Better Beaters - Building Cars and Daily Drivers

 Vintage More doors, dope or nope? Part One.

Yes, I've tipped the scales in my direction. Hard to believe that this is a Packard
a shadow of it's former grandeur.

,

Yeah, I know who Drew Peacock is!

Four slams, no clams. More on this later.

These two Fords were far from sports cars, but snazzy? Yes!

To be completely honest, I'm an old school Boomer and for me, and most of my Generation, there was a definite hierarchy of desirable models. First are convertibles, followed by two door hardtops. Then two door sedans followed by four door hardtops. Bringing up the rear by a large margin are the four door sedans. 

Feel free to disagree, but my experience and observation has proven me correct. 

Four door sedans, that is, four door cars that have full window frames and a center B pillar, have been the red headed step children of the auto hobbyists world for as long as I can remember. 

This body style and construction has been the mainstay of auto manufacturers the world over. It is accepted practice when producing a useful car.

Why is this so?

The sporty models have always been the convertible and the two door hardtop. These were always offered with the bigger engine, fancier trim and upholstery, and usually loaded with more extra price options. They were almost always the most expensive models. 

Someone added a little bling during the restoration,
with whitewalls, skirts and  visor.

The basic model was always the four door sedan. These could be quite austere with almost no chrome, plain one color paint jobs, and with very plain, simple interior trim. These usually eschewed the big motor, a basic in line six would suffice, usually with a column mounted three speed manual transmission. If you were lucky they were equipped with a few basic options, like a heater and an AM radio. 

Cheapskate cars, which can almost be equated to mean, old people's cars.

Grand Pa's car. 

Back when I was growing up, my Grandpa had lived through the Great Depression. Those hard times had left an indelible mark. The most important thing was to save your money, and if you had to spend it, then it was important to get a good value. After that, it was important to take good care of the things you bought. 

My Grandfolk's generation would prefer to save up and to pay cash for their cars. Financing a car was the height of irresponsibility, imagine paying extra money for interest on a loan! Bad enough the Government stuck out their hand to grab some of your cash as sales tax! With cash in your hand you could drive a hard bargain.  You know that your Gramps knew how to drive a hard bargain!

You get the idea that four door sedans were purchased by no nonsense individuals. That also came to include the  family man. 

I'm sure that a lot of young married men resisted the idea at first. Their '40 Ford coupe was a looker, and he and his young bride still liked going out for rides in it. As things progressed however, the couple found that they now had additional passengers going along for the ride. At first the babies were in their Mother's arms and the toddlers were safely corralled in the back seat. But as the kids got bigger and bigger,  there was a lot of fighting among themselves as to who would be exiting the car first. Easier to give each kid a door of their own, The youngest would be stuck in the center. 

They were practical cars, practical being the extreme opposite of glamorous. 

However as we got our driver's licenses, and became new young drivers, just the act of driving was considered glamorous enough. 

Some of us were lucky, as our folks bought fancy new two doors, but most others borrowed the Old Man's four door family sedan. At first we didn't care, just driving anything made us feel cool. 

We could pretend and imagine that we had bought that shiny hardtop for ourselves and bask in it's reflected glory. Driving that stodgy old sedan it was obvious that we were driving our parent's car, and we were quick to point that out to our friends.

Why was I even thinking about more doors? 

I've noticed that there were several builds on the HAMB, and the AACA forums that were concerned with old sedans. 

It appears that the only affordable old cars that are still available are old sedans. It makes sense. These were cars that were often owned by the original owners for decades. They were driven very little or maybe not at all as the owners aged. Many had been well maintained and kept in the garage. That's what the garage was made for, the old folks thought. So lots of these cars were well preserved for years. Even after they were sold off at estate sales, or given to the owner's kids or grand kids, they may have had twenty to thirty years of being preserved prior to this.  Unfortunately some were treated poorly by young drivers and were trashed. Most were probably just driven and passed to another sibling as soon as they could afford a better car of their own choosing. Some were cherished as mementos of beloved relatives.  

Over time more imported cars were showing up on the road. These were smaller and they were available as sedans so that the back seats could be made more useful. Domestic automakers followed suit and began building compact and smaller cars which could also benefit by having a couple of extra doors. Over the course of a couple of generations our kids got used to being driven around in four door Camrys and Honda Accords. Then there was the arrival of SUVs, another type of four door. 

These were coming up fast in the rear view mirror.

Probably the biggest thing to change the attitude was the arrival of the high end imported sports sedan, courtesy of Mercedes, Audi and especially BMW. These were cars that could out perform many of their smaller coupe brethren, and they had the prestige. 

So now there are kids that have grown up not exactly hating the four door sedan. It was just a car, actually it was the majority of the cars out there. Two door versions of the standard models pretty much had disappeared, the coupe business was left for specialty cars like Personal Luxury Cars and Pony cars, and the PLCs been gone for the last twenty years or so. A whole 'nother generation has grown up without our beloved two door hardtops.