The Birth Of Moss Motors

Coming up here on September the 14th, 1948, Al Moss bought a used MGTC in Southern California. And that kind of sounds like a pretty ordinary car purchase, except Moss was about to become one of the most influential names in the American-British sports car movement. Now, he took the erased the MG, he competed in Jim Connors, and he drove it around Los Angeles. So the little sports car got a lot of attention. So he was great with that and he was loving every minute of it, except he was very dissatisfied with his local MG dealer. Now, this caused him to eventually open his own shop in 1949. Now that business became Moss Motors, and it's one of the best known sources for MG and British sports car parts in America. Now, this of course has grown into a big corporation since that time, been bought and sold a lot, but that name is one of the legendary names in Southern California for the MGs.

Talladega Debut Of The Charger Daytona

Then coming up on September the 14th. Now, this was the inaugural Talladega 500 in 1969. The Dodge Charger Daytona made its NASCAR debut on September the 14th, 1969. It was a controversial weekend for several reasons. Several other NASCAR top drivers had boycotted the race because there were concerns about tire failures at the brand new, extremely fast track. Now that didn't slow down Richard Brickhouse because he took the new aerodynamic Dodge and he put it in victory lane. The Daytona had a dramatic extended nose and a huge rear wing, and Dodge built 503 street versions of this vehicle so they could qualify it for the NASCAR competition. Now, just a year later, Buddy Baker would drive one beyond a 200 mile per hour at Talladega. First time it was that speed was achieved at that track. And you'll also kind of think, well, you've seen other ones. Plymouth has one as well. Same thing. They built 500 of them so that they could get it onto the tracks, but it's real easy to tell the difference. Still got that same extended nose, still got the big wing, but the Plymouth version has a vinyl top on it. Now they did that for some very practical reasons. Once it was one, it was very popular. They were trying to get on the track, and it was cheaper because where the top would come in weld into the body panels there on the quarters, they had to well they had to smooth out the seams to make it paint worthy. Well, put a vinyl top on it, you just weld it up, glue it down, and you're gone. So there was a lot of reasons for that, but that's an easy way to tell the difference between the Plymouth Superbird and the Dodge Charger Daytona.

The First Big Mustang Update

Then coming up on September the 16th, 1965. This is this really blew my mind. The Mustang gets its first major update. Now the car has only been out a year and a half, it's already getting an update. But September the 16th, 1965, marked the beginning of sales for the 1966 Ford Mustang. It may not sound like a whole lot of history, but the changes demonstrated just how fast Ford was evolving with a Mustang after such a spectacular debut that it made. On the inside of it, there was a five-gauge instrument cluster that had been part of the 1965 GT. Well, now this was standard equipment on the 66 Ford Mustang. Ford sold nearly 681,000 Mustangs during the extended first model year. So that first year and a half, I mean, they were rocking and rolling, throwing them out the factory. So the challenge really wasn't creating the interest because there was a lot of interest after it rolled out at the World's Fair in 1964, but it was keeping the factories running so they could keep them out there, so they could keep selling them to keep the phenomenon going. This is the what started the Pony Wars and led to the response by several other manufacturers to what this vehicle has done.

Road Atlanta Opens With Can-Am

Now, the next thing we've got is on September the 13th, Road Atlanta opens up with a Can Am Thunder event. Now, this was in 1970, and it was the first race day at a brand new road course in Georgia. It's called Road Atlanta, of course. Now, Vic Elford put his car on the pole. There were a lot of other people there at that race, Sterling Moss, and they were all there. But Tony Dean won the inaugural Can Am race in a Porsche 908 after 75 laps. Now, Road Atlanta would go on to host Can Am's Formula 500s, IMSA races, Trans Am, and other major racing series, becoming one of America's best known road racing venues.

Dieselgate Becomes Public

Coming up next, we're going to find that we've got the on September the 18th, this is a day that just this really is terrible. The day dieselgate became public September the 18th, 2015, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced that Volkswagen and Audi diesel cars had been equipped from the factory with software that allegedly circumvented emissions during testing requirements. The EPA noticed that the involved four-cylinder diesel vehicles from 2009 to 2015 model years, the software in those vehicles could recognize when the vehicles were undergoing an emissions test. And it would alter the operation of the vehicle so that it would pass. So out on the road, the vehicles could produce dramatically higher nitrogen oxide emissions than is actually permitted and still pass the test because of this software. Volkswagen would later acknowledge discrepancies involving millions, literally millions of vehicles worldwide. What began as an emissions investigation became one of the biggest corporate scandals in modern American history.

Quick Recap And Wrap

And that's a few of the things that we found interesting on automotive history coming up in the next week. So I think next we're going to automotive automotive.