Welcome to this episode of Assess and Caress on Jay Leno's Garage. Tonight we're featuring three cars from the fabulous Audrain Museum in Newport, Rhode Island. If you've never been there, it's the most kinetic museum. I mean, every couple of months there's a whole new bunch of cars. I mean, you can go four or five times a year and never see the same vehicles. So it really is a lot of fun. They shipped us these cars using Reliable Transportation. They ship them all the way across the country to Newport. It's about as far as you can get on the East Coast to as far as you can get on the West Coast. And they go back and they do a great job. Never had a car damaged. So thank you, Reliable, with me. Not so reliable, my own good friend, the man of a thousand hairs on his face, Donald Osborne, ladies and gentlemen. Now, Donald, using some algorithm I have no idea, has come up with a value for these cars that I have to guess. What exactly are we doing?
Well, Jay, we're here to talk about two things. One is these cars and what makes them interesting or not to us and perhaps to the world. And then the second thing is we look at how they have behaved in the market in the past five years.
In the past only five years?
Only five years. And what is interesting about this entire segment we've been doing it now for a decade is the fact that it's always not the case that the most interesting car is the one the market cares the most about. And so we'll see if your idea of what's the most interesting car and my idea of what the most interesting car is match with what the people think when they go to buy.
All right. Now, let's start with what are the three cars we have.
Well, this segment is titled Americana through the decades.
So we've got three American cars. One from the 40s, one from the 50s, one from the 60s.
Okay. And we've got a 1947 Buick Roadmaster, a 1956 DeSoto Fireflite Sportsman, and a 1966 Oldsmobile 442.
Well, let's start with the 40s, shall we?
Now, this is a Buick Roadmaster 1947. Still has a lot of pre-war styling. You know, when the war ended, they were producing so many tanks and jeeps and all kinds of things. They didn't really have a chance to come out with brand new 40s. The only people that did were Hudson, and then of course you had the Tucker, which was such a sensation. So this was pre-war design cleaned up for after the war.
Well, yes and no. This is pre-war design. This is actually the 42 Buick looks exactly like this. But what's really interesting to me is the fact that Buick was one of the few cars that actually had all new styling for 42. And when you think about what didn't happen during the war years, it's amazing how forward-looking this car is. Think about what they were producing in Europe after World War II, right? Those were cars that really looked like 1930s cars, right? This looks like a 1950s car. You realize it's a 1942 model year.
So I think that Harley really did a great job with these cars. I think they're absolutely beautiful.
This has the Fireball straight eight.
And with a manual transmission rather than any sort of Dynaflow. Correct. What's really interesting too about this is that many collectors feel that the Buicks of the immediate pre-war period, immediate post-war period are actually equal to and in some ways better than the equivalent Cadillacs. And I happen to be one of those people. And it's also interesting to look at the marketing now. Of course, economics has changed a great deal, but this car was about $2,200 new in 1947. And the Cadillac Series 62 sedan was $2,800. Now, $500 today is not a big deal. Back then, it was a very big deal indeed. But when you think about the fact that this is a Buick, that's almost as expensive as a Cadillac. You really had to want that Cadillac badge to make the extra.
That's always been sort of the case. I remember when my dad bought an Electra 225 after looking at a Cadillac, there was only a few hundred difference between the two. So we got the Buick 225. So it's always been a close race.
Yeah, but let's talk about this too, because for our younger viewers, I have to tell the story about the fact that back in 1975, I had the chance to buy a BMW 2002ti, right? I didn't, and I chose a Volkswagen Squareback instead because the BMW was $4,200 and the Squareback was $3,500. That was a substantial price. So when you think about $500 back in 1947, that's really a substantial amount of money. But for me, this Buick delivers 95% of what the Cadillac did for that much less.
Well, $500 would be about $5,000. You figure it's 10 times what it was back in the day. Like to me, I smile when people say, 'We're looking for cars, but something just in the $5,000 range,' which makes me laugh because to me that still seems like a used car, expensive, you know, because we would look for $100 cars, $250 car. I mean, my Hudson was a beautiful original car. I paid 400 for it and I'm like scraping, you know, how much change 399 just to come up with the 400, you know. So, but you forget how that was. But yeah, these had, I mean, GM had air conditioning, they had power windows, they had all these things. When you bought a Cadillac, you got all of those. You got a V8 overhead valves. When you bought a Rolls-Royce, you got a six-cylinder with a manual transmission, roll-up windows. You know, American cars were a hell of a value back in the day.
It's a point that you make often, and I also like to point out to people, if you ever watch old European movies, watch British movies, post-war French movies, Italian movies, you always see the big shots driving an American car, right? Through these completely empty European cities, and you think, 'These people are truly kings of the road.' Yeah, this particular car is the king of the road and Roadmaster, which I think is probably one of the best car names ever, right? This is a car that truly lives up to its name. And this particular car is really interesting. It was donated to the Audrain Museum by a family that actually was not local to Newport, Rhode Island, but they had heard about what the Audrain does with cars and the fact that the Audrain likes to bring the cars out and use them, making sure that every car in the collection runs, is driven. And I've had the great pleasure of driving this car and it is a 33,000-mile-from-new car.
