Old Cars Become Big Business

In case you haven’t noticed, muscle cars are now big business in America. And not just modern muscle cars like the Saleen and Roush Mustangs. The old originals are racking up big transaction prices at auctions, provided they’re still stock, and they’re commanding six-figure stickers at a com-pany called Unique Performance in Farmers Branch, Texas, where they’re definitely much better than stock.

If there is a Henry Ford of the re-engineered muscle car world, it is Doug Hasty. Hasty, along with partners Chris Layne and Richard Kearby, founded Unique Performance to re-engineer and restore long-neglected muscle car classics and, like Henry Ford, made a successful business of it in the process.

“The car thing was just a hobby,” said Hasty. “We created [the first cars] for our personal use.”

Hasty built a re-creation of the Eleanor GT500E for his daughter, took it to the Shreveport Car Show and wound up getting a call from Carroll Shelby. Yes, that Carroll Shelby.

“Carroll wanted to put the car into a continuation program he was doing,” said Hasty. “He called me a coupla’ times.”

Hasty is an ol’ Texas boy with a thick Texas accent. Sit with him long enough and you’ll get a thick Texas accent, too. Yee-ha.

At first he put off Shelby (imagine that), saying he already had a career. But then he met with the man in Los Angeles and—few can resist Shelby’s charm—signed a contract.

“I called my partners and said, ‘We’re in the business of building cars.’”

2007 Saturn Aura

When founded as a subsidiary (not a division) of General Motors in 1985, Saturn’s aim was to match Honda and Toyota. From the time it started selling cars in 1990, it never measured up on the product side, though its fresh-approach dealer network captured a vital segment of buyers who had sworn off ever again stepping into a Chevy or any other GM store. Saturn engendered loyalty all out of proportion to the objective merit of its cars.

Now Saturn is in the midst of a product turnaround that promises to match or exceed the Cadillac revival for setting things right. This month it is rolling out the Vue Green Line hybrid; we’ll drive the Sky Red Line soon; the Outlook crossover is coming up; and the core product—a mainstream front-drive family sedan—finally merits comparison with the competition.

That’s right. Our experience with a prototype Aura sedan suggests if it’s not a bull’s-eye centered directly on the Honda Accord and Toyota Camry, it is darned close. When we asked each of the first three passengers invited into the Aura what they thought the car was, they all said, “Acura?” They had, perhaps, misread the name embroidered on the floormats, but they also hadn’t seen anything that said, “Nope, not an Acura.” From the embossed “Moroccan brown” leather to the cast-skin dash top to the console-mounted shifter, most everything the eye sees and the finger touches appears up to snuff.

Though the design resembles the Opel Vectra, when we parked the Aura near a 2005 Accord sedan, the similarity to the Honda design approach was evident. Mind you, that means it isn’t quite as sporty-looking as the Aura concept car that toured the show circuit early this year—it lacks the concept’s oversize wheels, aggressive fender flares and side skirts. Perhaps we’ll find that mean stance in a Red Line version?

The Aura is a handsome car, clean with a bit of jewelry to declare this isn’t the plain-Jane basic transportation that was Saturn’s forte. But Aura really surpasses expectations inside the cabin. This was a worry. Built on the same platform as the Saab 9-3 and Pontiac G6, the Aura also shares underpinnings with the Chevy Malibu, a competent car that needed a hurry-up interior redo and could still stand upgrades.

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2007 Cadillac Escalade

Cadillac’s Super Bowl television advertising featured a chrome-on-black 2007 Escalade, glittering center stage on a haute couture runway. It was hardly subtle in its appeal to the bling set: The fashionistas in this “Chrome Couture” ad represent precisely the image-conscious rappers, rockers, athletes, film stars, jet-setters and gangstas the Escalade has attracted since its debut in 1998.

However, as much as the Escalade shines in this spotlight, Cadillac says the rich and famous make up a mere 2 percent of Escalade owners; its bread-and-butter buyers haul kids and groceries, pull trailers and pile on highway miles. They are ordinary folk.

“We love the Hollywood and athlete crowd, but we can’t sell the Escalade as a vehicle just for them,” says Escalade product manager David Schiavone. The Escalade has to be a truck first and an homage to image somewhere further down the priority scale.

It does succeed. In our unscientific yet thoroughly real-world test, this third-generation ’Sclade stands out no matter where it traverses: grocery getting, nights out under bright city lights, cross-state highway runs and slogs through foot-deep mud. We did it all to prove this truck is a truck, even though it wears 22-inch chrome wheels and has plush leather seats and a rear-seat entertainment system.

2007 Saturn Sky

That high-powered turbocharged Saturn Sky Red Line shown at New York (“Big Time in the Big Apple,” April 17) sounds mighty promising, with 260 hp and 260 lb-ft of torque. Problem is it doesn’t come out until this fall and we haven’t driven it yet. But don’t let that stop you from reaching for the base Sky, which we drove just a few days ago. It shares a basic chassis and powertrain with its Pontiac Solstice fraternal twin but has more standard features as well as slightly softer shocks.

Now hang on, slightly softer can be good. In fact, it had us asking ourselves a very interesting question: Is the more comfortable Sky a better handler, or are we just getting soft ourselves?

After much consideration and lots of driving, we say yes to both. The purpose of a sports car suspension is to keep as much tire on the ground for as long as possible, something the Sky may do better than the Solstice. We have no empirical data to back that up, only a week of driving it around Los Angeles, seeking out empty, twisty roads.

To find empty, twisty roads in Los Angeles meant lots of time late at night on Mulholland Drive. We had to time it so we would be up there after the retired Hollywood moguls had already walked their poodles and gone in to watch Jake and the Fat Man, but not so late that the most recent 14th runner-up on American Idol would wipe us out on his or her way to a newly bought mcmansion.

It was at these times that we were surprised—pleasantly and thoroughly so—by how well the Sky tracks through Mulholland’s third-gear sweepers. Pick a line, ease the wheel over and the Sky sets to it—no undulatory shenanigans as the uneven pavement rolls past underneath.

New Nissan Skyline GT-R

Nissan is giving the world a big glimpse of its keenly anticipated 2007 Skyline GT-R with this carefully constructed show car. The GT-R PROTO is not a near-production model, though, as the interior is just a blank black panel, and Nissan is providing absolutely no details on the powertrain, suspension, or other critical technical details. Nissan wants to maintain the car's mystique for another two years, since the production car won't debut until the 2007 Tokyo Motor Show. Besides, the GT-R development team is still camped out at the Nürburgring, fine-tuning what is sure to be the most exciting new Nissan to come along in years.

Yet there is plenty to glean from the muscular show car, which features the Skyline GT-R's signature four round taillamps as well as four big-bore mufflers. Shaped as much for aerodynamic efficiency and functionality as for awesome road presence, the GT-R PROTO should whet the appetite and please the masses.


With Nissan insiders under a strict, mafia-like code of omerta (silence), the Tokyo grapevine reports that the 2007 production car will have a twin-turbo V-6 engine displacing about 3.8 liters and producing somewhere between 400 and 500 hp. We hope it will be closer to the latter figure. It also will feature an updated version of Nissan's ATTESA all-wheel-drive system.