25 Greatest Cars of all Time

Kent

That's exactly it McLaren...
Why award a car that was terrible to drive with being one of the 25 greatest cars of all time?
It just doesn't make sense to honor a bad car because the drivers were good enough to overcome the problems.

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In case anyone wants an example or two of how I disagree...
atti Veyron? Innovative?
I suppose throwing money and hp at any problem will make it an innovation, right? No. 👎
The Veyron is an amazing car but it certainly isn't anything more innovative than the last super high power car... Heck, the number of batteries and radiators alone shows how dependant it is on old technology being pushed by money and power.

Really... Think about it and tell me if throwing 4 turbos and 10 radiators onto a car is in any way innovative (other than figuring out how to fit all that stuff under the hood).

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The only difference is that the 917 did it because the drivers were incredible and capable of overcoming the problems with the car (score one for drivers, not the car). The R8 on the other hand has proven itself and become the benchmark (score one for the car, also the drivers).

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Automobile

Some of the other cars in these pages may have saved their company, but only one saved the free world.

"Truck, quarter-ton, 4X4." The official descriptor would never suffice. A machine this characterful, this endearing, would need a nickname, and it got one almost immediately: jeep. That name soon would be recognized the world over.
The jeep (with a lowercase j, as this was long before Jeep became a registered trademark of the Chrysler Corporation - or American Motors, or Kaiser, or Willys-Overland) was more than merely characterful or endearing, of course. It made its debut during World War II and immediately became indespensible. Endlessly adaptable and awesomely capable, the jeep and its abilities far exceeded what anyone had envisioned back in 1933, when the United States Army first started searching for a reconnaissance car to take the place of the motorcycle.
By 1940, the military was asking for prototype designs. The winning submission came from automotive engineering consultant Karl Probst, who worked for the American Bantam car company. The design was created with the help of Harold Crist, Bantam's factory manager, over four frantic days in July 1940.
The vehicle passed the tests, and 70 were ordered. Meanwhile, Willys and Ford delivered their versions for testing (both companies had been given copies of Bantam's blueprints). Ultimately, the Willys was the one selected for volume production. Both Willys and Ford built them. (American Bantam couldn't produce in the needed volume and built only a small number of jeeps before switching to other military contracts.)
Willys and Ford had built 636,385 jeeps by the end of World War II. The specs of the military jeep were very close to what Probst had originally designed and Batnam had delivered. The vehicle was 11 feet long, 40 inches high, and 62 inches wide. It weighed 2,325 pounds and was powered by a 60-hp Willys Go-Devil four-cylinder engine. It had a 3-speed gearbox, a 2-speed transfer case, and part-time four-wheel drive. It could reach 65 mph and deliver 16 mpg. There were seats for four. A folding windshield created a lower profile, and a canvas tarpaulin supported by a rear bracket provided some weather protection. The jeep could climb a 65-percent grade, drive across a 55-degree slope, carry 800 pounds, and tow half a ton.
The jeep revolutionized land warfare, and the Germans and the Japanese had nothing that could approach its wide-ranging capabilities. By 1942, jeeps were ubiquitous in the U.S. military. They were used as a mount for machine guns, they towed antitank guns, they were fitted with stretcher-carrying racks for use as ambulances, they floated on rivers with help from four 55-gallon drums, and, with special wheels, the pulled trains along railroad tracks.
War corresponded Ernie Pyle: "[The jeep] did everything, went everywhere, was as faithful as a dog, as agile as a goat...The jeep was a divine instrument of wartime locomotion." General George C. Marshall famously called the jeep "America's greatest contribution to modern warfare." A testament to American ingenuity, the jeep will forever be enshrined as a genuine war hero. Not bad for a quarter-tone 4X4 truck. - Joe Lorio

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Automobile

Transformation Machine.

