Deliver de Letter

De sooner, de better. Chances are, if you live in the United States, your mail is delivered in one of these Long Life Vehicles. Ours is; if you live in a city yours may be brought to your door by an ambulatory carrier. Since 1986, the United States Postal Service has purchased nearly 100,000 LLVs from Grumman Olson Corporation.

Although the US Post Office, forerunner to today's USPS, has been moving mail with motor vehicles since early in the Twentieth Century, carrier route delivery vehicles are a fairly recent phenomenon. Trucks were initially used to move mail between post offices and to transport carriers and mailbags to their routes. Intercity post was transported by trains. A standardized fleet of Model A Fords was placed in service in 1931; because of Depression austerity and priorities of World War II, many of these Model As remained in service until the 1950s. In the late 1940s, the USPO began to augment them with Chevys, Dodges and Internationals with special bodies by Gerstenslager Company of Wooster, Ohio.

When I was growing up, our mail was delivered by Marty in his own green Ford Ranch Wagon. He seemed to race from mailbox to mailbox, but perhaps this was because he was driving from the middle and steering with his left hand, and did the whole route in first gear. How he managed the clutch and accelerator I don't know.

The first carrier route vehicles, which came in 1956, overcame this problem. They were right-hand drive Jeep Dispatchers, with bright red, white and blue paint jobs supplanting the olive drab of the old Model As and Gerstenslager trucks. The Dispatcher was a two-wheel drive version of the Jeep CJ-3; in 1965, a new style DJ-5 replaced it. The DJ-5 postal Jeeps used Chevrolet four-cylinder engines, the unit developed for the Chevy II, and Powerglide transmissions. After American Motors bought Kaiser's Jeep business in 1970 the Rambler six was adopted, and a new extended grille was added to accommodate it.

The LLV had its roots in an experiment with electric mail trucks during the late 1970s. Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corporation had purchased the J.B. Olson Company, maker of truck bodies, in the 1960s. Grumman Olson, who made a popular Kurbmaster line of van bodies, decided to compete for the USPS contract with a vehicle called Kurbwatt, an all-aluminum unibody design. Some 41 Kurbwatts were placed in service, but the decline in oil prices caused interest in the project to wane. Grumman Olson then refitted the Kurbwatt with a front-drive Volkswagen Rabbit diesel power unit and sold it as the Kubvan. However, diesel demand was also fading by 1983, when the Kubvan was introduced. About 500 were built in 1983 and 1984.

The experience with the Kurbwatt and Kubvan, however, put Grumman Olson in an excellent position when the USPS put its LLV project out to bid. The LLVs have a Grumman Olson aluminum body mounted on a chassis derived from Chevy's S10 pickup, using the "Iron Duke" engine driving the rear wheels through a Hydra-Matic transmission. More recently, the USPS has taken delivery of 21,000 Flexible Fuel Vehicles built by Utilimaster of Wakarusa, Indiana. The FFVs, somewhat larger than the LLVs, are built on right-hand drive, two-wheel drive Ford Explorer chassis, and can burn either gasoline or ethanol.

Many postal Model A Fords remained in service for 25 years. Today's Long Life Vehicles celebrated two decades of service last year, and will remain on their routes for several more. As Poo-Bah sings in The Mikado, Long Life, Long Life to You!

The Mother of All Motorcars

The French had a word for it: "automobile," combining Greek and Latin roots, though it was initially used as an adjective, as in voiture automobile (self-propelled conveyance). First used around 1890, the term did not catch on in the United States until 1899, when it replaced "motocycle;" in Britain "motor car" was preferred and still is, to some extent, today. The French needed a word because they had a motor industry, starting in 1883 with Count Albert DeDion, who teamed with Georges Bouton and M. Trepardoux to build steam cars. By the turn of the Twentieth Century there was a vibrant industry, including steam proponent Serpollet (1887, later Gardner-Serpollet), and internal combustion pioneers Panhard et Levassor (1889), Peugeot (also 1889 and still going), Delahaye (1894) and johnny-come-lately Renault (1898).

