Simanaitis Says
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DREAM SHOPPING IN 1955
SO THERE I WAS, WITH MONEY BURNING A HOLE in my teenage pocket and leafing through the R&T Market Place, January 1955. And before you get all slobbery about prices, be aware that the CPI Inflation Calculator equates $1 in 1955 worth $12.10 today.
There’s still good dreaming to be had.
Note, “35c the copy” = $4.24 these days.
Here are several offerings from R&T Market Place in January 1955.
“Alfa Romeo ‘49 2500-cc station wagon. Body by Castanga. Good condition throughout. Wood refinished. Pirelli tires. Sports car handling with plenty of room. $1095.”
I sought an image online, but AI Overview responded, “There is no known Alfa Romeo station wagon from 1949. The Alfa Romeo 6C 2500, produced in 1949, was primarily offered in cabriolet, coupe, and berlinetta body styles, with coachwork by renowned firms like Pinin Farina and Touring.” Funny it didn’t stumble on Castanga.
By contrast, Wikipedia says of Carrozzeria Castanga, founded in 1849 in the carriage trade: “From 1929 onwards, station wagons were also created in the Woodie style adopted from the US, which the Castagna Milano company, which was founded in 1994, also repeatedly took up.”
And SimanaitisSays observed that a (non-wagon) 1934 Alfa Romeo 2.3-Litre Castanga exhibited “brio with elegance.”
Image from R&T, January 1956.
I suspect the 1949 Alfa Romeo station wagon possessed similar brio and elegance.
“1953 Alvis Classic Drophead Coupe. 14,000 miles; 125 hp, 6 cyl. twin overhead camshaft engine, 103 mph. Cost $4600. Sacrifice $1995.”
1953 Alvis 3.0-Litre TA21 Drophead Coupé. Image from Bonhams. Sold for £29,900 inc. premium; Hendon, RAF Museum, April 2012.
“Austin-Healey 100. ’54 light blue, excellent throughout. Modifications affecting heater, rain proofing, ventilation etc make this car actually more comfortable than when new. $2395.”
To put these mods in perspective, a stock Austin-Healey 100 went for $2985. In July 1954, R&T had nothing to report of the car’s heater, ventilation, or rain proofing.
I did observe, we’re canyon carving in R&T; not in Kansas anymore; nor Cleveland.
“Tucker Automobile. Low mileage, radio, heater, whitewall tires (Firestone). Good condition.”
Wikipedia recounts, “The Tucker 48, originally named and still commonly referred to as the Tucker Torpedo, was an automobile conceived by Preston Tucker while in Ypsilanti, Michigan, and briefly produced in Chicago, Illinois, in 1948. Only 51 cars were made including their prototype before the company was forced to cease all operations on March 3, 1949, due to negative publicity initiated by the news media, a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation, and a heavily publicized stock fraud trial (in which the allegations were proven baseless and led to a full acquittal).”
No price was listed in the R&T ad. What would a collector pay these days? The conceptcarz.com website suggests a median sale value of $1,347,500 and as much as $2,915,000 for a perfect Tucker.
Tuckers galore. Image from Conceptcarz.
“Allard K-3. November ’53—Special Chrysler engine. New custom black paint by Rich & Jones. Silver wire wheels, Pirelli whitewalls, blk. top and custom tonneau, brown leather. Meticulously maintained. $6200 investment. Best offer $4000.”
Photos were relatively rare in Market Place. This particular Allard K-3 was the only one pictured in January 1955. Indeed, it’s the same photo appearing in R&T, October 1954 and reappearing in “Allard K-3—Grendel’s Sophisticated Brother.”
And, in the same January 1955 issue….
“Cad-Allard K-3 Sports Convertible. 1953, midnight blue with black top and matching custom-made tonneau cover. Red leather upholstery, seats 3. Trunk provides ample luggage space for long trips. Has de-Dion rear axle, rigid chrome-moly parallel tubular chassis, and perfectly tuned Cadillac engine. Performance is terrific. Driven one season for pleasure in Palm Springs area. Cost $5240 with tax, license and extras. Will sell for $4200. Owner leaving for Alaska.”
Hmm… Lots of details, only modest depreciation for a two-year-old car, no particular consolation that the seller will be in far-off Alaska.
Custom Tonneaus? Note that both of these Allard K-3s had “custom” tonneaus. Have I ever told you that my Miata (VIN …00348) has a factory tonneau cover, a rarity I’ve never seen in any other Miata. It also has a glove box autographed by Toshihiko Hirai, project chief of the original MX-5 program. Indeed, there’s a spare glove box as well, also autographed.
Gee, I wonder if A.I. will ever scrape up these facts? ds
© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2025
Simanaitis Says 
Another Miata owner, eh!
I, too, am an owner of the quintessential British roadster, designed and built by Mazda. How many other Miata owners previously paid for British cars? My first car (1967) was a previously owned 1960 850 Austin Mini, followed by a long succession of British and American makes including a 1963 998cc Mini Cooper, a 61 Jaguar (Mk IX Saloon), a 69 Ford Cortina, an 80 Triumph Spitfire and a 1962 Morgan +4 Roadster (which I sold after 11 years of conservatorship last September to set the stage for buying my first Miata (2024 GT trim) at age 76.) I also previously had numerous Mustang convertibles, a few Fords (including a Mercury Cougar) and various Toyotas and Hondas and one 77 or 78 Chevy Vega (proof of having been pained by non-Brit cars in the past.)
