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Fish'NJim,
I always read your posts and comments with interest and respect your opinion. My comment on 'the eventual end of fossil fuels' isn't 'self-defeatist'; its just reality. As a race, we will 'use up' fossil fuels, just like they're draining the aquafers in California and decimating the forests by over-logging. Like air and fish and trees, there is a very finite amount of EVERYTHING on this rock, and as we gorge the earth with billions more people, and the usage redlines, the curve on that graph is going to become pretty acute. Someone posted on here a while back that the biggest threat we face on this planet is over population and I couldn't agree more. World Population has doubled since I was a teenager in school 50 years ago, and that means we've been growing globally by 200,000 people a day!! Every day, for 50 years. That's mindboggling when you think of the food to feed, getting rid of the waste, and all the 'consumed resources'. Having said that, there's probably a good 50 years left for fossil fuels and most of us will be long since dead when the last gallon of gasoline is pumped at a gas station somewhere! So, 'the end' isn't going to 'defeat' any of us!! Chris.

I don't consider a Packard that has been chopped up and motored with a small block GM V-8 a collector car. That is a piece of junk. The proposed holiday is for crate motored junkers and the idea obviously is an attempt to legitimize those abortions for the benefit of drop shipping outfits like Summit Racing. I suppose they are looking in dismay that a copy of Super Mario (whatever that is) can sell for millions of dollars while those chopped up Packards are taking up valuable floor space. I think the Super Mario deal makes more sense given it has no holding costs and is, thus, a lesser form of insanity. After all, you can't end up paraplegic, toothless, with a crushed skull from Super Mario or a baseball card like you can when you crack up your crate motored junkrod. Posting crash victim pictures to illustrate would be too far out.

Yes we are past peak oil and everybody seems to be acting out one of Voltaire's worst nighmares. The central bankers are generating no end of asset bubbles that defy logic while claiming the cost of capital should be zero. Back when I was valuing acquisitions the objective was a 15% return on investment from business operations and not returns based on stock price manipulations by virtue of phoey share buy backs and the shoddy GAAP that makes them possible. Today's market valuations are more like 2%. At the core I think is a sense of doom in the human psych that stirs up this wildly irrational behavior. The alternative hypothesis is that people are stupid.

For these Packards, if you like the car great. I like Packards, but I've lived through enough of them that I really don't want one. If I started putting instrumentation all over the engine I might not like what I see, but I wouldn't think of putting a junkyard engine in it. If I want more speed I'll buy a new car. Oh, but there is that gas issue again. I was around when there was the Nixon 55 mph national speed limit which made driving that stuff a lot safer. Today I'm being tailgated, in the slow lane at 10 mph over the limit, by some rude ass and thinking about how the SRS is not effective above 65 mph; and taking solace in the fact that when the knucklehead behind me crashes his monster truck he will be a deadman. Just leave me out of it please.

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Tim,
FWIW, I don't either. Maybe I am 'out of the loop' up here in Canada, but I didn't see anywhere in the CCAD preamble, that it was designated for chopped and rodded
vehicles only. There are, and always will be the from/to of old car enthusiasts, those who want to chop and hotrod everything they touch, to the dyed-in-the-wool purists, who wouldn't put an aftermarket part in their car to save their lives; and, of course everyone in between. I do think the point is being distorted to 'blame it on the greedy guys from Summit Racing'. Having a national day set aside for the hobby can do a lot of good, maybe get some young people interested in 'different' old cars, showcase the importance of preserving history, and possibly even the bringing together of the different factions of old car restoration. The purists, the rat-rodders, the hot-rodders, the extreme custom guys - are we all really that different?? Divisiveness can be our undoing, if we let it; might be time to take stock on what we share in common. Chris.

Well said...Chris...Ernie in Arizona

Opinions are like noses. Everybody has one, many of them are/have been broken, and many of those have been broken more than once.

That said, I'm no fan of the hoopdie crowd with their 26" wheels-n-tires nor of the tuners with their over-revving tin boxes which sound like sewing machines (am I dating myself here?) on steroids with empty oil can mufflers. I do what I do, and some folks think I'm violating some sanctity or another.

