Auto News 5

It's over now, but for seventy-five years the archetypical American automobile was a fairly simple machine, neither big nor small, about fifteen or sixteen feet long, with a V-8 engine driving a solid rear axle. The most significant contributors to creating that essential description were the 1932 Ford and the 1955 Chevrolet. More than 100 million derivatives of those cars' two V-8s have been built in the past seventy-seven years, and they inspired others to adopt the V-8. Even as our industry collapses and "green" ideologues dream of electric shopping-cart cars, we know there will be vestiges of those seminal cars for decades to come.