Today's Dave's Car ID Service pays homage to the General Motors Technical Center in Warren Michigan, which held its grand opening May 16, 1956. The absolute pinnacle of postwar Detroit style, confidence, and power, and a fitting showcase for a 1956 Cadillac Coupe de Ville. The shot of the Caddy was merely the lobby of the Design Center. The technical center itself is a huge 320 acre campus, built around an artificial lake, with office space originally designed for 5,000 workers - engineers, designers, researchers, GM's brain center. At the time of its opening 70 years ago it had a reported price tag of $100 million, about $1 billion in 2026 money.

Internal discussion of the project began in 1944, when GM car production was still shut down for war production. GM Chairman Alfred P Sloan and Research Director Charles Kettering (of Sloan Kettering cancer hospital fame) presented the proposal with early design layouts to the GM Board that December. It was approved, and the first 100 acres of farmland were purchased outside the then-tiny town of Warren, north of Detroit.

Neither Sloan nor Kettering really cared for architectural flourish, but GM's chief of styling Harley Earl argued that an architecturally distinct working environment would spur creativity and innovation. The earliest design by Finnish-American Eliel Saarinen were in a Streamline Moderne style, similar to the GM Pavilion building at the 1939 New York World's Fair. In 1948 GM again hired Saarinen, Saarinen & Associates to revise the plans. It was assigned to Eero Saarinen, Eliel's son. It would be his first solo project as an architect. Saarinen's revised design was in the International Style, influenced by Mies van der Rohe's IIT campus in Chicago. The landscape architecture was handled by Thomas Church.

It took 8 years to complete, and the Finnished product (pun intended) is among the most stunningly beautiful examples of Midcentury Modern architecture ever built. Subsequent expansion of the campus to accommodate 20,000 workers, and $1 billion renovation/restoration completed in have adhered to that style. It was truly "Where Today Meets Tomorrow."

Right fucking now

https://twitter.com/colecubelic/status/2054569932898091142

Players earning money, out in the open, in a free market
Historically bad program winning a championship
Teams with gigantic spending failing terribly
10-15 programs with a legitimate chance at a title
End of the ESPN-SEC 1000 year reich

What's not to like?

I love Texas, but my god the Dallas skyline is an aesthetic abomination.

Worldwide skyline rankings:

1. Chicago
2. 4000-way tie of also-rans

https://twitter.com/GiancarloSopo/status/2053486035791724720

Say what you want about Chicago, but its skyline is a 140 year long group project masterpiece. Unequaled on Planet Earth, go talk to a wall

M is for her Mercury Marauder
O is for her Oldsmobile Jetfire
T is for the Triumph Grandpa got her
H is for her Hudson white wall tires

A very happy 150th birthday to the Otto Cycle internal combustion engine from Dave's Car ID service! Revealed May 9, 1876, it was the first practical example of a gasoline powered 4-stroke (a/k/a Otto Cycle). Or as we gearheads say, "suck squeeze bang blow."

German Nicolaus Otto invested 14 years of research, trial and error, and help from his employees Gottfried Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach into creating it, but reportedly had zero interest in transportation applications; his were all designed as huge stationary engines for industrial or agricultural jobs. When it debuted, it claimed the "day of steam was at end." Not a correct forecast as it turned out, but it carved out a niche in the light industrial market. I've seen a working Otto engine from the early 1880s.

In any event, the potential of Otto's engine for transportation didn't escape his employees Daimler & Maybach, who pioneered the earliest days of automobiling with scaled down, more efficient versions of Otto's 4-stroke. It wasn't the invention of the car, but it made the invention of the car possible. Technically the Otto engine was not the first internal combustion engine. Otto was inspired to create his design after seeing Jean Lenoir's IC engine in 1862. He built a replica but noted it was noisy, inefficient, and had an unfortunate tendency to BLOW THE HELL UP.