At the end of the day, we're all Car Guys. Anything that might help (although coming from Big Gummint, "Help" may be a forlorn hope) is okay in my book.

But, what are the Unintended Consequences?

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Hi Wat_Tyler,
I've said for years that one could go door to door, handing out brown manila envelopes full of hundred dollar bills and someone would be offended!

You make a good point on 'opinions' and, at the end of the day, we all should 'go our way' and let the chips fall where they may. I guess I would classify myself as a 'semi-purist' where I like to keep everything as original as possible and practical, but when the situation at hand dictates a diversion, I'm okay with that. I'm with you on the other 'Car Guy's' pursuits, and while I'm not a fan of rods and the like, I can appreciate the work and craftmanship that goes into some of their work and customizations. To each, his own, right?? Chris.

There are big problems with electric vehicles. The time to recharge and available recharging infrastructure - grid and stations. Until these problems get fixed, EVs will be a secondary transportation.

Hydrogen fueled internal combustion engines is probably the best bet. It has energy close to or better than gasoline and diesel. The time to refill is like today's refueling. A hydrogen refilling infrastructure could be put in place quicker and easier than for EVs. The technology is in place to make hydrogen burning internal combustion engines with the only emission being water.

Alarming messages and actions by governments about quickly needing to convert to EVs as the only solution to curbing carbon emissions is, to me, akin the the sky is falling.

We need to get off of burning fossil fuels as quickly as possible, but electricity is not the best and only answer. I think the gasoline internal combustion engine is going to be the main source of transportation for many years to come.

I'm with Tim Cole on this one; he as usual nails it. Do not welcome self-serving chamber of horro-- commerce rah-rahs like this SEMA rubbish. Accepting such "any non-port in a storm" does not help, only further second- or third-tiers those of us preserving old, vintage, classic, special interest, Edwardian, brass, prewar (even pre-Vietnam for those so interested) automobiles, not junkrods, retrorods or egregious '60s midsized tin with station wagon engines, stumpy rear axle ratios, dopey decals, racing stripes.

Long overdue for us to get it together, bond with clubs Auburn/Alfa through Zephyr/Zagato.


At risk of inducing rancor in the hidebound, time we look at the big picture. The real threat to internal combustion cars is overpopulation. We've breeched a third of a billion in the US, double to quadruple what it was when our Packards engineered and built;
8 billion globally, triple what it was when Packard was after Ford, still the most recognized automotive name on earth, the leading choice of the world's embassies.

EVs without curbing overpopulation are just kicking the can a little further down the road; future wars over not just oil and fresh water, but copper, lithium.

Given the consumer-driven media's blackout on addressing overpopulation, despite a 2013 poll of 2,000 UN scientists, 11/5/2019 poll in Bloomberg News of 11,000 scientists concurring that overpopulation by far the biggest problem in the world, their words: "bigger than climate," since many people can't accept the dire need to have "one or none," adopt if more wanted, i.c. automobiles are a convenient whipping boy.

Norway has banned all i.c. automobiles including collector cars in three (3) years, 2025, the rest of Scandinavia 2030, the European Union 2035, France and England, for now, 2040, 2050. Here in the States, bank on ever increasing, punishing, restrictive fees and surcharges.

Meanwhile, UN and other vetted studies show that animals raised for meat and dairy produce more greenhouse gas than all the world's cars, trucks, buses, trains, planes, ships combined.

Our nation's tax codes still rooted in agrarian times when half of all children died before age four, and more kids meant more hands to work the family farm. Those with business models so weak they're dependent on evermore mall fodder and cheap labor will fight sane tax revision.

Now, we can either devolve to more us/them divisiveness, yeah buts, more Band Aids for the patient hemorrhaging in the ER, or triage: be vegan, which has hardly slowed 77-year-old rocker rodder Jeff Beck and the world's leading Grand Prix driver, Lewis Hamilton, so we're more likely to stave off heart disease, hypertension, inflammation, cancer, diabetes, dementia, Alzheimer's, be around to enjoy our cars;

and pressure Congress to revise our tax codes to encourage one or none, adoption, tax breaks for those preferring to be child-free. Congressional switchboard, open 24/7: (202) 224-3121.

