A good old 70's Monday morning traffic jam.

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 Maybe a bit modern to your taste, but this is exactly the kind of traffic your editor remembers from the days when he started driving a car by himself in the early seventies. A very nice mix of Western European everyday cars with a few earlier cars in the background. And yes -whether you like it or not- in between the first Japanese cars start to pop up. It's interesting that so many car history books are made about any decade, but the seventies - let alone the eighties! - are still far from the car historians. Not so with Timo Laitinen, a car historian and well-recognized SAH member, who took up the task to describe the automotive scene of the seventies in Finland using a lot of photos he took back then. The book is in the Finnish language and so for most of us impossible to read (though one page summary in English helps a bit). But still the pictures of the cars from that era grouped together bring back vivid memories. Ranging from Sunbeam Imp, Opel Rekord, Ford Taunus, Ford Escort, Volvo Amazon, BMW 1800, Peugeot 404, Saab 96 (made in Finland, by the way) and... Isuzu Bellett, Datsun Cherry plus more. Also - characteristic for the Finnish scene is a good portion of Russian AND American-made cars. Moskvitch, Lada, Volga as opposed to Buick Electra, Chrysler Newport, Pontiac Firebird and such. During the 70´s the gasoline price trebled in Finland which had a vast impact on what people drove as you can imagine. After the seventies the presence of US-made cars dropped to nearly zero. The end of an era and the beginning of the eighties. Timo is now preparing a book about that period as well.
"AUTO 70-LUVULLA" (Cars of the Seventies) comes in A4 format, 205 pages with 650+ period photos and adverts. It is available online at prices around Euro 30. But readers of PreWarCar-PostWarClassic have the option to order a signed copy straight from the editor at only Euro 20 plus postage. You can contact Timo Laitinen for more information. Or check the advert. 

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