Moreover, the French have an enduring claim on the invention of the automobile, at least as we define it. Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot, a retired Army officer, was given a contract in 1769 to build a steam-powered tractor for towing artillery. His first voiture en petite was demonstrated the following year and carried four people at a walking pace, but could only run for 15 minutes before running out of steam.

That same year he began building another, tested in 1771. This was a tricycle some 24 feet in length, with a huge kettle of a boiler cantilevered over the single front wheel. Twin vertical cylinders operated directly on the wheel, their connecting rods alternately operating ratchets on the axle. A two-handed tiller operated a simple steering gear, and a long rod controlled the speed by modulating steam leaving the boiler. Slung below the chassis was a wicker fuel tank, containing chunks of wood. Though crude by today's standards, including a total lack of brakes, it was forward-thinking in use of front-wheel drive and rack-and-pinion steering.

The fardier à vapeur (steam dray) operated on the streets of Paris, though the legends have gained in the telling. Conventional wisdom says it belched and snorted through the streets, terrorizing the good citizens, before knocking down a wall, whereupon the machine was seized and its inventor thrown into jail. Montagu and Bird dismiss the latter claims as "flights of purest fancy," while admitting that the tradition concerning the wall is "strong" and might have resulted in some "trifling damage."

What is perhaps most remarkable is that this mother of the motor car survives, on display at Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris. Much of it has been reconstructed, but the boiler and firebox are clearly original, nicely patinated and fragile in places. Its silhouette adopted as the emblem of the Society of Automotive Historians, you'd think that carfolk would be ten deep in paying homage, but on the day some friends and I visited in 2001 we had the fardier all to ourselves, save for the occasional browsing schoolboy.

Standard of the World

I've owned 40-some cars in my lifetime, but only one Cadillac. In the summer of 1967, in a misguided fit of youthful enthusiasm, I bought a boat. Since my Austin-Healey Sprite was an inappropriate tow car, I looked around for something heftier. After considering a 1955 Cadillac, a 1960 Lincoln and the car I should have bought, a low-mileage 1957 Buick, I settled for a 1959 Cadillac Sedan de Ville.

Henry Martyn Leland (seen here with "Osceola," his 1905 coupe) was the father of Cadillac and the "Master of Precision." He developed exacting standards for machine work at Brown & Sharpe, then went to Detroit to build engines for the new motor trade. Leland's Cadillacs were so precisely built that in 1908 three Model K cars were disassembled, their parts scrambled, then three cars built from the mixture, all of which started and ran. This earned Cadillac the Royal Automobile Club's Dewar Trophy and the title "Standard of the World."

By 1914, Cadillac was a large car, still with four cylinders but with electric starting and lighting. By 1923, closed cars were the norm and V8s ruled. As the Depression raged, Cadillac threw caution to the winds and introduced not just V-12s but also V-16s. In 1938, a young designer named Harley Earl penned the Sixty Special, a design icon to this day. Cadillac grew heftier in 1941, and after the war started the tailfin craze, and while the Fleetwood limos were anachronistic the fastback Sedanettes were positively beguiling.

It wasn't until 1950 that Cadillac surpassed Packard for good as top-selling American luxury car, but from that time Caddy never looked back, though by 1952 the cars were a bit overbearing. Finer lines in 1954 improved the looks, and by 1957 the Cadillacs were low and lithe, the top-of-the-line Eldorado Brougham selling for a cool $13,500.

My '59 was a camp caricature of a car, one of the reasons I bought it. The fins had grown to grotesque proportions by 1959 and the engine was now a 390 cubic inch behemoth. Mine was the four-window "flat top" style, rather than the more attractive six-window design, and had add-on air and gold lamé upholstery. It headstrong on snowy roads and several pairs of skis would fit in the trunk. The previous owner said it would run on Gulftane, Gulf's cheap low-octane brand (it didn't), and with 130,000 miles on the clock it needed lots of TLC, which included regularly checking the oil.

