Aaronw

Neat, I have a neighbor down the street who has one on these but metallic green and white.

Well since this seems to be drifting... I ran across some import data, the issue of when did imports arrive was brought up earlier. 1955 imports account for less than 1% of US auto sales. 1960 imports make up nearly 10% of US auto sales. 1962 imports drop to 5%. 1975 imports are up to 20% of sales 1976 imports sales drop to 13% 1979 VW sells more cars in the US than AMC. 1980 imports account for 26% of US car sales. Comparison to the present 2013 The Big 3 account for 47% of US auto sales. Toyota sells more cars in the US than Chrysler. More than 50% of "import" cars are built in North American factories (USA, Canada or Mexico).

China recently passed the US as the largest car market on the planet, a title the US had held going back to the days of the Model T.

They've been included in a few kits. Monogram did a couple of dirt bikes with a Datsun pickup, and there was a Honda trail bike in another kit but I don't recall which one. I remember somebody posted a model truck in the under glass area awhile back that had some sort of older Harley or Indian type bike in the back, but don't remember if it came from a kit or was a diecast they picked up somewhere.

I've always assumed the Corvair was a response to the import market. In 1955 imports accounted for less than 1% of sales, but by 1960 they made up 10% of new car sales (or around 800,000 cars / year). When looked at a counter to the growing import market the Corvair outsold any import. VW was selling around 20,000 Beetles a year in the US in 1960, and peaked at 90,000 in 1975.The Beetle was the top selling import car for most of the 60s. I can't find sales numbers but Corvair production was in the 100,000-300,000 range for each of the first 6 years. Maybe small by Chevrolet standards, but more than any import of the time.

I think you need to think about suburbia vs city as well. Even today you will find people who live in large cities who find they don't need a car. If you are in the suburbs or father out, a car or a second car is more of a necessity. Kind of weird, the license plates on the cars are all pre-69 black and yellow, but taking another look the Volvo in the ad has the 1971-74 style grill, so you are probably right more like 71-72 ish.

I wonder if this is the commercial that started this, it is a '56 but close enough. So this is about 10 years later 1967-68 (Volvo 140 series came out in 1967, California changed it's licence plates from black to blue in 1969), and hits the two car thing and imported compact cars.

The US is a big place. It wouldn't surprise me at all if affluent car crazy California saw a fair number of 2 car families in the late 1950s. The 1950 Nash Rambler is claimed to be the first domestic compact car Some VW Beetles came home with US soldiers postwar but the VW factory wasn't in full production until 1949. VW produced it's 1,000,000th Beetle in 1955. Other imports seem to have started seriously targeting the US market after 1960. My parents owned a VW bug in California during the early 1960s and they've told me it was still considered unusual, but not unique. They also had a Citroen which was impossible to find parts or service for outside of a major metropolitan area. They bought a Toyota Corona in 1970 and had similar issues getting it worked on outside of a dealership. I come from a long line of import cars and I don't think getting an import worked on really became a non issue until the mid 1980s.

Looks good. I know the camera tends to exaggerate but the foil looks a bit wrinkled in places. If you are not already using a burnishing tool, you might want to get one. I found it was very helpful for doing foil work. Something like this http://www.micromark.com/5-piece-burnishing-set,7976.html

A practical (relatively speaking) hotrod, didn't see that coming. There seems to a common thread running through Harry's Mustang thread, the tuner thread and this one... Get outta my yard you rotten kids

I think there is some truth to that in the past, but when the engines are designed from the start to be turbo charged I don't think longevity is an issue. More stuff to break obviously, but not particularly trouble prone if maintained. Many European cars have been running turbos for decades, without gaining a reputation for being short lived. Kind of a different beast, but most diesels are turbo charged and they are very durable engines.

Wow, nice job. Neat that you restored a 1-1 too. Seems like growing up, every parent who volunteered to haul kids for a field trip had a Country Squire, a Volvo 245 wagon or a VW bus. Still see the Volvos and VWs around occasionally but I haven't seen a wagon with faux wood panels in forever.

The Nissan Cube is weird, but this actually kind of works.