The key insight he derived was that compression mattered. Though it had a piston, Lenoir's design did not compress the fuel, it simply ignited and returned to TDC where it received the next fuel charge. It worked, but not for long due to the stress on the cylinder and piston. Otto's experiments proved fuel compression was more efficient and resulted in more power and durability.

Unlike Otto, Lenoir *was* interested in transportation. He powered a boat with one of his engines in 1861, and built his "Hippomobile" (2) in 1862. Petroleum powered, it made a 7 mile trip around Paris in 1863 at about 1.8 MPH. Arguably the first gasoline powered car, beating the Benz Patent-Motorwagen by over 20 years.

From my intrepid cousin, who has learned through the National Archives that our grandmother was forced to attend what was literally known as “Detention School” until she dropped out. I couldn’t be prouder or more delighted *I'm the result of crossbreeding a completely taciturn American Gothic Iowa farm family (Dad) and a family of insane dysfunctional Irish criminal alcoholics (Mom). This is my mom's mom

Honestly it's just Nebraska with a better PR agency

https://twitter.com/theepicmap/status/2052398833909584120

Fact: the most boring people from every Midwest high school go to Denver in the mistaken belief that this will make them more interesting

This is incorrect, per latest US Census estimates the largest US city without a big 4 sports team is Fort Worth

https://twitter.com/barstoolsports/status/2052435718589292868

Texans, set this guy straight

https://x.com/Pulse8943/status/2052488561463578685

Of all the Hot Dog Guying ever Hot Dog Guyed, this is the Hot Dog Guyest

https://twitter.com/nithyavraman/status/2051695252441112814

Honestly, I'm just not sure this Pratt fellow has the years of professional training and experience it takes to properly manage a free range herd of 30,000 violent drug addled incontinent zombies

@grok please convert these into NFL draft pics per million population and rerank

https://twitter.com/MySportsUpdate/status/2050274163613372831

Honestly if this were demographically adjusted Iowa would completely rout every other state

https://x.com/grok/status/2051628436204957862

https://twitter.com/TerribleMaps/status/2051033803448340557

Look, I realize that posts about the Midwest are engagement catnip, but I think you should have at least some vague familiarity with the Midwest before posting about it.

To me that map post comes off like an account based in Pakistan cosplaying as a tradwife thirst trap

Mornin', Dave's Car ID Service devotees! After a long overseas road trip, I'm back stateside and hankerin' to solve car mysteries and talk car history. As fate would have it, I returned on the 100th birthday of America's greatest road trip: Route 66, born April 30, 1926 in Springfield MO, which we celebrate with today's thread appetizer.

That 2,448 mile stretch from Buckingham Fountain in Chicago to the Santa Monica Pier played an important character in the American mythos. It was America's Main Street, the Mother Road, stretching from the big shoulders of Chicago through Midwestern cornfields, the vast Great Plains, the spectacular deserts and mountains of the Southwest, and finally to the palm-lined Promised Land of Hollywood. It portended liberation and exodus, deliverance and danger and discovery. It wasn't just a highway, it was a book in the American Bible.

66 was (and remains) a key to how we Americans view ourselves - and how others view us. I'm friends with several car folk around the planet who've made the pilgrimage here to retrace the route in vintage American cars. And in fact I recently met a few people in France and Italy planning their first Route 66 pilgrimage this year. For those in the know, that road trip is the best way to truly understand the soul of the United States of America.

I only use the past tense of in reference to Route 66 as a technical matter. It was officially decommissioned in 1985 after a long decline, having been largely supplanted by Interstates 55, 44, 40, and 10. But the idea of Route 66 is somewhat immortal.

Oh - and about this image: following the death of Will Rogers in a plane crash in 1935, the highway was renamed in his honor, with commemorative signs along the way. You can see some of those signs in John Ford's 1940 film adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath.