Then I noticed that David LaChance, of Hemmings Motor News, reported in the September Issue of that book, that he owned a Miata (1992 vintage) and called it “the most British of Japanese roadsters.” Until then, I had thought of Dave as Hemmings’ lead British car aficionado. And you noted your ownership of an even older Miata.
Many friends of mine in the Morgan Owners Group also adopted Miatas as they, the friends, approached their dotage (a term that applies to me no doubt.)
So what’s the correlation?
This led me to ask the AI bot ChatGPT “I’m looking for data on the history of car ownership. Are people who previously owned British motorcars (e.g., Triumph, MG, Jaguar, Morgan) more or less likely to subsequently own one or more Mazda Miatas?”
Here’s its reply.
Thought for 2m 3s
Short answer: there isn’t a good public dataset that directly answers this (i.e., “what’s the probability someone who once owned a Triumph/MG/Jaguar/Morgan later owns a Miata?”). The kind of person-level, longitudinal registration data you’d need lives behind paywalls at firms like S&P Global Mobility (Polk/IHS) or J.D. Power’s PIN and isn’t published at the model-to-model level. S&P GlobalJ.D. Power
That said, the best-available signals all point in the same direction: former British roadster owners are more likely than the average motorist to end up in a Miata.
If you want a rigorous, numbers-on-paper answer, here’s the clean way to get it:
If helpful, I can sketch the exact request language for S&P (variables, years, filters) and a simple statistic to report—e.g., a risk ratio:
RR = P(Owns MX-5 | Ever owned MG/Triumph/Jaguar/Morgan) / P(Owns MX-5 | No prior British make)
Let’s cut that off here.
I also went to another AI tool, Claude.ai, and asked it the same question I had asked ChatGPT. Here’s what Claude said:
Based on my search, I couldn’t find specific statistical data comparing the likelihood of former British sports car owners purchasing Mazda Miatas versus the general population. However, I can share some relevant insights from what I found:
There appears to be a conceptual connection between British sports cars and the Mazda Miata. The Miata has been described as “the best British sports car isn’t British” Mazda Miata: The Best British Sports Car Isn’t British | News | CarThrottle, suggesting that the Miata captures the spirit and essence of classic British sports cars like MG, Triumph, and Jaguar, but with better reliability.
The Miata was designed to recapture the classic British roadster experience that many enthusiasts missed after the decline of brands like MG and Triumph in the 1980s. When it debuted in 1989, it filled a void left by discontinued models like the MGB and Triumph Spitfire.
While I couldn’t locate specific ownership transition data, there are several factors that might suggest British sports car owners would be drawn to Miatas:
There’s more. Much more. But I’ve already provided too much, so I’ll stop here.
Can you survey your readership, seeking Miata owners who previously owned British motorcars or sports cars versus Miata owners who never did?
Thanks for the A.I info, Tom. I still retain an intellectual-property problem with its scraping the Internet, as well as its occasional hallucinations.
Perhaps other readers will respond.–d
Dennis: Chris Harris and Friends is my favorite podcast. A few podcasts ago, 1 of the team mentioned he had bought on ebay several years of autocar and had spent many hours going through the classifieds. Another mentioned a way to buy the entire back catalog (online) of another mag I can’t recall. But it’s fabulous to look back from time to time and see how times have changed. Thanks for all you write!
Thanks for your kind words. Agreed, old ads are fun.—d
Had a AH 100 back in the mid 60s. Since then had many newer AHs and the rest of the Brit cars. Now have two Morgans, but think the AH 100 is still the best looking of any car design.
Hello, All. Regular reader Mike Scott encountered problems in trying to make this Reply appear properly. This is my workaround. (Alas, I cannot get his pics from The Motor to transfer.)–ds
Being but four years old, i was even further afield, but had i been older and informed, the above Healey 100-4 especially. The above Alvis interesting, and had synchromesh on first gear since 1936, something no domestic car had ’til 1973, Jaguar not until late ’64.
Road & Track’s John Bond, in his Misc. Ramblings column of October 1950, was among those unimpressed by the Tucker Torpedo, its name for the planned 1947 debut, but not introduced ’til the next year as the “Tucker 48,” with its water jacketed 335-ci Franklin flat six shared with Bell helicopters and Stinson Voyager three-seat light utility plane given the curious rating of “166 horsepower,” until you note the otherwise most powerful automobile at the time was the ’47 Packard Super Clipper’s 165 hp.
Enroute to their SEC hearing in Washington, Preston Tucker told his press agent son-in-law the ’47 Cadillac Series 62 sedan they were driving was a better job than his namesake.
Bev Ferreira, a San Francisco mechanic well known in NorCal vintage car circles owned, among others, a canary yellow Tucker, which, despite being well fettled, the car he extolled and most drove was his ’41 Packard One-Sixty Super-8 sedan with overdrive. Bev told me at a 1979 area car show how Tucker owner Francis Coppola had engaged him as consultant for his planned Tucker movie, Burt Reynolds then slated to portray Tucker.
Meanwhile, consider these from 1937’s English magazine, The Motor, and from Manhattan in 1943, bearing in mind ’37’s dollar equal to $22.40 today, ’43’s buck $18.58 now, and both years’ pound equal to .73 of a dollar then, tho’ we have to wonder who’d want to be seen swanning around in such as Inskip offers while other young or youthful blades trying to avoid grenades and flack in Europe and the Pacific.