Many of those who came of age during the 1960s clearly recall their first ride or drive in a Volkswagen Beetle. It was like the first glimpse of a hummingbird or a fragile flower. Having grown up with family cars that displaced five, six, even seven liters under the hood, people wondered about the Beetle, its tiny, opposed four of never more than 1.6-liters thrumming like a fly trapped between panes of glass. What's more, this amazing powerplant was air-cooled. Yet the Beetle could take you to work or school or the riverside park or the rock concert just as well as the family wagon. Even without power steering, parking was a lighter-than-air maneuver. Using the four-speed gearshift was a marvel, unless on was shifting down into non-synchro first, in which case one needed virtuosic ability. The heater was said to work, but Howard Hughes was also said to have willed his estate to Melvin Dummar.
The Small is Beautiful era initiated by writer E. F. Schumacher was dawning upon society, and here was the perfect automotive emblem: the anti-car, missing the features, the trim, the accessories, half the power, and even more of the space - but able to perform while saying something cool about the people inside it. With mass protests becoming the order of the day, this was the mass-market automotive protest. Flower children drove the Beetle - but so did the fuzz of the Mamaroneck, New York, police department. People of few means and great means drove it. So did teenagers and grandparents.
Like the Ford Model T, it hardly changed from year to year, so people felt free to make their own changes. One could paint it, stick things to it - deface it! Doing so made this infinitely mutable car cooler still. One could turn it into a desert racer, a surf car, a fake Rolls-Royce. Even the ads for the Beetle were anti-ads: no razzle, no dazzle, and only a snippet of information leavened with humor. A myth grew about how the Beetle was built so tightly that it would float, and it proved true. As a cultural phenomenon unlike anything since the Model T, the Beetle starred in films as diverse as The Love Bug and The Shining, and it replaced the phone booth as the laboratory for collegians' population density studies.
All this hoopia and enthusiasm concerned an artifact of the utopian version of Adolf Hitler, the admirer of Henry Ford who sincerely wanted Germans to have cars, and of Ferdinand Porsche, who adamantly believed in this cockeyed configuration, with the engine slung out in the rear. What happened when Beetles eventually started rolling out of the Wolfsburg plant after World War II set the pace in several ways. Not only was the marketing top-notch, but so was the manufacturing. (The quality-control process was exemplary.) When Heinz Nordhoff, VW's inspired leader, decided to get utterly serious about the U.S. market, Volkswagen of America was created, and the paradigm for all subsequent importers was established. Sales exploded, with 569,292 units going out the door in 1968 for a 5.5-percent share of the overall market.
By then, though, the Beetle was essentially a 30-year-old design, and the world had moved ahead. Despite eventual concessions, such as an innovative if ultimately unsuccessful semiautomatic, as well as increasing engine output to a galvanic 57 hp, the Beetle found itself outgunned by the offerings from Detroit and Japan, as well as hard-pressed by regulations from Washington D.C. Volume fell throughout the 1970s. Although the Beetle remained in production until 2003 at the Puebla, Mexico, plant, stateside sales ended in 1980. The New Beetle, introduced in 1998, hits many of the same marks, but people can't help seeing it as a mere simulation. - Ronald Ahrens

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Automobile

Blue Flame to blue-blooded legend.

When you see that the factory Corvette racing team has won another endurance race, when you realize that anyone can buy a 505 hp Corvette Z06 that will easily top the 185 mph speed that seperates serious performance cars from also-rans in Europe - and for a fraction of the price other really fast cars command - it's hard to remember that the first Corvettes were awful, with nothing but jazzy styling to recommend them.
There are many tales about the origin of the Corvette, but the straight fact is that Harley Earl, General Motors styling boss, wanted to make a small series of stylish roadsters and presuaded the all-powerful GM Engineering Policy Committee to give the go-ahead some time in the early 1950s. The Motorama "dream car" Corvette was presented in January 1953, and production started in June of that year, far more quickly than would have been possible if, as popular lore has it, public demand brought it to market. There were only 300 1953 cars, all of them white with red upholstery, all of them equipped with th 3-carburetor, 150 hp, 3.9-liter Blue Flame Six that had its roots in the 1920s and was hooked up to a 2-speed Powerglide automatic that stifled whatever performance the engine could provide.
Those C1 Corvettes, purely and simply, copied the layout of the Jaguar XK120, itself a styling copy of the late-'30s Touring-bodied BMW 328. That the XK120 had a 3.4-liter six-cylinder engine and Chevrolet had something similar was surely the reason that Chevrolet, rather than Oldsmobile or Cadillac, was chosen as the recipient of Earl's design.
Production was almost canceled in 1956, when, despite the addition of a V8, a third of the cars built weren't sold. The elegant restyling for 1956 and the availability of a 3-speed manual gearbox helped, but the 1957 model - with fuel injection, one horsepower per cubic inch, and an optional 4-speed - finally assured the Corvette's continued existance. If the first Corvettes were antiques, the 1963 C2 cars were paragons of advanced thinking, with independent rear suspension, larger drum brakes, and a surplus of power.
Through four moreiterations, with big-block engines of up to 7.4-liters, the Corvette was refined, developed, and maintained as a proper sports car with an American bias. There were automatic transmissions, air-conditioning, and other comfort elements, but also - generally - raw performance, reasonable economy, and excellent roadholding. Every Corvette ever old by GM had a fiberglass-reinforced plastic body, the one bit of advanced engineering on the first car that has remained through more than a million copies. Tooling costs are quite low, and that has kept GM bean counters fairly quiet.
For 2008, the base small-block is up to 6.2-liters, emissions are reduced, fuel economy is retained, and the interior is less cheap-looking. Whether in basic form or as the 7.0-liter Z06 avatar of the 4.3-liter V8 introduced 53 years ago, the Corvette is one of the great cars of the world - and one of the greatest values. Today, there's no car available anywhere that offers so much capability per monetary unit as does the Chevrolet Corvette. - Robert Cumberford