If you're not familiar with Will Rogers, he was probably the biggest and most beloved celebrity in America at the time - writer, humorist, radio and film star, folksy stage performer, alway quick with a quip. And a native of Claremore Oklahoma, located right on 66. It's seems only fitting that America's most American road was named in honor of America's most American American. Of the countless Route 66 stories, one odd (and poignant) one is that it was the site of the first ultramarathon. To publicize its completion in 1928, wacky promoter C.C. "Cash & Carry" Pyle announce the Route 66 "Bunion Derby," a 3400 mile, 84 day foot race from Ascot Speedway in Los Angeles to Madison Square Garden, most all on 66.

First prize: $25,000. A king's ransom in 1928, and it attracted 199 entrants. What made it poignant was that the field was fully integrated, with 5 African Americans along with several Native Americans and Latinos. Black racers like Seattlite Eddie Gardner (seen in this photo) faced Jim Crow laws and spectator hatred along the route, forcing them to seek separate accomodations. Despite those privations, Gardner finished 8th in the race and took home $2500, and newspaper coverage of his story helped underscore the injustices of Jim Crow.

This is some lost isolated Amazon tribe shit right there

https://twitter.com/justalexoki/status/2048424815988498870

Americans order a new dryer online for afternoon delivery and installation because we’re not an economy that’s been careening downhill since 1939

https://twitter.com/spirckle/status/2048426899949465689

Spring has sprung, and a formerly young man's fancy turns to thoughts of... drive-ins. No meandering Dave's Car ID Service history dissertation today, just a meditation about the aesthetics of cars bathing in the nighttime glow of a drive-in restaurant sign, told through photos.

The most iconic for me is my late friend Norm Grabowski at Bob's Big Boy in Burbank in 1957, in the T-bucket he built that would later become the "Kookie T" of the TV series 77 Sunset Strip. The photo appeared on a LIFE magazine cover, and sorta perfectly encapsulates that aesthetic. Happily Bob's Big Boy Burbank is still thriving and I always make a cruise night pilgrimage there whenever I visit SoCal.
George Lucas's finest motion picture (in my option) American Grafitti leveraged that aesthetic to great effect; the glow of Mel's set the tone of the film from the opening shot. Cars, left to right, AC Cobra, 59 Olds, and Steve Bolander's (Ron Howard) 1958 Chevy Impala Sport Coupe.

It was a 1973 film nostalgic about 1962, a longing for a simpler optimistic time before the tumult of the 11 years to come. And Mel's was perfectly symbolic of it.

The Mel's restaurant chain still survives, but the original 1949 Mel's location where the movie was filmed - 140 South Van Ness, San Francisco - was demolished in 1976.

It's time to talk about the Elite Eight! And here at Dave's Car ID Service, that of course means elite 8-cylinder car engines. And as your host, I am going to set my Elite Eight of Elite Eights region by region.

In the Old Timers Region, I'm pitting the 1903 Ader V8 vs the 1905 Rolls-Royce 3.5 liter V8. Both have some claim to be the first V8 car engine; Clement Ader combined 4 V-twin engines on a single crankshaft to field a team of 3 V8 cars for the 1903 Paris-Madrid race. These were specially built for the race, and not a production model. The Rolls-Royce V8 was a production engine, although only briefly (1905-06) and in an unsuccessful model (the weirdly named Legal Limit). The next production Rolls-Royce V8 wouldn't appear until 1959.

I don't know about you, but it irks me that the USA doesn't have a claimant to first V8. But the 1915 Cadillac V8 (introduced in 1914) was the first highly successful production V8, considered globally an engineering masterpiece, and cemented the United States of America the Land of the V8 Motor. Even Rolls-Royce cribbed their 1959 design by studying the masters of Detroit.
But why does an 8 have to be in a V?

In the Freaks Region I've got the 1924 Ford X8 vs the 1904 Buffum Model G Greyhound racing engine.

As Henry Ford was looking ahead in the 1920s to build an 8 cylinder car, his engineers toyed with 60 different prototypes. The X8 design was reportedly one of his favorites, although the iconic flathead V8 won out. It actually ran in a car for a year for testing. Oddly enough the car was an Oldsmobile for engineering stealth reasons.