One Sunday evening I returned home from a weekend of skiing. The transmission had been shifting erratically and I nursed it the last 50 miles. I pulled into the driveway, shifted to reverse to turn it around and my Caddy didn't move. My Hydra-Matic had "Park" and five "Neutrals." The next day I took off as many saleable parts as I could and called the local scrapyard. I had owned the car for three months and it had cost me, including the purchase price, $300. For $100 a month, I reckoned, I could have a new car. I bought a showroom-fresh Volvo 122S.

The Low-Priced Three

Alfred P. Sloan's doctrine of "a car for every purse and purpose" was firmly entrenched by the early 1930s. General Motors had a clear cascade of makes, from Cadillac at the top of the market to Chevrolet at the bottom. Walter Chrysler recognized the phenomenon, which led him to introduce price-leader Plymouth to balance his namesake Chrysler. Henry Ford, whose name was synonymous with economy, left his own car at the bottom, forsaking the marquee position to Lincoln. Chevrolet, Ford and Plymouth, then, came to be known as the "Low-Priced Three," the place where a family of modest means would begin their car shopping.

The landscape was well established. In 1932, a Pontiac Six cost 22 percent more than a Chevy (based on the proverbial lowest-priced four-door sedans), a DeSoto 43 percent more than a Plymouth PB (Dodge cost more than DeSoto in 1932, remember). Ford's bigger brother, Lincoln, didn't really figure into this theory, as at $3,200 it was mega-times the cost of a $540 Model B Ford (this car was owned by my parents before my time - the children playing are my older cousins Becky and Ben).

In 1940, things hadn't changed much. The "Pontiac premium" over Chevy had risen to 25 percent, Dodge, now the lower-middle Mopar, cost 15 percent more than Plymouth, and Ford had a middle sibling, Mercury, that cost 32 percent more. In 1950 the Pontiac-Chevy margin was down to 18 percent, Mercury-Ford difference had risen to 38 percent and Dodge kept its 15 percent lead over Plymouth.

The Sixties changed all that. The new compact cars from the Big Three, Corvair, Falcon and Valiant, entered their companies' price ladders at the bottom, commanding 12 to 15 percent less than "full size" cars. There were no Pontiac or Dodge compacts, and Mercury's Comet arrived late in the year, priced just four percent more than a Falcon. Among the big cars, the Pontiac cost 16 percent over Chevy and Mercury was 19 percent more than Ford. But something ominous happened at Dodge. The new Dodge Dart Seneca cost less than one percent more than a full-sized Plymouth. When Dodge got a Valiant-clone, the Lancer, in 1961, its price premium was a scant one percent.

The tide had turned. Twenty years later, Pontiac's margin over Chevy (model for model, Phoenix vs. Citation - there was no analog to the Chevette) was four percent. When the Pontiac T1000 came in 1981, its Chevette premium was but two percent. Mercury's Zephyr cost only three percent more than a Ford Fairmont (though Bobcat's margin over Pinto was a hefty 16 percent), while the Dodge Aspen and Plymouth Volare were actually priced the same. In fact, so were the Dodge Omni and the Plymouth Horizon.

The Big Three were not the only manufacturers to offer entry-level cars. Independents had them, too, though no single maker offered them consistently. In 1932, Hudson's Terraplane (christened by aviatrix Amelia Earhart) sold for ten dollars more than a Ford or Plymouth, forty dollars less than a Chevy. The low priced insurgent in 1940 and 1950 was the Studebaker Champion, and in 1960 the Rambler American cost less than any of the Big Three compacts. Studebaker attempted inroads with the super-plain Scotsman in 1957-58 and the newly-shortened Lark made some headway in 1959. AMC came up with another price-leader, the ex-Gremlin $4,515 Spirit in 1980.

