That's funny you bring this up. We were just talking about this last weekend at the Concorso Italiano at Seaside/Monterey. There were millions of dollars of fancy Lambos, Ferraris, Porsche's and other high dollar cars around the Corral area there. The strange thing was our row of Cobras in the English Corral section was getting an inordinate amount of attention, all day long, in comparison to other cars. We noticed this on video again later...
One conclusion we've made is that people seem to be able to "identify" with Cobras, and it's americanized history with Ford and Shelby; esepcially people who grew up with V8 Mustangs from the 60s. These people seem to know that a nice replica Cobra is "within reach" or "obtainable" for the masses now...
I believe that quality replicas have made the Cobra even more popular now with various types of people and incomes. I believe most people won't spend extra time looking at motorcars they cannot visualize themselves driving or owning at some point...
It seems that because it's more obtainable for more people now, they have become more popular each year. Also, not to mention the fact that it spans so many categories like: sports cars, exotics, roadster/convertible types, street rod lovers, LOUD sidepipes attract the Harley riders, smaller/cute shape attracts the English Cars buffs, so on and so forth.
The replica market has definitely made them more popular, and I believe Shelby joined in because it was an opportunity to try and makes some money or regained fame at it. IMHO.
Hey Carroll,
I wonder what would have happened if IBM would have given OS/2 and OS2/Warp away for free like world has done with Linux?. M/C definitely hurt them though... and Token Ring went south too... Boy, IBM sure has done an about face with Linux now, learning from their sad OS/2 experience. I gave 3 hard years of my career to OS/2. As you probably know, RedHat and SuSe runs on all of the IBM boxes now from top to bottom including Z990 Mainframes. They learned the hard way, and now they are on a mission. It seems to be working. I'm done with Sun and gone Big Blue again, all the way... See Ya.
just talking about this...
Hybrid Mode
