A few years ago I was in a used bookstore in the Tenderloin section of San Francisco. Getting to this place meant running a gauntlet of agressive tranny hookers, but it was all worth it, as I found a pristine copy of one of the greatest auto review magazines ever published: a February 1967 copy of Road Test.
What makes Road Test great is the incredible depth of the comparisons they do. I guarantee nobody spends as much time deciding what car to buy as these guys did. Nobody could be that OCD and unmedicated anymore. This issue compared twelve imports, all of which are cars I adore. Their battery of tests and comparisons is vast, but one in particular always grabbed my attention and held it, tight: The trunk shapes comparison chart.
Nowadays, a car review may tell you the cubic footage of a trunk and if a set of golf clubs can be crammed in there. Road Test, on the other hand, takes trunk size to an entirely new level, providing three-dimensional drawings of the interior volumes of each trunk. They're like pictures of what you'd get if you cast the inside of each trunk in plaster and chipped away the car. They show every lump, depression, pipe channel, you name it. If you were shopping for a car based on how well you could haul your burlap sacks of doorknobs, french horns, and candelabras, I can't think of a more valuable resource.
More importantly, I find the shapes strikingly beautiful to look at— they sort of remind me of the work of Isamu Noguchi. No modern car review comes close to how these pages make me feel.
So, to celebrate my unbridled love for these 45-year old drawings of car trunks, let's have some fun. I've numbered the trunk shapes above, and the cars that match those shapes are shown here, in silhouette. See if you can match the car to the trunk volume! Answers are at the bottom of the post, upside-down. So turn your computer over to see how you did!
I suppose you could use "math" to calculate the values based on the dimensions in the drawings and identify them that way, but you should know I consider that cheating.
ɐuoɹoɔ ɐʇoʎoʇ-21 ɐɔɯıs-11 ǝןʇǝǝq ʍʌ -01 01 ʇןnɐuǝɹ-6 ןǝdo -8 0011 bɯ-7 ɐuıʇɹoɔ pɹoɟ-9 421 ʇɐıɟ-5 ɐıןbuɐ pɹoɟ-4 ɹ0011 ʇɐıɟ-3 009 ʇɐıɟ-2 unsʇɐp-1