By Frank Markus
My journey from GM to Ford to Chrysler and back again.
As a young car guy, I was raised an automotive chauvinist in a staunchly brand-loyal household. In those days whole families seemed to cleave to one manufacturer or another. Mopar folks never shopped “Found On Road Dead.” GM loyalists had so many brands to choose from they never needed to stray. AMC people felt everything else was either too big, powerful, fancy, or expensive. Of course, nobody bought “ferrin” cars.
Such brand loyalty is difficult to imagine today, when buyers’ automotive affections come up for grabs every time their lease expires or their odometer rolls past that magic sell-by number. Perhaps this intensified competition helped foster the high level of overall quality we enjoy today, but it has certainly kept marketing departments busy.
My family were GM folks. Mom’s uncle sold them in Wisconsin, and both sets of grandparents drove Buicks. We drove Chevys because that was the rung on GM’s price ladder we could reach. I came home from the hospital in a ’60 Bel Air two-door sedan that was soon traded for a new ’65 Impala fastback sport coupe, followed by a similar ’66 and a low-mileage formal ’68 Caprice custom coupe demo that dad bought at a cocktail party. Then in 1969 we bought a plain-Jane Townsman wagon, whose only “frills” were A/C, an AM radio, and a 350/Turbo-Hydramatic powertrain.
That was the car that really imprinted on me. It was in that driver’s seat that I first assumed command of both the steering wheel and the pedals after 15 years of yearning, helping steer, and driving the wheels off my pedal cars. For a variety of reasons, Dad decided to hang on to that Townsman for 170,000 miles, so when I went off to college, I inherited an even dowdier, un-air-conditioned ’69 Chevy Brookwood wagon from Dad’s cousin.
Even though my Chevy chauvinism was well established by this point, the first two cars I purchased with my Oldsmobile dealership (minimum) wages were ’66 Mustangs. I bought them despite their Fordness because they were iconic pony cars.
But I came to resent their Fordness every time I went to fix something, so my next purchase returned me to the Chevy fold: a fully loaded 10-year-old ’73 Caprice Estate wagon. When its horrendously thirsty 454 threatened to bankrupt me, I swapped it for a Canyon Brown metallic VW Dasher diesel wagon (yes, its manual transmission made it the ultimate car-scribbler ride). I admired its parsimony, loathed its lethargy, and parted ways permanently with the VW brand when its engine failed at only 150,000 miles.
An instant and permanent chauvinism shift occurred for my whole family when I took a job with Lee Iacocca’s post-bailout New Chrysler Corporation in July 1985. During my six-year engineering career there, sweet new car discount deals and access to the lot where cream-puff low-mileage exec lease cars were sold on the cheap helped Dad drop GM like an expensive mistress.
In addition to purchasing my one and only brand-new car—a custom-ordered 1986 Dodge Lancer ES Turbo—my newfound Mopar loyalty led to purchases of two “Forward Look wagons”—a ’59 Dodge Custom Sierra and a ’57 Plymouth Custom Suburban—and the 1967 Sunbeam Alpine I still own. (That was a quasi-Chrysler, produced by the death rattling Rootes Group subsidiary.) These days I also own a super cute 1985 Chrysler Town & Country K-car wagon that takes me back to my 22-year-old pocket-protected post-grad heyday.
Our dads are our heroes. We grow up assuming their choices were all well-reasoned and rational. But looking back, I have to wonder whether Dad would have made the same choices had he rigorously cross-shopped the competition. A few years back I got the chance to answer that question by comparing the very cream of the Chevy and Ford wagon crop in a head-to-head retro comparo for the late, great Motor Trend Classic magazine.
In the Bow Tie corner was, hands-down, the coolest ’69 Chevy wagon extant: the GM Heritage Center’s Kingswood Estate, factory-equipped with the crazy-rare L72 solid-lifter 427 engine. Only a handful of the 546 L72s installed in full-size Chevys went in wagons, and most of those were specced as stripper drag racing specials. This one was fully decked out with nearly every available option, and for added nostalgic value, it boasted the same Dover White over blue color scheme of the family Townsman. Representing Ford was a top-of-the-line Country Squire, similarly equipped with nearly every option and a 429 big-block in Presidential Blue with a gold woven-vinyl interior.
I spent a glorious day driving the two cars back to back and an additional day and a half piloting the Ford. My hard-nosed journalistic conclusion: That year—and perhaps for years before and after—the Ford was objectively the better car. It soundly trounced my beloved Chevy in terms of ride comfort, interior noise levels, body rigidity, seat comfort, wagon features, ventilation, radio—everything but quarter-mile times.
Of course, childhood chauvinism dies hard when I’m trolling Bring-A-Trailer for ’69 big-block wagons …
