BIRMINGHAM, MI – There are many Cars & Coffee-style cruise-ins in The Motor City where the car faithful are known to hang out, but perhaps the most notable is the weekly enthusiast gathering that happens every Saturday morning from early spring through late fall at Pasteiner’s Auto Zone Hobbies along Woodward Avenue in Birmingham, Michigan. Steve Pasteiner Jr.’s storefront shop is chock full of car magazines, books, models and all sorts of auto memorabilia, and it often draws 100 or more muscle cars, hot rods, classics and exotics from 8:30-10:30 a.m. on fair-weather Saturdays – as well as a mix of auto execs and engineers with their latest new rides, gearheads with their just-finished creations, and just about every other kind of car nut in-between.
These days, “Woodward Avenue” is best known for Detroit’s massive annual Woodward Dream Cruise, where more than a million people and some 45,000 classic and collectible vehicles converge each August on the famed roadway. Woodward’s historic link to Detroit’s automotive industry plays out in real time each summer, as auto buffs come from around the world to celebrate that time from “back in the day” when engineers and designers from the Big Three hung out after-hours on Woodward to cruise-test their latest offerings during the Muscle Car wars of the late-1960’s. You could say that same kind of Woodward car ritual lives on in spirit even today, as some of Detroit’s automotive inner circle are known to participate at the Pasteiner’s get-together at one time or another. That’s why our own photojournalist correspondent, Bill Cook, likes to keep us in the loop on what kind of rides show up during these early morning tire-kicking sessions (weather permitting).
Cook lives in nearby Rochester, Michigan, and grew up in a Ford family with his dad working at Ford Division Marketing and Sales. Throughout his own long Ford marketing career, Bill was well-known within the company as an active enthusiast and club member who could always be counted upon to show off photos of the many car shows and events that he attends regularly all across the Midwest. In retirement, it is no different. Because Bill is a frequent visitor to this cool “Cars & Coffee” on Woodward, each month he sends us a collection of photos that he snaps of the Ford-powered rides that he finds parked around Pasteiner’s. So before we enter into another year of checking out the cruise-ins there, we thought it’d be fun to prime the pump for the upcoming season with a look back at two of their last Cars & Coffee sessions – these from mid- and late-October of 2024. So take a look at some of the rides that Cook spotted on a couple of cold fall Saturdays on Woodward in his gallery below – and stay connected with FordPerformance.com to see what we might find during 2025.
FORD PERFORMANCE PHOTOS / COURTESY BILL COOK
