I've always been interested in cars. My Dad, the Chief, was a Chevy guy so I was a Chevy guy, too. Until I got back from Vietnam and started shopping around for a Butt-kicking Chevy and wound up buying a Butt-kicking GTO. From that pointg on I have been primarily a Poncho guy. I had to put it on a shelf during the years of kids and dogs and such, but have returned to tooling around in my pretty blue Goat. My boys all seem to have the bug, too, to varying degrees. Over the years I have had a number of sweet rides: three GTOs, a Sport LeMans, a '67 Nova, an Olds Wagon that was pretty good for a wagon, a TransAm or two, and various other compromises to family life. But my interest in cars was never dulled by the necessity of hauling around all seven of us at a time. My main focus was always mid-sized GM cars: Cutlass, Tempest, Chevelle, Gran Sport. I would often find myself arguing the merits of these cars compared to what Europe had to offer. Still will when necessary, and nowdays I have "ground-tested" evidence.
In 1981 the Red Army Faction made a RPG attack on General Kroesen, the Commander of USAREUR (U S Army Europe), in Heidelberg. Fortunately for our team and unfortunately for theirs, the General had just taken delivery of his new Armor Plated Mercedes the week before. Scary but not fatal, just slightly injurious. Immediately after the attack, all sorts of money became available to train the drivers who regularly transported VIPs in the art of "counter-terrorist" driving techniques. At USEUCOM, where I was a VIP driver, we were visited by the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (OSI) to be trained in what we later referred to as the "Dukes of Hazzard School of Defensive Driving". We learned to do the "J-turn", made popular by Jim Rockford on TV. Some also referred to this manuever as the CHP turn-around. Consists of driving backwards up to about thirty mph, then spinning the steering wheel and letting off the gas at the same time; the car will slew around practically in place and you wind up facing 180 degrees from where you were. Shift to drive or first gear as the car whips around and as soon as it is pointed in the way you want to go, you floor the gas. Don't try this at home. We also learned the "boot-leg turn", a manuever made famous by Robert Mitchum in "Thunder Road". At about forty-five miles per hour you slam on the parking brake which locks up the rear wheels, spin the steering wheel and the car slides around, and again, as soon as you are lining up in the other direction, you release the brake and you punch it and off you go. There were a lot of other manuevers and tactics we had to learn but some of that stuff was classified and I don't remember how much was and wasn't. In any case, it was three days of spinning, racing, crashing, and just plain having a ball...and we got paid for it.
Part of the training was learning to drive through controlled collisions. We had to negotiate road-blocks using our cars as battering rams. For this particular exercise, we used a number of cars that had been gathered up from the DRMO (the Army Junk yard). Some were European; some were American sedans that had been coded out for rust or such-like. There were two mid-seventies Chevelles that we used for the collision exercises; one of them didn't even have a front bumper. So, with cars in place to block our path, we had to drive the Chevelles through the blocks, identifying what kind of car blocked us, its approximate weight, where its engine was, and where its center of gravity was. Then we had to pick the right place to ram into it so as to pivot it out of the way and not get hung up in it...not as simple as it sounds. There was a full-sized Mercedes there that everyone wanted to get the chance to drive through the roadblocks. It was a pretty nice car and I wasn't sure why it had been in the junkyard, but, well, when we were done with it, it was in the right place.
Okay. Here is the imperical, "ground-tested" evidence I promised. There were about 18 drivers in this class. Each driver had to go through the controlled collisions at least three times, two practice and one graded exercise...more if you didn't get it right. That means there were a minimum of 54 collision exercises; each exercise included three impacts with other cars. All but about two or three of them were done by the Chevelles. The big body Merc didn't make it through the first exercise. The fenders collapsed into the wheels and the engine came off its mounts, the radiator split in half, and the front cross-member twisted and broke off. The other European cars were just as bad; none of them were able to go through more than once, if that. The Chevelles kept on truckin' crash after crash. The one without the bumper had to have its fender pried away from the front tires a time or two, but after a full day of collisions, both Chevelles were then used for high-speed chases around the airfield and finally, the one without the bumper was used to illustrate that a bullet hole in the radiator was not a show-stopper. The instructor used a screwdriver to punch three or four holes in the radiator then drove the car at 100mph for a looooong time before the motor started to have problems.
Okay. Safety experts: I know about the design of the European cars with the energy-absorbing crash zones to save the passengers and all that. The Mercedes and Audis and VWs did what they were supposed to do. BUT...in the business we were in, which is better: driving away from the shooters at the roadblock or sitting safe and sound in your protected cabin while the shooters make swiss cheese out of your car? Remember, everyone in those controlled collisions came out without a scratch...well, I did have a stiff neck that night...after a dozen crashes. At the end of three days of training, the Chevelle with a bumper was driven back to the junk yard to await whatever fate was in store for it.
So that is why my preference remains the GM mid-size models, I have had a Taurus that was a dandy car and I know it was crash-worthy, personal testimony, but my heart is still in the Ponchos. And now and then, when no one is lookin'...