Here’s to a New Generation of Classic Cars
Enough with Boomer nostalgia for shiny chrome and mad speed. Let’s celebrate old automobiles to suit our more sober, constrained America.
Updated at 3:00 p.m. ET on October 3, 2023
Here they come, two by two, the classic cars of America. The 1970s muscle cars, the ’60s coupes, and the ’50s sedans—“kandy-kolored” (to borrow Tom Wolfe’s phrase) beauties that came off the line in the golden age before the catalytic converter, when rich black smoke pooled above the beach lot where the boys gathered. These were America’s fantasy rides: the Cadillac Fleetwood Sixty Special, the sort painted pink for Elvis Presley; Porsche’s 550 Spyder, the kind James Dean drove to his death on U.S. 466 in 1955; the 1970 Plymouth Road Runner Superbird; the 1965 Shelby Mustang. They remain our classic cars, after six or seven decades.
These are the vehicles you see at shows and rallies or meandering on Sunday afternoons through all those picturesque Glencoes, Ridgefields, and Potomacs—driven, in many cases, by balding millionaires, with a small dog in back and a young wife shotgun. This parade makes me sad, even angry. How long must I live inside the nostalgia of the Baby Boomers? Isn’t it enough that they control every branch of government and most of the blue-chip corporations? Must we be stuck with their cheesecloth-covered memories as well? As part of the process of septuagenarians and octogenarians yielding room for later generations in the great American McMansion, space in the garage should be made for the fuel-efficient foreign cars (Hondas, Toyotas, etc.) that those who, like me, came of age in the ’80s and ’90s can consider classics.
It’s time to add these vehicles to the rallies and shows. The cars of the Boomers’ youth, such as the muscle cars of the ’60s, were really accepted as classics in the ’90s and aughts, about 30 years after the Mustang and the Chevelle were new. That’s roughly the same amount of time as has elapsed since I acquired a used 1985 Toyota Celica, a car that came to define me as surely as Vuarnet sunglasses and my love of the Super Bowl Shuffle. The cars of the past, those we choose to valorize, say as much about our history—what we were and what we are, how we got from that to this—as the names of our leaders and the dates in schools’ history textbooks.
An ’80s Toyota Corolla (the Celica was its sportier cousin) suggests the worldview of my generation—they called us “X” long before Elon got in on the act—just as surely as a 1969 Chevy Stingray suggests that of the Boomers. By 1987, when the Corolla was available in safe, stable front-wheel drive—no flamboyant, rubber-burning, fishtailing rear-wheel drive for its owners—we knew the United States was no longer as strong or dominant as it had been in the decades that followed World War II. After all, here we were, driving Japanese cars, a fate that would once have been unimaginable to our parents.
By our generation, most Americans were no longer affluent enough to be heedless of gas mileage, nor oblivious enough to laugh off pollution. Cars like the Corolla were what we were driving at the birth of our modern American moment. Sure, there were people who’d give you crap for not buying American, for being disloyal to a national brand—you did not want to drive a Toyota through Flint, Michigan, in those years—but we knew they’d get over it as soon they drew up the same sort of pro/con list that Herb Cohen, my father, had devised before his latest outing to the lots. These cars were modest to the point of being meek, fuel-efficient, dependable, only as fast as absolutely necessary, and drab but beautiful in their own way—especially if just washed and vacuumed at Kar King.
Our act of treachery coincided with the end of a period of extraordinary U.S. supremacy and the seemingly endless growth of the American middle class that came with it. That economic primacy was becoming a thing of the past. From now on, it was going to be America and Germany, America and Japan, America and South Korea, America and China. You only had to go out on your suburban street to see it happening: The cars told us—even if their new owners were less interested in tectonic geopolitical shifts than in value for money. As Herb said, “Don’t be a schmuck!”
The cars of the ’80s evoke the emergence of a new, more prudent American mindset. If domestic automakers did indeed find a way to compete in this market, it was not by winning but by adapting, by becoming what they’d once feared. There’s a lot to be learned from that.
And that is why I want to honor the Corolla and its cousins as classics.
To be considered a classic, at least in the technical sense defined by insurance and registration, a car need only be 20 or more years old and perfectly preserved. In other words, a 2003 Ford Taurus can be a classic car. Of course, that’s not what most people have in mind when they think about classic cars, a concept that’s been around almost as long as the cars themselves.
The first American museum dedicated to classic cars, the Swigart, opened in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, in 1920, “just 25 years after the first patented combustion engine automobile,” according to the museum’s website today. What was in that original display?