The H.H. Buffum Co. was a short lived (1901-07) car maker in Abdington MA. Oddly enough they also made machinery for shoe making. Anyhow Mr. Buffum made a flat eight-cylinder opposed by mating two of his production 4 banger engines for his Greyhound racing cars. The rationale was lower center of gravity. They also appeared in the 1907 Buffum production cars, but alas weren't able to stop the company from closure.

Coo loo coo coo, coo coo coo coo!

Get in hosers, today's episode of Dave's Car ID Service is taking off for the Great White North with a salute the oddball world of Canadian-spec car models and brands.

Pictured airdropping a keg of Elsinore over Toronto: Bob & Doug McKenzie's 1977 GMC Vandura from the Canadian cinematic masterpiece STRANGE BREW (1983). Sadly not a Canada spec item, but there was an era when residents of Canada had a bevy of cars Detroit (more specifically Windsor) made especially for them - albeit minor twists on their American cousins. Oddly enough, due to a geographical oddity, our story begins SOUTH of the border in Windsor Ontario. It's south of Detroit, Google-map it. Anyhoo more than 100 years ago, Detroit car makers set up plants in Windsor for the Canadian market. The models were basically the same as US; a Canadian Model T was exactly the same a US Model T. Local manufacture was largely due to tax advantages.

But eventually there was a marketing advantage to having distinct branding for Canada, with the vehicles becoming a source of Canuck pride.

Nowhere was that pride greater than Canadian farms who were treated to the special pickup brands like Mercury and Fargo. Mercury was basically a rebadged Ford (1953 Mercury M-100 shown), and Fargo a rebadged Dodge. But for my money they have a bit more pizzazz and mystery to them than their US equivalents.

It is kinda weird though that Chrysler chose an American town name for their Canadian trucks; I guess "Winnepeg" had too many letters for the badge.

Good morning, car mystery fans! Today's Dave's Car ID Service topic is... Hail Marys. Swan songs. Curtain calls.

In the epic grand opera that is US automotive history, there are countless characters. Roughly 3000 different makes have entered the stage since 1890, and all but a handful have been knocked off at some point. Even Shakespeare didn't write that kind of mortality rate.

It wasn't all tragedy for those unfortunate doomed companies, though. Rather than dying with a wimper, a noble few stared into the eyes of the fiscal Grim Reaper and went out in a blaze of glory.

Exhibit A: the 1963-64 Studebaker Avanti. Struggling Studebaker was in its death throes in the early 1960s, and brought in Raymond Loewy & Associates to design a new personal luxury coupe to help boost moribund sales. The resulting Avanti was a stunner - clean, sophisticated, uniquely modern.

It wasn't enough to save Studebaker from the grave, but the Avanti became a design icon with a life of its own. In 1965 a group founded the Avanti car company (sans "Studebaker" in the name) to make continuations from remaining production bodies. In 1967 the Avanti II became powered by Chevy small block. The Avanti II remained in production until 2006 (although by then it was a Chevy Camaro with a stylized front end).

For an automotive design, that's staying power. Unfortunately for Studebaker the patient died, but hey, the operation was a success. Studebaker wasn't the first dying patient to get an emergency design surgery from Dr. Loewy. In 1934 struggling Hupmobile commissioned him to jazz up their image with one of those sleek streamline designs he was famous for. Thus the 1934-37 Hupmobile 518 Aero-Dynamic was born.

Those moulded in headlights were far ahead of their time, especially for a modest price car. I would surely dig having a Hupmobile Aero-Dynamic coupe. But "Hupmobile Aero-Dynamic" almost sounds like an oxymoron, an old-timey horseless carriage make with a futuristic model name.