Contact the Pope and other religious leaders, the former via
Twitter feed: PopeFrancis@Pontifex. Email: info@salastampa.va
Phone: 390669881022, mail: His Holiness Pope Francis, Apostolic Palace, 00120 Vatican City.
Tell him that to not encourage adoption over making more babies at this very late date is immoral. He has time to assure his followers dogs go to heaven, he has time for this.

We're all the same DNA, stardust, after six to eight generations all traces but any memorable art, architecture, literature, music, science, engineering vanished. Let someone else have your kids. Introduce young folks to old cars as well as Vivaldi and Louis Armstrong.
If not born 2023, who's to say might not be born 2823, 4623, or 16823?

Support everything that makes education, contraceptives available to every woman and girl on earth.

Every nation with declining birthrate has higher GNP per capita.

A tall order, this. But then rebuilding a Packard correctly tougher than a Model A or "retro rod" from a catalog. The above likely fool's errand on most forums, but here's hoping not on that devoted to preserving "a gentleman's car, built by gentlemen," by a company advertising in National Geographic, Literary Digest, and the New Yorker.


I didn't revamp my 2103 to drive to Safeway, but after all the work and time, would like to fire up that spoilt, gothic-grilled b____ch now and then for no good reason without condemnation.

Think this is "politics, etc.?" Do not be surprised, in a few short years, when the bell tolls for thee.

Fifty years ago the population was 2+ billion people ( I was in high school), now it's 8+ billion people. That's the problem
If you do the math, there will be 32 Billion people by 2072, I won't be here to see that and I am glad

World pop hit one billion around 1804, when Beethoven finished his favorite of his nine symphonies, the Eroica, two billion in 1927, the year Lindbergh flew a crude, single-engine tail dragger to Paris, three billion 1960, four in 1975, five 1987, six 1999, seven billion 2011,
nudging 8 billion today.

How much higher we go is dependent on our actions today.

Ted Turner, who coolly gave one billion to the United Nations, thinks that an ideal figure. Bill Gates, whose foundation distributes education and contraceptives to women and girls around the world, as does the Clinton Foundation, believes two billion.

The world exceeded its carrying capacity at 3 1/2 billion, 1965.

Hesitate to bring up the above lest this devolve to a nerdathon of junk science purveyed by the usual corporate funded think tanks, or those who suggest everyone move to South Dakota. "Smart growth" without curbing population just means turning the nation into Queens, NY.
No disrespect to that outer borough of my old greater NYC, but do you want to subject your Packard to the halting lock step of concrete conveyor belt?

Of course, we'll hear from the usual "I've got mine, Jack" types who think all's well so long as they've got some bucolic backroads near their tree-lined street in the hinterlands.

Or snipes at the above fellows by those living on PCs and Windows, who think evermore synthetic pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, fertilizers the answer, overlooking the loss of natural heat sinks, the Pennsylvania-sized dead zone where heartland agbiz empties into the Gulf of Mexico, only 9 % the life in the sea as 1950, and all of that containing various levels of heavy metals, toxins, plastic, most of the South American rain forest Amazon dot gone at present rates of destruction by the late 2030s.

Facing such cataclysm, and we are, ICE cars the most convenient whipping boy, how wise is it to bury our heads in the sand, useless as the rubble of the Packard plant?

In the '30s, five of the Supreme Court justices drove Packards, many of the nation's and world's leaders, university presidents and dept. chairs, engineers, scientists, writers as well as Packard's mentioned whelming popularity in the world's embassies, advertising in magazines for educated folk.

A great irony is that too many who play with old automobiles also live in the past. The Packard brothers began producing electrical equipment, the highest tech of the day.

So, do we today carry forth that ability, or focus solely on who provides replacement glovebox cardboard?

Meanwhile, let's see the down homers at SEMA or elsewhere offer the below in 10mm form for us. Who among those here gathered might make that happen?

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