I love thread drift.
My hot rod days are long behind me and while I had a lot of fun, I squandered a small fortune (maybe not a fortune but more than I should have).
Despite my former quests for performance, I always had great respect for the workhorses. The engines that gave economical and yeoman like service for decades. The inline sixes were often included in the lists of workhorses that I admired.
The only Chrysler slant six I ever saw throw a rod was a 225 that a guy drove with only 2 quarts of oil in it and said the oil light would come on when he went around corners too fast…..
The Ford 300 was ubiquitous and was used in trucks, vans, generators, pumps and even aircraft tugs.
The Chevrolet straight six was such a good design that Toyota practically cloned it for their FJ40 engines.
The AMC 258 was used for years in Jeeps and other AMC products. It went on to inspire the 4.0L Jeep straight six. Chrysler was forced to drop the 4.0L when the tooling to make that engine finally wore out and they needed a more compact engine to replace it. As pointed out earlier, fuel mileage & emissions standards became a problem, and the thermal inefficiency of those long blocks didn’t help matters.
I had a Cummins 12 valve 6BT for many years and that turbo diesel was indestructible and reliable. (The rest of the truck sucked but that’s another issue).
Leaving the sixes for a moment, JonB, thanks for the SAAB reference!
I’ve always said that SAAB’s were made as if the engineers knew they wanted to make a car but had never seen a car before. Quirky is the one-word definition that gets applied to SAAB more than anything else. If you’ve ever opened the hood on a SAAB 900 you would think that 2 NASA engineers lost a bet with 2 M.I.T. students as to who could make the most complicated hood hinge that would still work perfectly.