Yes, but it's a Gucci handbasket

[Fisher, Scott]

> Yup, I actually agree whole heartly with you.  VW is guilty of this
> with the new Beetle, BMW with the new Mini, Ford with the 
> upcoming T-bird.

That's the external side of it.  I'm not overly keen on the new Beetle
because I was never too fond of the old one; the new Mini, on the other
hand, pegs all my gotta-see-one-up-close meters.  

> That said, this practice has not occurred with any production model
> bearing the four rings. 

You're right -- and I'm sorry, I was thinking of the "revival" of the
Bugatti marque.

> The TT may seem a tad "retro", and is named
> similarly to an old NSU model, but it doesn't pretend to be a new
> incarnation of some historic product of the Audi lineage.  Rather,
> it's Freeman Thomas' expression of a rather futuristic concept.

Agreed -- though its styling is highly reminiscent of the Karmann-Ghia and
the 356 from certain angles, a comparison that I consider a compliment. :-)
I run hot and cold on the TT; I think that putting in the oval-cornered Audi
corporate grille jars badly with the rest of the car, and is probably the
main thing I object to about the styling -- from the rear or rear
three-quarters, the TT is magnificent, especially (fair fa' yer honest,
sonsie face, Tess!) in silver, where the play of light heightens the use of
curves and planes to great effect.  From the front it's only really
tolerable (to me) in black, because the "but we have to give it a corporate
identity" grille disappears into the paintwork.  Oh well.

> Also, the Audi "Steppenwolf" concept car's [...]

I was reading through old Road & Track magazines when we were moving,
deciding which to toss and which to keep, and came across a really BEAUTIFUL
Porsche show car from 1996, somewhat styled after the great Spyder racing
cars from the late Fifties and early Sixties.

It was a great show car -- too bad they never built it.

(As a friend used to say, "Thank you for flying, and please observe that the
captain has turned the sarcasm light on." :-)

My point, if there is one, is that it's hard to generalize from a concept
car.  Sometimes they go straight into production with only the most minor of
changes -- the original Viper, for example, is very similar to the show car
it was based on.  The Boxster, at least to my eye, lost nearly all the
grace, charm and fluidity of the original and became a venomous bunch-backed
toad in production form -- a fast, agile, and impeccably put-together toad,
but a toad nevertheless.  One might be tempted to say that there is a
minimum quotient of ungainly, imbalanced, and downright ugly design cues
that must be maintained between a show car and the production vehicle, and
if they're missing in the prototype they'll have to be added on (that whole
"Now is the winter of our discontent" central brake-light edifice on the
production Boxster) to make it to the showroom.

> > [Piech] commissioned Giorgio Giugiaro (an
> > automotive artist, a Name in his own right, and one with an 
> > established
> > history with VWAG) to design a very interesting vehicle with a very
> > interesting Audi-developed engine -- so far so good -- and 
> > then painted it blue and named it after a dead automotive artist
> 
> Bentley?  Well I didn't know that Giugiaro had anything to do with the
> design of the race cars,

Bentleys, being British, are green.  Bugattis, however, were blue (being
French), and it's the new Bugatti that has my knickers in such a twist --
particularly because the idea of a Piech-engineered, Giugaro-designed,
1001-bhp quattro-equipped supercar OUGHT to be exciting enough without
tarting it up in the disinterred corpse of one of autodom's true greats.
Ettore Bugatti was brilliant, autocratic, the archetype of the
automaker-as-king to a degree that probably only Enzo Ferrari really lived
up to after WW2.  And he died fifty-odd years ago.  Requiescat in pace.

The economics (and aesthetics) of companies that purchase *existing*
carmakers is a whole different matter, and one that is considerably muddier
(read: harder to find a single, tangible idea to base one's distaste on :-).
The company that W. O. Bentley started (and which Ettore Bugatti described
as making the fastest motor lorries in the world) was failing during the
Great Depression, and was purchased in 1930 (if memory serves) by
Rolls-Royce, who gradually turned the marque into a Rolls for people who
liked to drive their own cars.  (It is worth noting that the marque clubs
for the two carmakers are, respectively, the Rolls-Royce Owner's Club, but
the Bentley Driver's Club -- the presumption being that in the case of the
Rolls, the driver is *employed* by the owner.)  A good friend has a lovely
1967 Bentley T Type.  It is no less a wonderful car for the absence of any
real mechanical connection to Tim Birkin and the Le Mans-conquering cars of
the Twenties, which were about as old when this car was built as it is
today.  It is also -- in a piece of wildly unintentional irony, because the
restoration predated Bentley's current ownership -- currently painted Audi
Santorin Blue.  Truth can be stranger than fiction because truth doesn't
have to make sense.

