History What would hot rodding look like if the '"pinnacle" cars didn't exist?

Hear me out. I am a huge fan of alternate history.

We all know that certain makes and especially certain years are heavily prefered by collectors and enthusiasts to anything else. The '32 Ford, '49 Mercs, '57 Chevys, '64 Mustangs, '69 Camaros, just to name a few.

So here are my questions:

What do you think hot rodding would look like today if those "pinnacle" cars turned out to be... you know... not so popular or flat out didn't exist?

What if Ford made variations of the T all the way to 1934 and lost a foothold on the market?

What if the first hot rodders started building fenderless Packard Twin 6 Roadsters, or Willys Whippets, or chopped Auburn sedans and left the Fords to sit and rust away?

What if Clare MacKichan designed kitchenware rather than cars, and Tri-Five chevys didn't exist in their current form?

What if Harley Earl was the chief designer for Lionel Trains instead of Chevrolets?

What would the street scene look like?

What cars would be in American Graffiti?

Would there even be an American Graffiti?

What would your garage look like?

Hell, what would "traditional" even look like?

What if the '32 Hudson Coupe became what the '32 Ford turned out to be?

What if the Beach Boys' "Little Deuce Coupe" was a '32 Hudson and not a Ford?



What do you think would make a suitable replacement for those pinnacle cars or what changes in history do you think would have happened?

Discuss.

 

Everything would be the same except for the design of the cars. Guys would have stripped down and hot rodded anything they could get their hands on. They only used Fords because they were cheap and plentiful. Milner would have a '32 Chevy or something similar.

For every guy out there that loves a Ford deuce coupe (doesn't everybody? ) there are guys that are happy with a Chevy or a Dodge or whatever. Just look at the diversity of cars here on the HAMB. Tons of "dare to be different" cars are built and enjoyed.

 

What would happen if my bald head started growing hair again? What would happen if that horse was given a name on that ride through the desert? "What ifs" to while the day away!
Certain cars my family had growing up are on my bucket list, even though they are not popular. My grandparents had a '46 Dodge pickup and a '54 Dodge Coronet 4 dr. My parents had a '58 Biscayne 4 dr, a '58 Ford Country Sedan, a '59 Vauxhall Victor Estate wagon, a slightly OT '66 Bonneville 2 dr hdtp (among others). I would love to have all of those and more. But I think the connection that is missing is the people; the cars merely trigger the memories and emotions of those times. I recently bought a square body '74 Cheyenne 20 Camper Special with a 454 in the same color as my dad's, and driving it brings back some good memories of going out to the horse farm with him and riding his Arabians.

 

If Henry Ford would have stuck with the T he would have lost market share and folded. His immense manufacturing power would have never been available for WW2. Hitler would have won and we would have been living The Man In the High Castle in real life

 

We'd all be in 55 Chevys instead of 57s.

If I can actually be serious for a moment and contribute to the discussion, I never found the 32 Ford to be a very attractive car in stock form, and I'm not a big fan of flatheads. I think they're cool to see used in hotrods, but I'd never own one. I'm sure I saw a 32 Ford hotrod before ever seeing a stock one, but I don't know that I'd have ever envisioned how cool they can be once customized. Had someone not had that vision of making a 32 Ford a hotrod, would someone else have? Would they have ever caught on, or would people just have yanked the flatheads out of them to put on other cars (which also happened, but I digress). Really not much before the mid-50s does all that much for me in stock form. 41 Willys is the closest for me, I think. 40 Fords too.

I don't want to get too far off topic, but I want to try to expand the discussion a little. As a younger guy (for this place), I speak from having the luxury of choice, and not having to make the best out of limited options. It's a whole different game today than it was when hotrodding was in its infancy. You can make damn near any old car cool or fast today. I wanted a 55 Chevy because of seeing them in movies and thinking how badass they looked as hotrods. Bob Falfa walking out on John Milner's 32 was just it for me. The stranger in the sinister looking car comes from out of nowhere and shakes up the natural order. Man that was just the coolest for me. Even in stock trim I thought the 55s were super cool looking. It wasn't until I got older did I understand how popular and common they are. Didn't sway me one bit, I still had to have one. My dad was a Vette guy and I didn't have a ton of exposure to old cars as a kid other than that. But I never reacted to antoher car like I did Bob Falfa's 55, and then the TLB 55 years later when I saw that movie.

I'm sure my story here is far from unique, but the point I'm trying to make is you like what you like for no other reason than you like it. If those options did not exist, you'd find something else you liked and go after that. What would those cars be? Hell, who can say?