Already perhaps the collection’s 1902 Crestmobile, with its bicycle tires and Victorian-couch seating. The 1904 Franklin Roadster, with its seats resembling La-Z-Boys strapped to a metal monster. A 1909 Overland Runabout, with headlights and a water-cooled engine. Perhaps too the 1909 Hupmobile, which, with its plush leather interior and wide running board, was the sort of car a madcap debutante might drive into a tree. A1910 Marion Phaeton, with its spoked tires, running lights that looked like kerosene lanterns, and seating for five. And not forgetting the 1911 Sears Model K Roadster, which resembled a buggy, cost $475, and came in the mail.
People presumably went to the Swigart in 1920 for the same reason people go to such museums today: to admire the ingenuity of the earlier workmanship, yes, but also to revisit the cranks and clutches and retractable windshields they recalled from their youth. It all came rushing back: the summer nights in open cars, rides under lamplight and starlight, quick runs to the market or liquor store. A middle-aged man in the driving seat of a Model T Ford in 1960 must’ve felt much the way I do today behind the wheel of a 1985 Toyota Celica.
Still, for most people, classic cars means muscle cars and racers, and the settled consensus defines the ’60s and early ’70s as the apex of American automobile style. Those were years when prosperous America was drunk on cheap gasoline—in the mid-’60s a gallon cost just $2.9 in today’s dollars. Fully six of the all-time top 10 “Classic American Cars” compiled by Opumo—“a collective of international curators who are passionate about great design”—were built from 1962 to 1970. The Shelby AC Cobra, Chevy’s Corvette Sting Ray, the Ford Mustang, the Chevy Camaro, the Dodge Charger, and the Pontiac Firebird Trans Am were all marketed and released within a 10-year span.
Design is what makes these cars classics: The beautiful lines undergirded by huge, thirsty engines—such as the Hemi in the stock-car driver Richard Petty’s Plymouth Barracuda—were the velvet glove over an iron fist. (Wolfe again: “Varoom! Varoom!”) These cars spoke of an America that was big, confident, fast, loud, and a little dumb. No seat belts. No airbags. No Babies on Board. A time when the highways were new, when no one had clocked climate change, and when the country carried itself like a teenager. Yes, we had the bomb to worry about, but nothing soothed the fear of nuclear holocaust like the throb of a V-8 engine at the stoplight where Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive turns into Sheridan Road.
But that kid grew up, and auto culture lost its innocence. When we looked in the rearview mirror, we saw a straight line from the halcyon days to what all of our beautiful behemoths had brought us: traffic jams, smog alerts, drunk drivers, bumper stickers, tailgate parties, demolition derbies, and pickup-truck decals of little guys giving you the finger.
When the reign of the muscle car ended, it ended fast—killed off by a series of shocks. The OPEC oil embargo, coming hot after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, sent the price of gas skyrocketing, if you could buy it at all. Among my first memories is a man getting out of his Dodge Charger in Glencoe, Illinois, and challenging the loudmouth waiting in line at the gas station to “Put ’em up.”
Detroit’s stumbling response to the demand for more economical cars was—in addition to union strife at the factories and shoddy manufacture—to give us a generation of lemons: the Pacer from AMC, the Pinto from Ford, the Citation from Chevy, the Cimarron from Cadillac. Japanese manufacturers filled the void. Dragging my father out of Steve Foley Cadillac and down Skokie Boulevard to the Mazda dealership, my mom said, “At least it won’t break down.” A 1980 two-door Mazda RX-7 with a sunroof and a lock on the gas tank to foil siphoners—a term that conjures that low moment—was my family’s first foray into the foreign market. It was silver, quick, and still going strong when I drove it from New Orleans to D.C. to begin a new life chapter in 1990.
The ashtrays of the old automobiles were gone, along with the thick shag. For us, in our Japanese cars, it was bucket seats. It’s these cars—the teachers’-lounge-beige Datsun, the chalk-white Nissan, the winter-sun-yellow Honda—that evoke our more constrained, less hedonistic youth. The pungent aroma of Armor All and Skoal Wintergreen, the gentle hum of the automatic transmission that, set to maximum fuel efficiency, carried us responsibly to adulthood. Design is not what makes these cars classics (though as a rule they were elegantly put together) so much as the epochal shift in mood and style that they evoke. American consumer values changed in the ’80s, and that change was seen in the market victory of these cars. The Mustang was beautiful because it was powerful. Even sitting still, its allure was its potential speed. The Celica came to seem beautiful because it was efficient. Its allure was its frugality and reliability.
So enough with the muscle cars of the ’70s. Goodbye to the sedans from the ’60s, all those Woodies and Wagons. To understand America and its shrunken aspirations, it’s not a ’64 Ford GT40 you should admire as a classic. It’s a sky-blue, two-door ’85 Toyota Celica with manual windows, retractable headlights, and a tape deck blasting the B-side of Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.”
This article originally stated that the Pacer was made by Ford. In fact, it was made by AMC.This article also originally mistook the price of gasoline in the 1960s.