Any Which Way You Can (1980)

Starring Clint Eastwood as Philo Beddoe, Sondra Locke as Lynn Halsey-Taylor, and Manis an orangutan, as Clyde. The photo is of the truck Clint as Philo Beddoe drove in the movie. What can you tell us about the truck? Make? Model? Or just movie trivia from "Any Which Way You Can".

Thanks,
Jerry

The Daily Telegraph is a huge newspaper in the UK.
It's readers chose the ugliest cars of all time, and I thought you might be interested in seeing the "Top 20", along with the newspaper's comments. Some American cars made the list! I have included a photo album with pictures of the more obscure makes and models.
Do you want to add to the list?
Personally, I LOVE the style of the 1958 Edsel

20-Range Rover
Once thought to be a practical, versatile ally for countryside dwellers. Now looks like a Securicor van.

19-AMC Gremlin
Launched, appropriately, on April 1, 1970

18-Nissan Micra
Funny that an innocuous runabout could stir such feelings of derision. Some singled out the coupé-cabriolet version as being particularly gruesome.

17-Ford Edsel
The company whipped the American public into a frenzy: they thought they'd be getting something special, but it turned out to be just another Ford. The grille was compared to something that is unspeakable in a family newspaper.

16-Trabant
Launched in 1957, it was originally supposed to be in production for 10 years but remained there for 33.

15-Audi Q7
"My other car's in the boot."

14-Triumph TR7
Noticed how many British cars of the 1970s and '80s are on this list?

13-Morris Ital
The Marina might have been a flawed attempt to tart up the Minor, but this was a very badly flawed attempt to tart up the Marina.

12-Ford Ka
Some people think it looks like a hamster on wheels. They have a point.

11-BMW 1 Series
Modern family hatchback has driven wheels in the correct location. Result. The styling has not been so enthusiastically received.

10-Chrysler PT Cruiser
Quite a number of old American cars were among the 309 that people nominated (although many received only a single vote). And this looks like an old American car.

9-Austin Princess
Originally known as the Austin/Morris/Wolseley 18-22, it was subsequently rebranded as the Princess (the death knell for Wolseley as a brand name) and later facelifted as the Ambassador. Quite straightforward, really.

8-Hummer
Some think they look good on 20-inch wheels. Others think the stretched version has presence. We think they are ideally suited to a) the desert, their natural habitat or b) the crusher.

7-Ford Scorpio
The Granada and Consul had a certain cachet, partly embellished by their dual role as both chase and getaway cars in TV cop shows. Then Ford sacrificed all that muscular flair and created this. Good ones run forever, apparently.

6-AMC Pacer
Shorter than most other American cars of the late 1970s, but just as wide, the Pacer had the advantage of looking like nothing else on the road. It had the disadvantage, however, of looking truly hideous. Somehow, they flogged 280,000 of them.

5-Porsche Cayenne
A masterclass in engineering… but this predominantly V8-engined SUV solves all kinds of problems that don't exist. That said, it does have the ability to tear along at 140mph in areas that don't yet have speed cameras (fields, the River Spey).

4-Austin Allegro
The same car in most respects, but one has a Rolls-style grille that looks rubbish on a compact saloon. Not actually as good as the Austin 1100 series that went before. And what was the point of a quartic steering wheel?

3-SsangYong Rodius
The original design brief, apparently, was to capture the essence of a luxury yacht. To gauge the success of this, we recommend the entire production run be shipped to the mid-Atlantic and dropped over the side.

2-Fiat Multipla
Derided for the blandness of its output during the 1980s and early 1990s, Fiat dared to start thinking outside the box. In this case, however, it simply added wheels to the box and chucked in a few curved balls.

1-Pontiac Aztek
When voting began, many of you possibly didn't know what an Aztek was. As a trickle of votes came in, however, people began searching Google's image database, eyes boggled, the floodgates opened and the Fiat Multipla's comfortable lead was pegged back.

Proof that Americans do ugly better than anyone else, the Aztek was General Motors' first mid-size "crossover" sport utility vehicle, based on a 1999 show concept with "Xtreme" styling. On sale from 2001-2005, priced from $21,445 with a 3.4-litre V6 engine and front-wheel drive or "Versatrak" 4WD, the Mexican-built Aztek was marketed as "quite possibly the most versatile vehicle on the planet", in other words the product of a cost-cutting committee's attempt to please as many people as possible. But designer Wayne Cherry (previously responsible the droop-snoot Vauxhalls of the 1970s) deserves most of the blame.