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*McLaren*

The car wasn't actually awful. It just a painful car to drive because it had so much power. But it's easily one the greatest cars of all time. It was and remains the main reason Porsche has the most victories at Le Mans.


It actually is pretty innovative, and obviously can't be that easy to just throw 2 W8s together with 4 turbos and keep the power under control with AWD. The Veyron's probably considered innovative because it is something no manufacturer really ever did, and sold to the public. Besides, only the brains of the 917 could produce something like the Veyron.


The 917 isn't a bad car. All that technology played a key role, not drivers alone. If you could stand to sit in that car, and feel every bump under you for 24 Hours, you were highly rewarded. Sure, Porsche could have made certain things like the seat and riding more comfortable, but the 917's a man's racecar, not a woman's shopping sedan. Porsche didn't like creature comforts with the 917.

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Kent

As for the 917...
I'm not really looking to agrue over that... I don't feel like racecars (especially purpose built racecars) have a place on the 25 all time greatest list.
The only reason I'd want to see a racecar on the list is for the sake of showing what one of the roadcars was capable of becoming (but only if the roadcar itself is worthy of the list on its own merits).

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*McLaren*

The car wasn't actually awful. It just a painful car to drive because it had so much power. But it's easily one the greatest cars of all time. It was and remains the main reason Porsche has the most victories at Le Mans.

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TheCracker

The 917 only ever won Le Mans twice. It was the 956/962 (and variations) that won Le Mans 9 times and put Porsche at the top of the pile for Le Mans victories.

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Kent

I don't feel like racecars (especially purpose built racecars) have a place on the 25 all time greatest list.
The only reason I'd want to see a racecar on the list is for the sake of showing what one of the roadcars was capable of becoming (but only if the roadcar itself is worthy of the list on its own merits).

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*McLaren*

Oh, that's right. My apologies.

Kent, if it makes you feel an differently, Porsche did attempt and build 2-3 917 road cars.

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*McLaren*

Kent, if it makes you feel an differently, Porsche did attempt and build 2-3 917 road cars.

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Wiki

Astonishingly, despite the car's impracticality, at least two 917s were road-registered. One, for Count Rossi of the Martini concern, was painted silver and given the Alabama plate 61-27737 to circumvent red tape in Europe, and the second, for Joachim Grossbad, was painted white and given the German registration CW-K 917.

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Automobile

A looker, a performer, an instant classic.

The E-type was an absolute sensation when it launched in 1961, with a marriage of performance and beauty that was once the sole province of Italian exotica. And one man was uniquely positioned to observe the seismic shift in the sports car world that the E-type represented.
Norman Dewis was a development engineer on a staggering 22 Jaguar models over four decades, going back to the XK120 and the C-type and D-type racers. Dewis was the man tasked with driving an E-type roadster to the Geneva Motor Show for the car's launch.
"The impact the E-type has was just huge," says Dewis. "Here was a beautiful, 150 mph sports car that cost less than 2000 pounds [and as low as $5,325 in the United States], which was a phenomenal price when you considered what Ferraris and the like were going for. And it was also a time when all of the work we did in the racing world - on C- and D-types - found its way into production cars. In fact, the first two E-type prototypes, E1A and E2A, were based on the D-type."
Given that the D-type was one of the most successful racing cars of its time, this boded well for the E-type. Compared with the XK120 that had come before it, the E-type was extremely advanced, with independent suspension and disc brakes at all four corners, plus a potent, smooth, 265 hp straight-six engine. The combination gave superb performance, ride, and handling to match looks that still are a curbside spectacle.
The E-type's beautiful form had recieved the close attention of Jaguar's brilliant aerodynamicst, Malcolm Sayer. Dewis remembers that Sayer wanted even more data than what a wind-tunnel test provided. "We'd go to this place in Nuneaton where they sold wool, and we'd buy a skein of it," explains Dewis. "We'd cut the skein into four-inch tuffs, and then we'd tape the lot all over the E-type where Sayer wanted them, including the windshield and the side glass. Then I'd drive with Sayer following in another car, taking notes on the way the tuffs moved about in the airflow. He'd then compare those results with what he got in the wind tunnel, and there would always be some variance. The man was a genius."
And then, of course, there was the car's stunning performance. The British motoring magazine Autocar recorded a top speed of 150 mph, which was phenomenal in an age where the average sedan could barely crack 80 mph - so phenominal that some skeptics figured that the engine had been tweaked. Not so, says Dewis with a smile: "But put it this way - that engine had done a lot of development work, and it was a nice, free, loose engine." Indeed. - Gavin Conway