And it's been repainted in sections. The hood's been repainted. A couple of parts of the rear fenders have been repainted, but the interior is completely original. And it's a remarkable thing to experience. Another thing that you often refer to is the fact that sort of the average driven speeds have really changed so much. I had the opportunity one day to take this car from Newport, Rhode Island, about a probably 35-mile trip up to Providence, Rhode Island to do a TV appearance. And I thought, well, I'll take the Buick Roadmaster. I thought, I don't want to be in morning traffic on the highway in this. Then I realized I don't have to do that. And I just took the two-lane roads and it was delightful. It was a 35-40 mph meditative experience on the road. It was spectacular.
And you can see the kind of World War II influence, the gunsight here, Harley Earl. They wanted to make it, you know, we just won the war. So you got a lot of pilots, guys out of the war. Oh, you buy a, it looks like the gunsight on my Spitfire or whatever it might be, you know. So it's pretty interesting. Yeah. This is a beautiful, beautiful car. It's drum brakes. Has it got power steering?
Has power steering, which was amazing. That was an amazing breakthrough. The differences in the dynamic driving experience between an early 30s car through the mid-30s to the 40s and now into the 50s is absolutely astonishing. Things that we take for granted in terms of the operating of a car is something that, as you said, was groundbreaking to the people that drove these cars.
When I take my 55 Roadmaster, I would park it somewhere and I come back and there'd be an elderly African-American man admiring the Roadmaster. I had it for some reason that the big migration from the South because the factories were paying black people the same money as white people, which I know it seems ridiculous now, but that was unfair, you know, so you had a huge migration. And the car a lot of these guys bought were Buicks. I think a couple of guys from the Tuskegee Airmen, they had Buicks because when they came here, a couple of those guys hit the road and they were all excited about seeing my Roadmaster, so it was kind of fun.
Well, you know, you mentioned your father buying the Electra 225, and I had some relatives from where my parents are from in South Carolina that also, the people that really did well, they owned a funeral parlor and things like that, they drove Buicks. And one of the other reasons why they drove Buicks was just because of what I was talking about, the experience of owning a Buick was just like having a Cadillac, but it wasn't ostentatious, so you didn't call attention to yourself, but people knew, oh, this person is someone who's got a bit of money, so you know, they could treat themselves.
All right, let's move on. What is the next car?
Next, we'll go to the 50s and our DeSoto.
Now, this is a 1956, correct?
Was that about, was 57 the last year for DeSoto?
Oh, see, that's right, I guess. Yeah, that's right. Yeah.
This is really interesting, too, because of course all the manufacturers wanted to duplicate the great GM ladder of brands. So they had to have a car for every one of the price ranges, right? You know, you had to have an entry in the low-price field, the mid-price field, and the... It was always a field. Exactly. You always got a mid-price field. You were always in a field somewhere. I don't know what that was, but yeah. The leader in the low price. They didn't want to say cheap cars. Exactly. Low-price field. Yeah. And you wanted to have a car that had the feeling of it was priced in a certain field, but had the feeling of the next field up. So you had that aspirational aspect going all the time. And DeSoto were really fantastic. And it's an example of something that a lot of times in a ladder, the corporate hierarchy will keep the cars that are in the low end or the middle end away from the high end, so that they won't really give it a lot of attention.
Well, sure. You see that nowadays, you see Maserati here, Ferrari here, Alfa Romeo, Maserati, you know, they don't let anyone get too close to the top one. Even Porsche still does it with the 918. It's never going to have more horsepower than the 911. I'm sorry.
It is one of those things that really amuses me. Plus, of course, you know that I love design, right? And this car is the absolute epitome of Virgil Exner's Forward Look. As a matter of fact, the 56 cars, these cars were called the $100 million look. It was something that really set Chrysler apart from GM and Ford. GM and Ford really had to catch up with Chrysler on design, which was quite something since Chrysler had been very conservative after the failure of the Airflow in the 1930s, right? So design was like anathema to Chrysler executives.
And Chrysler was always the engineering company. That was their thing. And it's hard to believe now, but each brand, even though they're under the Chrysler umbrella, developed their own engine. Buick developed a Buick engine that Pontiac didn't know about. Pontiac developed an engine that Chevy didn't know about. And they would spring this out at the auto show, whatever, a 389, 421, you know, whatever it might be. So now GM kind of uses the same engine for everybody. It doesn't seem that big a deal to people anymore. But back in, I guess, when the 70s was when they... 70s is when they started, you buy a Buick. What? It's got a Chevy engine. What, you know? Oh yeah, people sued and went crazy. Yeah.
Yeah, it was absolutely nuts. But as you said, this is the golden age. The 330 cubic inch Hemi in this car is DeSoto exclusive. And in fact, you talk about engineering and performance. Now, of course, Chrysler had introduced the 300, right, the year before, and you've got a couple of 300s. Those cars are absolutely astonishing. They deliver a level of performance that people who don't know 50s American cars can't imagine. Yeah, what these things did.
