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This is the very best time of year for anyone in New England with an old car. Winter is behind us with its icy winds and frozen rain. We don't need heaters to fight the cold or defrosters to keep the windows clear. Rear defoggers that weren't invented when our cars were built aren't required as we watch the trees fill in and spring turn into summer. We aren't into full summer yet so air conditioning isn't needed and even convertibles with black interiors are still comfortable to sit in under a cloudless sky. No burns on the back of your legs because of overheated vinyl. My son, Rob, who is in Phoenix, tells me that their driving season is all but over. With daily temperatures over 100 every day and some over 110 degrees, it's time to be either inside or in the pool. Every steering wheel is too hot to touch and few air conditioning compressors can overpower the inside cockpit temperatures in less that thirty minutes. They start cars remotely to cool them off not to warm them up as we do here. Never a triple digit day in New England, we should count ourselves fortunate to live in this changing climate, it certainly gets hot but not that hot. Sometimes it's tough to remember how things really were years ago. How did we ever survive those summers without air conditioning in our cars? The only real ventilation was a window. The early Porsches didn't even have vent windows to point into the wind to scoop a breeze. Those wouldn't appear until the '60's. There were two knobs under the dash at knee level that the owner’s manual said controlled fresh air into the cockpit. But they didn't, they actually opened a hole in the door jam near the hinge area. The theory was that if you were moving (there were no electric fans of any kind in these cars) there would be positive pressure inside the door jam and that would force the air into the car. This required that the rear side windows be opened somewhat as the air had to get out of the car somehow. The faster you were going the better it worked. At about 80 mph you could almost feel the air coming in the front windshield vent. Not enough to clear a fogged up windshield (that's what towels were for), but enough to offset the heat from the black vinyl dashpad. The air that was forced over the engine to cool it was the same air that was directed into the car to heat it in the winter. It was a marvel of engineering efficiency except that it didn't work when temperatures were less than thirty degrees. Things froze to the floor under twenty degrees temperature. It wasn't like today where you could build a car from the factory the way you wanted it. There was no lengthy option list that would allow the addition of rear heat or rear air conditioning. You got the car the way they built it or you didn't buy it. They did give five or six color choices and would paint a car to your sample if pressed but it wasn't encouraged. The factory even painted one in pink for a New York woman, very advanced marketing forty days ago. It was only a few years before and every car was black. A couple of engines were available most years but they were all four cylinder with dual carburetors. All transmissions were manual four speeds. Radios were almost always dealer installed and you could pick between Blaupunkt, Becker and Motorola here in the US. During the years that Porsches were sold alongside VW's some Shapphire AM radios found their way into 356's. I saw an automotive commercial on TV the other night that was showing the speed, power and sex appeal of one of Detroit's latest offerings. At the very end of the thirty-second spot the price of the car was shown with some smaller print at the bottom of the screen. It was visible for less than three seconds. Now I realize that in today’s fast moving world three seconds is a pretty long time. Probably time enough to almost complete a Mission on Grand Theft Auto - Vice City. However at my age, three seconds goes by pretty fast, so fast that I really wasn't sure that what I saw was accurate. So I ran the tape back to repeat the ad. We tape most shows because it lets us stop when we want, to let the dog out, get a drink, etc. but most important it lets us skip over the high volume commercials. Why doesn't the FCC prevent the ads from running at 75 db when the rest of the show is at 60 db? Just about the time that you get the volume up to where you can hear it an ad comes on and it's so loud that it wakes the dog up. Then she has to go out and you miss end of the show. You can see the wisdom of taping. The review showed my suspicions to be correct. The large print showed the featured car to have a list price of $23,550. That message was written right across the car itself looking sort of like the sale prices in a used car lot. Across the bottom of the screen was another figure that said, "Price as shown $36,600". It was gone again in less time than it took Eleanor to clear the ramp truck. I hit the replay again. Yep, there was a $13,050 difference between the base price and the delivered price of the car. I couldn't believe it, for the price of the options you could have bought three Speedsters back in the day. I know, that so long ago that gas was 16 cents a gallon and milk was free. But really, do you have to add 55% to the price of a modern day car to make it attractive? Do people walk through the showroom door thinking that they're looking for a $23k car when it's really $36k? That might be a tough bump for even an experienced car salesman to overcome. Porsches were never cheap. They weren't back then and they aren't now. When Speedsters were sold at the stripped down price of $2995 you could buy a VW beetle for $1500. I know that because I did. All right, my Beetle was used and costs less but I knew the prices because they sat on the same showroom floor. Besides the prices, the other difference was that the Porsches at the dealer were locked and the VW's weren't. New Chevy Impalas were only $2300 and Caddy’s were $2600. Even if you had the money the choices were tough. At least we didn't have to build it the way that is required today. And just think about how much those expensive options are going to be worth in a couple of years. Sets of chrome wheels were $23 for a 356A and the radios got as high as $89. The really fancy cocoa mats were $12 a set of four and a bolt on luggage rack from M G Mitten was $29.95. Even with every option in the book the price of a 356 couldn't go up 10%. Today with a few check marks on the order sheet you can add over 50% to the bottom line. Boy have things changed, and not always for the better. KTF |
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