I watch several YouTube car guy videos every week, including too many shows I only need to see once.
“There is an algorithm for any activity on the ‘Net that zeroes in on a person’s interests, whether the interests are the love and maintenance of house cats or, in my case, anything about the love and maintenance of old cars”.
Jim Sutherland
The algorithm army sends me very little when it comes to house cats and I sincerely thank the internet generals for that insightful strategy. However, the same internet army steered me straight off a cliff when I watched a YouTube channel about the worst muscle cars from the 1960s. The channel host also included several of the best muscle cars from the 1960s, but I was not interested in what appeared to be a cheap move designed to make car guys believe he was an expert on the muscle car era.
For the record, he was most assuredly not an expert on 1960s muscle cars and included several examples that would not even qualify as muscle cars. My best guess is the host is a few generations too new to make a well-informed opinion about the 1960s automotive scene, but he appears to be well-versed in YouTube click bait procedure.
We live in a world where everybody is entitled to an opinion, at least for the foreseeable future, but the beauty is we don’t have to accept their opinions as any remote form of fact.
My own experiences as a car kid during the 1960s were radically different from his historical analysis, so I stand by my assertion he was not even a concept during that decade. If he was around, he must have been in a coma because he missed an amazing automotive era.
I had a sense of wonder because I learned how to read as a young kid, and car magazines became my obsession as I advanced through the 1960s. It was a decade of massive automotive change where car styles changed quickly–and radically in many cases.
The 1960s offered plenty of surprises for a young car guy and I saw them on the street after I saw them in the car magazines. He used a 1962 Dodge as an object of ridicule in his video–even though it had a memorable car design never forgotten by me when I was an impressionable kid. I was living in a moment when less conventional car styles were a part of the program, and their unusual designs were enthusiastically embraced by this young car guy during the Sensational Sixties.
There were other 1960s-era cars on his hit list, including the first-generation Plymouth Barracuda and AMC’s Marlin. Both cars had radical fastback designs that were openly attacked by the host. I really liked their designs as a kid because they were on the cutting edge of the fastback movement at the time. However, neither would qualify as a muscle car, a fact I recognized while still in elementary school. The car show host never made the distinction.
He did include actual muscle cars from the Sixties, a list that featured the 1966 Chevelle SS 396 and 1969 Charger Daytona, both of which he felt were too heavy and ugly to be his vision of an ideal muscle car.’
The click bait addict felt two of the most celebrated muscle cars from the 1960s were well-placed on his list of worst muscle cars from the 1960s. He leaned toward modern standards of performance to make his case and fell flat on his face because the 1960s was a very different era for horsepower and handling numbers.
Yet another reason to believe he was just looking for attention and it didn’t have to be good attention to harness views.
“The happy ending is I won’t make the same mistake and watch his show again, so there will be a little less attention from me”.
Jim Sutherland
BY: Jim Sutherland
Jim Sutherland is a veteran automotive writer whose work has been published by many major print and online publications. The list includes Calgary Herald, The Truth About Cars, Red Deer Advocate, RPM Magazine, Edmonton Journal, Montreal Gazette, Windsor Star, Vancouver Province, and Post Media Wheels Section.
- CLICK HERE to Sign Up for the Newsletter
- CLICK HERE to Like us on Facebook
- CLICK HERE to Follow us on Twitter
- CLICK HERE to Follow us on Pinterest
