I think we're closer to agreeing on this issue than not. :-D

It can be successfully argued that quite a few of today's priceless, esteemed classics were "pretty lousy cars" in the strict sense of the term. As many of Le Patron's Bugatti creations were recalcitrant, obsolescent mechanical dogs on the day they left Molsheim as weren't, early Ferraris were ill-handling cars with bad brakes that relied upon high-revving horsepower for their speed, the first Lincoln Continentals were just gussied-up Mercurys, etc etc. The L29, along with the aforementioned automobiles, transcends the hard objectivism of grading them for their technical excellence, with qualities of design and heritage that lift their mundane nuts-and-bolts to the automotive pinnacle simply by virtue of their extraordinary beauty, and in the Cord's case, its landmark pioneering of front-drive application, however flawed it may have been. Sure, this car, or BITS of cars, may never again be one whole Cord L29, but the bits that remain are definitely worth saving and using to perhaps resurrect some other L29 that is a better candidate for a full restoration. Bad CV joints or no, the Cord L29 was, and is, one of the ultimate automotive achievements of the 20th century.

No one questions whether a derelict Bugatti, for example, is "worth saving". Why even raise the issue with a Cord? Both Cord generations, the L29 here and the later 810/12, are the products of peculiar genius that only America could have birthed and nurtured. They were, every one of them, inspired creations that came from the minds of a small group of people who were all at the right place, at the right time...Errett Cord the capitalist/entrepreneur/enabler, van Ranst the engineer who translated ideas into reality, Alan Leamy (L29), and maestro Gordon Buehrig (810/12) the artists who gave them their beauty, were the core-players in the Cord drama that will never be repeated again. Lesser remains have been resurrected into triumphant classics, far lesser.

The insightful observations by Jack cannot be discounted, nor can anyone who has been carefully observing the automotive marketplace of the past 20-30 years fail to come to basically the same conclusions. There is a "law of gravity" that pertains to automotive success stories, too. It goes up, therefore, sooner or later, it MUST come back down. We're seeing the down-part for the Japanese. Certainly it is more difficult to detect than the fall from grace of our domestic makers...they slammed into the ground with the force of a falling Airbus, while the current Japanese malaise is more like Sully Sullenberger's relatively gentle splashdown into the Hudson River this summer. But, in the end, both are scored as crashes.