Michigan Automotive Inspection Services

Honoring the man who helped the Corvette grow from infancy to rowdy adolescence for this week’s ‘Sales Ad Saturday’. Twenty-five years ago this week Zora Arkus-Duntov passed away in Detroit. While Harley Earl is rightly recognized as the father of the Corvette, it was Russian-born Duntov who saw it developed to its full potential as a true American sports car. A skillful engineer who was formally educated in Berlin, in the late 1930s Duntov was living in Germany and working a

What else can we talk about for this week's 'Sales Ad Saturday’? April 17th, 1964 was a big day for Lee Iacocca. Fifty-seven years ago today the work of Lee and his “Fairlane Committee” was finally on display for the world to see. The Ford Mustang was released to the public in a media blitz that coincided with the car’s first public showing at The World’s Fair in New York. Volumes have been written about the national response in the days after the release of the Mustang, but

“What’s in a name” is the question for this week's 'Sales Ad Saturday’. This week in 1954, the Ford Motor Company officially formed a styling committee to begin working on the development of their new “E” (for Experimental) car. The car that the stylists were working on would eventually come to be known as the Edsel, a famously embarrassing and costly financial failure for The Ford Motor Company. The reasons behind the failure of the Edsel have been widely chronicled, but the

A confluence of events brought about this week's 'Sales Ad Saturday’. Today in 1969, the legendary Harley Earl died in West Palm Beach. In the 29 years Earl was at GM, the automaker produced over 50 million cars, and Earl’s influence as the company’s first head of design touched nearly all of them. As luck would have it, I spent yesterday with some of Earl’s best work, a 1957 Eldorado Biarritz. Better still, a few weeks ago I acquired a large collection of Cadillac ads and de

Honoring an important moment in automotive history while dispelling a few myths for this week's 'Sales Ad Saturday’. It was this week in 1932, March 31st to be exact, that the Ford flathead V8 was first shown to the public at an event at the Ford Highland Park showroom. The very first V8-powered production Fords actually rolled off the line on March 9th that year, but a public showing was delayed a few weeks as additional testing and logistics for the national roll-out of For