Fast-forward to 2001. Pontiac Sunfire had a Sloan-like margin of eight percent over the Chevy Cavalier. Mercury had nothing competing with Ford's Focus, its cheapest car, the Sable, costing five percent more than a Taurus. Dodge and Plymouth were competing with Neons that differed only in their badge decals; their price stickers were still exactly the same. With hindsight, we can opine that Plymouth was doomed a full forty years earlier by Chrysler's rejection of Sloanism. And the Low-Priced Three? There were three 2001 cars sold in the US priced under $11,000. They were made by Kia, Hyundai and Toyota.

Infinit Wisdom

As I was finishing my Christmas shopping a fortnight ago, I came back to the parking lot and was greeted by these two silver cars. The one on the right is my everyday Infiniti I30, on the left a Jaguar XJ6, successor to the Series 3 Jag XJ6 I admitted lusting after in a previous CarPort. While I considered my old Infiniti J30 as a Japanese Jag, somewhat equivalent to the S-Type, I had never equated the I30 to an XJ6. Seeing the two cars together made me wonder if they're not closer than conventional wisdom admits. Could I have indulged my craving and satisfied my transportation needs with a single car?

The two cars are of different generations. The XJ, designated XJ40 in Jaguarspeak, was introduced in 1986 to replace the already long-in-the-tooth Series 3. The I30, an overlapping successor to the J30, was derived from the fourth generation Nissan Maxima and launched in 1996. Mine's a '98; the XJ6 seen here is a 1995 model (I had to check the VIN to be sure), made in this form until 1997, after which it was available only with a V8. It carries the XJ40 24-valve evolution of the legendary Jag XK dohc six. The Infiniti has Nissan's new-for-1995 VQ30DE engine, a 24-valve V6 called one of the "ten best" by Wards AutoWorld since its inception. While giving up a full liter of displacement and 55 bhp to its Jaguar rival, the VQ accelerates the I30 from zero to sixty in the same 8.1 seconds, due to its smaller overall size and 930-pound lighter weight. While the VQ is judged among the smoothest of V6 engines, there's nothing like a straight six, an inherently balanced design, for vibrationless running (although under Ford stewardship Jaguar no longer has an inline engine). The Jag is rear-wheel drive, more agile in dry conditions, but I prefer the I30's front-wheel propulsion when winter comes to New England.

The Jag is longer and wider, and presumably roomier inside, but for trunk space the Infiniti beats it by three cubic feet. No doubt British handling is more spirited than a Japanese car tuned for American tastes, but the low-end grunt of the VQ engine allows tall gearing that will achieve 28 mpg in highway driving (I've done it), vice the Jag's rated 23. I give the Jag an edge for aesthetics; the Infiniti's styling, while pleasant, is rather bland.

When I bought my I30, a year ago this month, I didn't even consider an XJ6. I don't regret the decision. A comparable XJ would have cost at least $1,000 more and I'd have had a narrower field of choice. That thousand dollars, less than a 20 percent differential now, takes on a different tone when considered as depreciation. The XJ6, at $54,400, cost nearly twice the price of an I30 when new.

My nearest Infiniti dealer is no closer (50 miles) than the Jaguar store, but it matters not. Mechanical parts are available from the local Nissan dealer, as well as the aftermarket - but in 12,000 miles of driving all I've needed, other than oil changes, is a pair of brake rotors and a knock sensor. J.D. Power rates the Infiniti's long-term dependability as "5 out of 5," while the XJ is only "average." Consumer Reports gave the I30 red circles, while all Jaguars were dealt black spots.

Strictly speaking, the Infiniti comparable to an XJ Jag is the V8-engined Q45, not the I30, but even the new "entry level" X Type Jag is larger and heavier than the I30. So on balance I think I got a Jag wannabe that's more reliable and more economical, at a lower price. I still want a Jag, but I'll wait to find the right Series 3 XJ6 at the right price, strictly as a plaything. Lust, after all, loses its luster if you indulge it every day.