Sorry Harry, I guess I wasn't clear, didn't mean to imply you were buying it to be cool. You said it is a fad, I say tuners have gone mainstream, now being the preferred performance car of the 21st century. They didn't disappear, they are everywhere.

Harry, you are wanting to buy a new fad. The 2015 Mustang with the 2.3 liter eco-boost is basically a tuner by any definition I've seen.

Marty, you might want to get out more. The auto companies are squeezing crazy amounts of power out of 4 cylinders these days, and that is factory. Once the customizers get a hold of them, the power only goes up from there. Then you add in they are going into cars that weigh a fraction of what a car from the 60s weighs. When you add in the a modern suspension, brakes, steering etc and to top it off they go at least twice as far on a gallon of gas. I love muscle cars but you can't dismiss the fact, they really are antiques at this point. In 2014 there are a lot of normal* autos coming with 2.0 - 2.5 liter (122-152 cid) 4 cylinder that put out 200-300 hp with a few getting up to 350+ hp. That is similar power to a 1969 factory L-48 350 small block which is nearly 3x the displacement and 4x the weight. * normal meaning affordable to the average person, not the wealthy elite.

Oh, and just because this give me an excuse to post this Fast & the Furious Stockholm style I'm assuming this is a parody, but there really are people out there getting 400+ hp out of Volvo's 1980s era 2.3 liter turbo 4 cyl. The old brick is apparently becoming popular with the tuner and drifting crowd.

I could be wrong, but my assumption is that "tuners" are primarily performance based modifications. There may be some cross over in style with more visual modification (splayed out wheels, hydraulics and such), but I think that is really something different. Seems kind of like lumping lowriders and hot rods into the same group just because they are modified cars.

I kind of like the term Tom had in his post, modern day muscle. With as broad as the general use of the "muscle car" term is it seems appropriate and could easily include subjects like the modern versions of the Challenger, Charger, Mustang, Camaro, Impala SS etc which in many ways share more with the heavily modified imports than they do the 1960s cars they are named after.

With most model contest's it is a build it and they will come thing, or more specifically build it and if there are enough they will add a category. There isn't much lonelier that seeing a category with only 1 or 2 models in it.

The deluxe kit came with extra stuff including a turbine engine. The basic glue kit only came with the gas motor of the prop car, not the turbine it was claimed to have in the TV show. The deluxe kit also included some additional detailing bits, a photo etch fret etc. The deluxe kits dried up pretty fast. I was planning on getting one but they were gone before I got around to it, although they do turn up on ebay from original retail to ridiculous prices. I'll be curious to see if this one includes the turbine, as that was really the only reason I wanted the deluxe edition.

Its probably been 20 years since I've seen a Maverick, and that one had been abandoned in a ditch for some time. Neat to see one still on the road. They don't seem to be just buy new tires every few years, change the oil now and then reliable like older Toyotas, but it is easy to work on and is built like a tank. 30 years old with 380,000 miles and it still feels like a new car.

Well after 14 years I'm no longer just a Toyota guy. Sadly just shy of 300,000 miles my 1996 Tacoma was the victim of a driver who apparently didn't realize cars can't share the same space. A moment of silence please ... So shopping around for cars, I just couldn't take all the jelly bean cars out there these days. Enter my new daily driver, a 1985 Volvo 244, aka the Swedish Brick. One thing I can definitely say, it does not look like a jelly bean.

The Ardun heads in the recent issue should be popular with the hot rodders, they were re-tooled and better than those in the older kits. It would probably be fairly easy to find someone interested in swapping them for the stock heads, stock flat heads are pretty common in 1930-50s Ford kits. Another option is the Ardun heads were initially intended for heavy commercial use, so it may be appropriate for use in a non hot rodded truck. I'm not sure how many actually found their way into commercial trucks though.

Kind of odd the only kits were of some of their less successful vehicles. The 740/760 didn't even make to the end of production of the car it was supposed to replace (240 ended production a year after the 740 / 760 did). Never seen the promos, looks like some variation in scale but looks like quite a few of the classics were covered. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stahlberg_Models