This will be the most complicated Amazon order return ever

https://twitter.com/JinWooIQ/status/2031765428608086230

This is why I buy all my Chinese missiles at Harbor Freight, if they're duds they'll give you a store credit

https://twitter.com/BBCNews/status/2031413910352302082

https://x.com/iowahawkblog/status/1827424207925317702

Greetings, car mystery fans! In yesterday's thread I examined the strange story of Bib, Michelin's long running humanoid tire stack mascot. To further enhance public appreciation for the tire advertising arts, today's Dave's Car ID will delve deeper into a few bangers from the early days of tire promotion - starting with this 1933 illustration for General Tires.

Behold the insouciant Gatsbyesque power couple returning from the Copa, or somesuch swank uptown nightclub for millionaire swells, to his Streamline Deco penthouse apartment. Lithe curvaceous Daisy is already eager to get into something more comfortable, perhaps because of the champagne, or perhaps because of the soft cushioned ride there provided *SPOTLIGHT* the General Deluxe Dual Balloon tires on Jay's powerful coupe. The doorman knows what's up, and offers a salute and wink.

Buy General Dual Balloons. Making tires - let's face it, the filthiest part of the car - glamorous and sexy is not the easiest job on Madison Avenue. But as a former tire shop monkey at Ben Fish & Son, I do appreciate the effort. General had a whole campaign in the early 1930s to glamorize and sex-up their new Dual Balloon (a/k/a General Jumbos).

I guess it was kind of the Pre-Hayes Code era of advertising, and the imagery is fantastic. Incidentally, General Jumbo tall sidewall tires and their associated special small diameter wheels are still quite a collector item amongst those of us in the hot rod & custom world.

Time for an old fashioned Dave's Car ID Service meandering car history lesson! This time about the world's most disturbing, and long-serving, tire company mascot and restaurant critic, The Michelin Man.

That's what we here in the States call him anyway, elsewhere he's called 'Bib.' And how he came to be is a bit of a stemwinder, but one that you can use to amaze and/or bore to death fellow cocktail party guests.

Let's start with the Brothers Michelin, Edouard and Andre, who owned a farm implement business in the southern city of Clermont-Ferrand. One day circa 1887 a bicyclist showed up at their door with a pneumatic tire in need of repair. That was a real bitch at the time, a couple hours of work, because tires were fixed to the wheel rim. That inspired them to design and create the first removable pneumatic tire, for which they received a patent in 1891. Voila, les freres Michelin struck it rich almost overnight, what with the huge bicycle craze, followed by cars, trucks, and motorcycles.

This was also the high age of French advertising poster design, and you had to go big to attract attention on the poster-covered walls of Paris and Lyon. Enter "O'Galop," the pen name of French cartoonist Marius Rossillon. For the Michelins he designed a chimera tire-pile humanoid that that debuted at the Lyon exhibition in 1894.

The 1898 poster below, by O'Galop, show how 'Bib' got his name:

'Nunc est bibibendum!!' - a Latin quote from the Roman poet Horace, meaning 'Now is the time for drinking!!'

The rest is in French, which translates as "that's to say: to your health, Michelin tires drink up the obstacles!"

Thus Bib is short for Bibendum, which is Latin for 'Drinkin' Time.' And look at ol' Bib, still poundin' down another glass of jagged rocks and broken glass while his competitors like 'Pneu X' are near dead.

So why, as a pile of tires, is Bib white and not black? Because the process of carbonized rubber had not been invented in the 1890s, and rubber tires were off-white, the natural color of raw latex. Sometime after the fin du siecle, Michelin decide to bring Bib out of two dimensional poster world into 3D Meatspace, and the effect at first was somewhere on the border between hilarious and terrifying.

In #1, coming to the rescue of a stranded 1925-27 Ford Model T C-cab candy delivery, like some sort of horrifying magical tire fairy.

#2: Some sort of final Tire Monster Boss Battle, in what looks like WW1 war ruins.

#3: To ensure the continuation of the Mutant French Tire Being species, Bib was given a mate sometime in the 1920s; note her open toed shoes.

#4: Michelin Tire People Bizarro World even had its own dance band. I have searched in vain for surviving recordings.