Request A Free Catalog | Start Shopping | Rate & Review | Contact Us To prevent our e-mails from going into your Junk Mail folder, Impala Bob's | 4753 East Falcon Drive | Mesa, AZ 85215 |1-800-IMPALAS Click here to unsubscribe. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Jumat, 29 April 2011
Gas Up and Go! Save $50 on Any Gas Tank for Your Impala
"Mudflap Girl" was my mom
| By Keith Barry, Wired Autopia "Mudflap Girl" was my mom
Allen, a fashion designer in Washington, D.C., claims the image was designed by his father Stewart, a long-haul trucker who always decorated his rig with an image of his wife, Rachel Ann. Now, Ed Allen is paying homage to Mudflap Girl, er, mom, with a line of shirts bearing her voluptuous profile, for which he now owns the trademark. "She's one of the few really hot women that your wife will still let you wear, because we all remember her," Allen said. Before we could page Dr. Freud, Allen let us know the original image was quite innocent, a simple vacation photo of mom in a bathing suit. It was nothing the whole family hadn't seen countless times before. Dad kept the photo in the cab of his truck, which always bore his wife's name on the hood. When a new corporate owner forbade Stewart from decorating a company-owned vehicle, Stewart put his wife's silhouette on his trailer's mudflaps so his boss couldn't see her when the truck was backed up to a loading dock. In 1967, Ed Allen said that a local truck accessories manufacturer named Bill Zinda saw the design. He liked it and, with dad's permission, started selling it. No one ever trademarked the image, and Mudflap Girl got around a lot during the freewheeling '70s. The back story is, of course, just that - a story. But it's a compelling one. "Regardless of the precise truth of the narrative, the important issue here is: why is this image so ubiquitous?" asked Heather Joseph-Witham. She's a folklorist who teaches at Otis College of Art and Design and who has also debunked urban legends for Mythbusters. To her, the Mudflap Girl is quintessentially American. "Why do so many people feel the need to display it? What does it say about us?" Allen assures us the story is true, but you'd expect him to do that. His father died in 2006, his mother now suffers from Alzheimer's and we couldn't find any trace of Bill Zinda. The first trademark of Mudflap Girl's likeness is held by Ed Allen. According to Joseph-Witham, the story has the hallmarks of an urban legend: anonymous origins, told in the first person as a true story dealing with contemporary culture, backed up with circumstantial evidence. Add that plenty of online accounts claim the real Mudflap Girl, who is said to have been everything from a naughty nurse to a sexy stripper. Still, Allen's story is enjoyable enough that even if it isn't true, it oughtta be. "The image is of a man who doesn't want to stay in one place, who wants to see the country but bring money home for his family," said Joseph-Witham. "He's free, but responsible." That image sure fits with how Allen described his father and the trucker lifestyle of the late '60s and early '70s. "It was one of those times that was all about individuality," he said. "It was all about not being part of the establishment. Especially back in the '70s, truckers were seen like modern cowboys." That's why she caught on. "As a blank image, as a projection, originally, everybody liked that rebelliousness."
While the trucker-as-cowboy ethos still appeals to many, since the '70s Mudflap Girl has also been re-appropriated with an ironic twist. She's flipping the bird as the symbol of the blog Feministing and holding a book in decals and T-shirts extolling the virtues of reading. Allen says his mother would've loved the new interpretations of her image. "Rachel is a pretty strong woman," he said. "Everyone thinks about the girl and, you want to go right into the truck stops. Actually, it's really a much more sophisticated audience." Photo: Brandon Doran/Flickr  This story originally appeared on Wired.com's Autopia on April 29, 2011, and was republished with permission.Email us with the subject line "Syndication" if you would like to see your own story syndicated here on Jalopnik.