I think it's a really interesting question. There's no possible right or wrong answer in my mind. What happend with the 32 Ford and the flathead V8, or the 55 Chevy and the small block Chevy would have happened with another car, but I couldn't say which one. We'd probably all be driving Mopars?

What would we have chosen if our first choices never existed? For me, there's so many cars I want, I suppose it would come down to what would have been the most accessible and affordable for me at the time. My second choice when I bought my 55 would not have been HAMB friendly, most likely. My car lead me to traditional hotrods, not the other way around.

 

Part of the popularity of the '32 Ford and later the '57 Chevy was the engines that powered them, the huge aftermarket that catered specifically to them, and the ability to swap those engines for bigger versions of the same engine from an over 30 year range afterward. The '32 was only a partial production year during the depression and the '57 got outsold by Ford that year which was somewhat rare. I think part of what made them legends is they were easier to keep on the road because of the ease of an engine swap.

If the flathead V8 Ford engine had never been developed, or the small block Chevy got cancelled and replaced a few years later like the Y block did, I think that would warp the history of hot rodding a lot more than if the designs were changed.

 

See there? THIS is what I'm talkin' bout. I love these kinds of discussions! The what if's left to the imagination. Conjures images of alternate timelines, hell maybe even zeppelins would still be a thing.

Keep goin', this is GREAT!

 

And most likely we would be driving hot rodded Volkswagons, the Beach Boys would have sung "My lil bug coupe"

Bobby Troup would have sang "Get you Kicks on the Autobahn 96"

Or the Rip Cords "Hey little Porsche don't you know your gonna shut them down"

Personally, I'm happy the way this has turned out. HRP

 

https://www.jalopyjournal.com/forum/threads/tired-of-homogenized-hotrods.1002926/

...Maybe they might make Sport Coupes Hotrod's with the Roof on...

...220 pages of what it might look like and was...I mean if you discount big Auto your limiting what was available...I like the Big picture, but I also like the freedom to create Hotrod/Custom with anything that was available in the Wrecking yard at whatever year you choose as a base for construction to your own inspiration including outside influence, the mags, the shows, whats going on around you...but remember no matter what someones gonna bitch about what you did, that's more Traditional than the Hotrods themselves...
​

 

There are countless outcomes in this scenario, so many variables. One scenario could be that we all ride bikes. We are all hot rodding bikes. My Schwinn is faster than your Huffy!!

 

Henry Ford’s concept of building simple cars that most anyone could afford is a pretty big trick and he pulled it off pretty good.. This success put Ford in a good position to make war related production possible during WWII. Most of the stuff that was developed for the war effort were simpler designs that made them easier to produce in mass. The US had the luxury of isolation and the ability to produce a lot of equipment during the war and all of that stuff had to be shipped overseas to participate in the war. The Sherman tank was a smaller simpler design when compared to the German Tiger and Panzer tanks but the Sherman’s simply out numbered them. And that is pretty much the case across the board.. At wars end the adrenaline junkies came home (no doubt with PTSD) and found other ways to get the adrenaline flowing and guess what..? There were a couple of decades worth of old Fords sitting around cheap and ready to hop up.. Those are some pretty big obstacles to get around in order to overcome the synonymous popularity of the Fords relationship to early hotroding.. Certainly, there were other vehicles being produced here but Fords mass production assembly line technology simplified and refined his vehicles. Transitioning from wooden structural body parts to steel is another advantage Ford had over most of the other production vehicles.. Simply eliminating the majority of the wood out of their vehicles made them lighter, stronger, and less prone to rot out..
Remove Ford from the equation and substitute something else but it probably wouldn’t go as fast as an early hotrod Ford..

Maybe hotrod Tucker’s and Studebaker’s would be the go to rides to hop up..? I just don’t know..

 

Other cars would have stepped up and become pinnacle cars.
'53 Studes instead of '57 Chevies
'48 Anglias instead of '40 Willys
Packards instead of '49 Mercs
Hudsons instead of '51 Mercs
Austins instead of early Fords
Desotos instead of Cadillacs
Mokes instead of, well, nuthin'
all the 4-doors
Remember, other hot rodders in other countries also have their own singular pinnacle cars which may or may not match up to ours.

 

Wow ! Deep thoughts …..


