Ralph Kinney Bennett March 3, 1941 – December 18, 2024
Articles, essays and columns by Ralph Bennett. Search by any word in an article, or narrow the list by publication, year or topic.
60 articles, page 2 of 3
Sometimes irony is shrouded in the mists of forgotten history. Thus it is with Pontiac, now sacrificed on the altar of reorganization/survival by General Motors. For Pontiac was a car with enough appeal to not only survive but be a…
America battling its way out of a recession. The U.S. auto industry hit hard. Annual car sales down 30 percent. Imports of smaller foreign cars rising. Talk about déjà vu!
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. –Arthur C. Clarke’s “Third Law”
What’s the best-selling car of all time? I took an informal poll recently and made it a point to ask some people who are real car buffs. I got some interesting answers. One person said 1957 Chevy. Two people guessed…
For the better part of a century the diesel engine has been looked upon as the gasoline engine’s loud, smelly, and coarse-mannered cousin. While the gas engine grew more sophisticated and quiet, moving in the world of sleek sports cars,…
In 1935 there was a sensational automobile called the Auburn Speedster. It was brawny yet rakish with its distinctive “boat tail,” swooping pontoon fenders, and great chrome exhaust pipes coiling out from the supercharged, 150-horsepower, straight-eight engine beneath its long…
The automotive world is abuzz about what might be the next Model T Ford or Volkswagen Beetle—an entry-level sedan to be built in India by Tata Motors Ltd. for about $2,500.
Are you wearing a wrist watch right now? It's almost certainly an electronic watch; quartz movement; maybe digital or maybe analog. It's incredibly accurate and unless you prefer to spend thousands on a wrist watch, incredibly cheap.
As the International Auto Show opens in Detroit this week, the growing number of "retractable hardtop" convertibles on display is a reminder of how, every once in a while, technology sort of catches up with itself in an interesting way.…
One Saturday, about a month before Christmas 50 years ago, I was with my Uncle George in a department store in Pittsburgh, Pa. The whole family was Christmas shopping here and there, but George and I happened to be walking…
As you prepare to head out to join with family and friends for that Thanksgiving turkey, give thanks right now for one of the most magnificent engineering feats of all time.
It was in the long ago, when I was an editor for The Reader's Digest that I chanced to be a panelist for some conference at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, in Monterey, Calif. I can't for the life of…
Cong. "Jack" Murtha is a sort of local legend here in Western Pennsylvania.
Sometime this week, probably Friday, the last Ford Taurus will be built at the Ford Motor Co.'s Hapeville, Ga., assembly plant.
Here is why we are not going to "win" the war against roadside bombs like the three that killed six American soldiers in and around Baghdad last weekend and have continued to take a steady toll throughout the Iraq conflict.
Maybe, as this terrible business in Lebanon unfolds, we'll finally get it:
The Israeli dismantling of Iran's expeditionary force in Lebanon -- Hezbollah -- began in earnest over the weekend.
As usual we'll gather at Conneaut Lake, up in northwestern Pennsylvania, as we have, some of us, for forty years or more.
It's the Frankenstein's monster of automobiledom. No, no, it's the Orphan Annie of automobiledom -- eternally singing "Tomorrow! Tomorrow!"
There was an awful inevitability to what happened to those two American soldiers.