| April 29th, 2011 Top Stories |
About Classic Cars: Temperature and Noise Control for Your Classic
| |
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Kamis, 28 April 2011
How Bob Lutz saved GM from Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and itself
| By Justin Hyde How Bob Lutz saved GM from Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and itself
In his book, "Car Guys vs. Bean Counters: The Battle For The Soul Of American Business," Lutz reveals what anyone who pays even the slightest of attention to the auto industry has known for years, that far from being created by the Obama administration, the original idea of the Volt sprouted in 2005 — and it would have never survived GM's bureaucracy without a push from Elon Musk and Tesla Motors. Lutz — a cigar-smoking, jet-flying former Marine — has long admitted that the halo cast by the Toyota Prius unfairly sainted Toyota while casting GM vehicles as pollution-barfing tanks. Lutz's original idea was to recommit GM to a pure electric vehicle with lithium-ion batteries — a prospect that GM's engineers and executives hated due to the scars from the EV1 project. When Musk unveiled the Tesla Roadster in 2005, it gave Lutz the ammo he needed to get a concept approved by GM's management. But as he talked with engineer Jon Lauckner, Lauckner said he had a better idea, and sketched out an electric-powered four-seat sedan with a T-shaped battery cell charged for extended range by an onboard engine — the basic design of the Chevy Volt sitting on dealer lots' six years later.
 "To all the doubters… [including] Glenn Beck, I say: 'Eat your hearts out. Volt is the future.'" The heart of Lutz's book details the problems he faced upon being coaxed out of retirement by GM Chairman and CEO Rick Wagoner in 2001 to remake the company's vehicle development process. Lutz had worked at GM before in the '60s, before stints at Ford, BMW and Chrysler, and he details the long decline of American automakers from the inside, pinging number-crunching CEOs, demurring stylists and engineers, and U.S. fuel economy standards, which he contends handed huge advantages to Japanese and European automakers. When Lutz finally comes back to GM in September 2001, he finds a bureaucracy asphyxiating on its own hubris, convinced the terabytes of PowerPoints will lead GM to global triumph despite all common sense. GM's pre-Lutz ideas included a Buick concept that could be driven entirely by voice control, because that's what Buick's elderly owners said they wanted in focus groups. Whether it was covering the first-generation Chrysler 300 in 90-odd post-it notes showing how its popular design failed GM standards, or worrying that adding chrome trim to the Chevy Impala would kill a cost target even while making the car attractive, Lutz details just how close GM came to being irreparably broken. Lutz was lucky to find under the bureaucracy's avalanche a hovel of talented people - from French-born designers to Harley-riding metal stampers - that knew exactly what needed changing, but had never had the chance to say so, or even been asked. He also managed to start the process of turning GM into a global automaker, rather than a cage match of regional vice presidents who fought ideas like selling the Holden Commodore SS as a Pontiac sports sedan. (Lutz's plans to turn Pontiac into an affordable American BMW offer some of the saddest what-might-have-been moments). Lutz argues the same dynamic that pushed GM to collapse threatens the rest of American business as well. He sees in too many executives the same numbers-obsessed, MBA groupthink that turned GM from world dominator to ward of the state. And he bleakly warns that the United States may have to come close to a Chapter 11 of its own before ridding itself of the idea of "too big to fail." To his credit, Lutz admits that even if he had been GM's CEO, he would not only have made many of the same mistakes as Wagoner, he might have added a few new ones too, like not buying Korea's Daewoo, which has become the source of GM's small car engineering worldwide. And that's the real secret: "Car Guys vs. Bean Counters" isn't a contest. It's the formula for success; when one side gets too dominant, the entire system falls apart. GM's newest models have proven successful, profitable and able to keep pace with some of the world's best. When Lutz came out of retirement in 2001, one Wall Street analyst estimated that if he successfully set GM's carbuilding right, Lutz could add $1 billion to GM's roughly $10 billion market value. Without him, GM probably would have struggled through until 2008, and still been bailed out — but left bereft of knowing how to build cars that people want. The old GM might have tried to put a value on Lutz's contributions. The new GM should know numbers never tell the whole story.
| April 28th, 2011 Top Stories |