And the DeSoto in 56 was actually chosen as the pace car at Indianapolis.
Right. Right. So this is a car about performance. So if you wanted that performance that gave you the impression of the 300 Chrysler, but you didn't want to spend the money for a Chrysler 300 and you wanted something that's a little more manageable, because the 300, I think, put out something like 335 horsepower, which is insane, right? But this is in the high 200s, and this is a car, I've driven this car. It really moves. It's got the two-speed TorqueFlite push-button transmission.
Oh yeah. If you can type, you can drive. That was the thing. And it just is this amazing combination. You've often talked about one of your favorite Chrysler products of this era, the Dodge La Femme.
Oh, La Femme. Yeah. Yeah. That was marketed towards women.
Had a matching handbag and a matching raincoat and umbrella, assuming that women would always wear the same clothes whenever they drove the car, you know. Yeah.
Exactly. Slightly silly, but I have to say this because people were secure in their identities. There would be nothing wrong with the most manly of men driving this coral DeSoto Fireflite Sportsman with this incredible almost baroque interior with the silver lurex threads in it. I mean, this is absolutely amazing. It's such style and presence. You know, today we've got black cars, white cars, gray cars, and that's it. That's all you have. When I was a kid, there was a guy named Mario the Carpenter, a friend of my dad's, you know, Italian with the hair and the cigarette rolled up, you know, and he would come to dinner and he had a big Buick convertible 58, which was like, that was the chrome boat, you know, and I always remember it because he would come to dinner and a few days before I heard my mother say, 'Oh, the women always swoon whenever Mario comes over,' you know. So he comes over and I'm looking. I go, 'Hey, Mom, I don't see anybody swooning. What are you talking about? You said swoon when Mario comes.' And of course my mother, she's all embarrassed by this. And Mario's like, you know, he's got the cigarette and he keeps the cigarette here. He got an extra cigarette here. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just very funny. But, you know, I love the colors from this era because when you see color film first coming in in cameras and things, they would shoot these cars and I mean, this is three colors on here. Yeah.
Yeah, that's pretty well actually. You got gray, pink, black. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're pretty amazing. Yeah.
And these cars, as I said, dynamically are so incredibly impressive. And once people drive them and they get the real idea of what these are like. As a matter of fact, it's something that all three of these cars have in common: incredible driving dynamics that really sort of epitomize their eras and also deliver a great deal of satisfaction for today's driving in a way you wouldn't expect. I remember Groucho Marx was a spokesman for DeSoto, and 'You bet your life.' Well, let's take a look at, hey, what a car this is, you know, and he would always say, you know, in the low-price field, this one is the best, you know, whatever it might be, you know, just so funny, always in a field. All right, let's move on to this one, this...
And our final car, the Olds 442. And this is again something that frankly we now have a generation of people that grew up with it not existing, so you don't have that same idea of, oh, Oldsmobile and performance. But of course, Oldsmobile built some incredibly capable performance cars, especially in this period. This and the Buick performance cars are some of my favorite of the GM muscle cars. Plus, I love this era of GM design. It is so incredibly clean. You think about the fact that just a few years before, cars were almost ridiculous in their over-design and over-decoration, right? This car is so simple and clean and elegant. And I grew up loving European cars and I love this car and cars like this because they look like European cars to me.
And this is like what they call the banker's hot rod. This is the answer to the Chrysler 300. It was a big full-size car. Wasn't a little weeny GTO-size thing, you know.
No, this is intermediate.
I guess it is an intermediate.
Intermediate. Oh, you're right. I suppose it would be. I suppose it would be. Yeah, yeah. It seems so huge now.
Yes, exactly. But it was more comfort. They used to call it the iron fist and the velvet glove. That's what they used to say when they talked about it because the GTO was like a hot rod whereas this was just torque, all kinds of power. Oldsmobile had the fabulous V8 with a four-speed. I mean, to get a car this size with a manual transmission and it's so much fun to drive. This is one of my favorites. We had this here for a while and we put a new dash in it and a few other things. It's just a wonderful driving car. It drives like a modern car. It is absolutely astonishing and again it also puts the lie to the idea that cars of this period, especially performance cars of this period, can only go in a straight line. This car handles beautifully and also it's very interesting. This has got the tri-power, the three two-barrel Rochester carburetors in it. They are set up with a sequential linkage. So when you're just sort of idling and driving around, you're just using the middle carburetor, right? And then as you get to 65-70% of the throttle, the outer carburetors come on and all hell breaks loose.
Well, it's interesting because Pontiac had tri-power, but it was a dealer option. You couldn't get it from the factory. Did this come from the factory?
This came from the factory.
Oh, that's interesting. And you think that's because they didn't want Pontiac to compete?
I think it was one of those things that Pontiac saw what was doing. Actually, this is a one-year-only, in 66. They had the W30, which had the same amount of horsepower, but was really a much faster car because it was geared for drag racing.
And the 442, people have debated what it is. It's a four-speed, four-barrel, dual exhaust. Isn't that correct?
