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1 week ago | 
hagerty.com | Aaron Robinson
The arrival of mass television in the 1950s spawned the golden age of the advertising jingle. Detroit was all-in, from “It’s Delightful, it’s De-lovely, it’s De Soto,” to “What a Thrill to Take the Wheel of a Rocket Oldsmobile.” But it was two jingle composers named Leo Corday and Leon Carr, working for Chevrolet’s longtime ad agency Campbell Ewald, who wrote what became the magnum opus of all car ditties.
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1 week ago | 
hagerty.com | Aaron Robinson
People who study airplane crashes talk a lot about the failure chain. It’s never one thing that causes an accident but a sequence of small missteps, or a failure chain, that eventually combines to produce a really bad outcome. Such was the case when I drained the fuel tank of the 1933 Wolseley Hornet Special that I recently bought with my friend Rick Shaw.
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1 week ago | 
flipboard.com | Aaron Robinson
18 hours agoBattery-operated vehicles were a mainstay more than a hundred years ago, but only a few still exist — one happens to be in Jay Leno’s garage. More than a century before Tesla rolled out its first cars, the Baker Electric Coupe and the Riker Electric Roadster rumbled down American streets. …
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1 month ago | 
hagerty.com | Aaron Robinson
People often complain that those gorgeous and slippery concept cars that automakers create to tout their brand vision and design prowess get watered down to weak sauce by the time they reach production. Trust us, there is a good reason for this. As well as a good reason for why designers never get promoted to the CEO job at car companies.
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2 months ago | 
hagerty.com | Aaron Robinson
As I sat waiting to turn left at a busy intersection, I noticed the five late-model cars across from me only because all of them were white. I looked around; every car waiting or whizzing through the intersection for a full minute was white, black, gray, or silver. Suddenly, a red Toyota Highlander appeared, and it stood out like Jessica Rabbit in a nunnery. The 1973 Land Rover in which I was trundling to the local cars and coffee is painted a yellowish tan known as Limestone.
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2 months ago | 
hagerty.com | Aaron Robinson
This story first appeared in the March/April 2025 issue of Hagerty Drivers Club magazine. Join the club to receive our award-winning magazine and enjoy insider access to automotive events, discounts, roadside assistance, and more. No disrespect to the proud International Scout and its admirers, who must be thrilled that the long-dead nameplate is being excavated from the grave after 45 years, but Volkswagen picking it to be the name of its new electric brand is a head-scratcher.
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2 months ago | 
hagerty.com | Aaron Robinson
If you drop almost 150 grand to buy a hot car, you’re entitled to ask what you’re getting for your money. What exactly is the deliverable? Is it speed alone, or can you also demand some emotion, some drama, some spine-tingling va-va-voom? The new 717-hp BMW M5 has us thinking, because while it is surely all ate up with speed, and it can do things no 5350-pound car ought to in a universe governed by Newtonian physics, it is something of an ersatz experience.
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Feb 24, 2025 | 
hagerty.com | Sajeev Mehta |Aaron Robinson |Eric Weiner |Nathan Petroelje
Performance brands create products we love to own, mostly because they are designed to outperform their competition. Who doesn’t want a piece of that winning formula? Some folks do not, and they pull at the purse strings of the companies behind these products. Chevrolet had the Super Sport (SS) for a long time, but applying it to vehicles like the Chevrolet Malibu MAXX might not have been the smartest long-term move.
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Feb 13, 2025 | 
hagerty.com | Aaron Robinson
More than 5000 car companies have existed in the United States alone, from Abbott-Detroit to the Zip Cyclecar Company. Yet some folks just can’t seem to find the perfect vehicle to buy, so instead, they build their own. This is the story of one of those people and one of those cars, a very special machine that sprang from the mind not of a shade-tree tinkerer or a reckless dreamer but from a talented engineer.
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Jan 31, 2025 | 
hagerty.com | Aaron Robinson
This story first appeared in the January/February 2025 issue of Hagerty Drivers Club magazine. Join the club to receive our award-winning magazine and enjoy insider access to automotive events, discounts, roadside assistance, and more. Almost every bit of a car has a workaround in case you can’t fix it or find a replacement, even the engine (there’s always electrification). But you can’t drive anywhere without tires, and you can’t 3D-print a set at home.
