SHIFTIN’ GEARS

By Ben Notaro • red63vetnj@comcast.net

Let me start off with a much-belated Happy New Year. Ok, now let’s get to my thoughts and words of wisdom for the first column of the New Year.

While looking at television and soaking up the various car commercials — you know — the ones that talk about everything but the car they are trying to make you want to purchase. Well, anyway, I started to realize that I and many of us “old timers” grew up in a time when you knew a car and po=wer ranking by its name and not a bunch of letters and numbers.

To start, if you were into a big and fast car, just listen to the names, they sound fast. The Chevelle Super Sport; it was a large, displacement-engine kind of ride and SS made one aware of that. The Plymouth Roadrunner and Dodge Superbee gave people the distinct feeling of a special breed of car. There were many others like the Cobra and Corvette, where names were simple and performance oriented. Yes, some companies used letters or numbers such as the Oldsmobile 442, GTO and a few others to make a statement. But they did not run the alphabet into the ground with so many letters and numbers for a car designation that you had to think a bit harder to know what the make of the car was — not just a bunch of funky combinations of the alphabet and numbers.

Let me provide a few examples of the names of rides that have these non-names and you can judge for yourself how cars are seemingly losing that identity to the age of name plates.

• Honda CRX HF

• Mercedes –Benz 560 SL

• Porsche 9285 4

• BMW 3, 4, 5 Series X1, X2, X3

• Cadillac CT4, XT, XT5

These are just a few cars that many people may have difficulty figuring out how these letters and numbers make for a quick interpretation of what the car is about. Also, for your information, I owned a Datsun 280 ZX and I still don’t know what the ZX meant (LOL).

For the record, many of these names and numbers do have factory significance and are not just thrown together. I just like to remind people of the good old days when there was simplicity in a car name. As with many facets of the ever-evolving automobile industry, everything is always subject to change.

Department of Energy: It’s only a matter of time before army tanks go EV.

Department of Education: Let’s teach the history of classic rides to the next generation.

Department of Good Corrections: Double check all event flyers for date and info corrections before announcing.

Here’s to enjoying our cruisin’ hobby in 2023.