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Automobile

Where the love affair with cars began.

In 1999, the Ford Model T was selected as the most influential car of the twentieth century by 135 journalists from 32 countries who pondered 716 nominations. The Tin Lizzie was the obvious choice; Henry Ford's Model T literally put the world on wheels. During its 19-year life span, more than 15 million Model Ts were built in at least 37 U.S. and more than a dozen foreign factories. In Henry Ford's homespun words, the T was "a motorcar for the great multitude...so low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one."
Ford's team of a dozen draftsmen, pattern makers, and tinkerers designed the Model T in a locked 12-by-15-foot shop on the third floor of the company's Piquette Avenue manufacturering plant in Detroit. During a 2-year period beginning in 1906, Ford sketched at a blackboard or relaxed in his rocking chair while colleagues inked blueprints and carved wooden models to give his brainstorms shape and form. Biographer Allan Nevis, auther of Ford: The Times, the Man, the Company, credited his subject with "extraordinary power of divination." What Ford lacked in formal education he more than made up for with an innate grasp of mechanics.
After Ford shopped the globe for inspiration and assessed contemporary designs, his engineering team ushered forth a revolutionary combination of lightness, power, durability, and affordability. The Model T's 2.9-liter, 20 hp 4-cylinder engine was one of the first to incorporate a removable cylinder head for ease of manufacturering and repair. Vital powertrain components were protected by enclosures and bathed by gravity and splash lubrication. A 3-point powertrain mounting system allowed the T's resilient ladder frame to twist over uneven terrain. Center-mounted leaf springs gave the spindly wheels ample articulation over rocks and ruts. In lieu of a trouble-prone battery, a magneto supplied the electrical power for ignition and lights. To save weight, the Model T's bill of materials included 20 grades of stamped and forged steel, shrewdly intergrated iron castings, and aluminum for the hood and the transmission housing.
Several innovations heightened the T's appeal to novice motorists. This was the first mainstream car with the steering wheel located on the left for an optimal view of the road. All engine controls were on the steering column, and T's clever 2-speed planetary transmission needed no clutch pedal. Steeping on one pedal got you going, another gave reverse. You shifted into high by lifting off the low-gear pedal; stepping on a third pedal engaged the brakes.
In spite of a few teething problems, the Model T was an instant success. The strategies Ford used to fan enthusiasm for his car were as brilliant as its design. Flaws were fixed and more efficent assembly procedures were implemented. After the switch to a moving assembly line slashed labor content from 12.5 to 1.5 man-hours, Ford wisely passed on the savings to customers. A five-passenger touring-bodied T that cost $850 at the start production in 1908 sold for $360 in 1917. Technical attributes, espcially the T's extensive use of heat-treated vanadium steel, were touted in advertising. And to ensure that these Fords could be owned by the workers who built them, the company's board of directors trimmed shifts from nine to eight hours and more than doubled compensation to $5 per day.
An endearing but mercurial personality was also key to the Model T's success. It was difficult to start in the winter but easy to keep going. The 40-plus mph top speed was a step up from horses but not too fast for early roads. More than any car before or since, the Ford Model T is the machine the accelerated mankind's mobility. - Don Sherman

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D0wNForc3

imagine what those beast would be like, i for one would pay to watch some poor sap get in and take it on a daily drive around a crowded street.

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BLITZ_69

What about the R8? it has won the last 4 or 5 or so 24 hour races.

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