Tom McCahill

Thomas Jay McCahill III (1907–1975) was an automotive journalist, born the grandson of a wealthy attorney in Larchmont, New York.

McCahill graduated from Yale University with a degree in fine arts.

(McCahill's father had been a football all-American at Yale).

He is credited with, amongst other things, the creation of the "0 to 60" acceleration measurement now universally accepted in automotive testing.

He became a salesman for Marmon and in the mid-1930s operated dealerships in Manhattan and Palm Springs, featuring Rolls-Royce, Jaguar and other high-line luxury cars.

The depression and his father's alcoholism wiped out his family's fortune.

After graduating from Yale, McCahill managed and later owned Murray's Garage in New York City.

During the war he wrote articles on a variety of subjects for magazines such as Popular Science, Reader's Digest and Mechanix Illustrated Magazine ("M.I.").

Hitting on the idea that an auto-starved post-wartime public might be interested in articles on new cars, he sold the concept to M.I. in February 1946, first reporting on his own 1946 Ford.

His opinions were fearless and this endeared him to some in the automotive world but created enemies too.

Ever the sportsman—at six foot two and 250 pounds—he once fought off goons hired by (as was believed at the time) General Motors.

It is alleged that he sent two to the hospital and the third running.

For example, he reported in a 1949 road test that the new Dodge, with its semi-automatic transmission, was a "dog."

McCahill was a personal friend of Walter P. Chrysler and appreciated the handling and performance characteristics of Chrysler Corporation cars in the late 1950s and 1960s, which included many advanced engineering features such as front torsion-bar suspensions (combined with rear multi-leaf springs) for flatter cornering, powerful V8 engine options across the board and positive-shifting three-speed TorqueFlite automatic transmissions.

He considered early 1950s Chevrolets mundane and utilitarian.

On many of his earlier road tests, his wife Cynthia would accompany him as his photographer and almost always his black Labrador Retriever, "Boji".

His later assistant was professional driver and photographer Jim McMichael who was photographed sitting—or lying—in the trunk of so many test cars McCahill eventually began calling him the " official trunk tester".

McCahill frequently used extreme metaphors and similes in his prose.

For example, in M.I. he described the AC Cobra as "hairier than a Borneo gorilla in a raccoon suit".

McCahill reported in detail on every car imported to the U.S. during the early 1950s, all the while ridiculing the U.S. automakers for their excesses, including soft suspensions ("Jello suspensions" as he referred to them) and poor handling qualities.

In 1952 McCahill entered his own Jaguar Mark VII sedan in the Daytona Beach NASCAR speed trials and won in the Sedan class.

Each year he attended and reported on world-renowned speed events, especially the Le Mans 24 Hour in France.

He purchased the first Thunderbird built and raced it successfully in the 1955 Daytona speed trials.

The Tom McCahill trophy was named for him.

As director of the yearly speed trials at Daytona beach, he was responsible for overseeing the rules as well as the safety of the drivers and spectators.

He was a personal friend of Briggs Cunningham and drove the fastest cars in the world.

He proclaimed the ride of a 1957 Pontiac to be as "smooth as a prom queen's thighs".

The 1957 Ford "cornered as flat as a mailman's feet" and the 1954 De Soto is "as solid as the Rock of Gibraltar and just as fast."

He described one model of Studebaker's gray-painted hubcaps as a feature "only an engineer could love."

McCahill was in favour of lifting the Automobile Manufacturer's Association ban on factory backed stock car racing; although the ban was agreed upon by GM, Ford and Chrysler in June 1957, manufacturers continued under-the-table efforts to provide performance parts and engines to racing teams or performance-car enthusiasts.

McCahill chose to live in Florida as its climate permitted owning such cars as his Jaguar sedan, as corrosion problems inherent with this type of car would have been compounded by the Eastern climate.

An example is provided by one of the first road tests of the 1958 Edsel in the September 1957 issue of M.I.: McCahill criticized the standard suspension as being too "horsey-back" and strongly recommended that Edsel buyers "pony up" a few extra bucks for the optional, heavy-duty (i.e. export) suspension package, which included heavier springs and shocks.

He went so far as to tell his readers that "I wouldn't own one except with the export kit; without stiffer suspension, a car with so much performance (his test car had the 345-horsepower, 410 cubic-inch V8) could prove similar to opening a Christmas basket full of King Cobras in a small room with the lights out".

In a 1959 road test of the Plymouth Sport Fury (which he referred to as the "Sports Fury"), he claimed that the torsion bar suspensions were the finest in America.

Few European sedans, said McCahill, could match the handling performance of the Plymouth.

On the other hand, many of McCahill's opinions about vehicles were far less favorable.

McCahill conducted and reported on the first road test of the Chevrolet Corvair in 1959.

In the presence of Zora Arkus-Duntov, chief engineer of the Corvair project, McCahill ran the car at speed on the G.M. testing grounds.

McCahill reported that he was pleased with the handling characteristics and that the Corvair handled better than the 1959 Porsche.

This conflicts with the assertions by Ralph Nader in his book Unsafe at Any Speed criticizing the Corvair's handling.