Sometimes the purchase of a passionate, smaller company by a successful,
larger one is the only way, or the only apparent way, to save a company and
its "installed base" of owners.  (I can think of a couple of listers in or
around Nashua, New Hampshire who may have an... interesting viewpoint on the
matter this week.)  Aston-Martin, for example, quite probably couldn't have
continued without Ford purchasing them.  Volvo, at least from appearances,
could have (though Per and others may have more insider information on that
front).  But what about Jaguar?  Or, to bring it closer to the four rings,
Lamborghini?  The water gets murkier when there's been continued production,
however sporadic or unprofitable, by the purchasee.

BMW's purchase of The Rover Group may end up being something other than the
stupidest move in modern industrial history if the New Mini is the success
it appears to be capable of, but there has been serious talk about using
some old nameplates found in the cupboards at Longbridge to lend their
appeal to new cars.  The poor old M.G. octagon has at least been kept in
current use to some extent, first on some high-performance Metro and Maestro
saloons and later on what I understand is a fairly decent mid-engined open
two-seater (if this really were a free country, my wife would drive the kids
around in a 156 Sportwagon, I'd drive an S3 in bad weather, and when it was
sunny I'd put the top down on my MGF), and the name has also been revived as
a racing marque at this year's Le Mans.  But when a magazine reports that
BMW is considering using the Austin-Healey name on a BMW two-seater... well,
one of my only regrets about the time I spent in the Healey Club (other than
that I didn't buy that red-over-black '55 100-4) was that I never got to
meet Donald Healey, who was a great personality in motoring history and
apparently one of the most all-around entertaining and worthwhile people who
ever graced the planet.  Even his son Geoff is now deceased, so there's no
chance of having any real connection to the Healey tradition other than the
letters in the logo.

Which, I guess, really underscores your original point, Ti: that these
"brands" were originally companies founded on the vision of a single
individual, usually one man with a passion for motorsport who was able to
turn that into a tangible automobile with a mix of features and flaws that,
taken as a whole, gave the cars in question some unique qualities that we
think of as character, and that we still value to this day.  Ettore Bugatti,
Enzo Ferrari, Ferrucio Lamborghini, Donald Healey, William Lyons, Carroll
Shelby, Ferry Porsche, Colin Chapman -- they all built cars that said
something TO them, and ABOUT them, and the echoes rang in the hearts of
motoring enthusiasts around the world.  And it's just not right that these
echoes are being digitally synthesized by faceless mega-corporations to try
to give the illusion of character to the NAMES of vehicles that don't
partake of the traditions that inspired the originals.

Especially when, as in the nosferatu Bugatti, the vehicle in question stands
every right of being pretty damn awesome on its own merits.  It would be
hard not to be thrilled by the performance of a car that has the equivalent
power of an S4tt -- on each wheel.  Just to put it in perspective...

(Now... to muddy things even further, I'm recalling that Bugatti was one of
the nameplates that Audi bought after an abortive attempt by several other
international investors to revive the name some years before Audi took it
over... which makes the issue a bit cloudier still.  Is Piech jumping in to
save the sacred Bugatti name from failed execution by incompetents?  That's
more what I'd expect from a guy who used to keep a 917 crankshaft on his
desk, a memento of his tenure in charge of that engineering team.)

> > (So, audifans, a reader survey: Scott needs a) more b) less 
> > coffee... choose one. :-)
> 
> Gee, I don't drink coffee and sometimes I get into this mode 
> of thinking myself! :-)

I compromised and switched to iced tea. :-)  

Not sure it helped -- I now find myself contemplating the question of
whether there is any real connection, technical or spiritual, between the
new Navigator and... Abraham Lincoln?  Yeesh.  Sic semper tyrannis!

--Scott Fisher
  Tualatin, Oregon