I think the scene would have been exactly the same , just different cars .
The young guys would of hot rodded what ever they could find or thought was cool and the aftermarket and performance guys would have chased the money .

instead if the small block Chevy it would have been ( xxxx). Insert other engine here .etc etc .

just look at the last 20 years or so of hot rods , cars that never would have been considered cool are now cool simply because they are available.
Cars that never would have been considered hit rod or custom fodder are now popular .

growing up in the 80’s and 90’s at the start of the “Hatchback revolution “ ….. why VW’s and Honda’s ?
Why ?
Cause they where cheap , they where fun and the aftermarket supported them.
now the “tuner cars “ with silly turbos and what ever else are pumping out crazy horse power !!!

anyways , my point is hot rodding and customs would have and will always be around simply because guys and gals love to mess around with stuff and either look cool or go fast or both !


Maybe we would be hot rodding these bad boys !!!
Regardless it would be something to fill the gap .

 

Replace the word "bird" with with Hot Rod per this Richard Feynman quote and see how far you get with your question.

“You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird... So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing — that's what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.”

 

Early on, Model A’s and 32’s were the choice of hot rodders simply based on the fact that they were plentiful and cheap. Let’s give some credit to the countless magazines that started up in the fifties and sixties. Ford, Chrysler and GM were heavy ad buyers in those days and certainly influenced the aftermarket. My ride in 1957 was only 4 years old.

 

how do you know we are not the alternative history and the cars in the other world are way more cool.

"what if the Lipshitz roadsters were never built, what would Hot Rods be made from, old Fords? this would be followed by laughter.

 

What if Studebaker had made some better financial moves and managed to get back in the black? Would have been interesting to see what Studebaker would have built during the muscle car era. What if the likes of DeSoto and Edsel hadn't been cancelled? What if Packard had survived? Lots of interesting possibilities if things had been more favorable...

 

We are already living in an era of "alternate history".

For example, to hear people talk today the Chevrolet and the Blueflame six were nothing more then a side note to history and no match for Ford and the V8.

The truth is the Chevrolet 6 is the reason Ford had to go V8! Chevrolet introduced their in line 6 in 1929 four years before the Flathead.

Today people act like no one wanted the Chev 6. I this part of the country people wanted Chevrolets and line 6s. V8 Fords were odd balls

Next once the Small Block Chevy was introduced it drove the final nail in the coffin of every other engine for hot rodding/racing.

It took a little while to catch on, people didn't trust an engine that didn't have shaft mount rocker.
Stu Hilborn thought he had made a mistake going into production with injection for the S.B.C once he realized it the rockers weren't on shafts.

 

A couple guesses based on absolutely nothing.

If Ford just kept making T's and went under before the Model A and V8 engines, I think a lot of early rods would have been Plymouth and Dodge based. They weren't as plentiful as Chevrolets (although that might be different in the alterna-universe) but they had a lot less wood in the bodies which I think would have translated to more bodies being around in the 40's and 50's. That would likely lead to more speed parts being made for the Mopar flathead 6. They're relatively simple, and anything you can make for a Ford flathead V8 you could make for a Plymouth/Dodge 6. Plus they were still in production through 1959.

If the small block Chevy was never produced and Chev just carried on with their Stovebolt 6 engines in '55, I think many more 50's and 60's rods would have been based around the Oldsmobile engine. They were already very popular and had a 5 year head start on Chevy. The 1950 Oldsmobile 88 becomes the icon of 50's speed (it already kinda is) and the hop-up parts industry focuses much more heavily on Olds. Hemis would still be popular but the Olds has the advantage of being a smaller package to fit into different engine bays and also has the excellent-for-hotrodding Hydramatic and way more common stick shift transmissions, where as Chrysler had few manual transmissions and only Powerflite until the later 50's.

 

I’d still be digging busses, step vans and trucks


Speaking of busses, I might have another one. hmmmmm

 

Popular Mechanics lied to us in the 1930s. I fully expected us to be hot rodding and customizing Hoover and ElectroLux hovercrafts by the 1950s...and not be still stuck on the pavement

 

The Beach Boys would still have sung about the "little deuce coupe". It would just have been the '32 Hudson litte deuce coupe................. and some would say that may have been even cooler.

 

Don't be so stupid. Everyone knows that Huffys are faster and better than Schwinns.

See? Some things would never change, no matter what reality we existed in.......

 

What if frogs had wings? They wouldn't bump their ass every time they jumped.....

 

If not for those iconic cars, we'd all have been driving Tesla's for the past 50 years.

 

The real pivotal point for the modern car was the 49 Ford. Otherwise we would be still be jumping on running boards with Thompson machine guns.

 

Now they just drive-by and "pop a 9mm cap in your ass" outta the window of their Corolla

 

Nor would there be so many ugly customs.

 

What if Southern California never existed?