Cars Is Cars

So, in the "automotive world" the big news is that Ford is to cease making cars. What? Steady on, I say, the Ford Motor Company is not going out of business, just rationalising its product. So sedan cars are being phased out, as demand for trucks & crossovers/SUVs continues to ramp up. Apparently the exception will be the 4 seat Mustang. Which isn't really a sports car, being more of a car with a sporting nature, for the most part. The only American real sports car is the Corvette, which, as we observed from a visit to a Corvette car show last weekend, has bloated from a lovely-looking & sensibly-sized vehicle into an aggressive over-the-top extravaganza.
We also observe that most motoring journalists are just hacks nowadays, regurgitating manufacturer-supplied blurbs, parroting each other without much originality. Gone are the likes of LJK Setright, an opinionated intellectual whose views weren't always sensible (he only liked Bristols) but at least were so beautifully written & thought-provoking that his stuff, in, say, CAR magazine, was the most entertaining as well as informative.
But back to Corvettes.

 It's not hard to tell which are the newer models & which date from the earlier, more graceful era.  Mind you, the level of safety & convenience are not at all comparable - the silver one below only had lap belts instead of the safer 3 strap belts we're familiar with nowadays. Also, the seats themselves were not bolstered as effectively. Still, I suspect the materials used were of a higher grade.
 I often wonder why cars have such appeal. It isn't really because of what they DO, so it must be either what they've DONE, in the past, like a classic racing car, or perhaps, it's just because, of how they LOOK.

Such as this Jaguar SS above. Surely no-one doubts that it's a beautiful car, but really, it is better looking than this, umm, is it a Bentley? Looks like a car from the late 1920s, whereas the Jaguar above dates from the 1930s.. it was called SS, from Swallow Sidecar, the original maker of Jaguar cars, but due to the War & the German organisation of the same name, the SS had to be dropped!