I HAVE A CONFESSION TO MAKE. I may have to give up my membership in the Democratic Party to say this, but I will no longer live with the secret shame: I think the pre-Oil Crisis cars made by American car companies up until the late 1970s were just wonderful.
I know — they were almost 20 feet long and thus impossible to park in a place like San Francisco; they tipped the scales at almost 3 tons and had the aerodynamic qualities of a brick, so city gas mileage was usually in the high single-digits, and highway mileage not much better; they spewed pollution so profusely that in my neighborhood in Richmond, California I was sometimes unable to see the El Cerrito Hills that were perhaps a mile away; and in the days before airbags and crumple zones, they were not a good place to be in a car accident. So I understand their disadvantages.
And yet … I still remember them fondly.