My 1966 Plymouth Belvedere let her 225 Slant-6 do the talking

“The door is ajar. The door is ajar. The door is ajar.”

That’s where it started in 1984, in the driver’s seat of a Chrysler. I was 10 years old when I saw my first “talking car” and thought it was wicked cool. Boys my age grew up pretending our banana-seat bikes were the jacked-up talking Trans Am called “KITT” on “Knight Rider.” Go on, click that link. You know you want to hear the theme song.

Our first Slant-6 lived in a 1969 Dodge Dart — white, four-door — that my mother bought for $200 in 1982.

That’s what we thought “smart” cars were. Had we known that by 2015 our automobiles would morph into steel mommies that made all our decisions for us, we might not have been so eager for “progress.”

Motor mouth

It started with the “helpful alerts” like Chrysler’s door-open warning. It’s reached its … zenith? … today with squawking digital touchscreens that beep, chime, blare, blink, cajole, and do just about everything except what you want a car to do.

Try finding a modern automobile that isn’t an iPad on wheels. Like the annoying, never-shuts-off “your food is ready” repeating chirp from the microwave, modern cars have been designed to irritate you to death instead of letting you perish naturally in a wreck like God intended.

My car is a 2012 Prius. Nope, I didn’t buy it for “environmental” reasons (pfft). I bought it because when it comes to cars, I prioritize value and reliability over the long term, and these things are tanks that go as many miles as the vaunted Toyota Camry. And as far as modern cars go — yes, 2012 is “modern” to me — it’s not that bad.

2012 Toyota Prius/Heritage Images/Getty Images

But still, a warning chime in middle C goes off 50 times in a row (yes, I counted) if I don’t buckle my seatbelt fast enough.

Even if I do, the same note dings for the first 10 seconds for no reason that I can discern, except to tell me the car is on. As if I couldn’t see the fireworks display of orange triangles and stupid pictograms that dance around on the projected dashboard every time it starts.

Nanny Camry

And like all contemporary cars, the Prius believes it knows better how to drive than I do, and the engineers at Toyota have decided that I don’t get to make decisions about the gear range, torque, or wheel spin.

Because the car is engineered for fuel efficiency, the transmission is continuously variable — it’s the sloppiest, softest gearbox I’ve ever driven, and it’s painfully slow to change ranges when needed.

Getting up my snow-covered driveway in Vermont is a challenge because the car “features” traction control. It cannot be turned off, even temporarily. Despite the best intentions of the designers, my Toyota simply cannot be parked on any incline in winter because it won’t ever grab the road the right way to get unstuck in snow.

You can’t rock it back and forth the way you could with a manual with a clutch, or even with an old-fashioned column-mounted automatic shift. The gear shift is literally an electronic joystick that gives zero physical-world feedback and operates on a digital timer, rather than in sync with the motion I apply to the stick.

Sunday drivers

More recent cars are even worse. My friend bought a 2022 BMW SUV. This friend loves high technology and automation to the degree that I loathe it. He couldn’t wait for me to drive this beast and experience it driving itself.

And it does. It keeps the lane, it brakes if something enters the road ahead. It’s impressive and uncanny, but I don’t like it. And while not even my age contemporaries will listen, this is going to contribute to further degradation of human driving skills.

It’s like what happens to commercial airline pilots. Modern passenger jets are so highly automated that most pilots spend only about 10% of total flying time actually flying the plane manually. “Stick skills,” as they’re called, get lost, leaving pilots unprepared for the weight and feel of the craft when they have to take over in an emergency.

Built tough

Now, it’s true that modern automobiles are far more reliable than they ever were. I have to admit how pleased I am with the fact that my Toyota has never failed to start and has never “run rough” or stalled.

Neither did my old Toyota. This is my second, and the only reason I don’t have the first one still is that a 17-year-old rear-ended me at 20 miles an hour.

Anyone old enough to remember standing over a carburetor spraying ether and praying the engine would catch in the dead of winter appreciates the reliability of modern internal combustion engines. Modern cars don’t rust like they used to either. My childhood in the ’80s featured cars that were less than 10 years old limping along, nothing but a lattice of rust held together with Bondo long enough to get to the junkyard.

Overall, modern-build quality is far superior to what we used to have.

No passing Caprice

But I don’t like modern cars, and I long for some of the simple, straightforward, and attractive autos I grew up with and had the pleasure of owning. The full-sized, V8, comfort-suspension American sedan, for example, desperately needs to make a comeback.

My 1986 Chevrolet Caprice Brougham was a Cadillac at a working man’s price. That silver beast with a black vinyl top and crushed velour bench seats was a hotel lobby on wheels. You could drive over a railroad crossing at 50 miles per hour and not even notice.

A custom 1988 Chevrolet Caprice LS Brougham/Julia Beverly/Getty Images

On my first night in Vermont, I brought the car down off a tow-dolly and made my way to my friend’s house on a dark country road, up a hill, in a place I’d never been. Naturally, I hit a doe at 35 miles an hour. She went flying into the ditch, but the Chevrolet didn’t even swerve off course. When I got to my friend’s house and checked out the front end, there was no damage.

Slanted and enchanted

The cars I miss the most, though, weren’t the biggest or plushest. But they were the best mechanical engines Americans could buy for decades: the fabled Chrysler Slant-Six. The Slant-Six engine is so called because the six-cylinder motor block is canted 30 degrees off true in order to fit under the lower, sleeker hoods introduced in the 1960s.

Some kind of sorcery went into the Slant-Six engine because these things would not die. Ever. Our first Slant-Six lived in a 1969 Dodge Dart — white, four-door — that my mother bought for $200 in 1982.

1974 Dodge Dart on the set of “Friday Night Lights”/NBC/Getty Images

We went all over Southern California in that car until the day it was too rusted to pass inspection. The junkyard tow driver showed up and started the engine out of curiosity. It fired right up and made that sound that you are hearing in your head right now if you’ve ever owned a Slant-Six. These engines ran with a soft and regular tick-tap-tick-tap like a well-oiled Singer sewing machine. There’s no sound in the world like it.

My mother cried when the Dart disappeared around the corner and so did I.

Eventually, I bought my own 1975 Dart, and it carried me around rural Virginia as a cub crime reporter for years, with air conditioning that would have chilled a penguin. All that for $500.

Ode to Francine

Years later, I bought the car I now miss the most: a 1966 Plymouth Belvedere II with a 225-cubic-inch Slant-Six, retrofitted with the Super Six double-barrel carburetor for extra oomph. In darkest navy blue and chrome, Francine was in near mint condition with only 46,000 miles when I bought her in 2010. She started with a mere half-second flick of the ignition switch and never faltered or stalled.

Francine was so perfectly preserved that guys stared on the street, and a couple of teenagers begged me to drive them to the prom so they could be seen in a car from the era when automobile romance was still alive.

As a bonus, Francine was virtually theft-proof. Not only was this large sedan a manual shift with a clutch, but it was a three-on-the-tree; a three-gear manual shifted by a stick on the steering column. Put this column in front of your Gen Z grandson and watch his puzzled expression.

I wish I’d better tagged the photos in my old phone, but here she is, a few days before I sold her:

Josh Slocum

Now that is a car.

Tell me about the cars you’ve loved and lost in the comments!