Electel Blogspot

1963 Pontiac Grand Prix at Monaco's Hotel de Paris Arthur "Art" M. Fitzpatrick (1919-2015) is famed in illustration circles for his classic 1959-1972 series of illustrations for Pontiac made in collaboration with Van Kaufman.  Fitzpatrick rendered the cars and Kaufman furnished the settings and people.  There was some overlap in that settings and people might be reflected on the cars. I previously wrote about him and the Pontiac illustrations  here .  Also, I met him about 15 years ago at the Pebble Beach Concours and still have his business card. Fitzpatrick's Wikipedia entry is here .  An interview of him is here , and includes the following regarding his way of working on Pontiac ads such as that shown above: "I photographed a car [for General Motors testimony at a congressional hearing] … same position/view with 3 different lenses, 35, 50, and 120mm. Photographers, for reasons that continue to escape me, were using long lenses, which shorten a car, making th...

Many Lincoln Town Cars of the 1998-2011 generation are still on the road as I write this.  I've never driven one, but occasionally have ridden in some that are used as airport limousines.  They have luxurious interiors and the back seats are nice and comfortable.  And I've read that they are reliable and can easily attain high mileages -- that is why many limousine operators were unhappy when Ford stopped production, meaning that possibly inferior replacements would eventually be needed. Wikipedia entries for the Town Car and its Ford Panther platform siblings, the Mercury Grand Marquis and Ford Crown Victoria, are respectively here , here , and here (scroll down to the 1998 generation in each case). Besides cruising around cities and towns, these cars cruised well on the USA's Interstate system of freeways.  Police forces used the Ford version in beefed up form. I had trouble finding suitable factory-sourced images for this post, so what you see below will have to ...

Ford Motor Company's mid-range brand for many years was the Mercury (Wikipedia entry here ).  It, Ford and Lincoln -- the company's entire lineup -- were redesigned for the 1952 model year. Ford and Mercury used the same basic body, and Lincoln's was similar.  These cars were Ford's second-generation postwar cars, and stylists had had the time to consider such matters as: dealing with flow-through (not separate) fenders; trends regarding size (especially height); and technology (mostly improvements in shaping automobile glass). The result for Mercury was a tidy, rather squared-off shape of the kind later termed "three-box."  That is, the cars were bustle-back types.  Flat trunk lids echoed low, flat hoods up front.  One reason hoods appeared low was because fender lines were high -- at the passenger compartment, the fender line and the belt line were the same. I have always liked 1952 Mercury styling.  However, when they first appeared they were criticized ...