Can you find the year, make, model, and owner? Quote from the owner "I bought this car for my son when he turned 16"

Good luck,
Jerry

Ok, here we have another automobile engine. Can you tell us anything about it? It is (not) tuff so guessing is ok. Simple answers are fine. Going to guess at the cam? Ok but no way to tell. Just take a shot with any information.

Thanks,
Jerry

Can you find the year, make, model, and owner? Quote from the owner "This is what these cars were made for "A Chick car"!"

Good luck,
Jerry

Ok, here we have an automobile engine. Can you tell us anything about it? It is tuff so guessing is ok. Simple answers are fine. Going to guess at the cam? Ok, but no way to tell. Just take a shot with any information. Let me know if this works or not.

Thanks,
Jerry

Sad news for Smokey and the Bandit fans today... Jerry Reed died Monday morning at the age of 71 of complications from emphysema.

Reed of course played Cledus 'Snowman' Snow in the Smokey and the Bandit movies, and sang the theme song "East Bound and Down."

He picked up guitar as a child, was writing and performing in high school, and was signed by the time he was 18. He received the Grammy Award for Best Male Country Vocal Performance in 1972. In the mid-70s, he starting appearing in films like Gator and Smokey and the Bandit.

To us car guys and gals though, we will always remember him best for his role as Snowman, and for singing "East Bound and Down."

RIP, Jerry.

I came across this on the Internet and thought you might get a laugh from it.

In the early 1960s, Harold Lightburn, owner of a cement mixer, washing machine, and fiberglass boat manufacturing business, decided that there was a huge hole in the Australian automotive market--namely, there was a need for an inexpensive, domestically produced second car. So, in a fit of daring, schizophrenia, or a lot of both, he purchased the rights to the British-designed Anzani Astra and proceeded to create a custom fiberglass body for it. Thus, the Lightburn Zeta was born.

To fully grasp how completely and utterly insane this enterprise was, consider the following--the Astra was the smallest and cheapest British car in 1954. Choosing a 10-year-old, barely post-war British design for your new car manufacturing business is only slightly more sane and well-thought-out than a Warsaw Pact country licensing and building old Fiats and attempting to resell them in the United States after Fiat itself had been run out of town. Thankfully, the relative sanity ended there--had it continued any farther, we never would have been treated to a car with truly bizarre and wonderful properties such as the lack of a tailgate, or the ability to go 60 MPH in reverse.

Oh yes. You read that last sentence right.

Because the Zeta's frame was made of fiberglass, Lightburn was unable to equip the Zeta with a tailgate--allowing the rear end to open would have severely compromised the already suspiciously fragile body. Consequently, putting anything in the back of the Zeta required the owner to remove the front seat. Of course, this begs the question--why did the Zeta need a fiberglass body? Simple: When you're building a car with a 324cc engine that's "good" for 16 horsepower, you save weight when and where you can.

This, in turn, brings us to its unique backwards handling properties. The Zeta used a chain drive to move the wheels (a technology available on second-hand Schwinns), which led to a problem--how does one shift a chain-driven vehicle into reverse, exactly? Lightburn's answer was as cleverly simple as it was a sign of his deep-seated washing machine agitation cycle-induced madness: Make the owner turn the car off, then press a button that turns the engine in reverse. The result was a car that had as many gears in reverse as it had going forward, meaning it could go just as fast in either direction.

Lightburn marketed the Zeta aggressively, pricing it at £595 and entering it in the 1964 AMPOL Around Australia Trial, a 7,000-mile rally through some of Australia's toughest roads and terrain, with the hopes of highlighting its superior British-inspired engineering. Impressively, one of the three Zetas entered did complete the course, which shocked everyone; most people thought the Zetas would be lucky to make it past the starting line. Less surprisingly, though, it came in dead last.

Unfortunately, neither the aggressive pricing nor the rally-inspired PR stunts helped sales--by 1965, only 363 Zetas made it off of the showroom floor, thus ending that exercise in supreme futility.

Can you find the year, make, model, and owner? Quote from the owner "Bought this because I wanted to have something to play around with after I retired from the military."

Good luck,
Jerry

This is a photo of a very beautiful car. Ronny & The Daytonas liked it so much they wrote a song about it. Can you tell us the year, make, and anything else you can find out about this car.

Thanks,
Jerry